However much I love seeing competition for Microsoft and however much I respect Sun for their server-side products, I have to say: Sun is absolutely clueless when it comes to desktop software and useability. Let's hope they're still able to learn...
OK, so I whould have read the story before posting... It's simply Intel moving to a new instruction set (ARM V5) and building a (slow) emulation of the old one (ARM V4), and Microsoft says it would be horribly difficult to support two different instruction sets, so the choice was to either live with the new CPU performing slower than the old one or cut off support for the old hardware.
Hmmmmm, yet another thing (like the OS modularity) that MS seems to be unable to do, while my Gentoo Linux is doing it by default. The sourcecode to their products has to be a complete and utter mess if they can't even get it to take advantage of new instruction sets without dropping compatibility.
That's exactly what I thought first. Then I realised: cvs *won't let* you check something in if you haven't run cvs update on a file where it would be necessary. Yes, it is possible to create the situation the original poster describes, but only by circumventing the usual cvs mechanisms - cvs makes this possible, but I can't believe someone (or even a group of people) does this without realising they're doing something terribly wrong. In fact, I believe the original post is just a highly successful troll!
The people at your company seem to think that "sourcecode" refers to the stuff that gets put into the compiler. Wrong. The GPL defines "sourcecode" as the form in which modifications to the program are usually made. As you are not working on the obfuscated version, that version is *NOT* the sourcecode to your application, at least not according to the GPL, and so, publishing that version does not make your company compliant with the GPL.
I always found the definition of the term "sourcecode" in the GPL very clever, as it definitely stops any attempt to circumvent the GPL the way your company does. Believe me, many people have had this idea before, the reason why noone does it is because the GPL simply doesn't fall for this trick.
I've also recently noticed it when reading LUG mailing lists and articles on the internet: Some linux non-guru describes how configuring xy is not so hard after all... and then starts off with a long list of bash commands.
And I always think "who the hell told him to do it that way? It can be done so much easier using the tools his distribution offers. And he's not the kind of user who wants to do it "the hard way", otherwise he'd be using debian or slackware (as I do, btw)."
This even starts scaring me, as I want linux to succeed, however this kind of "propaganda" rather scares people off.
From the vp3.com website:
"With VP3, there are no platform limitations and developers are not required to pay the restrictive license fees that other open source codecs make mandatory."
restrictive license fees for open source...? They seem to have a very strange concept of the term "open source".
Nope, that's not the problem. I didn't install mozilla as root, I installed it as a regular user
in my home directory. Still doesn't work.
BTW, I just looked at the install.log file in
the mozilla directory. Everything seems to work
fine until:
I have the same problem. I tried with my old
0.9.4 install, a fresh 0.9.4 install, a nightly
build, removed my ~/.mozilla directory....
whatever I do, after the install mozilla looks
exactly the same as before.
(I'm on Slack8.0, btw)
Completely useless, period. Why? Because this only affects people who are running IIS (or, to be more precise, people who are running an OS that thinks they should be running IIS, even if they don't know about it). So, if Windows thinks you should be running IIS, then it certainly will make sure that the integrated firewall doesn't get in the way.
You can't change a license retroactively, period.
There is, however, a special provision in the GPL: you're *allowed* to use GPL'd code under any later versions of the GPL (the GPL explicitly states that fact) - but you can't be *forced* to.
In the comment you've linked to Reed seems to
say that ipf will stay in Net/FreeBSD and there's
no problem with that.
Huh? I don't get it. I can understand that these
projects can redistribute the ipf code if they
don't modify it or find some other kind of
agreement with Reed.
But how can they redistribute it _under the BSD
licence_??? They can't! Otherwise I'd be able to
download FreeBSD, take the ipf code from it and
say "Hello peops, here's mvoipf (my version of
ipf). It's under the BSD license, do with it
whatever you like!"
Are they going to drop the BSD license? Certainly
not. But what else are they going to do? Are they
going to say "some parts of our system are under
the BSD license, others are not, but who cares
about freedom anyway?"
I always thought the BSD people were so proud of
their license, because it offers more freedom
than any other license. But if you take the BSD
license seriously, you can't integrate ipf
anymore, because the result will have additional
restrictions incompatible with both the wording
and the intent of the BSD license!
So, does Free/NetBSD not care about their own
license after all???
I've also spent some time musing about this, and I've come up with something really nasty which I haven't seen described anywhere yet (althought I'm sure someone somewhere must have thought of it already).
I think the worst damage you can do is still publicizing or destroying large amounts of company data. Destroying is usually very limited since there are backups... but what if you managed to sneak some transparent file encryption tool in, so that even the backups are encrypted, and after running this configuration for a couple of months, your Trojan "looses" the key....
Of course, the admins of the network would have to be morons not to notice this for months, but we all know how many morons are working as admins these days!
Yep, they've been removed by now. But only after the letter I've linked to had been published. They realized that this was counterproductive, even marketing-wise. But that doesn't change anything about the fact that they found it well worth trying.
If they really get them and manage to drive
VMWare (and plex86) out of business in the US,
then this would be a really good example of
patents hindering innovation. So, while this
would be pretty bad (at least for US citizens,
not me, I'm living in a free country (Germany)),
it would hopefully spark a public discussion
of recent patent practice and help to get it
in the right direction, so it could be very
good in the long run.
OK, as you requested: "the world as we know if will end" doesn't make sense!
However, my superhuman brain has already found out what's wrong and my superhuman altruism makes me share this knowledge with you:
IT'S A TYPO!
That's right, another typo on/.
That makes (at least) 2 typos IN ONE ARTICLE!!!!
But that's not enough, my superhuman brain has even found the CORRECT SPELLING of your sentence (ha, took me just a couple of minutes to figure that one out): It's "the world as we know IT will end".
Clever, huh?
Yep, the font rendering really does suck, but they (the XFree86 team) are working on it. Check out this page (this has been reported on/. just a few days ago, btw).
It is true however that X develpoment is SLOW and I'm a bit saddened by the fact that lots of projects now get support from big companies but XFree86 seems to get neglected there a bit.
Yes, apperently they get some support from SuSE, but that's obviously still not enough, they have a complex task at hand.
Call me a freak, but I've been thinking (well, rather phantasizing) about writing that ubervirus. And I don't usually consider me an emotionally disturbed person (mind you, that may be why I only thought about it and didn't actually do it - it'd take a LOT of time). The point is, it's just VERY tempting for some amongst us to get in such a powerful position. That person probably wouldn't use it to destroy the internet, however, that example just serves to show just HOW powerful that position would be!
> Or do all TCP/IP exploits rely on knowing the target architecture (buffer overrunns need to inject machine code... etc).
Nearly all of them, at least those that allow you to take over a machine. TCP/IP itself had(s?) some glitches that allow for DoS attacks of strict implementations thereof, but those do not allow you to write an ubervirus, or indeed any virus at all.
a: Highly critical. Still not very vulnerable, because large parts even of the distribution chain haven't been e-something'd yet.
b: Critical. But I think it's not very vulnerable, those systems usually aren't (yet?) connected to the internet to a degree where you could shut them down remotely.
c: Well, critical to many companies, but not soooo critical for J.Average. Could be reduced back to the traditional communication channels (Phone, Snailmail,...)
Slashdot Mirror
However much I love seeing competition for Microsoft and however much I respect Sun for their server-side products, I have to say: Sun is absolutely clueless when it comes to desktop software and useability. Let's hope they're still able to learn...
OK, so I whould have read the story before posting...
It's simply Intel moving to a new instruction set (ARM V5) and building a (slow) emulation of the old one (ARM V4), and Microsoft says it would be horribly difficult to support two different instruction sets, so the choice was to either live with the new CPU performing slower than the old one or cut off support for the old hardware.
Hmmmmm, yet another thing (like the OS modularity) that MS seems to be unable to do, while my Gentoo Linux is doing it by default. The sourcecode to their products has to be a complete and utter mess if they can't even get it to take advantage of new instruction sets without dropping compatibility.
That's exactly what I thought first. Then I
realised: cvs *won't let* you check something
in if you haven't run cvs update on a file where
it would be necessary.
Yes, it is possible to create the situation the
original poster describes, but only by
circumventing the usual cvs mechanisms - cvs
makes this possible, but I can't believe someone
(or even a group of people) does this without
realising they're doing something terribly
wrong.
In fact, I believe the original post is just a
highly successful troll!
The people at your company seem to think that
"sourcecode" refers to the stuff that gets put
into the compiler. Wrong.
The GPL defines "sourcecode" as the form in which
modifications to the program are usually made.
As you are not working on the obfuscated version,
that version is *NOT* the sourcecode to your
application, at least not according to the GPL,
and so, publishing that version does not make
your company compliant with the GPL.
I always found the definition of the term
"sourcecode" in the GPL very clever, as it
definitely stops any attempt to circumvent the
GPL the way your company does. Believe me, many
people have had this idea before, the reason why
noone does it is because the GPL simply doesn't
fall for this trick.
"platform agnostic" and runs on IE only... those marketeers never fail to amuse me.
I've also recently noticed it when reading LUG mailing lists and articles on the internet: Some linux non-guru describes how configuring xy is not so hard after all... and then starts off with a long list of bash commands.
And I always think "who the hell told him to do it that way? It can be done so much easier using the tools his distribution offers. And he's not the kind of user who wants to do it "the hard way", otherwise he'd be using debian or slackware (as I do, btw)."
This even starts scaring me, as I want linux to succeed, however this kind of "propaganda" rather scares people off.
From the vp3.com website:
"With VP3, there are no platform limitations and developers are not required to pay the restrictive license fees that other open source codecs make mandatory."
restrictive license fees for open source...? They seem to have a very strange concept of the term "open source".
Nope, that's not the problem. I didn't install mozilla as root, I installed it as a regular user
in my home directory. Still doesn't work.
BTW, I just looked at the install.log file in
the mozilla directory. Everything seems to work
fine until:
[40/40] Register Content: resource:/chrome/mozgest/content/
Install **FAILED** with error -239
OK, off to the bugs page...
I have the same problem. I tried with my old
0.9.4 install, a fresh 0.9.4 install, a nightly
build, removed my ~/.mozilla directory....
whatever I do, after the install mozilla looks
exactly the same as before.
(I'm on Slack8.0, btw)
Completely useless, period. Why? Because this only affects people who are running IIS (or, to be more precise, people who are running an OS that thinks they should be running IIS, even if they don't know about it). So, if Windows thinks you should be running IIS, then it certainly will make sure that the integrated firewall doesn't get in the way.
You can't change a license retroactively, period.
There is, however, a special provision in the GPL: you're *allowed* to use GPL'd code under any later versions of the GPL (the GPL explicitly states that fact) - but you can't be *forced* to.
In the comment you've linked to Reed seems to
say that ipf will stay in Net/FreeBSD and there's
no problem with that.
Huh? I don't get it. I can understand that these
projects can redistribute the ipf code if they
don't modify it or find some other kind of
agreement with Reed.
But how can they redistribute it _under the BSD
licence_??? They can't! Otherwise I'd be able to
download FreeBSD, take the ipf code from it and
say "Hello peops, here's mvoipf (my version of
ipf). It's under the BSD license, do with it
whatever you like!"
Are they going to drop the BSD license? Certainly
not. But what else are they going to do? Are they
going to say "some parts of our system are under
the BSD license, others are not, but who cares
about freedom anyway?"
I always thought the BSD people were so proud of
their license, because it offers more freedom
than any other license. But if you take the BSD
license seriously, you can't integrate ipf
anymore, because the result will have additional
restrictions incompatible with both the wording
and the intent of the BSD license!
So, does Free/NetBSD not care about their own
license after all???
But how are you going to enlarge the cake if your market share already exceeds 90% ???
I've also spent some time musing about this, and I've come up with something really nasty which I haven't seen described anywhere yet (althought I'm sure someone somewhere must have thought of it already).
I think the worst damage you can do is still publicizing or destroying large amounts of company data. Destroying is usually very limited since there are backups... but what if you managed to sneak some transparent file encryption tool in, so that even the backups are encrypted, and after running this configuration for a couple of months, your Trojan "looses" the key....
Of course, the admins of the network would have to be morons not to notice this for months, but we all know how many morons are working as admins these days!
... running it in VMWare, then suspending the
virtual machine and looking in the RAM file...?
Bet they didn't think of that!
Muahahahaha.....
Yep, they've been removed by now. But only after the letter I've linked to had been published. They realized that this was counterproductive, even marketing-wise. But that doesn't change anything about the fact that they found it well worth trying.
If they really get them and manage to drive
VMWare (and plex86) out of business in the US,
then this would be a really good example of
patents hindering innovation. So, while this
would be pretty bad (at least for US citizens,
not me, I'm living in a free country (Germany)),
it would hopefully spark a public discussion
of recent patent practice and help to get it
in the right direction, so it could be very
good in the long run.
OK, as you requested: "the world as we know if will end" doesn't make sense! /.
However, my superhuman brain has already found out what's wrong and my superhuman altruism makes me share this knowledge with you:
IT'S A TYPO!
That's right, another typo on
That makes (at least) 2 typos IN ONE ARTICLE!!!!
But that's not enough, my superhuman brain has even found the CORRECT SPELLING of your sentence (ha, took me just a couple of minutes to figure that one out): It's "the world as we know IT will end".
Clever, huh?
It is true however that X develpoment is SLOW and I'm a bit saddened by the fact that lots of projects now get support from big companies but XFree86 seems to get neglected there a bit.
Yes, apperently they get some support from SuSE, but that's obviously still not enough, they have a complex task at hand.
That's "sentence", not "sentance", stupid.
Call me a freak, but I've been thinking (well, rather phantasizing) about writing that ubervirus.
And I don't usually consider me an emotionally disturbed person (mind you, that may be why I
only thought about it and didn't actually do it - it'd take a LOT of time).
The point is, it's just VERY tempting for some amongst us to get in such a powerful position.
That person probably wouldn't use it to destroy the internet, however, that example just serves
to show just HOW powerful that position would be!
As I said - look at Kuro5hin.
> but the problem is that you would have to rely on the good judgment of the moderators (which is, in effect, what we do with rob, taco et al)
Actually, at Kuro5hin there is no distinction between moderators and readers - anyone can vote!
...and that's simply because TCP/IP itself hasn't got any mechanisms for transmitting and executing CODE.
Forgot to say that...sorry...I'm pissed...
> Or do all TCP/IP exploits rely on knowing the target architecture (buffer overrunns need to inject machine code... etc).
Nearly all of them, at least those that allow you to take over a machine.
TCP/IP itself had(s?) some glitches that allow for DoS attacks of strict implementations thereof, but those do not allow you to write an ubervirus, or indeed any virus at all.
a: Highly critical. Still not very vulnerable, because large parts even of the distribution chain haven't been e-something'd yet.
b: Critical. But I think it's not very vulnerable, those systems usually aren't (yet?) connected to the internet to a degree where you could shut them down remotely.
c: Well, critical to many companies, but not soooo critical for J.Average. Could be reduced back to the traditional communication channels (Phone, Snailmail,...)