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I think we must thank microsoft and its C# initiative, er... plan for world domination, for convincing Sun to open up. That couldn't be done 10 years ago when Java was the only player, and it being free as in beer was already a step forward compared to other environments.

It is likely an argument, but talk about open sourcing JAVA is quite old.

A few years ago I wrote this article, and there are similar articles from other people. From my server logs I know that this article has been read by quite a few people from SUN, and I have had some discussion with a few of them.

For years it seems it was a matter of "we'd like to, but we don't dare to".

Uh, no. The Israelis have stolen the homeland of an ethnic group through Brittish Imperial fiat

They did indeed take a piece of land where other people were already living among a lot of jews. Matter of fact is that it wasn't their land of course.

They took this land following a proposal dating back to the end of the Ottoman Empire. A proposal that would have provided for home countries for jews, palestinians and kurds. A plan that never got executed, except for the creation of the state of Israel some 30 years later. This happened despite attempts from the Brits to prevent it. You may want to read up a bit on that bit of history.

Fact is also that jews have been living in what is now Israel for almost as long as history is being written, and it was by far the most logical place for a home country from that point of view.

Regardless, people have been driven off their land, and the least that needs to happen is that those people get compensated for their losses. Israel is of course doing the exact opposite of this.

and are waging a very literal war of genocide so they can keep. THEY are in the wrong. The Palestinians are fighting for survival,

Fighting for survival does not legitimize things like attacking Israeli civilians. Those who do that are wrong regardless of their motivation (and yes, by the same token Israel is wrong in attacking civilian targets and possibly civilians themselves in Gaza and Lebanon as well regardless of their motivation).

the any other arab groups involved are generally trying to aid them in this.

Other Arabs only made things worse, not better.

Because what the israelis are doing is 100% wrong.

That does not change that what Palestinians are doing is wrong as well.

Just as wrong as what the Nazis did to the Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews. The ONLY difference is that Israel is genociding slowing, a family farm in Gaza here, a bus load of students there, and 50 years later we have millions of palestian dead.

And somehow the answer to that is hate of all jews and killing them regardless of where they are or what they support?

You my friend are full of anger. Your anger is justified, but it clouds your judgements and as a result your conclusions are wrong.

Oh, and if you want to compare things to Europe, you may want to put a lot more time into figuring out how Europe managed to put an end to 1000 (!!) years of war and territorial conflict between France and Germany.

Also, read http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20060720 023409472 to find out a bit more about what I think about this conflict. Just keep in mind that I don't really care about who is right or wrong, rather, I care about who is willing to actually solve something. In that both parties in the conflict are not doing too well.

http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20050203 220950714

The problem is that obvious in this context doesn't mean what you think it does.

See this discussion for some more information.

Now I think of it, we have had some earlier discussion on this.. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145368&thresho ld=-1&commentsort=0&tid=155&mode=nested&cid=121724 07 and http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20050416 0032461

And yes, you have a point, but that point is not very likely to convince the individual or small business developing software commerically. It will do a lot better with the kind of company that actually has the funds to fight such things.

Individuals and small businesses are responsible for a disproportionally large part of innovation in software, at times being succesfull, and when being succesfull at the expense of some of the big companies in the field, not seldom finding themselves with the choice between attacking more patents then they can possibly fight, or pay the barrier to market fee being demanded.

While many of the programs you use today may have some bigname company logo, the actual concepts behind many of them were thought up by some individual developer or small company.

I think that explains part of why many in the software industry have a problem with patents applying to their 'field', despite there also being some things in software development that may be worthy of a patent.

Heh, funny read.

While not by far as funny as what the Onion had to say, this was my take on it at the time

Specifically, check http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20040605 084457375

It was written quite soem time ago, but it describes my ideas pretty well I think.

Also, see the current headline article, tho it has more to do with copyright in relation to specific media and accepting that using a specific medium puts some inherent limitations on your rights as copyright owner.

Security is not (just) a process Not that I disagree with what you are saying, but I disagree with the 'security is a process' statement.

I'm not trying to redress the argument to suit my needs.

Yes you did. You changed it from copying and/or distributing (for proffit or not) into taking credit for creating a work.

You say that you don't care whether someone copies your work and makes money off of it, because you assume that people will come to you when the need new work.

You are right about what I said, but the reason you give is not correct. I hope people will come to me for new works because I have the ability to create them. If someone else can do that better then obviously people will go to someone else.

The person who distributed the work could try to write something new, fine with me, I trust my ability to do that better however.

Just for your info, I am not against copyright as such, but I do not believe current copyright law is serving its stated purpose, and I do not believe it is just either. If you want to know what I'd think to be better, look here

So according to you musicians can't make money at all: the record companies rip them off and customers don't buy direct. The problem with this view is that it doesn't reflect reality.

That view reflects reality for the large majority of musicians out there. As said, there are exceptions, but for each such exception, you can find thousands of examples of the opposite.

I am not going to judge if record companies rip them off, and I can see there being a valid argument in record companies providing a service which if the artist wants/needs it, has a price.

Matter of fact is that virtually all artists contracted by recording companies have to pay a very substantial part of the cost of producing and marketing a record, and a record has to sell extremely well to break even on that. It is not unusual to start record sales with a substantial debt, and end it with a smaller debt. Ending with a proffit is not the rule however. (interestingly, record companies claim this as being one of the reasons why they need the huge proffit margins on CDs and the like, while in virtually all cases the artists pay most of the bill for it)

This is somewhat different with smaller recording companies (cost of marketing is lower when there is less marketing done for example), but it is still not easy at all to make a proffit, let alone a living from that.

On the other hand, I have half a dozen people in my friends circle alone who live from performing music (mostly rock and symphonic)

The picture you are painting is really only true for the very very tiny group of extremely well selling musicians.

The courts use codified definitions so that things are exacting, fair, and not open to interpretation as much as possible. You wouldn't want the courts using vernacular because it would open up for tremendous abuse.

I am aware of that, and I see the need for it. That doesn't mean that courts can go on and use definitions that are unlike the ones used in general.

The simple reason for this is that as a citizen of the USA (and many other countries) you are supposed to 'know and understand the law'. This can only work if that law is in fact understandable (at least the basics of it) to the general public.

Strict definitions are needed, but to define soemthing completely different from its generally accepted meaning is just plain wrong.

The piracy thing is one example, but there are many others. To illustrate, many young people now consider sex to only be vaginal intercourse, so oral/anal would not be sex. Would you want the courts to use that definition of sex? Perhaps abortion becomes first degree murder. Et cetera, ad infinitum.

Well.. it seems to have worked that way for one of the former presidents of the USA in some quite high pitched legal fight now didn't it?

He no doubt knew he was wrong there, but still, you simply cannot expect people to keep to the rules if those rules don't use a language they can understand. WHat you are doing in that case is creating the room for a profession of 'interpreter of rules', aka lawyers (lawyers involved in defence of a suspect is something different, and is much needed to get a fair system)

Another more on topic one... the media equates copyright infringment to theft, which means many people believe it is. In your setup, that would mean that all copyright infringers could now be charged with theft.

The article that we seem to be discussing here suggests the exact opposite. While media companies may believe it equals theft, most people do not.
Since the law is there to serve society, one could indeed argue that that means it simply is not theft, and should not be treated that way either.

The legal definitions of things are very important because it limits scope by creating more exacting boundaries.

Agreed. We don't seem to disagree about needing strict definitions, but about the actual definitions being used.

A imho very good example of a legal definition that is pretty much unlike the meaning of the same word in 'normal' use is the word 'obviousness' as applied in patent law.

ROughly spoken, for patent law it means 'logical combination of pre-existing or known techniques/inventions' while normal use is more like 'easy to come up with'.

They do in fact come from the same thing, and you can interpret the general meaning to say the same as the legal meaning. That is however not how most people will interpret it, rather, it describes one very specific and 'obvious' way for soemthign to be obvious. When comparing the interpretation to the actual text in the law and the parts of the US constitution it is based on, one can very well argue that the legal definition is not the definition as was intended by the original law.

The legal definition of obviousness was created on the fly while applying patent law, and was not pre-defined together with that specific law. As such, it was defined as seemed appropriate at the moment it was needed, and wasn't an intentional limitation on the scope of patent law or such.

For some details and discussion regardign this specific legal definition, see for example
this discussion

Sorry for replying twice.. but I just remembered I have written something about this all quite some time ago and posted it to my weblog:

Check The Quest For Fair Copyright

Also, for fun, check this somewhat recent post about this subject..

Anyway, again, I couldn't agree more. Limitations on copyright terms should be reviewed, and should be kept reasonable so society can get its part of the deal also.

I somewhere promised to come back on a patent relating to using xor for displaying a cursor, this concerns patent #4,197,590, its from Cadtrak and not from Microsoft as I thought. Google for it and you will find more discussions about why it should or should not have been issued, enough has been said about it I think.

Then, for your reference, I have tried to write up a bit on why the whole concept of patents when applied to software feels seems rather alien for someone involved in software development.

What it comes down to is that a general purpose computer is just that, an aperatus that can perform any function within its physical limitations, based on instructions provided to it in a form it can read.

The creation of the sequence of instructions is where the actual investment takes place, and this is already 'protected' by copyright. Algorithms in this function in a way very similar to mathematics and should be treated as such, they are the basic building blocks for software and are usually discovered and not so much invented. What is invented at times is new systems that make algorithms possible that were previously only theoretical, and I think those can be subject to patents.

At any rate, when someone tries the effect of the typical working of some tool (using a general purpose programmable device to run a program) to solve a new problem, when there is a likelyhood that the tool will affect the problem, and where it is possible to test many variations for outcome without much efford (a consequence of the general purpose nature of a general purpose programmable device) then that should be enough motivation already to try and as a result make for obviousness (given that the way the tool (computer) is used in itself was known beforehand, pssibly without use of the specific tool (general purpose programmable device))

The crux here is that the aperatus is the general purpose programmable device, and not so much a combination of that and a program. The general purpose programmable device makes it possible to go from blueprint (well, something written in some formalized lamguage to be exact) to the final result virtually without efford, and eliminates the need for building a specific device, this was invented with the invention of the general purpose programmable device, and has been known fact ever since.

That someone could have initially patented the running of a program on a programmable device as a means of solving problems without having to build a specific machine for each problem is another matter, and probably someone did (I recall a limited version of this happening in France somewhere in the late 1700s or early 1800s with regards to machines used for weaving paterns and the use of punch cards)

If they indeed talk to their customers and try to get the trojans removed, then this may be a good idea.

I find it kindof funny however that problems with their nameservers is what finally got them to act, while they can quite prevent such infected PCs from messing up for their other customers.

A while ago I wrote a bit about preventing flooding of a nameserver that with a bit of tuning would quite help to prevent the slowness of their nameservers regardless of those trojans. What is more, it would make trojaned PCs that flood the nameservers mostly unusable without hindering normal clients, giving their customers more of an incentive to deal with it themselves.

> I work on several open source projects. I use java -- in fact, I prefer Java. There is no problem with the current situation.

This article that I wrote quite some time ago is still as valid as when I wrote it.

You may not have a problem, but who are you to decide for others that they don't have a problem? So stop claiming there is no problem just because you don't happen to have one.

Complaining about JAVA... first of all, take a peek here for some not so technical but still rather real problem.

Then, it seems to me that hotspot on x86 machines mostly ends up generating 486, and in few ocations 586 optimized native code, and there are quite a few cases where that won't be that difficult to beat with modern compilers and good optimizing with any pre-compiled language (including JAVA of course). This is not a theoretical limitation on JAVA performance in any way, but it is one in practise on one of the most often used platforms.

That said, I am happy with the performance of it esp. for serverside use, and my workstation is more then powerfull enough to not really notice startup delay of applications. I do not like its resource use, esp. when it comes to memory tho.

> Since when hasn there been a "much needed authentication of email senders"? Other than destroying privacy on the 'net, how does that help anything?

I suggest you read this and esp. the articles it links to. No need for me to repeat what has been said quite often and quite well already.

I agree with your sentiment regarding anti-spam zealots btw, but really, paying for email in whatever form is not the solution, it takes away the eact thing that makes email so usefull and widely used.

I believe it would be both mroe effective and cheaper in the end to simply fix smtp to the point where this is no longer a possibility.

Some info on how that should be done and why..

Sender Policy Framework
Why SPF?
Authentication Is Key To Fighting Spam
Spammy issues

This solves a lot more then the 'zombie' issue, and has to be done anyway, why not do it now and fix multiple problems at the same time instead of putting up fees for all kinds of things.

Yeah, mr. expert.. justr explain also why (as the original article mentions) there are actually MORE FreeBSD servers now then a year ago out on the internet. If your explanation was anywhere near the truth then there wouldn't be.

Then, mind actually providing any actual information, such as links to explanations of why MySQL on FreeBSD sucks? I told you how to find the info to make it work without being sucky, and for some more info on it still you can go read this for example.

Now.. come up with some actual evidence of your claims or just fuck off mr. anonymous braveheart :P

> Yahoo themselves admitted they would use more Java if they weren't locked into thousands of FreeBSD servers.

I have migrated machines between FreeBSD and Linux and the other way around.. given a few right choices, it is not that much work since virtually all the same apps are available, and you have enough control over both to make them as you want.

THere is a price to migration, but between 2 open sourced variations of Unix such costs will be relatively low when you have the knowledge to maintain a large cluster of such machines and change the source and rebuild things as desired already anyway.

So there is a matter of JAVA being important enough to overcome the costs of that and any possible disadvantages it might bring. It seems that its worth the wait for a practical distributable JAVA on FreeBSD for as far as yahoo goes..

I am using FreeBSD with JAVA right now, and with the latest patches it is quite stable and usable. There are other problems but most are not of a technical nature, but rather of the way Sun deals with JAVA and not confined to FreeBSD really. It seems tho that at some point FreeBSD can distribute JAVA binaries once their current patchwork on JAVA is deemed good enough... so there is some hope for Yahoo to get both without having to move in the end.

When you need reliable things on a large scale, you may indeed also have a preference for things that had more time to prove themselves. That however will only work favorable for such inherently older thigns if they do actually prove themselves.

Legacy is King only in certain areas of IT, and guess what, sometimes it even matters. Conservatism with regards to OS choice however has little to do with legacy but with wanting things that have proven themselves, which can at times make you end up with what you'd call legacy stuff. Its a bonus in the case of FreeBSD that it in specific cases also performs better, tho one that many people worked quite hard for.

Why not use SPF? check my weblog for some details as to why this is a much better idea then blacklists or some of the other solutions being proposed.

Take a peek at this. The problem is not just making Java apps portable, that is quite doable in fact. The problem is first of all the portability of the JVM, and second, the fact that so many people end up using OS specific extentions/apis, which removes the portability quite efficiently.

Problem is... the encoding/compression standard used is only one part of the story.

The actual encoder that is used and the parameters used for encoding are of at least as much importance.

Then, there is a whole lot of compromises to be made. I am not too familiar with sorenson and wmv9 but for mpeg video you have a lot of things you can tune on the encoder side (for all mpeg versions, tho the actual tunables differ). At any given resolution and average bitrate, you still have a choice to use more I frames, more b frames between i/p frames, a whole variety of different ways to find macroblocks, quite a few ways to do the yuv subsampling, different ways to distibute bandwidth over a frame (ie: analyse frame, divide bandwidth such that most bits are available for the higher detail parts of it, set an average and increase quantizer when bitrate gets over it due to detail level, simply drop bitrate toward the end of a frame if you find you haev used too much etc etc)

Those things have a major impact on the resulting quality at a given bitrate, they usually also have significant impact on encoding time.

Shameless plug for a page about mpeg-1 and 2 encoding with mpeg2enc on unix systems:
Video CD encoding on Unix
It describes some of those tunables with regards to mpeg-1 and 2 encoding with mpeg2enc

To be able to copy/transcode DVDs with Linux, use either mencoder (comes with mplayer) or transcode.

Note that in many countries this is illegal.