I tried to mention this recently in response to the article about open-source coding devaluing software development, but none of the moderators saw it.
Anyhow, as any law student knows, volunteering in the community is an absolute necessity. Many employers won't even consider you if you haven't done significant volunteer work during law school, and you're expected to do so during your career.
The computer industry should be no different. Pro bono work should be considered the NORM.
I can believe that Microsoft gave $100 million to SCO. I think both Microsoft and SCO should burn in hell.
But I don't buy the memo. There are just too many "carefully placed" typos. It looks like someone engineered typos to make it LOOK authentic, but something about it's just a bit too intentional and obvious looking.
If you're a law school graduate, many employers won't even look at you if you haven't done significant volunteer work while in school. Pro bono work and "giving back to the community" are DEMANDED.
In the Tech industry, why should it be any different? If you're looking for a job, and you can point the employer to a project you've done that demonstrates that you have excellent coding skills, then unless the employer is an idiot, this will do nothing but increase your value.
You can also think of this as a way to separate the wheat form the chaff. The free software community forms a ranking system based on merit. Being very unstructured, there is no one who can "push you down". If you're good, you're good, and if you suck, you suck, and someone looking for you on the net can determine that if you've participated.
Lots of people chortle over Intel supporting x86-64, like it's an embarrassment for the big guy to copy the little guy.
But since when it this new in the computer industry? Very little of what Microsoft sells WASN'T copied/stolen/extorted from some much smaller company. That's their life-blood.
I didn't mean to say that the code in Linux would be an ACTUAL derivative of Windows code. I meant only to suggest that Microsoft would find a way to CLAIM that it was.
Someone who wants to take the risk of tainting themselves (in OH so many ways) by looking at Windows code should probably do a full analysis in order to locate GPL violations, if any.
This is serious. The last thing the open source community needs is for Microsoft to have an excuse to claim that some of THEIR code has shown up in the Linux kernel. As long as open source developers keep their eyes away from the code, they won't be influenced, and thus they will not write code which Microsoft can claim resembles Windows code too much.
In fact, this is such a huge problem for open source, that I would not be surprised if Microsoft leaked the code intentionally. See, it doesn't MATTER if they leaked their code. It'll never hurt their business, because anyone who steals code will get a prompt visit from Microsoft lawyers and a copyright violation suit. If Microsoft even can find half an excuse to sue you over this, you will starve to death, because they'll take everything you have.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Free Software community: PLEASE, keep yourself clean here. I know it's tempting to look at the code so you have something to snicker at, but TRUST ME, you just do not want to open up that can of worms.
On the other hand, if you never intend to contribute to a high-profile open source project, please, feel free to look at the code all you like. It's probably something good to amuse yourself with.
SCO is a gnat on the windshield of IBM. But even IBM would not enjoy taking on Microsoft. Besides, Microsoft would never be foolish enough to go after IBM. They'd just sue the little people who can't defent themselves. And it doesn't even matter if they lose, because Microsoft will run you in the ground just on legal fees. They will make your lawyer rich and yourself destitute.
Sound alarmist? This is Microsoft we're talking about here. Every day, they thumb their noses at the DOJ settlement and its ineffective orders. Microsoft is STILL very much a danger to everyone.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who buy HP printers don't care about these things.
HP, like most inkjet printer manufacturers, produces printers which have an inordinately high operating cost due to the cost of ink carts and their relatively short lifespan. But does this stop people from buying them?
Absolutely not.
HP has a reputation for producing inexpensive printers and proving good customer service for them. I have an HP Photosmart 1115, and I had a problem with it. No biggie. They fed-ex'ed me a new one with instructions as to how to package the old one and send it back. It didn't cost me a dime and it took a matter of a couple of days to handle the complete transaction.
They can afford to do this because their profit margins on the ink are so high. And since most people don't add up the cost of ink, they don't realize just how much they're spending. They only know that the printer was cheap and they can actually talk to a human if they want technical support.
This doesn't mean I intend to buy more HP inkjet printers. Since I bought the photosmart, I have learned a lot about inkjets, laser printers, and operating costs. I know there are better alternatives.
But we slashdotters are somewhat unusual among humans in that we tend to research what we buy rather than judging products based on plastic color and price tag at BestBuy. We are, unfortunately, a tiny minority. Those who are not like us will continue to buy more and more HP printers and ink carts.
I would like to respond to your article entitled "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty".
I think the best way to describe that article is "unethical journalism", in part since it has already been determined that the primary goal of the worm is to turn Windows PCs into email gateways for spammers. Analysis of the coding style of the worm suggests that it was written by a professional, not some hacker with a grudge.
But my greatest complaint is that "people who like interoperable standards" are being termed as "internet zealots". Linux users are people who want to get work done. This is an ethic that many of us have: working and being productive. Linux and open source software are major enablers because they are based on open standards which maximise interoperability. And we can do all of this without having our data (that we have worked hard to produce) locked up in proprietary formats that we can't decode.
Now, it is theoretically possible that there are some jerks who use Linux and who might also stoop to tactics as unethical as those used by SCO. But the vast majority of Linux users want to fight SCO in COURT using FACTS.
As I alluded to above, the author of the worm you refer to was clearly not written by a "linux zealot". No hard-core linux zealot would stoop to the level of actually writing software for Windows in order to attack SCO. The coding style of the worm suggests that the author knows a lot more about Windows programming than would be known by the sort of person the article characterizes as an "internet zealot" who uses Linux. Such a person would eschew Windows in all forms. This is a major flaw in the logic of the article and demonstrates ignorance of what this sort of zealotry implies. If one is that much of a zealot then certain things come with the territory. No such person would want to invest the incredible amount of time necessary to learn Windows programming that well just for the sole purpose of writing a VIRUS. That makes no sense.
It is likely that whoever wrote this virus designed it to attack sco.com with the express purpose of making the Linux community look bad in the light of recent events. The executives of SCO probably tracked down someone who was already writing viruses for spammers and paid him a lot of money to add the denial-of-service attack against sco.com. This kind of underhanded tactic has been typical of SCO since the beginning of their campaign against Linux. Lies and deception are their bread and butter.
I think the best attack against SCO is to go on with our lives and continue to be productive, adding value for software users and advancing science.
Darl isn't the only one who works at SCO, _and_ they have a law firm on their side. Darl can be as insane as you like, but how does he control the minds of so many other people and make them believe that he's right?
Being the CEO of SCO gives him power over his employees, but why hasn't Boies figured out that Darl's a lunatic and dropped him like a rock? Yes, I know that the law firm has SCO stock, but when you know you're going to lose, cut your losses!!
I've noticed/.'ers mentioning two COBOL compilers (OpenCOBOL and TinyCOBOL). It makes me wonder why more mainframe COBOL apps aren't just redeployed on Linux. No rewriting, nothing. How hard could it be to write a COBOL compiler that also inserts code to emulate quirks of the old OS and compiler?
I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
Indeed, one idea that seems obvious to me is to create a shell and environment that runs under GNU/Linux which looks and acts like the mainframe interface, except that when you compile COBOL (or other languages), it compiles to native (ie. x86) machine language.
Where I work, we've had some rather unpleasant experiences with Veritas. I'm not the sysadmin, so I don't have all the details. In any event, we had a hardware failure, resulting in the need for a full restore from tape. Here are some of the problems we encountered with Veritas:
- The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores. - Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second. - Veritas would crash after restoring only a few gigabytes, requiring us to restart where we left off, only for it to crash again after a few gigabytes. This resulted in a few gaps in the restore. - Veritas uses some proprietary format on tape, making it impossible for us to get at the data some other way so that we could write scripts to check what was restored and what was not. - Veritas support is prohibitively expensive. - We were down for a week because of this horrible software.
The article did mention ethanol, but it's very understated. Brazil has been using ethanol in all of its cars for a very long time. Sugar cane is the answer. Well, don't we have more corn than we can shake a stick at in the US? I'm sure other countries have some surplus grains or can import the alcohol.
This is probably redundant, but most CPU's have a HALT instruction which causes the CPU to, well, HALT and use minimal power. The CPU sleeps until an interrupt wakes it back up. Operating systems rely on this to reduce power usage when there is nothing to process.
Mind you, I think the RIAA is a huge bully and is evil and must die and has an out-dated business model. But the one point they make that is correct is that copying music that you didn't pay for is a violation of copyright law.
You might find it ironic, then, to see that many of the same people who write Free Software and rely on the GPL to protect them from piracy are themselves pirating music. [*]
MP3's and Free Software: Both so easy to pirate.
Don't get me wrong -- there IS a difference. People who pirate music also tend to buy a lot of it and they don't profit from it. People who pirate GPL software make buttloads of profit from it unfairly.
But it's still a double standard we have when you consider this only in terms of copyright infringement.
[*] Disclaimer: I, for instance, am an advocate of both the GPL and P2P, but for legal reasons, I am compelled to state that I do not advocate the use of P2P to violate copyright law. *g*
The main problem is that companies (like Synopsys and Cadence) have been working for decades on design tools that work with binary. Although 3-level may, theoretically, be faster and smaller, binary will beat it because the tools are so sophistocated. It would take a long time to develop ternary design tools, and no one's going to want to foot the bill to develop new tools on such a "radical" idea.
Think about this: most interconnects only allow 90 degree turns. Using 45 degree turns would be a much less radical improvement. The idea was thought of long ago. The tools still don't do it. Why? Not worth the development effort to companies making millions from the status quo.
In the U.S., we're accustomed to going 10mph over the limit most of the time and only getting a ticket for 15 over.
If this sort of fining were proposed in the US, there would be massive outrage. US culture is like that: the rules aren't REALLY to be followed. They're there just to annoy us.
I know... it's stupid. I just wish the speed limits were higher. But then again, not everyone has a car that handles as well as mine at 120mph.
Random number generators are used in ASIC and FPGA logic placement and interconnect routing.
The goal is to place and route logic in a way that meets the designer's timing and area constraints. The problem is that a deterministic algorithm for that is NP-complete. Instead of considering all possibilities, a number of randomly-generated possibilities are considered, with some ability to make adjustments when one is chosen.
The randomly-generated possibilities, of course, are not completely random -- it's a matter of multiple gates competing for the same fixed-location logic cell, etc. Who gets the one closest to where they all want to be? Where do you place the rest? What about others competing for THOSE locations? It's complicated.:)
Isn't this what happened the LAST time someone wrote an anti-worm?
Vague recollection here, but someone wrote a worm which was designed to patch a security hole, but that worm caused so much network traffic that networks slowed to a crawl. I think they got into trouble for it too.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to mention this recently in response to the article about open-source coding devaluing software development, but none of the moderators saw it.
Anyhow, as any law student knows, volunteering in the community is an absolute necessity. Many employers won't even consider you if you haven't done significant volunteer work during law school, and you're expected to do so during your career.
The computer industry should be no different. Pro bono work should be considered the NORM.
I can believe that Microsoft gave $100 million to SCO. I think both Microsoft and SCO should burn in hell.
But I don't buy the memo. There are just too many "carefully placed" typos. It looks like someone engineered typos to make it LOOK authentic, but something about it's just a bit too intentional and obvious looking.
If you're a law school graduate, many employers won't even look at you if you haven't done significant volunteer work while in school. Pro bono work and "giving back to the community" are DEMANDED.
In the Tech industry, why should it be any different? If you're looking for a job, and you can point the employer to a project you've done that demonstrates that you have excellent coding skills, then unless the employer is an idiot, this will do nothing but increase your value.
You can also think of this as a way to separate the wheat form the chaff. The free software community forms a ranking system based on merit. Being very unstructured, there is no one who can "push you down". If you're good, you're good, and if you suck, you suck, and someone looking for you on the net can determine that if you've participated.
Lots of people chortle over Intel supporting x86-64, like it's an embarrassment for the big guy to copy the little guy.
But since when it this new in the computer industry? Very little of what Microsoft sells WASN'T copied/stolen/extorted from some much smaller company. That's their life-blood.
But we're talking about PREMATURE apoptosis here. Plus, brain cells don't have the same reproduction rates as other types of cells.
I didn't mean to say that the code in Linux would be an ACTUAL derivative of Windows code. I meant only to suggest that Microsoft would find a way to CLAIM that it was.
(1) Now that the source code is leaked, more virus developers can write more viruses, making it dangerous to use Windows.
(2) Concerned individuals and companies can learn from those who look at the code just how BAD the vulnerabilities ARE.
This could very well accelerate migration away from Windows and towards other OS's which are secure despite having available source code.
Someone who wants to take the risk of tainting themselves (in OH so many ways) by looking at Windows code should probably do a full analysis in order to locate GPL violations, if any.
This is serious. The last thing the open source community needs is for Microsoft to have an excuse to claim that some of THEIR code has shown up in the Linux kernel. As long as open source developers keep their eyes away from the code, they won't be influenced, and thus they will not write code which Microsoft can claim resembles Windows code too much.
In fact, this is such a huge problem for open source, that I would not be surprised if Microsoft leaked the code intentionally. See, it doesn't MATTER if they leaked their code. It'll never hurt their business, because anyone who steals code will get a prompt visit from Microsoft lawyers and a copyright violation suit. If Microsoft even can find half an excuse to sue you over this, you will starve to death, because they'll take everything you have.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Free Software community: PLEASE, keep yourself clean here. I know it's tempting to look at the code so you have something to snicker at, but TRUST ME, you just do not want to open up that can of worms.
On the other hand, if you never intend to contribute to a high-profile open source project, please, feel free to look at the code all you like. It's probably something good to amuse yourself with.
SCO is a gnat on the windshield of IBM. But even IBM would not enjoy taking on Microsoft. Besides, Microsoft would never be foolish enough to go after IBM. They'd just sue the little people who can't defent themselves. And it doesn't even matter if they lose, because Microsoft will run you in the ground just on legal fees. They will make your lawyer rich and yourself destitute.
Sound alarmist? This is Microsoft we're talking about here. Every day, they thumb their noses at the DOJ settlement and its ineffective orders. Microsoft is STILL very much a danger to everyone.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who buy HP printers don't care about these things.
HP, like most inkjet printer manufacturers, produces printers which have an inordinately high operating cost due to the cost of ink carts and their relatively short lifespan. But does this stop people from buying them?
Absolutely not.
HP has a reputation for producing inexpensive printers and proving good customer service for them. I have an HP Photosmart 1115, and I had a problem with it. No biggie. They fed-ex'ed me a new one with instructions as to how to package the old one and send it back. It didn't cost me a dime and it took a matter of a couple of days to handle the complete transaction.
They can afford to do this because their profit margins on the ink are so high. And since most people don't add up the cost of ink, they don't realize just how much they're spending. They only know that the printer was cheap and they can actually talk to a human if they want technical support.
This doesn't mean I intend to buy more HP inkjet printers. Since I bought the photosmart, I have learned a lot about inkjets, laser printers, and operating costs. I know there are better alternatives.
But we slashdotters are somewhat unusual among humans in that we tend to research what we buy rather than judging products based on plastic color and price tag at BestBuy. We are, unfortunately, a tiny minority. Those who are not like us will continue to buy more and more HP printers and ink carts.
I would like to respond to your article entitled "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty".
I think the best way to describe that article is "unethical journalism", in part since it has already been determined that the primary goal of the worm is to turn Windows PCs into email gateways for spammers. Analysis of the coding style of the worm suggests that it was written by a professional, not some hacker with a grudge.
But my greatest complaint is that "people who like interoperable standards" are being termed as "internet zealots". Linux users are people who want to get work done. This is an ethic that many of us have: working and being productive. Linux and open source software are major enablers because they are based on open standards which maximise interoperability. And we can do all of this without having our data (that we have worked hard to produce) locked up in proprietary formats that we can't decode.
Now, it is theoretically possible that there are some jerks who use Linux and who might also stoop to tactics as unethical as those used by SCO. But the vast majority of Linux users want to fight SCO in COURT using FACTS.
As I alluded to above, the author of the worm you refer to was clearly not written by a "linux zealot". No hard-core linux zealot would stoop to the level of actually writing software for Windows in order to attack SCO. The coding style of the worm suggests that the author knows a lot more about Windows programming than would be known by the sort of person the article characterizes as an "internet zealot" who uses Linux. Such a person would eschew Windows in all forms. This is a major flaw in the logic of the article and demonstrates ignorance of what this sort of zealotry implies. If one is that much of a zealot then certain things come with the territory. No such person would want to invest the incredible amount of time necessary to learn Windows programming that well just for the sole purpose of writing a VIRUS. That makes no sense.
It is likely that whoever wrote this virus designed it to attack sco.com with the express purpose of making the Linux community look bad in the light of recent events. The executives of SCO probably tracked down someone who was already writing viruses for spammers and paid him a lot of money to add the denial-of-service attack against sco.com. This kind of underhanded tactic has been typical of SCO since the beginning of their campaign against Linux. Lies and deception are their bread and butter.
I think the best attack against SCO is to go on with our lives and continue to be productive, adding value for software users and advancing science.
That article was amazingly content-free.
This virus was probably written by some dingbat who KNOWS what kind of harm it will cause to the Free Software community.
:)
Yeah, I know it's far fetched, and probably untrue, but some people need to grow up and realize that the only useful weapons against SCO are FACTS.
Either that or a big budget with which to purchase them... but their IP is so worthless, who would buy them?
Darl isn't the only one who works at SCO, _and_ they have a law firm on their side. Darl can be as insane as you like, but how does he control the minds of so many other people and make them believe that he's right?
Being the CEO of SCO gives him power over his employees, but why hasn't Boies figured out that Darl's a lunatic and dropped him like a rock? Yes, I know that the law firm has SCO stock, but when you know you're going to lose, cut your losses!!
I've noticed /.'ers mentioning two COBOL compilers (OpenCOBOL and TinyCOBOL). It makes me wonder why more mainframe COBOL apps aren't just redeployed on Linux. No rewriting, nothing. How hard could it be to write a COBOL compiler that also inserts code to emulate quirks of the old OS and compiler?
I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.
Indeed, one idea that seems obvious to me is to create a shell and environment that runs under GNU/Linux which looks and acts like the mainframe interface, except that when you compile COBOL (or other languages), it compiles to native (ie. x86) machine language.
Where I work, we've had some rather unpleasant experiences with Veritas. I'm not the sysadmin, so I don't have all the details. In any event, we had a hardware failure, resulting in the need for a full restore from tape. Here are some of the problems we encountered with Veritas:
- The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores.
- Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second.
- Veritas would crash after restoring only a few gigabytes, requiring us to restart where we left off, only for it to crash again after a few gigabytes. This resulted in a few gaps in the restore.
- Veritas uses some proprietary format on tape, making it impossible for us to get at the data some other way so that we could write scripts to check what was restored and what was not.
- Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.
- We were down for a week because of this horrible software.
The article did mention ethanol, but it's very understated. Brazil has been using ethanol in all of its cars for a very long time. Sugar cane is the answer. Well, don't we have more corn than we can shake a stick at in the US? I'm sure other countries have some surplus grains or can import the alcohol.
This is probably redundant, but most CPU's have a HALT instruction which causes the CPU to, well, HALT and use minimal power. The CPU sleeps until an interrupt wakes it back up. Operating systems rely on this to reduce power usage when there is nothing to process.
Mind you, I think the RIAA is a huge bully and is evil and must die and has an out-dated business model. But the one point they make that is correct is that copying music that you didn't pay for is a violation of copyright law.
You might find it ironic, then, to see that many of the same people who write Free Software and rely on the GPL to protect them from piracy are themselves pirating music. [*]
MP3's and Free Software: Both so easy to pirate.
Don't get me wrong -- there IS a difference. People who pirate music also tend to buy a lot of it and they don't profit from it. People who pirate GPL software make buttloads of profit from it unfairly.
But it's still a double standard we have when you consider this only in terms of copyright infringement.
[*] Disclaimer: I, for instance, am an advocate of both the GPL and P2P, but for legal reasons, I am compelled to state that I do not advocate the use of P2P to violate copyright law. *g*
First exploding cell phone: "Only Nokia parts are reliable. Buy only from Nokia. Give us more money!"
Second exploding cell phone: "Well, I guess Nokia parts aren't reliable either."
The main problem is that companies (like Synopsys and Cadence) have been working for decades on design tools that work with binary. Although 3-level may, theoretically, be faster and smaller, binary will beat it because the tools are so sophistocated. It would take a long time to develop ternary design tools, and no one's going to want to foot the bill to develop new tools on such a "radical" idea.
Think about this: most interconnects only allow 90 degree turns. Using 45 degree turns would be a much less radical improvement. The idea was thought of long ago. The tools still don't do it. Why? Not worth the development effort to companies making millions from the status quo.
In the U.S., we're accustomed to going 10mph over the limit most of the time and only getting a ticket for 15 over.
If this sort of fining were proposed in the US, there would be massive outrage. US culture is like that: the rules aren't REALLY to be followed. They're there just to annoy us.
I know... it's stupid. I just wish the speed limits were higher. But then again, not everyone has a car that handles as well as mine at 120mph.
Once known as the country that taxes everything, the UK will now be known as the country that fines everything.
Random number generators are used in ASIC and FPGA logic placement and interconnect routing.
:)
The goal is to place and route logic in a way that meets the designer's timing and area constraints. The problem is that a deterministic algorithm for that is NP-complete. Instead of considering all possibilities, a number of randomly-generated possibilities are considered, with some ability to make adjustments when one is chosen.
The randomly-generated possibilities, of course, are not completely random -- it's a matter of multiple gates competing for the same fixed-location logic cell, etc. Who gets the one closest to where they all want to be? Where do you place the rest? What about others competing for THOSE locations? It's complicated.
Isn't this what happened the LAST time someone wrote an anti-worm?
Vague recollection here, but someone wrote a worm which was designed to patch a security hole, but that worm caused so much network traffic that networks slowed to a crawl. I think they got into trouble for it too.