Deejahll

YouTube mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZZOLHQpd0

I'm curious why they changed from noncommercial permissive to GPL2+ instead of GPL3.

If their goal is to prevent misuse of the project by unethical profit-minded entities, GPL3's anti-tivoization language would have ensured that even if a company profits from building or running a MAME-based cabinet (which is good!), they wouldn't be able to deprive their customers' freedom to fix or upgrade the software that runs it. (As they now can!)

It's even worse for the permissively-licensed parts of the code, which can now be used to build locked-down proprietary cabinets that users can't even inspect. I'm glad they got at least part of the project covered by copyleft.

The "common questions" on their site contains some confusing claims, too:

Q. Can I include MAME with my product? A. Yes. You can use 3-clause BSD compliant files but project as whole is under GPL-2.0 license so in case you wish to use those part you need approval from specific developers.

You'd only need permission if you didn't want to comply with the terms of GPL2. There's nothing in GPL2 that requires permission for inclusion with a product.

Maybe that's just leftover from before the license change?

Oh yeah I just pulled that from a fever dream I had, that sort of thing never happens in real life.

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", is a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

This presumes that any modifications to "your" code that someone else makes should be none of your business. Seems fine on the surface.

But what if your code writes files or communicates over the network? And what if, say, Microsoft takes your permissively-licensed code that is just beginning to gain popularity, changes one piece of it to make it incompatible with yours, and doesn't release their change? They use their massive marketing department or pre-bundling to get lots of Windows users to use it. Everyone is still free to use "your" version of the code, but nobody wants to, since it is incompatible with the more popular Microsoft version, now on its way to becoming "the standard."

If you are okay with that, no rabid copyleft zealot like me has any place to criticize you. Release your code with a permissive license. That's fine. (Permissive licenses are considered "Free Software" by FSF and rms as well, after all.)

But to me, that seems grossly unfair for code I spent my valuable time designing and developing, so I don't release my code under a permissive license. If Microsoft wants to build a product with the work I have done, it needs to convey the same freedoms to its users that I did. That's the cost.

This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid.

In order to interpret that one sentence the way you did, you had to:

- divorce it from the context where the software was released as copyleft

- ignore that person getting wealthy must share their source code

- willfully misinterpret "don't get rich" as "get paid nothing"

- presume that money given to some charity is more of a societal good than software

- presume that that the creation of free software "counts for nothing"

But please do continue to abuse me as "incredibly" naive and/or stupid, and make comparisons to "slavery!" It might not feel like a genuine Hacker News discussion if you didn't.

deliberately obstruct people from using our work as a foundation for successful entrepreneurial efforts

No, the GPL does not do this.

Obeying the requirement to share source code does not necessitate that your profits must evaporate. If your competitor picks up your (A)GPL'd source code? They too then must release their changes.

because we can't handle the idea, even the /mere possibility/, that someone might be more successful with our own project then we are.

If by "success" you mean "rich," then no. GPL is not concerned with money, it is concerned with the user's freedom to inspect and modify the source code of the software they use.

Go ahead, get rich. Be more popular than me. But if you base your work on mine, I want to see what your software is doing in my computer, or with my information. I want to fix a bug long after you have stopped supporting your software. I want to make the software run on devices that you will never care about. I want all the value and data and time I've spent on your SaaS service to not simply evaporate when your crappy VC-funded startup gets bought and shut down by Facebook.

People won't stop contributing just because you aren't forcing them, BSD is proof of that,

Yes, some people would still be ethical and contribute back. Many won't. Companies are notoriously sociopathic, especially companies who are legally required to maximize profit for their shareholders, especially companies whose primary goal is return on investment for the VC that funded them.

I don't trust companies to be nice. You want to avoid paying a developer to build a poor NIH mimic of my awesome work? The price is that you must give your users the source code of your changes. I don't care if you get rich in the process. But I reject the implied assertion that you're "obstructed" from doing so.

Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code ... and make millions while you make nothing? ... You shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better."

This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.

I don't want somebody to take the work I have done and turn it into proprietary software that other users may no longer have the freedom to inspect, modify, and share. THAT is why all my work is GPL or AGPL. It has nothing to do with whether you make money or those users spend money or I get a cut of some money.

Now that we have so many SaaS startups, "turn it into proprietary software" includes "use it to build a service and never distribute the sources."

GPL and AGPL protects my code from this happening, while licenses like MIT and BSD ("permissive" licenses) do not.

Permissive licensing, in the context of SaaS, is functionally equivalent to proprietary licensing. Somebody benefits (not necessarily monetarily) from the use of my software without paying its price: improvements must be shared.

If your needs are extremely simple (e.g. graphical dialog boxes launched from a shell-script,) then there's zenity (gtk): https://help.gnome.org/users/zenity/3.14/ and kdialog (kde).

For an ncurses-style version of zenity/kdialog, there's dialog http://linux.die.net/man/1/dialog and whiptail http://linux.die.net/man/1/whiptail .

I'm very happy more people are coming around to this idea, despite multiple independent discoveries. :)

Here's another project that attempts something similar: https://github.com/berdario/invewrapper

Here's a sortof-blog-post and some more discussion about the superiority of modifying a subshell rather than sourcing a bunch of janky shell-functions that modify your current shell: https://gist.github.com/datagrok/2199506

In the end of 2012 I purchased a Lenovo x230, which ran Debian very well for the past year:

deliberation: https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/avV5eL1P...

follow-up: https://plus.google.com/u/0/106336989542410513415/posts/PR4e...

debian wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Thinkpad/X230/whe...

A couple weeks ago I upgraded to a Fujitsu Lifebook u904, for the 14" QHD (3200x1800) display. I was surprised at how very well it works with Linux, given how little information I could find about compatibility.

debian wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Fujitsu/LifebookU...

Gnome hasn't got their act together yet around high-resolution displays so font configuration is a bit wonky but that's not a hardware incompatibility deal-breaker. Even the touch-screen works.

Will your recommendation algorithm be public or secret? Will it be customizable by your users?

You mention a bulk import. Will you provide a bulk export, or will I have to keep my own backup database to avoid lock-in?

I see in your API example a bucket, a source, and a target. Would you consider a "value" field, for graphs with weighted edges? (The question is moot if I can't modify the recommendation algorithm to employ it.)

http://www.depressioncomix.com/posts/g1/

Get professional help immediately. Any/all of your reservations against doing so are misplaced.

We can't tell you what meds to take, which exercises to do, which foods to eat or avoid, or what lifestyle changes to make. Different people experience depression for different reasons, and for _no reason at all_.

See a pro.

The author of this article, Tim Kreider, may be better known by some of us Internet folk as purveyor of the fine web-comic "The Pain": http://thepaincomics.com/

Volunteerism, public-funded research projects, and progressive open-source-friendly companies are the best thing we FOSS advocates have until business models that are more appropriate for the Information Age become popular.

Commercial and closed-source software exists because we've accepted the foisting of a manufacturing-age business model upon intangible (digital) works. It is inherently unfair to charge by-the-copy for goods that cost $0 to manufacture, but we accept the obscene profits that the industry winners make because it's hard and risky to envision or implement other models.

Many FOSS licenses including the GPL encourage the programmer to charge as much as she wishes for the software. But, if we allow the customer the same rights as they have with tangible (physical) goods, then they're allowed to turn around and give away copies for nothing, undercutting the original developer. So we might as well just give it away.

If only there were a way to ensure that the original developer gets compensated for the time they spend developing their work, but still permits software to be sold without draconian restrictions.

I was really excited when Kickstarter came along because that was the closest thing to a "fair" business model that I had encountered: customers don't receive the product until enough people agree to purchase the product.

If more marketplaces existed that we creators of "intangible goods" could take advantage of, I think we'd see a lot more, higher-quality FOSS software. Creative commons by-sa-licensed works of illustration, literature, and music, too.

Kickstarter's model is one of many variants. If this sort of thing is interesting to you, google "Dominant Assurance Contracts": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract

The authors mischaracterize the "code of conduct" statement first as a redundant legal system, then as a decree that "spreads guilt onto an entire gender," then as an "overarching act of protection condemning basically every social behavior between men and women."

A code of conduct is none of those things. It is an invitation: "this is how we expect people attending our event to behave; where you find it not so, be assured that your concerns will not be ignored. Here are ways to help the event organizers address conflicts: A, B, C."

There is a legitimate need for this statement to be made.

A "business guy" complains about developers allegedly making contemptuous generalizations about clueless business guys by making contemptuous generalizations about developers.

He assumes that the reason that we who know how to write software don't (generalism) do his job is because we're "blind to those opportunities."

He sees himself as the architect and software developers as the grunts who lay the bricks.

After a lot of deliberation, I just picked up a Lenovo x230 for about $950 pre-tax. Running Linux flawlessly was one of my primary criteria for purchase. It arrives tomorrow so I'll comment then when I know whether or not I've made a terrible mistake.

I think the touchscreens are just gimmicky toys. Useless to me. But since Intel soon won't let you call your thin laptop an "Ultrabook" unless you include one (and Windows 8), and non-developer consumers are obsessed with tablets and consuming Internet with their fingers, it's getting difficult to find new hardware without one.

I wrote about how I arrived at my choice, among others including the $1500 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Includes Ubuntu), the $350 Asus Q201e (Includes Ubunutu), the $500 Asus Q200, the Samsung Chromebooks ($250/$550), and a $150 used Asus 1015PX Netbook: https://plus.google.com/106336989542410513415/posts/avV5eL1P...

I also considered momentarily the $900 ZaReason Ultralap 430 and the $670 System76 Lemur Ultra. I would have liked to support Linux-only vendors, but both at 14" were too big for my preferences. I tried an Asus 1025CE but the recent Atom CPUs require crappy proprietary video drivers from a Linux-unfriendly vendor, it was a mountain of pain to try to make it work.

One comment: If you buy a custom machine from Lenovo.com, ignore the lies they tell you about shipping dates and just assume it will take 30-45 days at least.

Wow, I hate this advice.

OP, if you are, like I was, completely repulsed by the constant insistence from everyone that you should go to college so you can toke, drink, party, and fuck: take heart, you can get a lot out of college without ever associating with meatheads and frat houses. The idiot carnival is not as prevalent as popular culture would have you believe; you can invest yourself into a hugely rewarding intellectual field, have excellent roommates that don't make you shove strange objects up your ass, and never even learn the name of your school's sports team, if that's more your style.

Also: though it is certainly easy to do all of those things while racking up student loans or mooching the monetary equivalent of a new car off your parents, the implication that you can't do most of those things without (or after) college is simply wrong. I feel much more able to "do whatever I want" now that I'm out of college and successfully making money for a few years.

I think college is important for the fundamentals it provides: data structures, mathematics, a vocabulary that helps you reason about (programming) problems. Exposure to concepts that you wouldn't otherwise know are useful. I met my wife in college too. But at the same time there's a lot that I think was both unavoidable and completely wasteful.

On balance, I feel like I got a lot out of it, and I'm glad that I didn't let the people whose college experience was mainly about sex dissuade me from going. It is what you make of it.

Woah is that...? It is!

Author Tim Kreider may be better known by some of us Internet folk as purveyor of the fine web-comic "The Pain": http://thepaincomics.com/

Of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan

But it will never be put into practice. Thanks in part to the huge amount of money thrown away on the Republican-biased Diebold and their insecure black boxes, people have been trained to repeat bumper-sticker criticisms like "hackers can break into anything" or "no electronic voting is completely secure." They form ridiculous conclusions like "the only fair vote is a paper vote."

To make matters worse, even if we someday do see a sea change and implement secure, verifiable electronic voting, it isn't going to make much of a difference unless we also adopt a better method of choosing a winner: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

Been running Ubuntu on my employer-issued MacBook Pro for almost a full year.

Ubuntu 10.10 was nearly flawless.

Upgraded to 11.04 and lost the ability to change screen brightness easily.

There are some configuration recommendations on the Ubuntu wiki specific to the MacBook that you should take note of.

The nvidia display configuration tool is finicky; unplugging from an external monitor at my desk and plugging into a projector in a conference room sometimes takes multiple rounds of invoking it and clicking "detect displays." Also there are a couple of projectors it won't play with.

I used grub-pc (the default) not grub-efi. If you don't have to dual boot Windows you don't need Boot Camp, ReFit nor the ridiculous hack of MBR partition table syncing. Just carve out some space with Mac OSX's partition tool and have Ubuntu install its bootloader to sda. Hold down option when you boot to choose your OS.

Don't blow away the OS X partition, you apparently still need it for firmware updates.

If I had the option, I'd get a PC instead. I like Asus, and I'm aware of more than one fan of Lenovo but never used them myself.

For anyone wondering, the video being played is by Cyriak. http://cyriak.co.uk

I sunk a lot of thought into a very similar idea a while ago, but then Kickstarter launched. Since it was successful and "close enough" to mine it kindof took the wind out of my sails and I've let the idea languish.

I bought a domain to describe it that is obviously now old and stale and incidentally will expire in about a week.

This page describes my motivation but is light on technical details: http://libazaar.com

This page that I have just reconstructed from older drafts has lots more text: http://libazaar.com/faq.html

Similar ideas other than Kickstarter have been conceived: http://tdaa.digitalproductions.co.uk "The digital art auction" http://www.contingencymarket.com "The contingency market"

There is a name for this Kickstarter-style model: Assurance Contracts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract

The "Dominant Assurance Contract" idea mentioned on that Wikipedia article is worth investigating.

For what it's worth, I think that assurance contract style markets provide the only truly fair way to buy and sell goods "made of information" like software, novels, digital art, and digital music in the information age. The price-per-copy model is an artifice imposed by those who don't want to change from the simple old manufacturing-age business models, and our acceptance of those models have enabled them to be grossly overcompensated.

"nature has given us a remarkable blueprint for beautiful and effective proportionality...Evident in plants, animals, the shape of galaxies, and even your DNA..."

The author is buying into unfounded hype and mysticism regarding the golden ratio. Debunked: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm

Fourteen mentions of "Free Software" and neither this article's author nor the article he mentions seems to know anything about the actual Free Software movement. The author he replies to has even modified his article after being corrected on this point.

"TeleHash is the culmination of years of discussions with many people, and is being primarily bootstrapped by Jeremie Miller."

This is the same Jeremie Miller who invented the Jabber (XMPP) protocol.

Where did you get that? I'm telling you that 15 minutes on a treadmill beats doing no exercise at all. It's contemptible to suggest to a sedentary person that if they can't exercise outside in the sun then they shouldn't even bother.

That scientific questions exist that humans "by nature cannot" or "will never be able to" understand. (Due to our brains being too unsophisticated or unimaginative, etc., or due to a projection from our current inability to observe.)

I'll second everything said here. "The gym doesn't count" is an utter lie. If you've led a multiple-year sedentary lifestyle, a mere 15 minutes on a treadmill in the morning will show you an immediate difference in your motivation and mental clarity.

Also, fat-asses: you don't have to kill yourself at the gym. Look up on the internet what your target heart rate should be, and stick to it. If you feel like you're going to fall over and die, you're making it too hard on yourself.

If you're just getting started, developing the habit of going regularly (at least 3x/week) is immensely more important than minutes ran, reps, or pounds lifted.

It's incredibly hard to start and stick to a routine if you're not used to it. I've only done it three times in my life, but it paid off every time. And the years in between were racked with life-altering depression and failure.

And if you are, like I was, repulsed by the constant insistence from everyone that you should go to college so you can toke, drink, party, and fuck: take heart, you can get a lot out of college without ever associating with meatheads and frat houses. The idiot carnival is not as prevalent as popular culture would have you believe; you can invest yourself into a hugely rewarding intellectual field, have excellent roommates that don't make you shove strange objects up your ass, and never even learn the name of your school's sports team, if that's more your style.