But not in what I do for the most part. I don't want to share OS instances on one box, I cluster boxes behind load balancers to scale load handling. It's good for sharing a bunch of low-utilization servers on one mini or things of that nature, but not the be-all and end-all, just like Citrix hasn't killed the desktop OS market.
It's a niche. Maybe a big one, but still just a niche.
I've been looking at D, and it seems to address a lot of these concerns while cutting the "complexity" of C++, and borrowing things like "foreach" from other new languages.
It's looking interesting, but not quite there yet for me.
I guess the whole parent post here is that C++ isn't tolerant of sloppy coding practices, and allows programmers to seriously hose themselves up because of it.
Really, the big difference between a great programmer and an average one is that the great ones know how to think through a problem, figure out how to express it succinctly, then start coding. It's not really possible to code something unless you understand what you're trying to accomplish.
It would go off but would look nothing like an atmospheric burst. It would be a really bright spherical event that mostly produced an incredibly intense flux of gamma rays, with some neutrons as well. The only actual matter to heat up would be the bomb itself, so the size of the visible explosion would be small, but unbelivably bright.
The idea is to cause this really intense light and gamma ray burst to heat the surface of the asteroid enough to cause vaporization and ablation. That would cause a small thrust that changes the direction of the asteroid enough to miss the Earth.
It's a little complicated, but here's a quick stab at it...
First, remember that copyright only protects the "expressive content" of the work. "Functional" elements are not protectable. However, since it's almost impossible to separate the two, it almost always results in the entire work being copyrighted.
Your case of the porting to a new archetecture is interesting. If he totally rewrote the code to do the same thing, and it's not substantially the same as yours, then he's in the clear. The "functionality" and "underlying facts" are what he used, not the "how I said it" of your code.
It's kind of like the argument Lexmark made trying to tie their toner cartridges to the DMCA by setting up a little code snippet in the cartridge that had to be read in order for the printer to use the cartridge. The court rejected that and found Lexmark's little snippet was "functional" in nature, not "expressive", and tossed them out on their ear.
One big thing the courts also recognize is that portions of the work that are dictated by outside standards and requirements are not protectable either.
GPL allows you to give a link to the source, BUT the link has to be on a system that you control. It's part of the "licensing fee" of the code. When it says "you" have to make the source available, it means "you", not "you can use someone else's system and bandwidth".
It's always great to see the greedy bastard "PHB" types get blasted by the same "IP Protection" scheme they are trying to use against everybody else. There's a lot of these types out there who try to steal anyone else's work while attempting to protect and lock down their own.
GPL code is absolutely NOT public domain. It's licensed, with the fee being to "play nice" with the developers and end users by releasing source. Anyone who doesn't like those terms is free to use a commercial offering instead. Just ignoring the terms is illegal, and it's great to see these copyright criminals getting busted for it.
Either we have protection or we have open. What we can't have is open for corporations to use and protection for their works. One standard please.
I have to admit a real admiration for Moglen and the rest of the guys who figured out this hack of the protectionist copyright laws. It's absolutely brilliant, and so far impenetrable.
Yeah, digg has a lot of liberal dope smoking hippies, some paid trolls, and some general wierdos. Slashdot has... well we know technology too.
Really, the quality of the discorse here on/. is much better than on digg.
In any decently-run world, a false claim would result in the loss of the ability to hold any copyright in any work. Immediate disgorement of all holdings to the public domain would be a great deterrent. Imagine if we could apply that to the RIAA...
Software RAID... sorry, but never use it. 3Ware SATA RAID cards are cheap enough that the cost savings just isn't worth it. I consider my data to be worth the extra couple hundred bucks rather than monkey around with SW RAID that is a real pain to rebuild.
For the REALLY important stuff, I use an Adaptec 3400 RAID card with 10 SCSI drives, and sustain 86 MB/s over a RAID-5. You can get this stuff off eBay cheaply enough that cash isn't a real issue at all.
I fail to see how this could possibly pass any obviousness test at the USPTO. It sure sounds almost identically to just embedding existing adware/spyware tech into the OS at the time it's shipped rather than after the fact. Uh... after the big KSR decision, repackaging already known techniques and getting the expected result is not patentable.
Add in the fact that the whole idea is just unbelievably evil...
The reason is that the lawyers are basically a guild in existence to generate money for each other. They WILL find a "legal" way to find the simple license illegal in some way or another.
Again, my point is NOT to force opening the internals to the device, just the interface. There is a very "bright line" there (as the legal types like to say) between the internal function and design and its interaction with the outside world.
Nothing in an interface reveals how the thing achieves its functionality.
For example, let's say we have a printer. Knowing that if we send the "Form Feed" character causes it to spit out a page does NOT tell us how the printer's motors and microcontrollers are wired up and programmed. Not revealing this information means that the printer may only work with the manufacturer's client software, which was developed in conjunction with Boise-Cascade paper sponsorship and always sends a form feed after every 10 lines of text. You would be powerless to write your own driver to get around the paper waste.
More real-world examples are graphics cards. It is well nigh impossible to get any sort of 3D acceleration to work with newer graphics cards unless you are running Windows. The manufacturers release neither drivers nor specifications for others to code one, so the owner of the card is forced to either discard the product or pony up for a copy of Windows.
For programmers, think of the difference between a.C file and a.H header. Headers are interfaces that tell you how to CALL the functions defined in the.C file. They contain none of the actual implementation.
The key point is to stop the lock-in and lock-out paradigm that is very common nowadays.
All I can say is "WOW!"
I've long been an advocate of unlocked interfaces. Actually, if I had my way, every product sold that has any ability to be "connected" to something else would be REQUIRED to fully and completely document any and all interfaces, API's, and/or file formats. We really need to end this current paradigm of creating lock-in and lock-out of end users' own property and data under the guise of "protecting intellectual property," which doesn't actually protect anything other than preventing an aftermarket and forcing updates at the vendor's whim.
I'm not asking to open-source the internals of a device or software product, but providing interfacing information isn't too much to ask. The line the law SHOULD draw is at the interface. Inside the device is the vendor's territory, but outside is the customer's.
Violation of this requirement should result in an injunction preventing any sale of the device or product until compliance is achieved, with a daily fine equal to the highest sales revenue for the product in question.
Note that this will not allow infringements of patents or copyrights of the device, but will end the days of not being able to use some device with some other device. No more lockout of aftermarket printer cartridges, or devices that can't be made to work with Linux.
The DMCA won't protect this scheme after the big loss that Lexmark took. Patents on ink formulations are really open to attack under the KSR decision earlier this year under "obviousness" grounds. Basically, combining already-known techniques and getting an expected result is now considered legally obvious, and I just can't think of much ink technology that hasn't already been known.
Maybe they should just use good old UDP instead and implement a tweak to the FTP protocol to handle retransmit and error checking. The 'Net doesn't drop very many packets anymore, and UDP can work just fine.
The Supreme Court just slammed the granting of a lot of "obvious" patents in the KSR decision. Quick summary of it is that patents are no longer permitted for combining known processes and techniques and getting the expected result.
This ruling was huge, but it will take a while for cases to wind through lower courts applying it to all the patents out there already.
Slashdot Mirror
But not in what I do for the most part. I don't want to share OS instances on one box, I cluster boxes behind load balancers to scale load handling. It's good for sharing a bunch of low-utilization servers on one mini or things of that nature, but not the be-all and end-all, just like Citrix hasn't killed the desktop OS market. It's a niche. Maybe a big one, but still just a niche.
I've been looking at D, and it seems to address a lot of these concerns while cutting the "complexity" of C++, and borrowing things like "foreach" from other new languages. It's looking interesting, but not quite there yet for me.
I guess the whole parent post here is that C++ isn't tolerant of sloppy coding practices, and allows programmers to seriously hose themselves up because of it.
I smell a FUD campaign here.
Really, the big difference between a great programmer and an average one is that the great ones know how to think through a problem, figure out how to express it succinctly, then start coding. It's not really possible to code something unless you understand what you're trying to accomplish.
It would go off but would look nothing like an atmospheric burst. It would be a really bright spherical event that mostly produced an incredibly intense flux of gamma rays, with some neutrons as well. The only actual matter to heat up would be the bomb itself, so the size of the visible explosion would be small, but unbelivably bright. The idea is to cause this really intense light and gamma ray burst to heat the surface of the asteroid enough to cause vaporization and ablation. That would cause a small thrust that changes the direction of the asteroid enough to miss the Earth.
Patriotic Pups! Who would have guessed?
The moment there's any link to a terrorist cause, the Gov't will simply sieze the assets and patent rights for their own use.
It's a little complicated, but here's a quick stab at it...
First, remember that copyright only protects the "expressive content" of the work. "Functional" elements are not protectable. However, since it's almost impossible to separate the two, it almost always results in the entire work being copyrighted.
Your case of the porting to a new archetecture is interesting. If he totally rewrote the code to do the same thing, and it's not substantially the same as yours, then he's in the clear. The "functionality" and "underlying facts" are what he used, not the "how I said it" of your code.
It's kind of like the argument Lexmark made trying to tie their toner cartridges to the DMCA by setting up a little code snippet in the cartridge that had to be read in order for the printer to use the cartridge. The court rejected that and found Lexmark's little snippet was "functional" in nature, not "expressive", and tossed them out on their ear.
One big thing the courts also recognize is that portions of the work that are dictated by outside standards and requirements are not protectable either.
GPL allows you to give a link to the source, BUT the link has to be on a system that you control. It's part of the "licensing fee" of the code. When it says "you" have to make the source available, it means "you", not "you can use someone else's system and bandwidth".
It's always great to see the greedy bastard "PHB" types get blasted by the same "IP Protection" scheme they are trying to use against everybody else. There's a lot of these types out there who try to steal anyone else's work while attempting to protect and lock down their own. GPL code is absolutely NOT public domain. It's licensed, with the fee being to "play nice" with the developers and end users by releasing source. Anyone who doesn't like those terms is free to use a commercial offering instead. Just ignoring the terms is illegal, and it's great to see these copyright criminals getting busted for it. Either we have protection or we have open. What we can't have is open for corporations to use and protection for their works. One standard please. I have to admit a real admiration for Moglen and the rest of the guys who figured out this hack of the protectionist copyright laws. It's absolutely brilliant, and so far impenetrable.
No traffic from me to double-click. They're blacklisted in my DNS server as well as in my firewall's rules as much as possible.
Yeah, digg has a lot of liberal dope smoking hippies, some paid trolls, and some general wierdos. Slashdot has... well we know technology too. Really, the quality of the discorse here on /. is much better than on digg.
In any decently-run world, a false claim would result in the loss of the ability to hold any copyright in any work. Immediate disgorement of all holdings to the public domain would be a great deterrent. Imagine if we could apply that to the RIAA...
Software RAID... sorry, but never use it. 3Ware SATA RAID cards are cheap enough that the cost savings just isn't worth it. I consider my data to be worth the extra couple hundred bucks rather than monkey around with SW RAID that is a real pain to rebuild. For the REALLY important stuff, I use an Adaptec 3400 RAID card with 10 SCSI drives, and sustain 86 MB/s over a RAID-5. You can get this stuff off eBay cheaply enough that cash isn't a real issue at all.
I fail to see how this could possibly pass any obviousness test at the USPTO. It sure sounds almost identically to just embedding existing adware/spyware tech into the OS at the time it's shipped rather than after the fact. Uh... after the big KSR decision, repackaging already known techniques and getting the expected result is not patentable. Add in the fact that the whole idea is just unbelievably evil...
The reason is that the lawyers are basically a guild in existence to generate money for each other. They WILL find a "legal" way to find the simple license illegal in some way or another.
You may want to be careful what you ask for. You never know, the groupie may well be Gay Bob down in Accounting....
Again, my point is NOT to force opening the internals to the device, just the interface. There is a very "bright line" there (as the legal types like to say) between the internal function and design and its interaction with the outside world. Nothing in an interface reveals how the thing achieves its functionality. For example, let's say we have a printer. Knowing that if we send the "Form Feed" character causes it to spit out a page does NOT tell us how the printer's motors and microcontrollers are wired up and programmed. Not revealing this information means that the printer may only work with the manufacturer's client software, which was developed in conjunction with Boise-Cascade paper sponsorship and always sends a form feed after every 10 lines of text. You would be powerless to write your own driver to get around the paper waste. More real-world examples are graphics cards. It is well nigh impossible to get any sort of 3D acceleration to work with newer graphics cards unless you are running Windows. The manufacturers release neither drivers nor specifications for others to code one, so the owner of the card is forced to either discard the product or pony up for a copy of Windows. For programmers, think of the difference between a .C file and a .H header. Headers are interfaces that tell you how to CALL the functions defined in the .C file. They contain none of the actual implementation.
The key point is to stop the lock-in and lock-out paradigm that is very common nowadays.
All I can say is "WOW!" I've long been an advocate of unlocked interfaces. Actually, if I had my way, every product sold that has any ability to be "connected" to something else would be REQUIRED to fully and completely document any and all interfaces, API's, and/or file formats. We really need to end this current paradigm of creating lock-in and lock-out of end users' own property and data under the guise of "protecting intellectual property," which doesn't actually protect anything other than preventing an aftermarket and forcing updates at the vendor's whim. I'm not asking to open-source the internals of a device or software product, but providing interfacing information isn't too much to ask. The line the law SHOULD draw is at the interface. Inside the device is the vendor's territory, but outside is the customer's. Violation of this requirement should result in an injunction preventing any sale of the device or product until compliance is achieved, with a daily fine equal to the highest sales revenue for the product in question. Note that this will not allow infringements of patents or copyrights of the device, but will end the days of not being able to use some device with some other device. No more lockout of aftermarket printer cartridges, or devices that can't be made to work with Linux.
The DMCA won't protect this scheme after the big loss that Lexmark took. Patents on ink formulations are really open to attack under the KSR decision earlier this year under "obviousness" grounds. Basically, combining already-known techniques and getting an expected result is now considered legally obvious, and I just can't think of much ink technology that hasn't already been known.
Maybe they should just use good old UDP instead and implement a tweak to the FTP protocol to handle retransmit and error checking. The 'Net doesn't drop very many packets anymore, and UDP can work just fine.
She's suing each company individually as well as the RIAA itself.
The Supreme Court just slammed the granting of a lot of "obvious" patents in the KSR decision. Quick summary of it is that patents are no longer permitted for combining known processes and techniques and getting the expected result. This ruling was huge, but it will take a while for cases to wind through lower courts applying it to all the patents out there already.
My wife put a keyboard in the dishwasher and killed it dead. Never did work again.