The DMCA threats against DeCSS didn't move it underground, they moved it into the public spotlight!
I agree with what you're saying, though. There's a certain knee-jerk reaction to these intellectual "property" issues that make companies do dumb stuff sometimes. They should take lessons from id software, who build a very strong user base through active collaboration with their fan developers. (Though I would like to see what would happen if someone made a server for Q3A that didn't check CD keys...)
I'm no lawyer, but this sounds like pure bullshit to me.
It's common practice for corporate lawyers to send vague threatening (but totally unfounded) e-mails to people when they don't like what they're doing, even if they have no intention to fight a losing legal battle.
Here's why I think this is stupid:
- The anti-circumvention clause deals with access to a copyrighted work. There doesn't appear to be a copyrighted work in question here.
- There is an explicit exception for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability, with a sentence like, "... to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs." Which seems to be almost precisely what they are doing.
Even if you can't afford a lawsuit, please guys, make it expensive (in some sense) for corporations to make these kinds of threats. That can mean fighting back a little and racking up legal fees, that can mean spreading the word on fansites and such and causing an *increase* in popularity (when what they want to do of course is to stifle the project). It can mean starting up your own similar project and making them have to track you down and threaten you, too.
Personally, I've had a couple of these run-ins myself. For the first one, I got help from the FSF and the lawyers finally backed off. Most recently, I had a run in with some type foundries over my program "embed" (http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/); simply letting the lawyer know that I wasn't willing to back down without a fight convinced them to give up.
Re:You remind me of Mulder
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
> My understanding is that.NYET based languages all > have the same capabilities as C#.
Well, your understanding is wrong. SML (available as SML.NET), for instance, is a much more powerful and interesting language, and it is compilable to.NET precisely because of extensions made to the platform for implementing alternative languages. (I am thinking in particular of the tail-call instruction.)
It's true that other object-oriented languages can be compiled to the JVM, but the JVM was not designed to be language-neutral..NET wins in this respect.
Try using yahoo for your spamdrop. I actually don't even bother clicking the box so that I'm not subscribed to the crap when I sign up for something, and my yahoo mail mostly filters out the spam. (I'd say about 1 in 10 makes it through their spam filter.)
Re:Finally? Java has been out for about 5 years
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 2
I think I made it clear that I value widespread acceptance in a platform, but that it is not my only consideration. It's not even my primary consideration, though I don't know any mature platforms that can even hold up to.NET technologically.
If you can't understand my posts, I guess it's not worth talking to you. Later.
The email address wasn't harvested 8 hours after being posted, it was sent spam 8 hours after being harvested.
What would be more interesting is to find out how long it takes with your address on the web before it gets entered into the various lists...
Re:Finally? Java has been out for about 5 years
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 2
The university is Carnegie Mellon University.
> I guess your last two posts mentioning the size of
> vendor and the level of acceptance were just lies
> then right?
No, I'm saying that a high level of acceptance and backing by a large vendor are good qualities, but that they hardly drive my language choice. This is clearly evidenced by my choice favorite language, SML, which is neither widely accepted or backed by a large vendor. Maybe I was unclear. What I am excited about is the likely popularity of the platform (essentially the CLR) so that I can target it with more interesting programming languages.
> Maybe some day there will be one but I'd venture
> to say it will be exactly like the the version
> of IE for solaris and the version COM for
> solaris, just about useless and outdated by
> several years.
Since.NET is actually documented, I think there will be plenty of people wanting to maintain a port to linux, so that they can run all of the apps written for it. But, I guess we'll see.
Malcontent, you're not making a very good argument. In particular, the attacks against my person rather than my ideas are childish and irrelevant. Others reading your post must think you have some kind of vendetta against me. What is up with that?
Re:Finally? Java has been out for about 5 years
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
Yikes..
I plan on using SML.NET. Plenty of SML implementations exist, but none let me write win32 apps without lots of pain.
I certainly don't choose my languages based on the size of vendors and level of acceptance. In fact, I hate when other people do that too, since I am somewhat of a language lover. I'll reiterate: the main thing that.NET has over java (and in fact, the most important thing in my view) is that it is a well supported language-neutral platform. That will let me program for Windows (or linux, or whatever) in whatever language I choose, providing it has a.NET implementation.
As for your assertion that I am ignorant.. well, maybe I am naive about the real world, but I do know a lot about programming languages. I'm currently working on my PhD in them, actually. I'm sure you are sad that.NET and C# will likely (well, who knows?) take over where the JVM and Java left off, but there's no need to take it out on me!
Let me put in my vote against the common conception that the GBA screen is horrible. In fact, it is nicer than all of the previous Game Boy screens. Some games (Castlevania) have made the mistake of having really dark graphics -- but this was true even on the GBC (Paperboy?).
I can see my GBA fine as long as there is a light on or I'm outside. I might get the backlight for playing in the dark, but I've had plenty of fun playing through several games with its screen as it is!
Re:Finally? Java has been out for about 5 years
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 2
No...
.NET will actually be widespread because MS makes it. That is a point in its favor. Java is fine, but it doesn't have the level of acceptance that it'd need before I would use it as my platform for a big project. (One other reason I like.NET more than the JVM is that I don't actually have to program in Java or C#, which I think are pretty mediocre languages.)
I think it's pretty sloppy to characterize me as a MS-lover and VB programmer because I think one of their technologies is good. In fact, the only MS product I prefer over the competitors' is Windows XP.. I think I prefer Apache over IIS, LaTeX over Word, gcc over VC++, etc. (And I haven't programmed in QB for 10 years...)
Re:You remind me of Mulder
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
I am judging it by its technical merits, actually, and it is better than the JVM. For me, that is because it is designed to host more than just Java. (Believe it or not, I don't think that Java or C# are as good as languages get...)
Microsoft has never really fucked me in particular, though I do believe they're a pretty devious company. But I have to be fair, it's good when they roll out a technology that really should be there.
What if MSFT or Cisco had a strong push to roll out IPV6? I'm sure there are other vendors trying, but none can actually do it in such a broad manner. What if Ford or Honda decided to stop selling gas-powered cars and make only electric or propane? What if GE started selling only white-led lights? I'm happy when any company uses its market position to push something good, even if they are a shitty company otherwise.
Re:Finally? Java has been out for about 5 years
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 2
Well, java is around, but it doesn't have all the advantages of.NET. Mostly, it is missing the biggest OS vendor pushing its OS and development tools to the platform. Nobody else can do this but MSFT.
Also, Java is in a few ways not as good as the CLR. For instance, I can't efficiently target the JVM with other high level languages that I care about, like SML.
Actually excited about .NET
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm excited about.NET (when I say that, I mean the CLR). I think it's an idea (while not very original) whose time has come. I think that superior technologies exist (for instance, stuff like typed assembly language), but none are really mature enough to be rolled out across the board.
And really, Microsoft.com is the only one that could manage to make this a reality. As much as I hate the company, I can't help but feel grateful that I'll finally be able to write apps in a nice high-level type safe garbage collected language and have that be the most well-supported method. (And if others start using high-level languages, maybe my computer will not crash so much, or have so many buffer overflow sercurity holes.)
(As an aside... I fucking hate when people (like the author of this otherwise good article) use the word 'whilst'. Just say 'while'. It's not like we live in Medieval Britain.)
Guess what? Fox has no idea whether I watch Futurama or not. They only know aggregate data collected from Nielsen participants.
The point is -- they already know how many people watch it. Maybe they just need to know how many rabid fans there are...
But anyway, I actually do hope these petitions for TV shows go away. I like TV sometimes, but anybody who's in love with a show so much to make a petition about it... well, they need to watch less TV.
Mine is still providing a nice warm red night-light via the PS/2 power... I'm not selling!
Anyway, though I'd like to believe it, I don't think it's the IP tactics that did them in. The simple fact was that they had an absolutely retarded business plan. Nobody wants to scan barcodes from a magazine. It wasn't even fun for the novelty value.
OCaml and SML are different languages, OCaml is the one implementation of OCaml (...) and SML/NJ is one of many implementations of SML. Some other SML implementations worth checking out are MLton, Poly/ML, Moscow ML, and (soon) TILT/ML.
I don't know of any other mature ML dialects (though there are plenty of spin-off languages).
Personally, I like SML the best, but here's the rundown.
Here's some reasons to prefer SML:
- Many more compilers on (I believe) more architectures. There are something like 10 SML compilers vs 1 for caml.
- A more stable, thoroughly designed and defined language. Caml's is defined by the implementation and docs, and changes somewhat frequently (though the core language usually stays the same).
- A fancier module system
- More aesthetic, I think.
Here's some reasons to prefer O'Caml:
- Faster? Their native code compiler is awfully good. I think mlton (for SML) can stand up to it pretty well, but caml's is probably faster for most stuff.
- More hacker-oriented; it has stuff that's pretty difficult to justify from a theoretical or aesthetic perspective, but which is useful in practice. One example is a C-style "printf" keyword.
- One compiler and one platform means a rallying point for tools and libraries, so I think they are somewhat richer in this area.
Either way, you'll be able to do almost anything you want. All SML compilers I know of have C library interfaces, so you can pretty easily hook into libraries when you write your programs. I think it's mostly a taste issue..
That's just because nobody uses it. I program in functional langauges almost exclusively, as do some of my friends, and we're having a great time. I think a good marketing force behind one of the modern functional langauges could make it really soar -- Java is a pretty mediocre language that has met with great success essentially because of marketing.
I'm actually excited about the.NET framework (well, the CLR) because it will mean I can use my favorite functional language, SML, to write Windows apps.
Why do we care? In a really old thread I rant about the virtues of modern functional languages (and indirectly, SML). I think it's still relevant, though most of the other languages associated with.NET (ie, C#) have some of the same basic benefits now (like safety and portability). Here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6343&threshold =1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=929697
In general, it's not wise to learn about computer science from O'Reilly books!
The languages that can be expressed with NFA, DFA, and Regular are the same. I promise I know what I'm talking about; I've taught this material to undergraduates in fact. It might be the case that O'Reilly has a word for something in Perl or Python, and they call it "Nondeterministic Finite Automaton", but whatever that is, it isn't a real NFA. NFA also cannot capture back-references or counted sub-expressions; they are subject to the same shortcomings as DFA. But, it might be an abuse of the terminology "NFA", just as everyone calls the (non) regular expressions that perl uses "regular expressions". Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused... no big deal.
DFA and NFA are equivalently powerful. (It is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.)
It's true that Emacs et al. support a richer language than what's offered by traditional regular expressions (as can be implemented on DFA or NFA) but that's because the languages are *not regular*. It has nothing to do with the distinction between DFA and NFA.
I am tired of hearing this shit adage. Just because something is obscure doesn't mean that it's not secure. Furthermore, things that are obscure and secure intrinsically are typically more secure extrinsically, since there are more unknowns and they are harder to attack.
It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
The DMCA threats against DeCSS didn't move it underground, they moved it into the public spotlight!
I agree with what you're saying, though. There's a certain knee-jerk reaction to these intellectual "property" issues that make companies do dumb stuff sometimes. They should take lessons from id software, who build a very strong user base through active collaboration with their fan developers. (Though I would like to see what would happen if someone made a server for Q3A that didn't check CD keys...)
I'm no lawyer, but this sounds like pure bullshit to me.
It's common practice for corporate lawyers to send vague threatening (but totally unfounded) e-mails to people when they don't like what they're doing, even if they have no intention to fight a losing legal battle.
Here's why I think this is stupid:
- The anti-circumvention clause deals with access to a copyrighted work. There doesn't appear to be a copyrighted work in question here.
- There is an explicit exception for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability, with a sentence like, "... to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs." Which seems to be almost precisely what they are doing.
FYI, the text of the DMCA is here: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap12.html .
Even if you can't afford a lawsuit, please guys, make it expensive (in some sense) for corporations to make these kinds of threats. That can mean fighting back a little and racking up legal fees, that can mean spreading the word on fansites and such and causing an *increase* in popularity (when what they want to do of course is to stifle the project). It can mean starting up your own similar project and making them have to track you down and threaten you, too.
Personally, I've had a couple of these run-ins myself. For the first one, I got help from the FSF and the lawyers finally backed off. Most recently, I had a run in with some type foundries over my program "embed" ( http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/ ); simply letting the lawyer know that I wasn't willing to back down without a fight convinced them to give up.
> My understanding is that
> have the same capabilities as C#.
Well, your understanding is wrong. SML (available as SML.NET), for instance, is a much more powerful and interesting language, and it is compilable to
It's true that other object-oriented languages can be compiled to the JVM, but the JVM was not designed to be language-neutral.
Try using yahoo for your spamdrop. I actually don't even bother clicking the box so that I'm not subscribed to the crap when I sign up for something, and my yahoo mail mostly filters out the spam. (I'd say about 1 in 10 makes it through their spam filter.)
I think I made it clear that I value widespread acceptance in a platform, but that it is not my only consideration. It's not even my primary consideration, though I don't know any mature platforms that can even hold up to
If you can't understand my posts, I guess it's not worth talking to you. Later.
PS. You mean "copyrighted", not "copywrighted"!
The email address wasn't harvested 8 hours after being posted, it was sent spam 8 hours after being harvested.
What would be more interesting is to find out how long it takes with your address on the web before it gets entered into the various lists...
The university is Carnegie Mellon University.
> I guess your last two posts mentioning the size of
> vendor and the level of acceptance were just lies
> then right?
No, I'm saying that a high level of acceptance and backing by a large vendor are good qualities, but that they hardly drive my language choice. This is clearly evidenced by my choice favorite language, SML, which is neither widely accepted or backed by a large vendor. Maybe I was unclear. What I am excited about is the likely popularity of the platform (essentially the CLR) so that I can target it with more interesting programming languages.
> Maybe some day there will be one but I'd venture
> to say it will be exactly like the the version
> of IE for solaris and the version COM for
> solaris, just about useless and outdated by
> several years.
Since
Malcontent, you're not making a very good argument. In particular, the attacks against my person rather than my ideas are childish and irrelevant. Others reading your post must think you have some kind of vendetta against me. What is up with that?
Yikes..
I plan on using SML.NET. Plenty of SML implementations exist, but none let me write win32 apps without lots of pain.
I certainly don't choose my languages based on the size of vendors and level of acceptance. In fact, I hate when other people do that too, since I am somewhat of a language lover. I'll reiterate: the main thing that
As for your assertion that I am ignorant.. well, maybe I am naive about the real world, but I do know a lot about programming languages. I'm currently working on my PhD in them, actually. I'm sure you are sad that
Macgyver will always be better in Macgyver.
I can't believe how often the lameness filter has rejected my totally sensible posts, yet, it has no problem with a uuencoded binary!
Man, who types with their palms? Must be some big-ass keys...
Let me put in my vote against the common conception that the GBA screen is horrible. In fact, it is nicer than all of the previous Game Boy screens. Some games (Castlevania) have made the mistake of having really dark graphics -- but this was true even on the GBC (Paperboy?).
I can see my GBA fine as long as there is a light on or I'm outside. I might get the backlight for playing in the dark, but I've had plenty of fun playing through several games with its screen as it is!
No...
.NET more than the JVM is that I don't actually have to program in Java or C#, which I think are pretty mediocre languages.)
.NET will actually be widespread because MS makes it. That is a point in its favor. Java is fine, but it doesn't have the level of acceptance that it'd need before I would use it as my platform for a big project. (One other reason I like
I think it's pretty sloppy to characterize me as a MS-lover and VB programmer because I think one of their technologies is good. In fact, the only MS product I prefer over the competitors' is Windows XP.. I think I prefer Apache over IIS, LaTeX over Word, gcc over VC++, etc. (And I haven't programmed in QB for 10 years...)
I am judging it by its technical merits, actually, and it is better than the JVM. For me, that is because it is designed to host more than just Java. (Believe it or not, I don't think that Java or C# are as good as languages get...)
Microsoft has never really fucked me in particular, though I do believe they're a pretty devious company. But I have to be fair, it's good when they roll out a technology that really should be there.
What if MSFT or Cisco had a strong push to roll out IPV6? I'm sure there are other vendors trying, but none can actually do it in such a broad manner. What if Ford or Honda decided to stop selling gas-powered cars and make only electric or propane? What if GE started selling only white-led lights? I'm happy when any company uses its market position to push something good, even if they are a shitty company otherwise.
Well, java is around, but it doesn't have all the advantages of .NET. Mostly, it is missing the biggest OS vendor pushing its OS and development tools to the platform. Nobody else can do this but MSFT.
Also, Java is in a few ways not as good as the CLR. For instance, I can't efficiently target the JVM with other high level languages that I care about, like SML.
I'm excited about
And really, Microsoft.com is the only one that could manage to make this a reality. As much as I hate the company, I can't help but feel grateful that I'll finally be able to write apps in a nice high-level type safe garbage collected language and have that be the most well-supported method. (And if others start using high-level languages, maybe my computer will not crash so much, or have so many buffer overflow sercurity holes.)
(As an aside... I fucking hate when people (like the author of this otherwise good article) use the word 'whilst'. Just say 'while'. It's not like we live in Medieval Britain.)
Guess what? Fox has no idea whether I watch Futurama or not. They only know aggregate data collected from Nielsen participants.
... well, they need to watch less TV.
The point is -- they already know how many people watch it. Maybe they just need to know how many rabid fans there are...
But anyway, I actually do hope these petitions for TV shows go away. I like TV sometimes, but anybody who's in love with a show so much to make a petition about it
Mine is still providing a nice warm red night-light via the PS/2 power... I'm not selling!
Anyway, though I'd like to believe it, I don't think it's the IP tactics that did them in. The simple fact was that they had an absolutely retarded business plan. Nobody wants to scan barcodes from a magazine. It wasn't even fun for the novelty value.
OCaml and SML are different languages, OCaml is the one implementation of OCaml (...) and SML/NJ is one of many implementations of SML. Some other SML implementations worth checking out are MLton, Poly/ML, Moscow ML, and (soon) TILT/ML.
I don't know of any other mature ML dialects (though there are plenty of spin-off languages).
Personally, I like SML the best, but here's the rundown.
Here's some reasons to prefer SML:
- Many more compilers on (I believe) more architectures. There are something like 10 SML compilers vs 1 for caml.
- A more stable, thoroughly designed and defined language. Caml's is defined by the implementation and docs, and changes somewhat frequently (though the core language usually stays the same).
- A fancier module system
- More aesthetic, I think.
Here's some reasons to prefer O'Caml:
- Faster? Their native code compiler is awfully good. I think mlton (for SML) can stand up to it pretty well, but caml's is probably faster for most stuff.
- More hacker-oriented; it has stuff that's pretty difficult to justify from a theoretical or aesthetic perspective, but which is useful in practice. One example is a C-style "printf" keyword.
- One compiler and one platform means a rallying point for tools and libraries, so I think they are somewhat richer in this area.
Either way, you'll be able to do almost anything you want. All SML compilers I know of have C library interfaces, so you can pretty easily hook into libraries when you write your programs. I think it's mostly a taste issue..
That's just because nobody uses it. I program in functional langauges almost exclusively, as do some of my friends, and we're having a great time. I think a good marketing force behind one of the modern functional langauges could make it really soar -- Java is a pretty mediocre language that has met with great success essentially because of marketing.
I'm actually excited about the .NET framework (well, the CLR) because it will mean I can use my favorite functional language, SML, to write Windows apps.
It's also from MSR: http://research.microsoft.com/Projects/SML.NET/
Why do we care? In a really old thread I rant about the virtues of modern functional languages (and indirectly, SML). I think it's still relevant, though most of the other languages associated with .NET (ie, C#) have some of the same basic benefits now (like safety and portability). Here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6343&threshold =1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=929697
If you want to learn SML, or learn why I think it is so cool, maybe you'd like my under-construction tutorial called SML for Hackers: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/tom 7misc/docs/sml/ml-for-hackers.txt?rev=1.3&content- type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
Unfortunately, all the comments at 4 and above are complaining about how Google intends to rip people's ideas off.
In general, it's not wise to learn about computer science from O'Reilly books!
The languages that can be expressed with NFA, DFA, and Regular are the same. I promise I know what I'm talking about; I've taught this material to undergraduates in fact. It might be the case that O'Reilly has a word for something in Perl or Python, and they call it "Nondeterministic Finite Automaton", but whatever that is, it isn't a real NFA. NFA also cannot capture back-references or counted sub-expressions; they are subject to the same shortcomings as DFA. But, it might be an abuse of the terminology "NFA", just as everyone calls the (non) regular expressions that perl uses "regular expressions". Anyway, I just hate to see technical terms get misused... no big deal.
DFA and NFA are equivalently powerful. (It is a relatively simple proof to show transformations between them.)
It's true that Emacs et al. support a richer language than what's offered by traditional regular expressions (as can be implemented on DFA or NFA) but that's because the languages are *not regular*. It has nothing to do with the distinction between DFA and NFA.
I am tired of hearing this shit adage. Just because something is obscure doesn't mean that it's not secure. Furthermore, things that are obscure and secure intrinsically are typically more secure extrinsically, since there are more unknowns and they are harder to attack.
It's ok to say that obscurity is not sufficient security on its own, but "no security at all" is nonsense.