butlerm

26 ms·

241.
by butlerm 5y ago
Congress has changed the law since MAI v. Peak specifically to allow users to create copies and adaptations of software programs as an essential step in running or utilizing the program in question on a machine, or for limited archival purp
242.
by butlerm 5y ago
Static linking creates a work that incorporates another work, in a way that does not appear to be mere aggregation and which usually requires at least a modicum of creativity. I imagine end users might statically link things together all da
243.
by butlerm 5y ago
The claims that have never been tested in court here aren't part of the license, but rather commentary as to what constitutes a derivative work under copyright law. If true, they would affect the legality of a number of practices that
244.
by butlerm 5y ago
That may be true, but in this case the relevant parties to be persuaded are federal appellate judges before it can fairly be said that reality has changed on the ground. How likely they are to be persuaded by a position that has no apparen
245.
by butlerm 5y ago
There are actually two possibilities here: (1) The text of the GPLv2 does legitimately restrict user programs as derivative works of the kernel, and therefore a license exception is needed from the licensors in order avoid violating the lic
246.
by butlerm 5y ago
Unfortunately the FSF's idea of what a derivative work is largely something they made up with no basis in statutory law and which has never been tested in court. It basically consists of wishful thinking on their part. In the US, a de
247.
by butlerm 5y ago
Not sure how well this works out in practice, but if one drive returns a read error for a sector and the other returns the corresponding sector without an error, it should be a simple matter to trust the latter. Of course that assumes that
248.
by butlerm 5y ago
A board of directors is more important for a non-profit organization than for a for-profit one. They are part time, serve in a non-executive role, and are in charge of the overall direction of the enterprise, and for a non-profit organizat
249.
by butlerm 5y ago
I think it would be more accurate to say that UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format which by its name is logically distinct from Unicode itself. There are good reasons to store and process Unicode in UTF-8 format internally in many case
250.
by butlerm 5y ago
BGP is only necessary to advertise large blocks of provider independent address space. It would still go through your provider's routers however, with appropriate BGP filtering, unless you managed to use some kind of tunneling system.
251.
by butlerm 5y ago
The Supreme Court does not make policy, at most it stops other branches from making certain kind of policies, when presented an opportunity to do so when resolving an actual case or controversy.
252.
by butlerm 5y ago
The National Labor Relations Board is a federal agency created by an act of Congress. No, they are not the Supreme Court. The acts of every federal agency are subject to judicial appeal. Generally speaking, you cannot file suit in federal
253.
by butlerm 5y ago
"Don't interfere with defective radar altimeters" is not the way the law works. The law says don't emit more power than you are allowed to within your assigned frequency band, and much less outside it. The basic problem
254.
by butlerm 5y ago
The Atari ST made up for a lot with better, separate black and white and color monitors in the early versions.
255.
by butlerm 5y ago
Aztec C was a commercially available, and very popular, C compiler available for the Amiga at the time. And for any reasonable size program, it was fast enough. I worked on one unusually large program for the comparable Atari ST that took
256.
by butlerm 5y ago
He intended to cause harm, and that is enough to make it a malicious act.
257.
by butlerm 5y ago
Nothing. People vote with their feet or their checkbooks.
258.
by butlerm 5y ago
He did something much worse than break a contract, he committed a crime that he could probably be prosecuted for. He did the whole thing with malice aforethought. It looks like fraud at the very minimum - he released a version with the in
259.
by butlerm 5y ago
That would be a serious problem if Oracle's idea of "UTF8" wasn't roundtrip compatible with UTF-8, but it is fortunately, so approximately no one should notice the difference.
260.
by butlerm 5y ago
> Three bytes are enough to fit nearly any of the chars in use in any language This is not a fixed length encoding scheme, it is a subset of UTF-8, which is a variable length encoding designed so that the most common characters only take
261.
by butlerm 5y ago
Advertising the ability to store UTF-8 characters when you can do no such thing is a serious problem. Obviously you have to do whatever it takes to fix it, including fixing a deficient indexing implementation if necessary. I believe the li
262.
by butlerm 5y ago
All competent software tokenizes a input string before calling atoi on an extracted piece of it. Otherwise you can't even tell the difference between "0" and an empty string.
263.
by butlerm 5y ago
> Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least If that were true, a child born with a life expectancy of eighty years would be dead by age forty. Life expectancy is meas
264.
by butlerm 5y ago
It is certainly true that most users of relational databases before MySQL used them for applications where throwing away data is a potential catastrophe, and most uses of MySQL were for toy applications where if that happened no big deal.
265.
by butlerm 5y ago
Pretty sure the name "utf8" isn't metaphysically wired to a defective physical representation. All they have to do is wait until the next minor release, add a compatibility name, make the generic name refer to a non-defectiv
266.
by butlerm 5y ago
Relational databases have been used in production since the late 1970s. You would be hard pressed to find any that silently corrupted user data like that, ever, until MySQL came along. Sqlite is more of an embedded database, but if it sile
267.
by butlerm 5y ago
They should have made "utf8" have UTF-8 semantics by default as soon as the defect was discovered, not twenty plus years later.
268.
by butlerm 5y ago
Implementing silent string truncation in the first place (by default(!)) is an excellent indication of how fast and loose and out of touch the original MySQL developers were with the database world. It is the worst database "feature&q
269.
by butlerm 5y ago
MySQL's adoption of a utf8mb3 limitation for "utf8" was over seven years obsolete when it was adopted. It would have been obsolete in 1996.
270.
by butlerm 5y ago
It is variable length, by definition. If it were four bytes per code point it would be named something more like UCS-4 or UTF-32.

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