The difference, of course is that ideas are not copyrightable. Nor are they patentable. So your situation is ridiculous, but has no bearing at all on reverse engineering of software.
Hmm... Someone ought to inform the patent office about that... I'm sure someone creative enough could patent it as a "business method" or some other abstract description of the process and get away with it. The entire computer industry has been built on reverse engineering the works of prior creations and building bigger and better products... Now that these same companies that engaged in this reverse engineering in the past have gained money, and power, they want it to stop immediately to protect them from someone doing the same to them.
things like disabling the FF during ads, region encoding, macrovision, and CSS scrambling. None of these technologies help the consumer directly, and most of them don't even have any indirect benefit, they are there purely for the benefit of the company, consumer goodwill be dammed.
Actually, most of those have severe disadvantages to customers, not including the lack of ability to use the content on the media. It also drives up the cost (DVD video manufacturers have to license Macrovision, and CSS). Locking out the region encoding and fast forward in the advertisements is mostly just an annoyance.
You're still left carrying all the baggage of 20 years of the x86 line, however. Regardless of if those wacky instructions vanish or not in 64-bit mode, I have a feeling it's not going to be as simple as it would seem from the surface.
And as for GCC generating better code? I've seen GCC create code consisting of movl %eax, %eax, so I'm not going to hold my breath too much.
If I remember correctly, there were some Microsoft sponsored benchmarks that compared Apache-based dynamic content (using CGI), and IIS-based dynamic content (using ISAPI), and they made the claim that IIS was over 600% faster than Apache based on that. Mind you, this comparison isn't fair by any means, but you get the idea of how easy it would be to manipulate these figures. Not that it matters all that much, according to MS's benchmarks, MS could host their entire website on a single NT/2000 server, but instead have a farm of servers doing the site.
Microsoft has come up with a winnning technology here, it's going to be the future of computing as we know it. Just because its not GNU licensed and powered by Linux doesn't mean that we can't appreciate their work.
Only time will tell if it's a winning technology or not. It's far too new to make that claim at this time.
MS's Windows Terminal Server performs over 30x as quick as XFree does, while providing even more functionality, such as a way to save files on Microsoft's core server with the touch of a button.
Over 30x "as quick"? Somehow I doubt that. I've seen both XFree86 and Microsoft Terminal Services run quickly, and I've seen both run slowly. It depends on what's going on on the client machine, and the bandwidth you have available. I also fail to see how it provides more functionality, as both are merely a way to run programs remotely over a network.
The problem as I see it, is that most of these development teams are too concerned with what happens behind the scene, rather than what works when learning how to use a computer. The framework behind KDE and Gnome is really quite phenominal and powerful, however it's the UI that still suffers from being still somewhat impractical or kludgy. The reason that Windows and MacOS are easy to use is that both have said point-blank, these are the user interface guidelines, USE THEM. Whereas X and the various desktop environments have often taken the position that you should write the program however you want, which usually ends up creating evolved user interfaces rather than designed user interfaces with certain features located in non-obvious places, etc.
That sounds like a really good idea... It'll make the watermark nice and easy to detect and remove. Encode once on SDMI hardware, encode once on non-SDMI hardware, and your differences are the watermark within a certain tolerance.
Incidentially, it doesn't say that content HAS to be converted to SDMI protected format.
5.3 SDMI Compliant Applications
5.3.2 SDMI Default Usage Rules
When Content that does not include Usage Rules is converted to SDMI Protected Content for Local Use, the following default rules shall apply:
The Local SDMI Environment shall contain no more than four usable copies. Three of these copies may be transferred to PDs/PMs.
As I read this, if you encode your music using an SDMI application (I see no mention of hardware), the app must encode the SDMI data into the stream. Since these are likely to be proprietary formats anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. It's not likely the average MP3 player/encoder will care.
Well, they could've been worse. They could've reported the patent was overturned and invalidated. This won't be the end of the stupid patent. The only way this'll ever change is if government decides to go against big business (however unlikely) and disqualify software patents in general.
Try compiling MFC on Borland C++ sometime with the MSVC++ MFC compatibility hacks turned off. It doesn't work, and won't work. MS had to make a number of extensions to their C/C++ compiler to make MFC work and cleanly compile.
Unfortunately at this time, GTK is a rather poor on any platform that doesn't use X. The point of doing a port from one OS to another isn't just to get the program to run on that OS, but rather it should work and feel as if it was natively designed for it. It's the same reason I dislike Netscape 6's UI. It's not enough to almost look like the native OS. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but Gnome/GTK, Windows, and MacOS all have very subtle differences between how certain operations work. Take copying and pasting text. In Gnome/GTK/X, you simply select the text to put it on the "clipboard", whereas with Windows, you select the text, and press ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard, and MacOS is different still.
I haven't used the Win32 version of QT, so I can't say how well/poorly it deals with these sorts of differences, but it seems to do a little better than GTK/Win32 does at this point, but still doesn't produce a truely native looking app without some real work on the developers' part.
IMO, it's easier to work with a program that looks like it fits on your desktop, rather than one that just looks like original program on the original platform, trapped in a native-style window.
If there exists no protocol similar to TCP, and you create one, can you honestly not see a suit asking why in the world you wish to "give away" the tech you spent so many hours on?
This actually depends on a multitude of factors. First would be the fact that if the protocol was released free of patent restrictions, the barrier to it's introduction would be extremely low, the the momentum to get it accepted above all others would be much more substancial.
Second, look at http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html, and count the number of protocols that are patent protected and also widely in use. Of the few that are, many have cluases giving royalty-free use of the patent to implement the specification as described by the RFC (e.g. MD2,4,5 and RFC1319, 1320, and 1321, etc). If these were not freely implementable, I doubt they would've reached the kind of audiences it's reached right now. I think the LZW and GIF illustrate this concept very nicely. For years Unisys didn't try to defend it's patent on LZW compression, and during that time, the GIF format grew in popularity like wildfire. Now, after their annoucements of their intention for enforcing their intelectual property rights, there has been growing distaste of GIF.
The other problem I have with all of this is, I don't believe in software patents in general. In an industry where the barrier to entry is exceedingly low, it doesn't make sense to give big business this kind of growing power. In the hardware manufacturing arena, the equipment needed to develop and bring an invention to market is extremely high, but in the software industry, you can easily get all the equipment you need to make tomorrow's "killer app" in less than a thousand dollars, assuming you don't have to license patents from a million big businesses. I find it difficult to believe that in an era where big business is fourishing, we need to have lawmakers sharpen the weapons they use to keep lowly consumers in line. "Promoting the useful arts" with patents and copyrights has become "putting your competitors out of business via lawsuits".
One of the things that always bugs me about X apps is the fact they're often so inconsistent. And having a dozen different "desktop environments" doesn't help this at all. While I'll agree that choice is nice, I see no reason why the two major desktop environments can't have their development teams collaborate a little more. Not too long ago I thought I had read something about KDE and Gnome working on a singular specification for objects sharing between both. Now there's little if any mention of this anywhere, and they seem to have gone their separate ways again, with Gnome sticking with a CORBA based solution, and KDE using DCOP. More recently, I've heard rumours of them working on standardizing the window manager hints, so that a WM wouldn't need to specify supporting one or the other. But who knows if/when this'll fall through.
I firmly believe that with collaboration, we'll end up with desktop environments that are truely fantastic, and give users as much choice as developers. Without it, we're only going to end up with merely adequate desktops that lock users into the choice they make, and that's no way to compete with Microsoft.
What is bothering me about the current distributions is that they are forgetting about old hardware. I can't install Mandrake on a system with 8 megs of ram, but the system will run.. How screwed it that - the installer needs more ram than the OS!
The installer doesn't have the benefit of the swap partition, like you do after boot. There's also the overhead of having a ramdisk. It's the price you have to pay for getting a GUI-based installer. Slackware or Debian would both likely install and work well on a 4MB machine (I don't remember if RedHat still has a text-based installer or not). A basic Linux kernel, initrd, a minimal version of XF86 and the installer easily eats up 8MB.
I am well aware of alien, unfortunately, it's almost impossible to "cleanly" convert between those formats due to the fact they're so different from each other. Dependancies aren't always calculated properly (especially given a couple RPMs that are inter-dependant), pre/post-installation and removal scripts can't be converted, etc.
This isn't true at all. Red Hat Linux 7 does NOT enable any of them by default. 6.2 didn't enable them all by default.
Now that we can ship a secure replacement, we would have no reason whatsoever to enable them by default on fresh installations, and we aren't doing it.
Last RH 7 beta I used, rsh/rlogin were still enabled in the inetd (or rather xinetd) config file when installing the default server configuration, and they were indeed listening on those ports. Whether or not they were allowed by the hosts.allow/deny files, I didn't check. I just reinstalled the beta I had installed, and sure enough, rlogin and rsh were enabled. rexec isn't present, and I appologise for that. Maybe this was changed in the final product, I don't know -- haven't downloaded it yet.
Right now, I'd call them about on par, and there's no reason to move users to a totally different configuration file layout if it doesn't get them any major benefits.
Lastly, there's kwuftpd (included in kdeadmin as of KDE 2.0) which provides an easy way to configure wu-ftpd. I haven't seen a similar tool for ProFTPD.
Point taken. For the rest of the tools in RH7, I guess wu-ftpd is the correct tool for the job. All things considered, I'm not terribly impressed with either of their histories, wu-ftpd or proftpd.
[Re: Sendmail] Yes. Some people rely on its features.
I don't doubt that. Sendmail has many very powerful features that are very easy to mess up. If you're experienced with it, it's the way to go for sure.
I realize I might've been a little too negative -- indeed there are many important improvements over the previous versions. Adding SSH by default is great and is an example that others should follow. But it really irked me after I installed, rsh and rlogin were sitting there both enabled and listening.
However, there is still a fault due to the fact that Exchange servers are not configured by default to strip out "Outlook Rich Text" formatting back to plain text. This all severely predates Outlook 2000, or Outlook in general. The "Outlook Rich Text" format dates all the way back to the MS Exchange client that shipped with the original Win95 that was designed for MS Mail servers. Users of Exchange client for Win9x sending e-mail to the internet would often generate the same winmail.dat TNEF message that plaques the current clients.
Microsoft Exchange client for Win95 severely predates all of Microsoft's internet efforts, so this is not a case of Microsoft trying to takeover the internet standards bodies as some slashdotters like to believe. It's just short-sightedness, and the ever-present anchor of backwards compatibility.
At work, I've basically disallowed sending Rich Text (TNEF) messages to the internet (internally is fine), and only allow plain text or HTML formatted e-mails, since they can be fairly read by the majority of clients out there.
Funny... It seems to me Debian releases a new version (.1 or 1. increment) each and every year, almost faithfully throughout their history.
But once you get used to apt, it's almost impossible to go back to RPM (and it's almost impossible to convert those RPMs into.debs), although I have to admit that dselect takes a good amount of getting used to. Then again, RedHat doesn't have a text-based package management UI, so it's hard to compare it to anything else. Gnome-apt is getting really good, though.
Yes, and like all previous versions of RedHat, you'll get to have rsh, rexec and all those other worthless security problem inetd daemons enabled by default. Sendmail is still the default MTA, despite RH's continual positioning as an "easy-to-use" Linux distro. Wu-FTPd is still there if I'm not mistaken, as well. You'd think that after 7 versions, they'd get this right...
It's been repeatedly proven that Sendmail is extremely easy to configure poorly, and even one of the more "fringe" Linux distributions -- Debian, has switched to exim which is a breeze to configure, even if it's isn't all that powerful or feature packed.
Wu-ftpd is, well, wu-ftpd. I think we all know it's not too distant past.
I know RedHat is trying their best to make a "ready-to-use", friendly version of Linux, but I think they need to audit their default installation. Far too much is loaded at installation time, and much of it is of limited merit (does anyone really use rsh/rexec on the internet anymore?). Adding OpenSSH is nice, but shouldn't it obsolete rshd/rexecd and to a lesser extent telnetd?
They're STILL fighting VCRs. Due to the wonders of things like Macrovision, which is present on almost all commercially recorded VHS tapes, many movie and some sports transmissions, and on all DVD players. Not only that, they're fighting to try to make it near impossible to record HDTV and digital cable transmissions. On a global scale, the ballances are tipping in the favour of those with power and money, leaving consumers with almost nothing. I have to wonder when "Fair Use" will be eliminated entirely, having become too much of a bother to these same large businesses. Personally, I blame Disney. They were one of the biggest forces a few years ago to strengthen copyright laws by extending their period to the point where Copyright might as well last forever (90 years? Please! If you haven't made back your initial investment in 20 years, I doubt you ever will.) And all because their little mascot, Mickey Mouse(R) was about to become public domain.
I really can't believe that people aren't raising a bigger stink about these IP law "enhancements". Where will this end? We already have far too much IP laws that apply to computers, including both patent and copyright protection, something no other industry has available to it, and yet these companies are still crying out, "more! more!". It's gotten to the point where I'd be hesitant to try and implement almost anything similar to a commercial vendor. MS has already claimed they have the.ASF format patented (how??), and even something as simple as XOR animation is patented, and possibly subject to high "licensing fees".
I firmly believe the copyright and patent systems worldwide need reform, not strengthening. Both copyright and patent protection terms should be subject to various factors, such as time-to-market, the level of invention in that field at the time. A field that innovation is happening naturally and quickly obviously needs less protection and government granted monopolies than a slow moving stagnant market. 21 year long patents and 90 year long copyrights are absolutely absurd in the software industry, where if you're 2 years late to market, your target market may have completely changed.
Why is it that in an era that big business is booming that they need more "intelectual property" protection?
This atheism/agnosticism is most likely so vocal because secretly they want someone to come around and convince them they are wrong.
I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but the only reason I'd be vocal with my religious beliefs would be to see how others react to challenges about their religion. I've noticed that people often react by trying to insult you, try to convert you to the One True religion (theirs), ignore you, or will discuss it rationally with you (very rare).
The only thing I desperately want to believe in is the human spirit, but thus far, I've been severely disappointed.
That still doesn't stop HTML embeded images from "phoning home", and the default security settings for "Restricted Zone" doesn't disable scripting at all. ActiveX controls marked "safe for scripting" are still scriptable, as well as standalone JScript and VBScripts embeded into the HTML. The Java VM is still available, etc.
None of these "technologies" have any place in e-mail. HTML e-mail is nice for somethings, but not with this much potential for abuse. I can't think of one single legitimate reason why E-Mail needs to allow scripts to run, let alone ActiveX and Java applets.
The so called Restricted Zone should be restricted to the point where anything that's not HTML and not on the same "site" as where the page resides isn't allowed. And MS's e-mail programs should use it by default!
I'm not sure anything could be less entertaining than some of the junk that Hollywood pushes down our throats. I decided near the start of these trials that I would not buy another DVD, nor watch another movie in the theaters. Thus far, I have had no reason to.
If it weren't for the cartoon channels, I doubt I'd end up watching any TV at all.
Slashdot Mirror
And as for GCC generating better code? I've seen GCC create code consisting of movl %eax, %eax, so I'm not going to hold my breath too much.
For example: http://www.micro sof t.com/NTServer/nts/exec/compares/NtLinux.asp
The problem as I see it, is that most of these development teams are too concerned with what happens behind the scene, rather than what works when learning how to use a computer. The framework behind KDE and Gnome is really quite phenominal and powerful, however it's the UI that still suffers from being still somewhat impractical or kludgy. The reason that Windows and MacOS are easy to use is that both have said point-blank, these are the user interface guidelines, USE THEM. Whereas X and the various desktop environments have often taken the position that you should write the program however you want, which usually ends up creating evolved user interfaces rather than designed user interfaces with certain features located in non-obvious places, etc.
Incidentially, it doesn't say that content HAS to be converted to SDMI protected format.
As I read this, if you encode your music using an SDMI application (I see no mention of hardware), the app must encode the SDMI data into the stream. Since these are likely to be proprietary formats anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. It's not likely the average MP3 player/encoder will care.Well, they could've been worse. They could've reported the patent was overturned and invalidated. This won't be the end of the stupid patent. The only way this'll ever change is if government decides to go against big business (however unlikely) and disqualify software patents in general.
Try compiling MFC on Borland C++ sometime with the MSVC++ MFC compatibility hacks turned off. It doesn't work, and won't work. MS had to make a number of extensions to their C/C++ compiler to make MFC work and cleanly compile.
You could just distribute the MFC DLLs (in Win32 native format)... You DO have a license to do that if you own a MS development tool (I don't).
I haven't used the Win32 version of QT, so I can't say how well/poorly it deals with these sorts of differences, but it seems to do a little better than GTK/Win32 does at this point, but still doesn't produce a truely native looking app without some real work on the developers' part.
IMO, it's easier to work with a program that looks like it fits on your desktop, rather than one that just looks like original program on the original platform, trapped in a native-style window.
This actually depends on a multitude of factors. First would be the fact that if the protocol was released free of patent restrictions, the barrier to it's introduction would be extremely low, the the momentum to get it accepted above all others would be much more substancial.
Second, look at http://www.ietf.org/ipr.html, and count the number of protocols that are patent protected and also widely in use. Of the few that are, many have cluases giving royalty-free use of the patent to implement the specification as described by the RFC (e.g. MD2,4,5 and RFC1319, 1320, and 1321, etc). If these were not freely implementable, I doubt they would've reached the kind of audiences it's reached right now. I think the LZW and GIF illustrate this concept very nicely. For years Unisys didn't try to defend it's patent on LZW compression, and during that time, the GIF format grew in popularity like wildfire. Now, after their annoucements of their intention for enforcing their intelectual property rights, there has been growing distaste of GIF.
The other problem I have with all of this is, I don't believe in software patents in general. In an industry where the barrier to entry is exceedingly low, it doesn't make sense to give big business this kind of growing power. In the hardware manufacturing arena, the equipment needed to develop and bring an invention to market is extremely high, but in the software industry, you can easily get all the equipment you need to make tomorrow's "killer app" in less than a thousand dollars, assuming you don't have to license patents from a million big businesses. I find it difficult to believe that in an era where big business is fourishing, we need to have lawmakers sharpen the weapons they use to keep lowly consumers in line. "Promoting the useful arts" with patents and copyrights has become "putting your competitors out of business via lawsuits".
I firmly believe that with collaboration, we'll end up with desktop environments that are truely fantastic, and give users as much choice as developers. Without it, we're only going to end up with merely adequate desktops that lock users into the choice they make, and that's no way to compete with Microsoft.
The installer doesn't have the benefit of the swap partition, like you do after boot. There's also the overhead of having a ramdisk. It's the price you have to pay for getting a GUI-based installer. Slackware or Debian would both likely install and work well on a 4MB machine (I don't remember if RedHat still has a text-based installer or not). A basic Linux kernel, initrd, a minimal version of XF86 and the installer easily eats up 8MB.
I am well aware of alien, unfortunately, it's almost impossible to "cleanly" convert between those formats due to the fact they're so different from each other. Dependancies aren't always calculated properly (especially given a couple RPMs that are inter-dependant), pre/post-installation and removal scripts can't be converted, etc.
Last RH 7 beta I used, rsh/rlogin were still enabled in the inetd (or rather xinetd) config file when installing the default server configuration, and they were indeed listening on those ports. Whether or not they were allowed by the hosts.allow/deny files, I didn't check. I just reinstalled the beta I had installed, and sure enough, rlogin and rsh were enabled. rexec isn't present, and I appologise for that. Maybe this was changed in the final product, I don't know -- haven't downloaded it yet.
Right now, I'd call them about on par, and there's no reason to move users to a totally different configuration file layout if it doesn't get them any major benefits.
Lastly, there's kwuftpd (included in kdeadmin as of KDE 2.0) which provides an easy way to configure wu-ftpd. I haven't seen a similar tool for ProFTPD.
Point taken. For the rest of the tools in RH7, I guess wu-ftpd is the correct tool for the job. All things considered, I'm not terribly impressed with either of their histories, wu-ftpd or proftpd.
[Re: Sendmail] Yes. Some people rely on its features.
I don't doubt that. Sendmail has many very powerful features that are very easy to mess up. If you're experienced with it, it's the way to go for sure.
I realize I might've been a little too negative -- indeed there are many important improvements over the previous versions. Adding SSH by default is great and is an example that others should follow. But it really irked me after I installed, rsh and rlogin were sitting there both enabled and listening.
Microsoft Exchange client for Win95 severely predates all of Microsoft's internet efforts, so this is not a case of Microsoft trying to takeover the internet standards bodies as some slashdotters like to believe. It's just short-sightedness, and the ever-present anchor of backwards compatibility.
At work, I've basically disallowed sending Rich Text (TNEF) messages to the internet (internally is fine), and only allow plain text or HTML formatted e-mails, since they can be fairly read by the majority of clients out there.
But once you get used to apt, it's almost impossible to go back to RPM (and it's almost impossible to convert those RPMs into .debs), although I have to admit that dselect takes a good amount of getting used to. Then again, RedHat doesn't have a text-based package management UI, so it's hard to compare it to anything else. Gnome-apt is getting really good, though.
It's been repeatedly proven that Sendmail is extremely easy to configure poorly, and even one of the more "fringe" Linux distributions -- Debian, has switched to exim which is a breeze to configure, even if it's isn't all that powerful or feature packed.
Wu-ftpd is, well, wu-ftpd. I think we all know it's not too distant past.
I know RedHat is trying their best to make a "ready-to-use", friendly version of Linux, but I think they need to audit their default installation. Far too much is loaded at installation time, and much of it is of limited merit (does anyone really use rsh/rexec on the internet anymore?). Adding OpenSSH is nice, but shouldn't it obsolete rshd/rexecd and to a lesser extent telnetd?
I really can't believe that people aren't raising a bigger stink about these IP law "enhancements". Where will this end? We already have far too much IP laws that apply to computers, including both patent and copyright protection, something no other industry has available to it, and yet these companies are still crying out, "more! more!". It's gotten to the point where I'd be hesitant to try and implement almost anything similar to a commercial vendor. MS has already claimed they have the .ASF format patented (how??), and even something as simple as XOR animation is patented, and possibly subject to high "licensing fees".
I firmly believe the copyright and patent systems worldwide need reform, not strengthening. Both copyright and patent protection terms should be subject to various factors, such as time-to-market, the level of invention in that field at the time. A field that innovation is happening naturally and quickly obviously needs less protection and government granted monopolies than a slow moving stagnant market. 21 year long patents and 90 year long copyrights are absolutely absurd in the software industry, where if you're 2 years late to market, your target market may have completely changed.
Why is it that in an era that big business is booming that they need more "intelectual property" protection?
The only thing I desperately want to believe in is the human spirit, but thus far, I've been severely disappointed.
apt-get install sendmail
Done.
None of these "technologies" have any place in e-mail. HTML e-mail is nice for somethings, but not with this much potential for abuse. I can't think of one single legitimate reason why E-Mail needs to allow scripts to run, let alone ActiveX and Java applets.
The so called Restricted Zone should be restricted to the point where anything that's not HTML and not on the same "site" as where the page resides isn't allowed. And MS's e-mail programs should use it by default!
If it weren't for the cartoon channels, I doubt I'd end up watching any TV at all.