installs database software without setting the password (Heck, installs any software that has passwords without changing the default) and
exposes their corporate database to the web
is too incompetent to keep their job. I seriously believe that infections like this should start becoming yardsticks that system administrators are hired and fired against. Seriously, if your corporate network gets infected by Code Red, Sircam or this new SQL server worm it is a sign that somebody somewhere is not doing their job. This goes for UNIX boxen as well, if you're hit by a BIND, sendmail or wu-ftpd exploit then your sys admin is a waste of money and you are better off hiring some college kid who needs the experience. It'll be cheaper and you probably will get better service anyway.
Is anyone else wondering whether this means that it would soon be mandatory for software that is used in the US to have exploitable security flaws in order to better catch terrorists?
For those that would point out that convincing someone to click on an attachment is social engineering and not really an exploit, I'd like to point out that there are mechanisms that can be put in place both at by the OS or the mail reader to make things like clicking attachments less dangerous (automatically running attachments as a user with minimal privileges is one of them). But given that the FBI is relying on OSes not to make doing this easy would applications or OSes that tend towards security start to face the
same stigma and negative association that encryption has faced since the events of 9-11?
Actually, no there wasn't. The 120 char limit on sigs is a pain. I tried shortening the quote a little bit all I ended up being able to do was get as far as "Lord Oml" before running out of room. If it bothers you that much I can change my sig.
PS:Moderators don't bother modding this thread down as offtopic, that's what the [OT] in the subject is for. Instead go find something insightful or informative to mod up instead.
The last post in that thread is this one by Andrea Arcangeli sometime this morning and from the looks of things (if you read the entire thread) there is conflict between Alexander Viro and Andrea on which is the better solution.
Linus saying he prefers a patch on an initial viewing isn't the end of the situation for now. I'd suggesting waiting a week and revisiting the thread to find out what the final word was.
We're not a bunch of self righteous bastards who whink we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world, we're a bunch of self righteous bastards who KNOW DAMN WELL we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world.
Yet people like you wonder why people are willing to die to give Americans a taste of what they live with daily due to the self righteous, do what we DAMN WELL like foreign policy decisions of the American government.
WHO THE HELL CARES what they think of us? You can't fight the actual individuals who are working towards the kind of attacks that we have been the successful and unsuccessful targets of. You can't threaten to bomb them -- they expect to die. All you can do is start making life as difficult as possible to live (or impossible to live in the case of those who end up under one of our bombs) for those guilty-by-association (and unfortunately those innocent people who have chosen to stand by and allow the guilty to operate). We can't stop terrorists directly with threats or direct actions, but if the threat of suffering and death makes the people around them take action and prevent their actions, then so be it. Good for us for having the ability to do that.
All this does is make more people mad enough at America that they are willing to die for revenge. What you suggest is a self perpetuating cycle of violence that will most likely turn the US into a totalitarian police state in efforts to prevent terrorism while alienating most of the world because of the US's seemingly imperialist policies.
As for expecting poor, starving civilians to change the policies of armed governments or pseudo-militia that is as ridiculous as Bin Laden thinking that terrorist attacks against the US would turn the American populace against the US government and make them change their foreign policy instead of uniting them in hatred against a common enemy (kinda like how the Iraqi sanction situation has ended up).
Remember that when the US bombed that "nerve gas factory" in Somalia, we were never able to present any hard post-hoc evidence that it was not, as the Somalis claim, a medicine factory. Eventually, the Pentagon mostly kind of sort of admitted it was full of shit. "Oops, sorry! We'll be more careful next time!"
Actually it was a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan not Somalia. Interestingly enough the fact that the US bombed a factory that was producing medicine for in a poor country that is torn apart by famine, disease and strife is one of the rallying cries that Bin Laden used to recruit and swell the ranks of Al-Qaeda.
The subject of my email is an African proverb that refers to the fact that when largeer than life entities do battle (e.g. kings at war), it's typically the little people in the middle who suffer the most. Having spent time as a mentor at a poor school in inner city Atlanta I think both proposals are self-serving, misguided and will provide less benefit than is being touted.
First of all about computers and software in schools. Studies have shown that the benefits of computers in school range from minor to non-existent especially when compared to tried and proven practices like increasing class sizes, upping teachers pay and engaging students in extracurricular activiteis like field trips. Secondly, in situations where computers proved to be beneficial it took an average of 3 years for the teacher to successfully integrate computers into the curricullum. Considering that the average lifespan of PC hardware is 3 - 5 years, this makes any push for computers in school a decision that should be weighed heavily before being taken.
As for having the students use Linux instead of Windows, I can't see how this is a good idea in either case. On the one hand, you have poor schools that are faced with having to find cash to pay for MSFT products after a certain time period expires and they have become used to using them and on the other you have places where middle school students struggle with concepts like "multiplication" (many teenage students I mentored did multiplications on their fingers) and "quadrilaterals" (and this was after repeated prepping by teachers in preparation for one of many standardized tests that students had to take) who are expected to learn how to use Linux. I hardly see that as Win-Win but instead Lose-Win where the winner is either Red Hat or Microsoft
Microsoft's answer to this failing was to make threading as fast as possible, and to push multithreaded programming as a hack around a fundemental OS problem.
Many OS purists think that using multiple processes is a hack around understanding multithreaded programming especially since traditionally there is a context/address switch cost from process to process versus when using different threads. Linux merely legitimizes this hack by implementing the clone system call and copy on write semantics for pages shared amongst processes which makes the worst problems with using multiple processes instead of multiple threads dissappear.
So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks.
This statement puzzles me greatly. How can Linux threads be faster yet their performance still sucks? Faster than what then?
mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick).
Huh? How is userland programs being able to create multiple threads a bad idea? Should creating multiple processes the only way to handle multiple tasks at once in an application?
So, the moral of the story is that Linux has a much better core, but seeing that the Linux community actually cares about standards, performance isn't quite up to snuff.
This statement implies that Linux has POSIX compliant threads which the last time I checked is not true especially since the primary kernel hackers (Alan Cox, Linus, etc) are against it. They specifically had issues with the inconsistent way signal handling is suposed to be implemented amongst threads in the same process if memory serves me correctly.
If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.
Actually you're wrong. The issues that caused the rise of Free Software have nothing to do with having to recompile your application for different architectures and everything to do users being free to fix bugs in software they have been sold.
The beauty of Open Source especially Free Software is that it gives immeasurable benefit to users. Unfortunately it also takes away from developers the opportunity to make money just from software. Now this doesn't mean people can't make money from Open Source, they can. It just means that the people who'll make money from Open Source are most likely the people who use it as a means to an end (e.g. IBM, TiVo) and not the ones who spend time and money developing software only to give it away or try to charge for software that can be obtained elsewhere for free.
This is why Microsoft does not like Open Source because they think long term and can see the future. Eventually Open Source will drive away off-the-shelf software, and the only people making money from it will be the consultants and the hardware people (again IBM is already be at the forefront of this) who are actually primarily users and in most cases not developers of the software. Giving away software and trying to make it up in services that anyone else could provide is a dead business model because there is zero barrier to entry into the market. The one who does all the initial expenditure of capital to create the market and develop the products can be subpurned at any time by anyone with enough capital to enter the market. VA Linux found out exactly what happens when you rely on Open Source in a market with zero barrier to entry...thats right, the big boys with money come in and take over your playground.
Microsoft is smart and has already started branching out to get ready for the software apocalypse. XBox and.NET MyServices (aka Hailstorm) are just the beginning. If you work for a company that isn't thinking that far ahead then I suggest you begin to plan your future elsewhere or start working towards being an independent.
IMHO, in the future once Open Source Software is commonplace the people making money from software will all be users; consultants and people who use it as a way to avoid paying high licensing costs. This is fine by me since consulting sounds like fun and is better than being a cog in the wheel anyway.
Hi,
I wrote a paper on native XML databases and SQL databases that support XML that appeared on Slashdot a little while ago. While doing research for that paper I asked myself the same question, whether instead of coming up with hybrid methods to store relational and hierarchical data we should store XML in already existing hierarchical databases. Unfortunately things are not so clear cut.
First of all, a lot of data out there is relational and people aren't ready or willing to
transition all that data to XML based storage so mixing of relational and XML data will probably be with us for a while. The biggest problem with object oriented databases is that they didn't understand this fundamental issue but it seems that with XMKL databases the vendors understand that hybrid data will be with us for quite a while which is why Tamino supports importing data from relational sources and even ships with a SQL engine.
Secondly, XML documents have a lot of metadata beyond the hierarchical parent-child relationships such as processing instructions, comments and entities which are require more intelligence in the support from the database than just storing parent-child relationships.
Finally all the major [commercial] relational database vendors have included some sort of native suppport for XML including XML types and there is a an ANSI standard in the works for combining XML and SQL. From what I've seen, none of the hierarchical databases plan to support XML as much as the relational databases have or plan to.
Now if you were simply asking whether a native XML database can be built on top of a hierarchical database then I believe the answer is yes. Then again native XML databases can and have been built on object oriented databases and relational databses so it makes sense that they can be implemented in a database system that is more suited to handling hierarchical data.
Currently the Linux kernel is filled with functions that are either poorly documented or completely undocumented. One of the purported benefits of Free Software is that many developers can jump in and help yet when you have functions like __free_pages_ok in page_alloc.c that are important, complex yet the only comment is
Buddy system. Hairy. You really aren't expected to understand this.
doesn't this somehow defeat the point of the source being available in the first place? Basically the question I have to ask is this, "I have flirted with the thought of sending comment only patches to the kernel to further help people understand certain subtleties (e.g. why the pprev and next pointers in user_struct are not what they seem) in the source code especially CS students who are learning about the kernel in operating systems classes. If someone were to start such a program would such patches be accepted into the kernel?
I was very interested in seeing how anyone would come up with a Micropayment proposal that would have all the problems of previous proposals, well if you havent read the article don't bother there's nothing of worth in it.
90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.
Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:
How exactly will websites bill you a penny per page? Who will handle transactions so small because credit card companies and banks don't seem interested.
What about frequently visited sites? Slashdot probably generates a hundred pages a day for me considering I check it every hour, read comments and check my user history for replies to my comments. Between Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News there are probably another hundred hits. Using a penny-a-day I'm paying 2 websites $30 a month.
How will a person's web usage be metered for billing all across the internet without some sort of extensive and intrusive user monitoring?
A penny per page would be expensive for people in third world countries?
How exactly are people who browse from internet kiosks or libraries supposed to be billed? Are websites supposed to now have front pages that lock you out until you enter your credit card number or must everyone who uses the 'net sign up with a central authority before being able to browse the web?
How exactly do they expect the top 1000 websites to form a coalition?
This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.
Any Contingency Plans in the Works?
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Considering that no one is exactly sure if VA can make it as a business selling proprietary extensions to Source Forge has anyone thought about what will happen to Freshmeat and Source Forge if (or is it when) VA goes under?
I know that a couple of projects have started mirroring their Source Forge content in case anything happens but are there any credible replacements being worked in case both these extremely useful sites lose their their parent company? Specifically are there any sites that are viable replacements to either Freshmeat or SourceForge? Currently we have multiple Linux distros so the death of one, two or more companies in that area would be sad but not devastating on the other hand the dissappearance of VA considering how much of a central repository for Open Source apps SourceForge and Freshmeat have become would be devastating.
Hmmm, I expected something extremely damning when I clicked on the Register story but saw little to be surprised about. MSFT's biggest rival in the server space used to be proprietary UNIX, now that expensive proprietary UNIX solutions are giving way to cheaper Linux solutions it only makes sense that MSFT should refocus their energies at Linux. This is especially since the biggest UNIX vendors(IBM, HP/Compaq, Sun) have all embraced Linux in one way or the other from IBM's billion dollar campaigns to Sun ensuring that the next version of Solaris runs Linux binaries.
MSFT didn't get where they were today by ignoring rivals and pretending they don't exist so I don't see why this memo should come as a shock to anyone. Frankly, what would have surprised me is if there were no internal emails flying around concerned about the growing popularity of Linux and how to tackle it.
1. False. I am not claiming that at all. Read my post again. And again. As long as it takes for you to understand. What I said was: you are still allowed to distribute the original (unmodified) version; you are not allowed to distribute the code that you wrote by contract because you don't own it -- the company does. If the comany decides to distribute this code then they must do so according to the terms of GPL. If they decide not to distribute it then they can do whatever they want. Point is: the company owns the code, not you -- therefore the company makes decisions about the code, not you.
The only way this paragraph makes sense is if somewhere along the line internal use of software by a company has been explicitly declared as not being distribution. If this is the case please provide a citation or a link to where this is defined. I'm not trying to be combative simply curious about what I and a few people I've spoken to consider a gray area in the GPL.
This is the way I currently interprete the GPL from what I've read online and in the GPL; the only reason the company is allowed to distribute modified versions of the GPLed software is if they agree to abide by the rules of the GNU Public License which includes allowing recipients to have access to the source and redistribute it. Thus if a secretary received an internal build of Mozilla she is not only supposed to have access to the source but she can give this to whoever she sees fit. The only thing I see making this line of reasoning invalid is if some precedent has been set that specifically excludes distributing software within a company or organization from the GPL's concept of distribution. Again, if this is the case I'd be rather grateful if you could provide a link or further citation to back up this argument.
2. GPL has absolutely nothing to do with contract law. It is based entirely in copyright law. Therefore, it is actually stronger than most proprietary licenses (well, until all states pass UCITA anyway;-)
That was an oversight, I actually meant to write that the GPL is an artifact of copyright law (which should make my original statement make more sense).
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
I am aware of that clause. The question is whether a company can place such a pertinent obligation on you without itself violating the GPL and if so what part of the GPL or legal precedent allows this.
When you write code for a company, you do not own it. Repeat: it doesn't matter that you wrote the code -- whoever pays you to write the code owns it. Therefore, if the contract you signed prevents you from distributing the code, you cannot distribute it because 1) it's not yours; 2) you don't have permission.
The GPL gives anyone who receives the code permission to redistribute it. This is the entire point of the GPL. You are claiming that an NDA (an artifact of contract law) can override the GPL (another artifact of contract law). Unless you are a lawyer or even better can show me the court case that shows the precedence for this I'm sorry I but I'll have to dismiss your opinions as just another uninformed opinion just like mine.
PS: Your post is the same as claiming that an NDA allows you to violate software licenses since the GPL is a software license.
In house projects _don't_ have to have their source code released, according the the GNU license. If you use/extend GNU software in house for your own use, you don't even have to tell anyone you've done so. It's not until you _distribute_ the binaries to others that GNU obligates you to _distribute_ the source
GPL advocates keep mentioning this but until I see it tested in a court of law this is a very gray area. For example, what if I work for a company that uses a modified version of some GNU software internally that completely outperforms the version used in the main development tree. Now let's say my NDA forbids me from revealing source code I've obtained from work or written while working as an employee as most NDAs do. Yet the GPL specifies that I can redisribute any GPL code I receive with source, not just that but if I redistribute it I must deliver source and also that there should be no restrictions on how I can distribute it. Now if I decide to redistribute it, what has precedence my NDA or the GPL? If it's the GPL then I've done nothing wrong but it then means that people claiming that you can use GPLed software internally and not have to reveal your modifications are not absolutely correct since any body who receives the code internally can redistribute it to the outside world. On the other hand, if it's the NDA then this means that the GPL can be overriden by contractual obligations which may open up a hole from which exploitations of the GPL can begin.
I am not a lawyer so I cannot answer this but I can see it being argued both ways. Until some legal precedence is set as to whether in-house modifications of GPLed software can be redistributed by those who receive it internally within the company or not, I don't think anyone can state authoritatively that using modified GPLed software in-house doesn't have any pitfalls.
What if, besides caruso, Intel's compiler is actually a BETTER compiler than gcc on intel hardware? Then were stuck using gcc for compiling the kernel when something better is or might be some day available. . Locking the kernel to a compiler is a BAD THING[tm].
The Linux kernel is not only available on Intel chips. It is available on ARMs, DEC Alphas, SUN Sparcs, M68000 machines (like Atari and
& Amiga), MIPS and PowerPC, as well as IBM mainframes.
Which makes more sense? Targetting a cross plartform compiler like gcc are targetting individiual compilers for each platform Linux runs on?
Wait, the Kernel uses GCC extensions? I thought the Kernel was written in real C, not that bastard GCC version. I've never look at Kernel code, so I'm not sure. Is this really true?
If it's true, I think that's a huge mistake. The Kernel should not be at the mercy of one compiler.
Why not? The major goal of operating system design is to extract as much performance as possible with as little overhead as possible. Portable code by definition is rarely as efficient as code targetting a specific platform or compiler.
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
At best,.NET My Services previously known as hailstorm, would be a system for centrally storing all the user info from Hotmail/Windows XP users that decided they want Microsoft to be the central arbiter of their information.
Oracle and Sun on the other hand decided to use the an incident that involved the most deaths by violent means on American soil in over a century as a chance to hawk their fucking software. People on Slashdot like the bash Microsoft because their software is buggy and they put a couple of greedy startups out of business yet when people sink so low as to use the deaths of their fellow citizens as a cheap and guady way to make more money WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?.
PS: What's interesting is that besides being one big ad for Oracle and Sun products not one person has shown how a national ID card would have prevented the acts of September 11th. Heck, it isn't like teh airlines weren't already asking for ID before people boarded the plane or are Ellison and McNeally suggesting racial profiling where all foreigners fly on seperate flights from God Fearing Americans?
You have an obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect the data on your computer. That means making backups of any valuable data. Are you going to sue Western Digital if your hard drive fails?
People regularly sue if hardware is made faultily. Toshiba paid billions to settle a lawsuit with floppy disks that never showed up in the field and couldn't be reproduced. I personally have lost track of the number of class action lawsuits I've seen for faulty computer products.
What if it gets fried by a lightning strike?
Being struck by lightening is an act of nature which is completely different from human negligence. Please get your analogies right.
Even if Apple was found to be grossly negligent, they shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost due to the negligence of the computer's owner.
Why shouldn't they be held responsible? If attaching your DVD player to your TV blows it up or your fax machine shreds your documents, are you also liable in such situations? Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?) and then blames customers when their shittily written software fails to behave as it should.
Programming is less difficult than building a bridge or an airplane and yet software companies have hoodwinked the public into making it seem that badly made software is a fact of life.
One day people are going to realize that the software industry has been shamming them all this time and the lawsuits will start to pour in. This is probably when software companies will finally go back to using techniques developed decades ago to improve and measure software quality but by then the damage will be done.
Slashdot Mirror
- installs database software without setting the password (Heck, installs any software that has passwords without changing the default) and
- exposes their corporate database to the web
is too incompetent to keep their job. I seriously believe that infections like this should start becoming yardsticks that system administrators are hired and fired against. Seriously, if your corporate network gets infected by Code Red, Sircam or this new SQL server worm it is a sign that somebody somewhere is not doing their job. This goes for UNIX boxen as well, if you're hit by a BIND, sendmail or wu-ftpd exploit then your sys admin is a waste of money and you are better off hiring some college kid who needs the experience. It'll be cheaper and you probably will get better service anyway.Is anyone else wondering whether this means that it would soon be mandatory for software that is used in the US to have exploitable security flaws in order to better catch terrorists?
For those that would point out that convincing someone to click on an attachment is social engineering and not really an exploit, I'd like to point out that there are mechanisms that can be put in place both at by the OS or the mail reader to make things like clicking attachments less dangerous (automatically running attachments as a user with minimal privileges is one of them). But given that the FBI is relying on OSes not to make doing this easy would applications or OSes that tend towards security start to face the same stigma and negative association that encryption has faced since the events of 9-11?
No room for credit in your sig?
Actually, no there wasn't. The 120 char limit on sigs is a pain. I tried shortening the quote a little bit all I ended up being able to do was get as far as "Lord Oml" before running out of room. If it bothers you that much I can change my sig.
PS:Moderators don't bother modding this thread down as offtopic, that's what the [OT] in the subject is for. Instead go find something insightful or informative to mod up instead.
The last post in that thread is this one by Andrea Arcangeli sometime this morning and from the looks of things (if you read the entire thread) there is conflict between Alexander Viro and Andrea on which is the better solution.
Linus saying he prefers a patch on an initial viewing isn't the end of the situation for now. I'd suggesting waiting a week and revisiting the thread to find out what the final word was.
We're not a bunch of self righteous bastards who whink we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world, we're a bunch of self righteous bastards who KNOW DAMN WELL we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world.
Yet people like you wonder why people are willing to die to give Americans a taste of what they live with daily due to the self righteous, do what we DAMN WELL like foreign policy decisions of the American government.
WHO THE HELL CARES what they think of us? You can't fight the actual individuals who are working towards the kind of attacks that we have been the successful and unsuccessful targets of. You can't threaten to bomb them -- they expect to die. All you can do is start making life as difficult as possible to live (or impossible to live in the case of those who end up under one of our bombs) for those guilty-by-association (and unfortunately those innocent people who have chosen to stand by and allow the guilty to operate). We can't stop terrorists directly with threats or direct actions, but if the threat of suffering and death makes the people around them take action and prevent their actions, then so be it. Good for us for having the ability to do that.
All this does is make more people mad enough at America that they are willing to die for revenge. What you suggest is a self perpetuating cycle of violence that will most likely turn the US into a totalitarian police state in efforts to prevent terrorism while alienating most of the world because of the US's seemingly imperialist policies.
As for expecting poor, starving civilians to change the policies of armed governments or pseudo-militia that is as ridiculous as Bin Laden thinking that terrorist attacks against the US would turn the American populace against the US government and make them change their foreign policy instead of uniting them in hatred against a common enemy (kinda like how the Iraqi sanction situation has ended up).
Remember that when the US bombed that "nerve gas factory" in Somalia, we were never able to present any hard post-hoc evidence that it was not, as the Somalis claim, a medicine factory. Eventually, the Pentagon mostly kind of sort of admitted it was full of shit. "Oops, sorry! We'll be more careful next time!"
Actually it was a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan not Somalia. Interestingly enough the fact that the US bombed a factory that was producing medicine for in a poor country that is torn apart by famine, disease and strife is one of the rallying cries that Bin Laden used to recruit and swell the ranks of Al-Qaeda.
The subject of my email is an African proverb that refers to the fact that when largeer than life entities do battle (e.g. kings at war), it's typically the little people in the middle who suffer the most. Having spent time as a mentor at a poor school in inner city Atlanta I think both proposals are self-serving, misguided and will provide less benefit than is being touted.
First of all about computers and software in schools. Studies have shown that the benefits of computers in school range from minor to non-existent especially when compared to tried and proven practices like increasing class sizes, upping teachers pay and engaging students in extracurricular activiteis like field trips. Secondly, in situations where computers proved to be beneficial it took an average of 3 years for the teacher to successfully integrate computers into the curricullum. Considering that the average lifespan of PC hardware is 3 - 5 years, this makes any push for computers in school a decision that should be weighed heavily before being taken.
As for having the students use Linux instead of Windows, I can't see how this is a good idea in either case. On the one hand, you have poor schools that are faced with having to find cash to pay for MSFT products after a certain time period expires and they have become used to using them and on the other you have places where middle school students struggle with concepts like "multiplication" (many teenage students I mentored did multiplications on their fingers) and "quadrilaterals" (and this was after repeated prepping by teachers in preparation for one of many standardized tests that students had to take) who are expected to learn how to use Linux. I hardly see that as Win-Win but instead Lose-Win where the winner is either Red Hat or Microsoft
Microsoft's answer to this failing was to make threading as fast as possible, and to push multithreaded programming as a hack around a fundemental OS problem.
Many OS purists think that using multiple processes is a hack around understanding multithreaded programming especially since traditionally there is a context/address switch cost from process to process versus when using different threads. Linux merely legitimizes this hack by implementing the clone system call and copy on write semantics for pages shared amongst processes which makes the worst problems with using multiple processes instead of multiple threads dissappear.
So, now Linux has both faster processes and threads, but thread performance still sucks.
This statement puzzles me greatly. How can Linux threads be faster yet their performance still sucks? Faster than what then?
mostly to support implementing multithreading in userspace (ick).
Huh? How is userland programs being able to create multiple threads a bad idea? Should creating multiple processes the only way to handle multiple tasks at once in an application?
So, the moral of the story is that Linux has a much better core, but seeing that the Linux community actually cares about standards, performance isn't quite up to snuff.
This statement implies that Linux has POSIX compliant threads which the last time I checked is not true especially since the primary kernel hackers (Alan Cox, Linus, etc) are against it. They specifically had issues with the inconsistent way signal handling is suposed to be implemented amongst threads in the same process if memory serves me correctly.
If you agree with that statement, you're simply wrong. In markets with a single CPU architecture and operating system (VAX -> VMS, SPARC -> Solaris, x86 -> MS-DOS) people just trade executables, they don't for the most part bother with source. You only need source in markets with a variety of CPU architectures and/or operating systems. The ideas behind Open Source were conceived in an environment of many, often propietary operating systems and CPU architectures, pre-1989, pre MS-DOS dominance. The economies of scale that caused cheap Pee Cee hardware have little or nothing to do with Open Source.
Actually you're wrong. The issues that caused the rise of Free Software have nothing to do with having to recompile your application for different architectures and everything to do users being free to fix bugs in software they have been sold.
Here's a history lesson or two
The beauty of Open Source especially Free Software is that it gives immeasurable benefit to users. Unfortunately it also takes away from developers the opportunity to make money just from software. Now this doesn't mean people can't make money from Open Source, they can. It just means that the people who'll make money from Open Source are most likely the people who use it as a means to an end (e.g. IBM, TiVo) and not the ones who spend time and money developing software only to give it away or try to charge for software that can be obtained elsewhere for free.
.NET MyServices (aka Hailstorm) are just the beginning. If you work for a company that isn't thinking that far ahead then I suggest you begin to plan your future elsewhere or start working towards being an independent.
This is why Microsoft does not like Open Source because they think long term and can see the future. Eventually Open Source will drive away off-the-shelf software, and the only people making money from it will be the consultants and the hardware people (again IBM is already be at the forefront of this) who are actually primarily users and in most cases not developers of the software. Giving away software and trying to make it up in services that anyone else could provide is a dead business model because there is zero barrier to entry into the market. The one who does all the initial expenditure of capital to create the market and develop the products can be subpurned at any time by anyone with enough capital to enter the market. VA Linux found out exactly what happens when you rely on Open Source in a market with zero barrier to entry...thats right, the big boys with money come in and take over your playground.
Microsoft is smart and has already started branching out to get ready for the software apocalypse. XBox and
IMHO, in the future once Open Source Software is commonplace the people making money from software will all be users; consultants and people who use it as a way to avoid paying high licensing costs. This is fine by me since consulting sounds like fun and is better than being a cog in the wheel anyway.
Get it here
PS: Mirrors encouraged, so if you manage to grab it and can host it at a site with beefier bandwidth, go ahead.
Hi,
I wrote a paper on native XML databases and SQL databases that support XML that appeared on Slashdot a little while ago. While doing research for that paper I asked myself the same question, whether instead of coming up with hybrid methods to store relational and hierarchical data we should store XML in already existing hierarchical databases. Unfortunately things are not so clear cut.
First of all, a lot of data out there is relational and people aren't ready or willing to transition all that data to XML based storage so mixing of relational and XML data will probably be with us for a while. The biggest problem with object oriented databases is that they didn't understand this fundamental issue but it seems that with XMKL databases the vendors understand that hybrid data will be with us for quite a while which is why Tamino supports importing data from relational sources and even ships with a SQL engine.
Secondly, XML documents have a lot of metadata beyond the hierarchical parent-child relationships such as processing instructions, comments and entities which are require more intelligence in the support from the database than just storing parent-child relationships.
Finally all the major [commercial] relational database vendors have included some sort of native suppport for XML including XML types and there is a an ANSI standard in the works for combining XML and SQL. From what I've seen, none of the hierarchical databases plan to support XML as much as the relational databases have or plan to.
Now if you were simply asking whether a native XML database can be built on top of a hierarchical database then I believe the answer is yes. Then again native XML databases can and have been built on object oriented databases and relational databses so it makes sense that they can be implemented in a database system that is more suited to handling hierarchical data.
doesn't this somehow defeat the point of the source being available in the first place? Basically the question I have to ask is this, "I have flirted with the thought of sending comment only patches to the kernel to further help people understand certain subtleties (e.g. why the pprev and next pointers in user_struct are not what they seem) in the source code especially CS students who are learning about the kernel in operating systems classes. If someone were to start such a program would such patches be accepted into the kernel?
90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.
Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:
This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.
Considering that no one is exactly sure if VA can make it as a business selling proprietary extensions to Source Forge has anyone thought about what will happen to Freshmeat and Source Forge if (or is it when) VA goes under?
I know that a couple of projects have started mirroring their Source Forge content in case anything happens but are there any credible replacements being worked in case both these extremely useful sites lose their their parent company? Specifically are there any sites that are viable replacements to either Freshmeat or SourceForge? Currently we have multiple Linux distros so the death of one, two or more companies in that area would be sad but not devastating on the other hand the dissappearance of VA considering how much of a central repository for Open Source apps SourceForge and Freshmeat have become would be devastating.
Hmmm, I expected something extremely damning when I clicked on the Register story but saw little to be surprised about. MSFT's biggest rival in the server space used to be proprietary UNIX, now that expensive proprietary UNIX solutions are giving way to cheaper Linux solutions it only makes sense that MSFT should refocus their energies at Linux. This is especially since the biggest UNIX vendors(IBM, HP/Compaq, Sun) have all embraced Linux in one way or the other from IBM's billion dollar campaigns to Sun ensuring that the next version of Solaris runs Linux binaries.
MSFT didn't get where they were today by ignoring rivals and pretending they don't exist so I don't see why this memo should come as a shock to anyone. Frankly, what would have surprised me is if there were no internal emails flying around concerned about the growing popularity of Linux and how to tackle it.
1. False. I am not claiming that at all. Read my post again. And again. As long as it takes for you to understand. What I said was: you are still allowed to distribute the original (unmodified) version; you are not allowed to distribute the code that you wrote by contract because you don't own it -- the company does. If the comany decides to distribute this code then they must do so according to the terms of GPL. If they decide not to distribute it then they can do whatever they want. Point is: the company owns the code, not you -- therefore the company makes decisions about the code, not you.
;-)
The only way this paragraph makes sense is if somewhere along the line internal use of software by a company has been explicitly declared as not being distribution. If this is the case please provide a citation or a link to where this is defined. I'm not trying to be combative simply curious about what I and a few people I've spoken to consider a gray area in the GPL.
This is the way I currently interprete the GPL from what I've read online and in the GPL; the only reason the company is allowed to distribute modified versions of the GPLed software is if they agree to abide by the rules of the GNU Public License which includes allowing recipients to have access to the source and redistribute it. Thus if a secretary received an internal build of Mozilla she is not only supposed to have access to the source but she can give this to whoever she sees fit. The only thing I see making this line of reasoning invalid is if some precedent has been set that specifically excludes distributing software within a company or organization from the GPL's concept of distribution. Again, if this is the case I'd be rather grateful if you could provide a link or further citation to back up this argument.
2. GPL has absolutely nothing to do with contract law. It is based entirely in copyright law. Therefore, it is actually stronger than most proprietary licenses (well, until all states pass UCITA anyway
That was an oversight, I actually meant to write that the GPL is an artifact of copyright law (which should make my original statement make more sense).
I am aware of that clause. The question is whether a company can place such a pertinent obligation on you without itself violating the GPL and if so what part of the GPL or legal precedent allows this.
When you write code for a company, you do not own it. Repeat: it doesn't matter that you wrote the code -- whoever pays you to write the code owns it. Therefore, if the contract you signed prevents you from distributing the code, you cannot distribute it because 1) it's not yours; 2) you don't have permission.
The GPL gives anyone who receives the code permission to redistribute it. This is the entire point of the GPL. You are claiming that an NDA (an artifact of contract law) can override the GPL (another artifact of contract law). Unless you are a lawyer or even better can show me the court case that shows the precedence for this I'm sorry I but I'll have to dismiss your opinions as just another uninformed opinion just like mine.
PS: Your post is the same as claiming that an NDA allows you to violate software licenses since the GPL is a software license.
In house projects _don't_ have to have their source code released, according the the GNU license. If you use/extend GNU software in house for your own use, you don't even have to tell anyone you've done so. It's not until you _distribute_ the binaries to others that GNU obligates you to _distribute_ the source
GPL advocates keep mentioning this but until I see it tested in a court of law this is a very gray area. For example, what if I work for a company that uses a modified version of some GNU software internally that completely outperforms the version used in the main development tree. Now let's say my NDA forbids me from revealing source code I've obtained from work or written while working as an employee as most NDAs do. Yet the GPL specifies that I can redisribute any GPL code I receive with source, not just that but if I redistribute it I must deliver source and also that there should be no restrictions on how I can distribute it. Now if I decide to redistribute it, what has precedence my NDA or the GPL? If it's the GPL then I've done nothing wrong but it then means that people claiming that you can use GPLed software internally and not have to reveal your modifications are not absolutely correct since any body who receives the code internally can redistribute it to the outside world. On the other hand, if it's the NDA then this means that the GPL can be overriden by contractual obligations which may open up a hole from which exploitations of the GPL can begin.
I am not a lawyer so I cannot answer this but I can see it being argued both ways. Until some legal precedence is set as to whether in-house modifications of GPLed software can be redistributed by those who receive it internally within the company or not, I don't think anyone can state authoritatively that using modified GPLed software in-house doesn't have any pitfalls.
What if, besides caruso, Intel's compiler is actually a BETTER compiler than gcc on intel hardware? Then were stuck using gcc for compiling the kernel when something better is or might be some day available. . Locking the kernel to a compiler is a BAD THING[tm].
The Linux kernel is not only available on Intel chips. It is available on ARMs, DEC Alphas, SUN Sparcs, M68000 machines (like Atari and
& Amiga), MIPS and PowerPC, as well as IBM mainframes.
Which makes more sense? Targetting a cross plartform compiler like gcc are targetting individiual compilers for each platform Linux runs on?
Wait, the Kernel uses GCC extensions? I thought the Kernel was written in real C, not that bastard GCC version. I've never look at Kernel code, so I'm not sure. Is this really true?
Here's some kernel code. Now you've seen it.
If it's true, I think that's a huge mistake. The Kernel should not be at the mercy of one compiler.
Why not? The major goal of operating system design is to extract as much performance as possible with as little overhead as possible. Portable code by definition is rarely as efficient as code targetting a specific platform or compiler.
Where's any mention of Sun? I haven't even heard of Sun being involved. Did you read the article?
Sun Micro CEO Sees More Support for National ID
When a company like MS eventually gets Hailstorm rolled out, they will have a database of a large sector of the country.
.NET My Services previously known as hailstorm, would be a system for centrally storing all the user info from Hotmail/Windows XP users that decided they want Microsoft to be the central arbiter of their information.
At best,
Oracle and Sun on the other hand decided to use the an incident that involved the most deaths by violent means on American soil in over a century as a chance to hawk their fucking software. People on Slashdot like the bash Microsoft because their software is buggy and they put a couple of greedy startups out of business yet when people sink so low as to use the deaths of their fellow citizens as a cheap and guady way to make more money WHERE THE FUCK IS THE OUTRAGE?.
Here's my take on it...Prototype of US National ID Card Unveiled
PS: What's interesting is that besides being one big ad for Oracle and Sun products not one person has shown how a national ID card would have prevented the acts of September 11th. Heck, it isn't like teh airlines weren't already asking for ID before people boarded the plane or are Ellison and McNeally suggesting racial profiling where all foreigners fly on seperate flights from God Fearing Americans?
You have an obligation to take reasonable precautions to protect the data on your computer. That means making backups of any valuable data. Are you going to sue Western Digital if your hard drive fails?
People regularly sue if hardware is made faultily. Toshiba paid billions to settle a lawsuit with floppy disks that never showed up in the field and couldn't be reproduced. I personally have lost track of the number of class action lawsuits I've seen for faulty computer products.
What if it gets fried by a lightning strike?
Being struck by lightening is an act of nature which is completely different from human negligence. Please get your analogies right.
Even if Apple was found to be grossly negligent, they shouldn't be held responsible for data that was lost due to the negligence of the computer's owner.
Why shouldn't they be held responsible? If attaching your DVD player to your TV blows it up or your fax machine shreds your documents, are you also liable in such situations? Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?) and then blames customers when their shittily written software fails to behave as it should.
Programming is less difficult than building a bridge or an airplane and yet software companies have hoodwinked the public into making it seem that badly made software is a fact of life. One day people are going to realize that the software industry has been shamming them all this time and the lawsuits will start to pour in. This is probably when software companies will finally go back to using techniques developed decades ago to improve and measure software quality but by then the damage will be done.