That's a good, concise distinction between the two.

For a while now I've maintained that EULA's (but not free software licenses because, as you pointed out, are different from EULA's) are bunk anyway, in the vast majority of cases. Copyright law explicitly grants to end users the right to make copies of software as necessary to use the software, so what other rights or permissions does an EULA grant to the end user? If you (as an end user) don't agree to the EULA, then you can still legally use the software and are not bound by any of its terms and conditions*. Requiring the user to accept the terms before installing the software is merely a technical hurdle, not a legal one.

* Copying and distributing software is covered by copyright, so an EULA doesn't add any protection in that area that isn't already in law.

You're stating the exact same thing as the parent you replied to. What are you doing when you "make copies of my Linux install CDs and give them to friends"? You're DISTRIBUTING it. The GPL (which is not a EULA because it doesn't apply to the end-user but to anyone distributing it) gives permission to distribute the software with a few conditions on such distribution.

Even in the absence of an EULA, it's still illegal. (Of course, an EULA almost invariably does not grant the user any additional rights (eg, to use the software) beyond what they already had in the absence of the EULA. But I'll save that discussion for another time.)

Even RMS is not opposed to people being paid for writing software. Employees at Redhat, Google, and many other companies are paid to write free software, and neither RMS nor the GNU GPL are opposed to that. Don't you think that the GPL would restrict selling software or being paid for writing software if RMS were opposed to it? It doesn't, and he is not.

Last time I checked, most of my shortcuts that are "launched by click" don't specify the full path to the executable. Take a shortcut to Firefox as an example. The command is just "firefox" (plus possibly some switches and options). When I click on the shortcut, the underlying system (Gnome or whatever) searches the PATH environment variable for that executable and runs the first instance that it finds, in the same way a shell would do (of course, Gnome technically is a shell too). This means if I install a different version of Firefox under /usr/local/bin, the system then runs that version instead, just as it should (because /usr/local/bin comes before /usr/bin in PATH).

How would a change in the libc affect whether users can write to directories? The C library doesn't determine file/directory access; if it did, it would be extremely easy for a program to get around file permissions by using a different C library, or by not using a C library at all. It sounds like either the permissions or groups changed (see /etc/groups), or SE Linux stuff (which I don't believe is necessary for most users) is getting in the way.

It's more like comparing a family sedan to a Ferrari (which relatively few people can afford). They're reasonably priced (free!) and have all the basic features needed for PERSONAL photo management. Besides, what CRITICAL features are these photo managers, combined with other software like Rawstudio, missing that Lightroom has (for personal use, mind you)? It can't be noise reduction; Rawstudio has decent noise reduction. Lens correction? Rawstudio has that too. It can't be ease of use either; Rawstudio Shotwell, and F-Spot are all pretty easy to use.

There's no personal photo management and editing software for Linux? I guess I better tell the developers of F-Spot, Shotwell, and Darktable (and perhaps a few other projects too) that they don't exist. I personally use Shotwell; I used F-Spot for awhile, but older versions of F-Spot had show-stopping bugs for me. Shotwell has transparent RAW conversion and a few basic editing options. It's easy to open photos in a "real" editor (eg, Raw Studio or GIMP) for more extensive work, but for many photos it's sufficient.

Likewise with video editing software. Lately I haven't had much need to edit videos (other than transcoding or basic effects, which is easily done with ffmpeg or mencoder), but I know that video editing software does exist for Linux. Kdenlive is one that I've used most recently. It's not bad. Then there's Cinelerra, which is supposed to be the most advanced NL video editor available for Linux. I used it once in the past, but it was sluggish on my antiquated hardware at the time. I know there's a few other NL video editors out there for Linux, but I can't recall their names at the moment.

For vector graphics, there's Inkscape.

For that legacy in-house Windows-only software for which you lost the source (shame on you for losing it in the first place!), there's Wine. But frankly, if you lose internal source code that easily, good luck keeping track of all those software licenses!

At work, I use VS2010 Express for one of my projects, and if the full version is anything like it, I say "no thanks". It's buggy (especially the Intellisense, which is more like Nonsense sometimes), and the editor itself is nothing to write home about. I also use Netbeans for both Java (a fairly large Java project at that) and C++, and it's a far better IDE. But for this one project I have to use some Microsoft header files which don't work with GCC (some of their headers have syntax errors!), which is why I use VS2010 Express. Of course, I could probably use the VC dev tools in Netbeans, but that just seems wrong for some reason.

So really, it seems like you've been living under a rock (or under Microsoft's shadow, which is roughly equivalent) for several years when it comes to Linux. Either that, or you're a troll. Take your pick.

Yes, clearly everyone here is an idiot (except you, of course). Did you sign up on /. just to point out all the idiots?

You still missed the point of the analogy, by the way.

I think you missed the point of the analogy. The statement can be reworded as:

Calculator is to No RPN as Computer is to Only Runs Windows

In other words, No RPN (that is, only infix or algebraic notation) is like Windows, both of which can be seen as limitations of their respective devices.

tl;dr version: Whooooosh!

What you say about blue light (400nm) is its wavelength, not the size of the photon itself. Size and wavelength are separate properties. I could be wrong, of course (I am not particularly familiar with quantum mechanics and such).

If you do decide to download the full images, keep this in mind: Each tile image is between about 15KB and 50KB or so (let's say 30KB average), so the full detail image consists of roughly 9 gigabytes of JPEG images. Please, everyone, for the sake of their servers don't try to download it all at once! (I would personally try to trickle download it over the course of a week or so to be nice on their servers.)

Look at the source code of (for example) http://www.haltadefinizione.com/magnifier.jsp?idopera=10. In there you'll find this code:

swf.addVariable("xml","/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/properties_krpano.xml");

That's a relative address—the full URL is http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/properties_krpano.xml. That file contains stuff like this:

<image type="CYLINDER" hfov="1.00" multires="true" tilesize="256">
<level tiledimagewidth="181273" tiledimageheight="113625">
<cylinder url="venere_krpano/l7_%0v_%0h.jpg" />
</level>
...

The URL, again, is relative (to the XML file) and points to http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l7_%250v_%250h.jpg, where %0v and %0h are the vertical and horizontal coordinates, respectively. Since this level is 181273 pixels wide and 113625 pixels (taken from the "level" tag), and tiles are 256x256 pixels (taken from the "image" tag), you can grab all images at this level with the fusker string http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l7_[01-444]_[01-709].jpg. Be careful downloading the whole picture at this detail level (7). It's 314,796 tiles! If you just want a wallpaper-sized image for this image, try downloading detail level 1, which is 2833x1776 pixels (84 tiles) (fusker string: http://www.haltadefinizione.com/immagini/opere/10/imgfull/venere_krpano/l1_[01-07]_[01-12].jpg).

By the way, the watermarks are all embedded directly in the tile sets, unfortunately. They seem to be stamped on every tile whose coordinates modulo 4 are 0, meaning only 1/16 of the images are stamped.

Happy downloading!

That's easy to win. Just start the program like this:

GOTO 20

Then you'll be happy to know that this site exists...

(Yes, it is Safe For Work!)

Hi Alex, I think you meant strace'ing a process multiple times, rather than recursive strace'ing. You can certainly use ptrace on a process that is using ptrace on another process, but the issue is trying to ptrace a process that is already being ptrace'd. In other words:

x -> y -> z

(x, y, z are processes, -> means tracing) works, but

x -> z <- y

does not work because process "z" can be traced only once. I think the technical reason a process can be traced only once is because only one parent can receive the process's state via the wait() system call, much like only one process can receive its child's exit status via wait() in a non-ptrace situation. There may be other reasons for it as well, but I couldn't locate the POSIX standards (IEEE 1003.4 Realtime Extensions, I believe) detailing the ptrace() system call and its rationale.

If I misunderstood what you meant about recursive strace, then I do apologize.