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OK so I didn't exactly cry in ICO, but at one point I got worried that maybe the NPC might be in serious trouble. I think that qualifies.

Anyone interested in arts and games shoud definitely check out ICO: the gameplay is fun in itself (it's basically the precursor for the new Prince of Persia game, where the puzzle is in the 3D architecture itself), but its artistic qualities make it the "poem of computer games".

"Given the huge number of Linux drivers, those are the kind of changes that Apple can pull off but a near to impossible to do in the Linux world."
You trade the freedom to use lots of different hardware (Linux) for the convenience of using Apple hardware. Deciding which is better is personal.

"kernel are not that important anymore"
I have difficulty agreeing with this comment. Certainly there may be a great deal of interoperability between Linux and OSX (perhaps ignoring the GPL in some cases) but this is not the same as saying that the particular kernels are not important. If your comment were correct, would we need Free Darwin? (Also here and here.)

As the Linux kernel progresses (adding more improved journaled file systems, better smp support, better use of resources, etc.), I believe the same applications which run under Linux and OSX will run better under Linux. (A related example is Quake3; it runs much faster under Linux than under Windows. Sometime Windows (applications) run faster under wine than under Windows. I do not know how OSX and Linux compare in this regard. However, OSX has an extra layer which probably does not help speed things up.)

And what happens when people start misusing the metadata like the current meta tags?

The Semantic Web just provides a method for expressing metadata. Maintaining the integrity of those expressions involves a different set of problems. Some of the solutions include trust metrics like Slashdot's own distributed moderation (PDF) or Advogato.

Bug fixing aint sexy but it is very very necessary.

Luckily, my vigilance paid off, and Brian Silverman, aka "electro_depot" was caught and charged by the FTC for his crimes.

Dozens upon dozens of people were scammed by Brian over the course of a year or two. Many of them went to google to find out more about him, because he failed to return emails and phone calls. At that time, my Advogato diary entry was the only hit that google returned, and over 80 people contacted me directly via email to ask if I had ever received my laptop (at the time, I hadn't).

I had an officer, Det. Mike Gischner from the NYC "Computer Crime Squad" division call me directly, based on that same Advogato diary entry (the only one mentioning "Brian Silverman" by name at the time), asking me if I had heard of anyone else that had problems with Brian. I asked him if 120 people was enough. Silence on the phone. He thought I was kidding. I forwarded him all of the emails I had received at the time, and proceeded with his end of the case. He had no idea that there were that many people being screwed by this jerk.

As time went on, several web sites popped up to try to track the fraud from Brian Silverman, based on my original "collection" of users and emails that I had received. I take full credit for bringing enough evidence to bring him to justice.

I did eventually receive my laptop... the last one he actually sent out to anyone. I managed to track him down, at his home address, and called him one night asking (no no, demanding ) my laptop, or I would be at his front door the next morning. The laptop arrived a couple of days later.

As an aside note, the laptop, which I am typing this reply on right now, has been back to IBM 7 times for repair in the last couple of years, for repairs and replacement of almost every part, several times. Its definately a lemon, but it works well now.. and is basically brand-new again.

Basically his scam was as follows:

• Put "several" laptop models online on eBay for sale (note: He never actually has these laptops at all, he has never even purchased them). Let's use 10 laptops as an example; 5 IBM laptops and 5 Sony laptops.
• Get several dozen bidders on the laptops, raising the price around normal MSRP
• Take the highest bidders on all of the auctions, and demand that they send the payment within 5 days of auction close
• 10 people send in their payments for the "10" laptops (remember, he hasn't ever purchased a single laptop)
• Keep the money as long as possible, in a bank account, until people start complaining about shipment
• Delay delay delay, using whatever tactics are necessary. I've heard dozens of his excuses from various bidders.
• Delay some more, making sure to keep that bank account interest rolling in (more profit in his pocket)
• When people get heated enough to start threatening, send 8 people back their money (leaving the highest 1 IBM and 1 Sony buyer waiting) (more profit in his pocket)
• It is now 2-3 months later, and the "top-of-the-line" laptop is now no longer top-of-the-line.
• He purchases the laptops, wholesale, from the absolute-cheapest place he can find, having them shipped ground, factory-direct. At this point, since it is 1/4 of a year later, the laptops cost anywhere from 20%-40% less than the original auction price (more profit in his pocket).

Eventually, he decided that the whole "Ship the laptop" thing was just too much trouble, and he started keeping the money, never purchasing any laptops at all, for any bidders.

I'm glad he's rotting in a federal prison right now, getting 60 months (from what I understand), for his crimes, and an enormous $600k fine and penalties.

Hey, johnnyb, where else have you posted this question? When you get answers, will you analyze them and post your conclusions? It could be interesting.

It must be a wonderful discussion, because as pointed out by Nathan himself: It's a safe place to rant without being contradicted by apologists, toadies, people worried about their unwise career choices, or even facts.

Given Sun's complete misunderstanding of the concept of "Open Source Software", as evidenced by their opinion that the Sun Community Source License is "open enough" in spite of it's many obvious problems, I urge caution. Wait until we get to see the license under which the Solaris source code is made available. If it has *any* of the problems evidenced by the SCSL, then it won't be an Open Source Software license, but some marketing gimmick and it should be avoided.

And that warning is so useful. Who do you send it to?

• The recipients? They don't care.
• The "senders"? They don't care. (The From: address is forged!)

These messages are a waste of everyone's time. I get hundreds of worms daily...but I never see them, because they're easy to filter. What I do see are these damned "helpful" messages that "I" sent someone a virus. Those are much harder to filter.

Much better way: reject viruses in the SMTP transaction. The SMTP client is then responsible for notifying the sender. If that client is a virus or worm, it will do nothing; no one is bothered. If it's a false positive, the sender will get the bounce. Reliable, unobstrusive.

If you want to filter email politely, you must follow these rules. People who don't cause the rest of us constant headaches. The worst thing is that they don't even realize it.

it's usually distributed as part of a collection called "bsd games", if you use Linux try here.

Apparently there are some systems that yum simply can't handle because it has to update the system while it is "online" (e.g. LVM). So it looks like the answer is "it depends on your set up".

See Seth Videl's post about it. My advice is to wait and see what the pitfalls are since there *will* be gotchas.

...hmm. advogato's being a bit strange today so let me post a quote:

Wrote up some not-yet-finished notes on how to yum update from FC1 to FC2 with relative ease. I'll post a link here when I'm happy. It's not a hard process and for most people it'll work fairly ok. For some people, however, for example, people using LVM, there are certain things yum just can't do, and there is no nice way around it on a running system. This is where anaconda is the only way to do it. Since it is running outside of your installed system it can muck with things w/o worrying about making its environment completely unusable.

hate to break this to you, but in the words of one of the GNU classpath developers "All your java are belong to Sun."

Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen.

In the mind of everyone who would learn about and understand such an action, Microsoft's image has already been damaged. For most of their customers, however, such an attack by Microsoft would slip under the radar... which is probably why Microsoft apparantly has no moral objections to making such threats against small targets and why people like this blogger can talk about that situation as if it were a hypothetical "view" rather than a recent occurance.

I wrote about this some time back, in "It's All in the Packaging". Of course, it was written before there was a Gentoo. Gentoo has policies but not (particularly) packages, yet similar considerations apply.

If that link gets slashdotted, here is another link of a PDF PowerPoint presenation.

Good read! This paper (with the discusion of the goodness/fastness of file appends) made me more interested in Prevalence - so much so that I am using it for my new project.

-Mark

Some useful links to information on ethical and anti-war licensing issues:

Slashdot thread

Open Source Software License discussion list thread

Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement: an example of a license which takes ethical issues in to consideration

Freshmeat thread

Advogato thread

UserLand thread

Yahoo group to discuss open source ethics

Fast-forward 3 months...

I let it lie for awhile (honestly, I was busy with other things, like trying to bring in paid work), until I read a story on Slashdot about the iptables/ipfilter team getting an injunction in Germany.

I decided to revisit our old friends, to see what they've been up to. I caught up with a friend on ICQ who lives in France, and he tells me that he knows a guy in Germany who wrote $APPLICATION entirely from scratch, and that it competed with his own product. Curiously, the guy he knows, is the same one that claims he didn't take any of our code (small world, huh?).

So I mentioned my issues with the "guy", and his company, and as I'm talking on ICQ, I start digging through the code again, and I find our functions littered through their codebase again. I also find an SDK that they've "written" to allow other developers to write "modules" that plug into their proprietary product (questionably using our code).

As I look through their SDK, I have this eerie feeling of deja-vu. I've seen this code before. I start grepping my source tree, and sure enough, the functions in their SDK are byte-for-byte identical to our own, including the comments. Of course, this portion of their code claims to be covered by the LGPL, but the copyright header has the author marked as this "guy", not the original authors who actually wrote the functions he's ripped off from us.

Needless to say, I reopened the issue with the FSF, and gave them the additional information they needed to have to make sure this incident does not get dropped this time.

Not only did this developer ("guy") in Germany lie to us about the nature of his code, he lied to my friend in France by telling him he wrote it all from scratch, and he is openly, and knowingly ripping off the hard work of others, by removing their copyright notice from their code (OUR code), and replacing it with his own name and company name, and are shipping it in an SDK, that they claim as their own. I wonder how many other companies and developers have downloaded this SDK, and are unknowingly also in violation of copyright?

Now I'm pissed. This is the third violation of our code, OUR code, by commercial companies in the last 6 months, without even a single "Thank you for all you've done" from any of them.

This blog post in Advogato deals with issues across the pond from MS home - but there are some interesting points about how the Open Source License is just as bogged down in terms of how different interfaces cannot *interoperate*

For instance - "In other words, the Wine team are entitled to write to the Samba team to ask them for their "interface" access points, such as the DCE/RPC and LANMAN and SMB file / print sharing interfaces. The Samba team responds by saying "you can get the code from here". The Wine team responds by saying "the license is incompatible, I cannot use that code". The Samba team responds "sorry, we cannot help you there".

Some proof-verification languages require verification programs that are rather large. For example, it has been estimated that a minimal verifier for HOL (a relatively light verification language) would require about 3000 lines of Python code for a verifier. Two projects that have significantly more modest requirements for their checking code are Ghilbert (currently in its early stages) and Metamath (more mature but with the drawback that new definitions can only be introduced as new axioms and therefore must be manually checked for soundness). A proof verifier has been written for the latter with only 300 lines of Python code.

http://www.advogato.org/proj/Gmail/ This page is funny cause gmail is dead.

Just a couple of days ago I found out about a cool metaclass hack to turn Python (the regular Python with the regular interpreter) into a metaclass based language. I posted about it on my Advogato journal. I mention this because I think it's pretty cool, and because I think people should see the alternative before thinking Phython is the only way to do this. That's not to say the new language isn't also a good choice.

People often complain about how buggy and how full of security holes. Bugs are what occur when you make something that is very large and very complex. People want stuff to be easy to use, which means advanced programming, which in turn results in bugs. As for security holes. This is a subject that really bugs me. The people that tend to be the most critical of microsoft for their numerous security holes (which also result from having such a complex system), also tend to be the ones that like to exploit them. Which is a damn hipocracy if you ask me. Security holes exist, they always have, they always will, and there is nothing whatsoever that you, I or Mr. Gates can do to change that. The problem isn't the security holes, it's the fact that there are people that exploit them. And then those innocent people who don't exploit them will get mad at Microsoft, effectively siding with those malicious jerks who exploit the holes. People should be supportive of Microsoft to fix the holes and bugs, while denouncing the jerks, letting them know that they are neither cool nor respected.

You say that the problem with bugs are that they are present in complex programs and the people who exploit them should be beaten with a donkey. I concur.

HOWEVER, it's not the fact that the bugs were created in the first place that pisses most people off. It is:

-Microsoft consistently releases software with known bugs...23,000 such known in Windows 2000 upon its deployment.

-Microsoft takes its time to fix even the smallest bugs. Remember this?

-Microsoft's patches often cause compatibility issues on down the road for enterprise systems (I don't think I need a link to prove that one).

My point is, you can whine about Microsoft being exploited all you want and complex software having bugs...it's life, it happens. But when the company in question releases buggy software on purpose, takes months to fix critical issues, gouges customers on support costs, releases patches that are not working and/or break other parts of the operating system, etc etc it shows a level of deception that rivals only the tobacco companies.

That's why, for one, I don't complain about release dates being shoved back and the public beta of Windows XP SP2. This shows that Microsoft is trying to become more responsible...but those few actions are but a whisper in the jet engine of Blaster et al.

Full details on the event are in my advogato diary.

Basically the scam was that this seller puts a laptop model for sale on eBay, dozens of times. Dozens of people bid on the item and he picks the 'n' number of highest bidders to "win" the auction. At no time does he own these laptop models he is selling. He requires that all payment be sent to him within 5 days of the auction close.

After 4-6 weeks of delays, people start sending emails, getting pissed, and mad. "Brian Silverman" emails them back, with excuses about delays at the "warehouse" and other excuses.

Meanwhile, 2-2.5 months later, he purchases the laptop model, at quite a discounted price from the vendor (not being the "newest" model on the market anymore).

So he keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars in auction buyers' money in his account, accruing interest, and then he purchases the laptops, at roughly 30-40% less than his original auction price.

But wait, it gets better... Brian decided that the whole "send the item to the buyer" part of the scam was eating into his profits too much, so he decided to just not send any laptops to anyone.

I was the last person he ever sent a laptop to. I actually tracked him down, and called him at home one night to demand my laptop, or the FBI would be at his door in 30 minutes. He claimed he would send it out that night, and double the RAM "for my troubles". A week later, I did indeed receive the laptop.

But I posted all of the details in my Advogato diary entries. Hundreds of other people who were being scammed by Brian Silverman googled for his "electro_depot" name, and my diary entry was the only one to come up. They would email me directly asking for more details.

I then received a call from the NY Cyber Crime division, asking me if I had any details on the "scam" with Brian Silverman, and if anyone else had contacted me, because they had a "few calls".

I said I had 141 separate people who had emailed me to complain. 141 people!!!

The end result, was that Mr. Silverman was tracked down out of the country, and the FTC caught and nailed him. I even received a nice little letter from the FTC praising me for my efforts in catching him.

My diary entry was THE reason people were brought together, and the FTC and NYPD took notice in the matter.

Vigilante justice does definately work, but you have to be very careful about how you go about it. After people found my diary entry, they created all of those other websites to track and report on Mr. Silverman's scams.

(And that T23 that I "won" is currently at IBM repair, for the 6th time in 2 years, so it wasn't exactly a "win" in my case).

OK Microsoft has a patent on encoding document files in XML format. Does anyone really think that they would try to enforce it? The prior art is called HTML. The only logical reason for filing that patent and many of the other recent ones is to stop a would-be Doyle doing the same.

Well, Microsoft also has a patent on the .asf video file format. I stress the file format - we're not even talking about something as complex as a codec or anything. Like the XML patents, it's nothing at all original, but that didn't stop them from using it to force the author of VirtualDub to remove ASF support from his program!

No, what we have is a situation where a big companies can use their boatloads of worthless patents to squash little guys who can't afford to fight and don't have the clout to pressure the USPO. While any patents, valid or not, an individual may have can easily be made worthless.

There's been a real attempt recently to create an economic situation where only large corporations can afford to do software development, and software patents and the DMCA are a big part of it. If Microsoft has there way all PCs will have X-Box like DRM protection where only signed code can be run, and any attempt to get around it will be illegal.

Damien Sandras, the main developer of GnomeMeeting, stated today that SIP-support is one of the main targets for GnomeMeeting 2.0, as well as better integration with the rest of the desktop (e-d-s, bonobo and dbus).

> Getting more contributors to OSS Java projects would
> be a pragmatic and actually helpful goal to work
> towards. As opposed to demanding Sun give away their
> source. IMHO

Just for reference, those of us currently involved in
developing free implementations of Java have not, to
my knowledge, demanded that Sun give away any source.
ESR has, but he doesn't speak for us.

Of course it would be hugely helpful if Sun gave away
their source. That would be man-years of work we wouldn't
have to do. For instance, right now some people are
actively working on Swing. I would expect this to take
quite a long time... Sun could shorten that considerably

We don't really expect that, however. And we don't really
need it; we'll do ok at our own pace.

The things we really could use, and that I at least really
would like Sun to change, are:

* Access to the TCK. No free implementation has ever
been run against the TCK. It has never been available
under suitable terms. E.g., becoming a Sun licensee
is not acceptable.

* Access to the JCP. I'm told that at the moment there
are still terms in the JCP that prevent developers of
free Java implementations from participating. So, for
the most part, we stay away. This is particularly
unfortunate as participation in the JCP would be
mutually beneficial.

* Lift restrictions on subsetting. Those of us working
on free implementations all understand that there is
a huge amount of value in compatibility. We don't
want to fragment the platform -- we aren't MS. However,
free software isn't well suited for a "have one big
complete release" model. Instead we do things piecemeal,
as they are implemented. In the past anyway, Sun
has frowned on this sort of thing and made various
attempts (e.g., in JSR click-throughs, or even in
licenses at the front of books) to prevent this.

The next question, though, is "what's in it for Sun?".
What is their incentive for opening things a bit more?
Unfortunately, I don't have very good answers here, yet.
I do think the free software community and Sun could
be natural allies in this space. Java has made good
inroads into free software, however it is still a work
in progress. E.g., Mono has appeared, perhaps in 5
years C# will have displaced Java in the free world
as well.

I fail to see how MS packaging extras with their OS and charging for the combination rather than selling them separately and not totally integrating them and allowing you to buy another player is abuse of monopoly status.

Don't just swallow all the hype. Think twice before bying in to child of marketing that is Java.

Java: Language of Tommorow
Java: Failure or Crime
many anti-Java rants on The Bile Blog
Sun itself won't use Java internally

Why do idiots (or astroturfing trolls) always say this and why do other idiots mod them up? Microsoft most certainly does go after people using patents. Just ask the author of VirtualDub

Just because most of these never make it to court is hardly an excuse either. Honestly, how many open source developers do you think could afford to face Microsofts high-paid lawyers in a patent case?

Amen.

/. Java fanatics wake up and smell the coffee, namely:

Java: Language of Tommorow
Java: Failure or Crime
the many rants on bileblog

i am mainly a C user but i tried java years ago when i was using a Mac and i have kept an eye on Java since. my problems with it and how Sun behaves are :

1. the claimed "portability" of Java

i think this is a fine joke. a java program has portability trouble across different JRE on the same processor and OS. dont even try to think of this about different processors or even various operating systems. the high deniability of people when you tell them about this tells a lot of the inner problems of Java : axioms you are not allowed to discuss even if everything shows there's something wrong.

let's get an exemple. you can install NetBSD 1.6.1 and in its kernel you have compatibility options that allow you to use binaries compiled on previous versions of NetBSD like a binary coming from ten years ago, compiled on NetBSD 0.9

how can i be able to run BINARY code that is ten years old on a machine, and not be able to run Java bytecode on the same machine with two different JRE properly ?

i can even grab a binary for a proprietary unix system years and years ago and have it run... so we are able to run today programs from machines whom are no longer available and that existed before Java even came to birth.

2. Writing non-portable code using Java

Java is said to be impossible to be used to write non-portable programs. fine. so why does the applet that works fine under Internet Explorer and Windows doesn't work on a Macintosh under MacOS or MacOS X ?

3. Standards

C is a standard. We had the ANSI C that was followed by ISO C and more recently the C99 which GCC supports. So if you write code relatively cleanly it will get compiled (sometimes with a few fixes) on weirdo platforms. C should suck compared to Java about portability. So a few monthes ago why did I run into so much trouble to try to run Freenet ? It has been written using Java so it would be as portable as possible. But when you try to run it with JRE A it doesn't work so you move to JRE B but you get even worse problems so you try another JRE... Excuse-me ?!

While in the same time we got programs written in C that can be compiled on Linux, BSD, Windows, HP-UX, AIX across a dozen different kind of processors. We could be able to find rpm, debian packages, Free/Net/Open's entries in their respective Ports/pkgsrc...

NetBSD 1.6.1 released in august 2003 runs on 52 different architectures, with 17 disctinct hardware architectures and 11 different processors and it's mainly based on C code. The beauty of it ?

If I find a PCMCIA card and write a device for it, it will also mean that if you got a Zaurus (which runs a different archictecture and processor as the i386 I could have used to write a PCMCIA driver) you can plug the PCMCIA card and have it work. It means that if you install NetBSD on a Mac and it has a PCI port, you can plug a x86 supported card and have it work while you have no driver for that very same card available under both MacOS and MacOS X.

I'm not saying that C is the answer but that proper design and continuous work can achieve great results. Linux is also available on an incredible number of platforms, probably even more than NetBSD currently has from small cards with tiny processors to big 8-way monster machines.

Last, let me reproduce the words of someone from Advogato about this, dej who says :

The only real problem with Java is that it is proprietary.

I cannot legally use Java in any way, without giving Sun the ability to impair my business. This does not hold true for C++.

The license that accompanies the JRE you can download from Sun gives you the right to use it to test your own applications. It does not give you the right to run other people's applications arbitrarily. I suppose you can buy a JRE from Sun for this purpose. But then Sun controls

i am mainly a C user but i tried java years ago when i was using a Mac and i have kept an eye on Java since. my problems with it and how Sun behaves are :

1. the claimed "portability" of Java

i think this is a fine joke. a java program has portability trouble across different JRE on the same processor and OS. dont even try to think of this about different processors or even various operating systems. the high deniability of people when you tell them about this tells a lot of the inner problems of Java : axioms you are not allowed to discuss even if everything shows there's something wrong.

let's get an exemple. you can install NetBSD 1.6.1 and in its kernel you have compatibility options that allow you to use binaries compiled on previous versions of NetBSD like a binary coming from ten years ago, compiled on NetBSD 0.9

how can i be able to run BINARY code that is ten years old on a machine, and not be able to run Java bytecode on the same machine with two different JRE properly ?

i can even grab a binary for a proprietary unix system years and years ago and have it run... so we are able to run today programs from machines whom are no longer available and that existed before Java even came to birth.

2. Writing non-portable code using Java

Java is said to be impossible to be used to write non-portable programs. fine. so why does the applet that works fine under Internet Explorer and Windows doesn't work on a Macintosh under MacOS or MacOS X ?

3. Standards

C is a standard. We had the ANSI C that was followed by ISO C and more recently the C99 which GCC supports. So if you write code relatively cleanly it will get compiled (sometimes with a few fixes) on weirdo platforms. C should suck compared to Java about portability. So a few monthes ago why did I run into so much trouble to try to run Freenet ? It has been written using Java so it would be as portable as possible. But when you try to run it with JRE A it doesn't work so you move to JRE B but you get even worse problems so you try another JRE... Excuse-me ?!

While in the same time we got programs written in C that can be compiled on Linux, BSD, Windows, HP-UX, AIX across a dozen different kind of processors. We could be able to find rpm, debian packages, Free/Net/Open's entries in their respective Ports/pkgsrc...

NetBSD 1.6.1 released in august 2003 runs on 52 different architectures, with 17 disctinct hardware architectures and 11 different processors and it's mainly based on C code. The beauty of it ?

If I find a PCMCIA card and write a device for it, it will also mean that if you got a Zaurus (which runs a different archictecture and processor as the i386 I could have used to write a PCMCIA driver) you can plug the PCMCIA card and have it work. It means that if you install NetBSD on a Mac and it has a PCI port, you can plug a x86 supported card and have it work while you have no driver for that very same card available under both MacOS and MacOS X.

I'm not saying that C is the answer but that proper design and continuous work can achieve great results. Linux is also available on an incredible number of platforms, probably even more than NetBSD currently has from small cards with tiny processors to big 8-way monster machines.

Last, let me reproduce the words of someone from Advogato about this, dej who says :

The only real problem with Java is that it is proprietary.

I cannot legally use Java in any way, without giving Sun the ability to impair my business. This does not hold true for C++.

The license that accompanies the JRE you can download from Sun gives you the right to use it to test your own applications. It does not give you the right to run other people's applications arbitrarily. I suppose you can buy a JRE from Sun for this purpose. But then Sun controls

• Trip to the Emergency Room

But you know, I'm still a productive member of society and all.

I just wish the SVG themers could come up with even a single aesthetically pleasing and extensive collection of file icons. The button themes are good already. It looks like SVG filters will likely be in GNOME 2.8 through librsvg, starting with blurs, which are needed to do decent shadow effects on the icons. Also, I hear that someone's has been working on non-icon SVGs for GNOME.

A certificate-based trust metric has already been implemented, in the form of Advogato. You need to be vouched for by existing members, and you gain ranks as more people certify you. Bad nodes can be separated and isolated, protecting the entire network. Orkut may offer some new features, but so far I haven't heard of anything groundbreaking in it's design.

Secondly, I don't see the point of all these Friendster-like websites. I manage my friends quite well without my relationships being formalized via the Internet. Seeing how I'm connected to other people doesn't interest me one bit. Maybe I'm weird, but it just seems ... unnecessary.

I guess atai must have submitted the same question here as well, but the "original" discussion took place on advogato:

http://www.advogato.org/article/735.html

It would be useful if he could state what his requirements and limits are, in detail, because that's a very necessary part of evaluating what would work.

His blog's up though. =)

But not for long. ;-)

And BTW: I'd suggest a look here for a Ximian employee's view on the inflated KDE claims.

You drooling java fanboys are all alike. Doing a google search on "java" doesn't prove anything about Java's performance (seriously- those werent even benchmarks you linked to). Neither does linking to a page titled "C++ Sucks".

Here is some data right back at you:
http://www.jelovic.com/articles/why_java_is_slow.h tm
http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/garf/2001/01/08/bad_ java/index.html
http://www.advogato.org/article/624.html
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~cs154/PerfComp/

Chew on dat, butt monkey.

"The fee will be used to provide much needed bandwidth and hosting space."

If this donation system actually begins to improve the service quality of SourceForge, while removing ALL banner ads, I see it as a good thing, except, that's not going to be the case here.

Let's also not forget about SourceForge drifting away from the community, being non-Free itself (with the code being unavailable), crippling common development and project management tools, and hijacking projects for personal gain.

I was going to say "Slashdot: ripping off Advogato content since 2002", but then I realised "jschauma" was credited to the Slashdot story, so he can hardly be accused of ripping off himself.

This would be an approach strikingly similar to that in the Advogato trust metric.

Microsoft forced the author of Virtualdub to remove support for the ASF format since Microsoft had patented the file format. That's the only one I remember.

This actually happened on Advogato.

There was a lack of filtering on one of the sites variables and a crafty user created a "virus" that spread from profile to profile.

If you viewed an infected page when logged in your own profile was updated to contain a copy of the infectuous code.

Full details here.

This actually happened on Advogato.

There was a lack of filtering on one of the sites variables and a crafty user created a "virus" that spread from profile to profile.

If you viewed an infected page when logged in your own profile was updated to contain a copy of the infectuous code.

Full details here.

Perhaps you'll be surprised to discover work on SVG in gnome-games started a while ago, before KDE made any announcement:

Link to the diary of gnome-games maintainer

They used them to protect the ASF file format as a previous post mentioned.
here

They also threatened to use them against OpenGL fragment shaders, though I don't know if they did anything official about it, and OpenGL has continued with fragment shaders uncahnged.

I'm suprised that there are these two examples. Microsoft has not been as clean as people think here. However they are nothing compared to a lot of compainies with patent portfolios.

Microsoft, however, has never been on the other side of the fence. They have only ever used patents in a defensive manner.

Microsoft used patents to kill ASF support in VirtualDub. See here.

Your complaints seem to be about GNU projects. They do some strange things. Not all of it is incompetence either. Some of it is politics.

Not only are people recreating the look-and-feel of Windows but the very things that made us dispise Microsoft and Windows in the first place!

That's why you have to take an active stance in avoiding script kiddie projects like GNOME or KDE. Just say no to crap!

I wouldn't characterize this group as cultists as they don't ignore the facts, but appear to welcome them. Most projects tend to develop some degree of "core" fans as the base who are enthusiastic about their "cause" (i.e., Linux, Gnome, Apache). What's admirable about this project is that they take every challenge head-on and have successfully answered the questions posed to them at their wiki and other sites as honestly as I've seen any other group. If they don't have the answers, they admit it.

I see Prevayler as a bit ahead of its time in the sense of hardware requirements (though that may change in a few short years). Also, it would benefit greatly if it gained a flexible schema framework; maybe by incorporating suggestions from Aspect Oriented Programming?

On the other hand, I don't see why this couldn't be used to replace any file-based database app such as FoxPro, Access, Paradox, Clipper, FileMaker or dBase. 1 GB .dbf or .mdb files are rare, and often easily corrupted. A web-based Prevayler application would be a boon to this departmental application niche.

= 9J =