When coders use the GNU Public Licence, they have no obligation to give anyone credit for anything.1 Despite this, coders almost always receive credit for everything they do, down to the exact line-changes.2 Meanwhile, the Creative Commons licences - far more popular with artists - have explicit stipulations, but don't …

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Feature-comparisons always turn into a murky mess when people compare proprietary software to FOSS. The proprietary software tends to try to do everything, while the FOSS-tools try to do everything by doing nothing. Office 365 vs Libreoffice Office 365 advertises a chonky list of features: Powerpoint Word Processing …

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The absolute fucking state of Linux documentation shows undeniably that nobody ever reads it. Open a terminal, and just try, in earnest, to learn about what is happening: 1$ ? 2$ help 3 4 5GNU bash, version 5.2.37(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) 6These shell commands are defined internally. Type `help' to see this …

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I switched to a left-handed mouse for the first time, at the ripe age of 38. It's unviable, so I've stopped. Finding a mouse was easy - my mouse is already symmetrical. Reversing the keys was just one command. But you can't use a computer with that mouse. All the GUI shortcuts - Ctrl + c, Ctrl + f - all focus on the …

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I used to think of programming as something natively binary. 0's and 1's, [ True, False ], just like the Propositional Logic in first year Philosophy. And filesystems do work that way on the disk - every picture is made of 0's and 1's. However, Philosophy, or Logic in general, has other systems. Some of them use 'True' …

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I asked an older family member about old Scottish legends. She told me about what she heard when she was younger, from someone older still, and I suppose that puts the legend at least a hundred years back. There are ghostly bagpipes that foretell death...there are banks of primroses, where, if you pick the wrong …

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Among certain circles, there is a general agreement that university Computer Science courses don't teach practical basics, or equip students to work with actual computers. This begs the question, what would a reasonable course look like? When I worked at an IT outsourcing company, I would test people's computer skills. …

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Software licences neatly fall into three categories - open, closed, and the uncertain - a kind of Schrödinger's licence, which must become one of the other two types in time. Ignorance can only end with knowledge or death. Once someone fixes a mistake in their thinking, by understanding the truth, and how they made …

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Some centuries ago, nobles learned about the riches in their estate through their seneschal, who would walk about counting things. 10 lambs, 8 sheep, 1 exceptional sheep, 2 sickly sheep, 50 pounds of turnip, 400 pounds of cabbage,... So on and on the counting would continue, so that the lord knew how much wealth he …

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Google's began by indexing massive portions of the internet, and rating sites according to which sites had the most links going towards them. You might state the general goal like this: We will write a program to rank the quality of writing on websites. This worked well for a while, but people with businesses saw how …

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