> Alavi is charged with one count of violating trade restrictions that prohibit exporting any goods or services to Iran. > He faces up to 21 months in prison if convicted.
Nice. I just wish they would make the drivers for the 8800 which I already paid them for work right.
At the moment, every time my machine reboots or goes to sleep my video color settings go entirely out of whack. Hue gets pegged at over 100%, and I have to go into the nvidia control panel, and drag it to zero, run the display optimization wizard, exit out, try a video a second time, and maybe repeat the process.
Actually, the work in question was being developed under a BSD license, but the executable as a whole isn't GPL compatible because it also uses Apache 2.0 public licensed code and you can't cross the streams.
Please do not jump to conclusions and assume that everyone is out to get you.
I personally license most of my code under the BSD license these days, simply because I cannot foresee all of the use cases for it, and I don't want someone to avoid it for non-technical reasons.
So, no more free ride for me. I'm a bad bad person for using code that requires patent indemnification. Oh wait, whats that in the next GPL draft...
I am well aware that the BSD license provides pretty much no protection for the users of a library and in no way ensures that continued development will also be made public.
However, most every application is a house of cards built over other people's code. One of the decisions you have to make in any library-use scenario is whether or not you feel the community will be there in the long run. I started a project under the assumption I could use AGG because the direction that AGG was going in was compatible with my long term goals and would avoid duplicating effort. I started my project based on the past performance of the AGG community and that it would continue on into the future in a similar vein.
While the developer was perfectly within his rights to change the license in this case and to continue his development under the GPL, I am also free to bitch about it and to find alternatives because what he is providing is no longer something I can use.
An anology would be Theo D.R. having a sudden change of heart and next week deciding to release OpenBSD under the GPL. He may be perfectly within his rights to do so, but not many of the commercial users of the OpenBSD code base would be able to go along with the change, and there would probably be a lot of complaining.
I'm still trying to figure out why the Anti-Grain Geometry library went from BSD-like to GPL a few months ago with no code change. http://www.antigrain.com/
I haven't found any information on why the switch occurred and the author doesn't appear to have explained his motivations. I find myself working on a project in which I can employ 2.4, but I can't upgrade to 2.5 due to the licensing restriction, so I must either fork and maintain what I am using from 2.4 or abandon the library.
The bait-and-switch nature of the change is somewhat troubling to me, though I admit the principal author of AGG doesn't appear to be gagging inquiries like in the SQLLedger/LedgerSMB case.
There is no such thing as a perfect copy protection scheme. Someone really really needs to explain the statistical concepts of type I and type II errors to Sony management.
The worst part about draconian copy protection measures is that they actually force legitimate users to use the hacks. I bought Doom 3, swapped my copy out at the store because the game would install but not play at the suggestion of the Activision rep on the phone, and finally gave up and cracked my legitimate copy of the game because I couldn't get it to play off the disk thanks to "Starforce 3." Now I simply refuse to buy any game with physical copy protection.
I stopped listening to music because of the asinine tactics of the RIAA, Sony's rootkit maneuvers, and the various CD copy-protection schemes out there. I may start listening again thanks to DRM-free EMI music being available, but in the meantime the worst part is they'll just point to my 'lost revenue' as evidence that they need to ratchet up their spending on these measures. One can readily draw parallels between the escalating costs and mis-characterization of innocent people via the DRM/copy-protection war-on-hackers and the war-on-terror, but the hyperbole admittedly seems a bit overblown in that light.
In any event, I won't be buying Sony DVDs for a while.
Fortunately, until the net-neutrality debate is lost, I at least have the internet to keep me entertained.
Easier still, grab a cingular or verizon phone and don't bother with service or sim card. it can still dial 911. Leave it at home for said emergencies et voila.
For all we know it was just because imagery taken earlier made a nicer mosaic next to the other satellite imagery they had and scored higher on some resolution vs. lack of clouds vs. temporal accuracy metric and were automatically subbed in.
US corn has a 44.64 cent / bushel average subsidy to start with. Each bushel makes about 2.5 gallons of ethonal which is then subsidized by 51 cents/gallon plus another 10 cents per gallon if you produce less than 60 million gallons.
The latter subsidies distort market conditions and take away corn from feedstocks hurting ranching and other industries.
At the same time we impart a 54 cent/gallon excise tax on sugar ethanol from Brazil. The reason is we have the same excise taxes per gallon as for gasoline. The problem is that ethanol produces about a third less energy per gallon, so the tax burden for its use as a fuel is higher. Brazil has economic leverage in that sugar cane is more efficient than corn when used to produce ethanol and they have a more suitable climate for growing it. It costs them about 50 cents/gallon to produce; we subsidize corn by more than it costs Brazil to produce. That said this picture is a little distorted as Brazil subsidizes their sugar crops and ethanol production.
Its not a matter of people paying fair prices for food, though they aren't if you want to argue from a free market perspective.
The issue is that corn ethanol can only exist because of very large market distortions and just doesn't supply a viable economic alternative fuel source.
If you want ethanol, fine, it is a reasonable goal, but leveraging corn isn't the best way to reach that goal. We can't compete with our corn ethanol on the world stage. All we are doing is playing protectionist sleight of hand games with the underlying economics. It lets politicians talk about how they are helping local farmers and talk big about having a vision for the future about energy self-sufficiency, but its all a shell game.
Now isn't the time to subsidize, it is the time to seriously evaluate if we want to construct an enormous infrastructure for corn ethanol production that doesn't make sound economic sense and that we will be stuck propping up indefinitely.
The issue that I raised was that the post in question seemed to implicate that the OTA functionality enabled by the firmware patch is something that should be thrown in for free and for which customers shouldn't be charged.
> USDTV customers are being charged $30 for a service and/or files that should be freely available to anyone who has a DB2010 in their possession.
The USB dongle appears to be being offered as a sop to a disaffected public to enable OTA, not to address source redistribution concerns.
The GPL issue is something they can be hanged for in a different court. I am not trying to defend their use of GPL'ed code without making the source code available.
They do owe the community a distribution of the GPL code that they have used, modified or unmodified; I spoke in haste and did not mean to imply a lack of burden in that respect on their behalf. While I don't know if there is still a legal entity there to call 'them' any more anyways to carry on that burden, it would appear that the subcontractors may have inherited the GPL burden by taking up redistribution to recoup costs. This was never the point I was trying to make, however.
I was merely pointing out that the $30 USB dongle doesn't (at least by the sound of it) consist of purely GPL code and that half of these posts seem to conflate these two issues. Any non-GPL code may very well have ownership issues that prevents them from distributing it more broadly.
Remind me next time not to try to clarify conflated arguments where the GPL is tangentialy involved. Go GPL, ra ra, down with Microsoft. Mollified?
Ok. I'm as much of an open source advocate as anyone, but I'm not sure I see what all of the hubbub is about or believe the proposition that this upgrade should be free.
Company makes a box that happens to run linux as the base OS. They should therefore redistribute any changes they make to the GPL'ed code they run. That I get.
What I don't see is how the GPL being involved in some of the software on the firmware entitles the people who bought the hardware to anything involving software that they used for the TV tuner portion of the box.
In one of the links they mention that they used the following bits of GPL'ed software:
Linux kernel version 2.4.18
glibc version 2.2.4
libpthread version 0.9
busybox version 0.60.0
GNU tar 1.13.19
gzip version 1.3
None of those, with the possible exception of the kernel would they have needed to modify to do what they were doing.
They went out of business, and they let people who were former subcontractors give away/sell the information needed to update the system so the end user can continue to use the hardware in some fashion.
I just don't see the relevance of the fact that some of the software is GPL'ed to the discussion at hand. You could argue that they need to make available a disk with the code for the GPL'ed stuff that they ran, but they are out of business, so good luck with getting them to honor that.
However, what is at stake is the ability to use their box to receive OTA signals. None of those packages deal with that. You can make a case that since they closed down they might want to try to give away their service to soften the blow, but the GPL issue is unrelated.
If I ran a computer company and sold computers preloaded with Linux that happened to come with some fancy proprietary biometric thumb scanner and I went out of business, I wouldn't spontaneously owe every one the source for some user-space application that controlled the thumbscanner.
If they modified the kernel, then sure the kernel mods are probably owed to the community. I'll bet that they aren't sufficient to perform all of the box's functions unaided however.
Without the service provided by this third party you are in possession of your very own Linux box running on funny hardware. The joke is on you. Good luck getting your money back.
It seems to me that one answer is to increase the reliability of the way we store information on digital media so that it is better able to handle corruption and loss.
For instance Reed-Solomon codes or Tornado codes can be used to break data up so that you can use a subset of the pieces to reconstruct the original signal. After chunking things up into small enough pieces that these codes are practical to apply, you can scatter the chunks across the disk or across multiple disks. This general sort of thing almost made it into Blu-Ray, but I guess in the rush to cram DRM down our throats the reliability of information was low on the list of priorities. http://www.truedisc.com/http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/00 1239
Erlang does work today and is rock-solid stable, even if I personally prefer stronger typing.
Software Transactional Memory works out of the box in current versions of the GHC Haskell compiler and is actually quite stable. The main thing it lacks at the moment is good library support, simply because the main Haskell libraries haven't had time to catch up. Once good general purpose data structures can be built that are parameterized over a wide family of monads (i.e. IO, ST, STM) using STM should feel more natural.
Manuel Chakravarty has also been working on Data Parallel Haskell which helps exploit ad-hoc parallelism across multiple CPUs, but I don't think its ready for primetime yet. The advantage there is that it doesn't change your basic programming style and from talking to some people down there they tested it on an 80-CPU environment with good results.
There are a bunch of packages on the ML side of the fence, but I am less familiar with those.
I am forced to admit, however, that there isn't anything in this space other than Erlang that I would use for commercial multiprocessor development today, but the STM approach in particular is very promising and not readily reproduced in an imperative setting.
I find it somewhat troubling that in this article John Backus is remembered primarily for the genie that he tried to put back in the bottle.
FORTRAN was utilitarian and procedural and good at enabling engineers and scientists to get work done. However, the problem with FORTRAN is the imperative pattern of though that it imposed led us to tell the computer a precise sequence of steps to accomplish each task. It doesn't offer information on dependencies, simply a "go here, do that" sequence of instructions. Imperative programs are inherently hard to reason about in terms of global state and effects and as written tend to be subject to off-by-one errors.
A lot of people don't see the point, having never programmed in a functional programming language like Haskell or ML. However even those people see dozens of cores on the horizon and wonder how they are going to deal with the debugging issues associated with all of the threads to keep those processors churning.
Functional programming offers an alternative viewpoint that is arguably much better suited to handle multiple CPUs working on large datasets. A case for this was recently reiterated by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames fame who said "in a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advan ced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf.
Haskell has brought Software Transactional Memory (STM) into play offering an alternative approach to traditional mutexes and locks that is compositional in nature unlike locking models. This is an approach that isn't readily emulable in an imperative setting because of the lack of guarantees about side effects. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ index.htm.
These are solutions to real problems that we are experiencing today, not some academic sideshow, and they arise from a school of thought that he helped bring a great deal of attention to.
If you want to do something to remember Backus take the time to learn OCaml or Haskell or even just take the time to learn how to effectively use the map and fold functions in Perl, PHP or Ruby.
It is his willingness to turn his back on what was percieved as his greatest work when confronted with a better idea for which I will remember him and I am a better programmer today for having learned what I could from his ideas.
Well, news flash,.js files can do the same thing through windows scripting host, and its not that unreasonable to try to open one to edit and view it and accidentally launch it through WSH instead because your browser has nicely decided to execute it locally.
Not a huge stretch for someone to make that malicious. I find myself more annoyed than not that you can't configure browsers these days to intelligently handle things that you just want to be able to view like.js/.cpp/.h files etc. I don't want it launching WSH. I don't want it opening Visual Studio. I don't even want it to open !@&*#( Notepad. I just want to view it in the browser, click the back arrow and move on.
If you want to calibrate to a large TV just build a simple rig with a couple of IR LEDs and a battery. You can then set the LEDs as far apart as you want to scale up the 'virtual' screen size.
I'm sure the impact on their business had nothing to do with them frothing at the mouth and raving like a pack of lunatics since 2003 while threatening to sue their own customers over using Linux.
Nope, not a bit.
It, like Groklaw, must all be part of a Scientology-level conspiracy by IBM to discredit them and make them look bad.
A good design by contract system can and should catch a lot of these errors at compile time.
That is the difference.
If you only catch something at runtime with an assert it is already too late.
Among the Haskell programming community there is a tongue-in-cheek saying, "if it compiles it is correct." This happens because the type system is so strong, it is hard to write a program that compiles, but doesn't do what it is designed to do.
Design by contract offers similar benefits to more imperative languages.
The problem is that offering total control out of the box goes against one of their design concerns. You can't rely on a little kid to respond intelligently to a dialog box asking for explicit permission management when they can't yet read.
You would prefer total control over initial application permissions. There doesn't appear to be anything fundamental preventing an advanced user from enabling that sort of thing in a security GUI so that every time a package is installed they get prompted, its just not a viable default.
The document said that it was not possible for the application to request P_DOCUMENT_RO access and network access simultaneously during installation.
But it also said that it was perfectly OK for a user to go in and explicitly grant P_NET access via the GUI to an application with P_DOCUMENT_RO access, thereby giving you an application that is able to read your images and mass upload them to teh interweb, but only to those users who know enough to explicitly use the security interface.
Also the OLPC or local government could issue a signed XO package that offered that functionality to younger children.
Slashdot Mirror
> Alavi is charged with one count of violating trade restrictions that prohibit exporting any goods or services to Iran.
s -Charges.asp
> He faces up to 21 months in prison if convicted.
Wow, tough sentencing.
Well, at least our other deterrents kept him away from drugs. http://www.commondreams.org/views/050900-101.htm
And its good to know that export of nuclear secrets is an infraction of about the same magnitude as carrying an illegal firearm. http://www.davidyannetti.com/PracticeAreas/Weapon
http://www.google.com/search?q=fuel+rods&ie=utf-8& oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&clien t=firefox-a
Fuel Rods
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on EBay
www.eBay.com
Nice. I just wish they would make the drivers for the 8800 which I already paid them for work right.
At the moment, every time my machine reboots or goes to sleep my video color settings go entirely out of whack. Hue gets pegged at over 100%, and I have to go into the nvidia control panel, and drag it to zero, run the display optimization wizard, exit out, try a video a second time, and maybe repeat the process.
If I add a second monitor it gets even worse.
And I'm not even running Vista.
Actually, the work in question was being developed under a BSD license, but the executable as a whole isn't GPL compatible because it also uses Apache 2.0 public licensed code and you can't cross the streams.
Please do not jump to conclusions and assume that everyone is out to get you.
I personally license most of my code under the BSD license these days, simply because I cannot foresee all of the use cases for it, and I don't want someone to avoid it for non-technical reasons.
So, no more free ride for me. I'm a bad bad person for using code that requires patent indemnification. Oh wait, whats that in the next GPL draft...
I am well aware that the BSD license provides pretty much no protection for the users of a library and in no way ensures that continued development will also be made public.
However, most every application is a house of cards built over other people's code. One of the decisions you have to make in any library-use scenario is whether or not you feel the community will be there in the long run. I started a project under the assumption I could use AGG because the direction that AGG was going in was compatible with my long term goals and would avoid duplicating effort. I started my project based on the past performance of the AGG community and that it would continue on into the future in a similar vein.
While the developer was perfectly within his rights to change the license in this case and to continue his development under the GPL, I am also free to bitch about it and to find alternatives because what he is providing is no longer something I can use.
An anology would be Theo D.R. having a sudden change of heart and next week deciding to release OpenBSD under the GPL. He may be perfectly within his rights to do so, but not many of the commercial users of the OpenBSD code base would be able to go along with the change, and there would probably be a lot of complaining.
In a similar vein:
I'm still trying to figure out why the Anti-Grain Geometry library went from BSD-like to GPL a few months ago with no code change. http://www.antigrain.com/
I haven't found any information on why the switch occurred and the author doesn't appear to have explained his motivations. I find myself working on a project in which I can employ 2.4, but I can't upgrade to 2.5 due to the licensing restriction, so I must either fork and maintain what I am using from 2.4 or abandon the library.
The bait-and-switch nature of the change is somewhat troubling to me, though I admit the principal author of AGG doesn't appear to be gagging inquiries like in the SQLLedger/LedgerSMB case.
There is no such thing as a perfect copy protection scheme. Someone really really needs to explain the statistical concepts of type I and type II errors to Sony management.
The worst part about draconian copy protection measures is that they actually force legitimate users to use the hacks. I bought Doom 3, swapped my copy out at the store because the game would install but not play at the suggestion of the Activision rep on the phone, and finally gave up and cracked my legitimate copy of the game because I couldn't get it to play off the disk thanks to "Starforce 3." Now I simply refuse to buy any game with physical copy protection.
I stopped listening to music because of the asinine tactics of the RIAA, Sony's rootkit maneuvers, and the various CD copy-protection schemes out there. I may start listening again thanks to DRM-free EMI music being available, but in the meantime the worst part is they'll just point to my 'lost revenue' as evidence that they need to ratchet up their spending on these measures. One can readily draw parallels between the escalating costs and mis-characterization of innocent people via the DRM/copy-protection war-on-hackers and the war-on-terror, but the hyperbole admittedly seems a bit overblown in that light.
In any event, I won't be buying Sony DVDs for a while.
Fortunately, until the net-neutrality debate is lost, I at least have the internet to keep me entertained.
Re: VOIP.
Easier still, grab a cingular or verizon phone and don't bother with service or sim card. it can still dial 911. Leave it at home for said emergencies et voila.
http://slashdot.org/
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
http://planet.haskell.org/
then I usually head back to slashdot and start all over again, grumbling about the lack of new posts before I give up and read from the firehose and rinse, wash, repeat.
I guess I just don't see the evil here.
For all we know it was just because imagery taken earlier made a nicer mosaic next to the other satellite imagery they had and scored higher on some resolution vs. lack of clouds vs. temporal accuracy metric and were automatically subbed in.
The problem is that this isn't a free market.
US corn has a 44.64 cent / bushel average subsidy to start with. Each bushel makes about 2.5 gallons of ethonal which is then subsidized by 51 cents/gallon plus another 10 cents per gallon if you produce less than 60 million gallons.
The latter subsidies distort market conditions and take away corn from feedstocks hurting ranching and other industries.
At the same time we impart a 54 cent/gallon excise tax on sugar ethanol from Brazil. The reason is we have the same excise taxes per gallon as for gasoline. The problem is that ethanol produces about a third less energy per gallon, so the tax burden for its use as a fuel is higher. Brazil has economic leverage in that sugar cane is more efficient than corn when used to produce ethanol and they have a more suitable climate for growing it. It costs them about 50 cents/gallon to produce; we subsidize corn by more than it costs Brazil to produce. That said this picture is a little distorted as Brazil subsidizes their sugar crops and ethanol production.
Its not a matter of people paying fair prices for food, though they aren't if you want to argue from a free market perspective.
The issue is that corn ethanol can only exist because of very large market distortions and just doesn't supply a viable economic alternative fuel source.
If you want ethanol, fine, it is a reasonable goal, but leveraging corn isn't the best way to reach that goal. We can't compete with our corn ethanol on the world stage. All we are doing is playing protectionist sleight of hand games with the underlying economics. It lets politicians talk about how they are helping local farmers and talk big about having a vision for the future about energy self-sufficiency, but its all a shell game.
Now isn't the time to subsidize, it is the time to seriously evaluate if we want to construct an enormous infrastructure for corn ethanol production that doesn't make sound economic sense and that we will be stuck propping up indefinitely.
The issue that I raised was that the post in question seemed to implicate that the OTA functionality enabled by the firmware patch is something that should be thrown in for free and for which customers shouldn't be charged.
> USDTV customers are being charged $30 for a service and/or files that should be freely available to anyone who has a DB2010 in their possession.
The USB dongle appears to be being offered as a sop to a disaffected public to enable OTA, not to address source redistribution concerns.
The GPL issue is something they can be hanged for in a different court. I am not trying to defend their use of GPL'ed code without making the source code available.
They do owe the community a distribution of the GPL code that they have used, modified or unmodified; I spoke in haste and did not mean to imply a lack of burden in that respect on their behalf. While I don't know if there is still a legal entity there to call 'them' any more anyways to carry on that burden, it would appear that the subcontractors may have inherited the GPL burden by taking up redistribution to recoup costs. This was never the point I was trying to make, however.
I was merely pointing out that the $30 USB dongle doesn't (at least by the sound of it) consist of purely GPL code and that half of these posts seem to conflate these two issues. Any non-GPL code may very well have ownership issues that prevents them from distributing it more broadly.
Remind me next time not to try to clarify conflated arguments where the GPL is tangentialy involved. Go GPL, ra ra, down with Microsoft. Mollified?
Ok. I'm as much of an open source advocate as anyone, but I'm not sure I see what all of the hubbub is about or believe the proposition that this upgrade should be free.
Company makes a box that happens to run linux as the base OS. They should therefore redistribute any changes they make to the GPL'ed code they run. That I get.
What I don't see is how the GPL being involved in some of the software on the firmware entitles the people who bought the hardware to anything involving software that they used for the TV tuner portion of the box.
In one of the links they mention that they used the following bits of GPL'ed software:
Linux kernel version 2.4.18
glibc version 2.2.4
libpthread version 0.9
busybox version 0.60.0
GNU tar 1.13.19
gzip version 1.3
None of those, with the possible exception of the kernel would they have needed to modify to do what they were doing.
They went out of business, and they let people who were former subcontractors give away/sell the information needed to update the system so the end user can continue to use the hardware in some fashion.
I just don't see the relevance of the fact that some of the software is GPL'ed to the discussion at hand. You could argue that they need to make available a disk with the code for the GPL'ed stuff that they ran, but they are out of business, so good luck with getting them to honor that.
However, what is at stake is the ability to use their box to receive OTA signals. None of those packages deal with that. You can make a case that since they closed down they might want to try to give away their service to soften the blow, but the GPL issue is unrelated.
If I ran a computer company and sold computers preloaded with Linux that happened to come with some fancy proprietary biometric thumb scanner and I went out of business, I wouldn't spontaneously owe every one the source for some user-space application that controlled the thumbscanner.
If they modified the kernel, then sure the kernel mods are probably owed to the community. I'll bet that they aren't sufficient to perform all of the box's functions unaided however.
Without the service provided by this third party you are in possession of your very own Linux box running on funny hardware. The joke is on you. Good luck getting your money back.
It seems to me that one answer is to increase the reliability of the way we store information on digital media so that it is better able to handle corruption and loss.
0 1239
For instance Reed-Solomon codes or Tornado codes can be used to break data up so that you can use a subset of the pieces to reconstruct the original signal. After chunking things up into small enough pieces that these codes are practical to apply, you can scatter the chunks across the disk or across multiple disks. This general sort of thing almost made it into Blu-Ray, but I guess in the rush to cram DRM down our throats the reliability of information was low on the list of priorities. http://www.truedisc.com/ http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/0
In other words, half the games I own.
Off the top of my head:
Erlang does work today and is rock-solid stable, even if I personally prefer stronger typing.
Software Transactional Memory works out of the box in current versions of the GHC Haskell compiler and is actually quite stable. The main thing it lacks at the moment is good library support, simply because the main Haskell libraries haven't had time to catch up. Once good general purpose data structures can be built that are parameterized over a wide family of monads (i.e. IO, ST, STM) using STM should feel more natural.
Manuel Chakravarty has also been working on Data Parallel Haskell which helps exploit ad-hoc parallelism across multiple CPUs, but I don't think its ready for primetime yet. The advantage there is that it doesn't change your basic programming style and from talking to some people down there they tested it on an 80-CPU environment with good results.
There are a bunch of packages on the ML side of the fence, but I am less familiar with those.
I am forced to admit, however, that there isn't anything in this space other than Erlang that I would use for commercial multiprocessor development today, but the STM approach in particular is very promising and not readily reproduced in an imperative setting.
I find it somewhat troubling that in this article John Backus is remembered primarily for the genie that he tried to put back in the bottle.
FORTRAN was utilitarian and procedural and good at enabling engineers and scientists to get work done. However, the problem with FORTRAN is the imperative pattern of though that it imposed led us to tell the computer a precise sequence of steps to accomplish each task. It doesn't offer information on dependencies, simply a "go here, do that" sequence of instructions. Imperative programs are inherently hard to reason about in terms of global state and effects and as written tend to be subject to off-by-one errors.
Backus saw this in 1978! See http://http//www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings /backus.pdf.
His insight spawned a great deal of the interest in functional programming languages. It was been credited by Paul Hudak of Haskell fame http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=72551.7255 4 (ACM membership required) (summarized here http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/classic/message4172 .html) and others as really helping to turn the tide and kept functional programming languages from being snuffed out.
A lot of people don't see the point, having never programmed in a functional programming language like Haskell or ML. However even those people see dozens of cores on the horizon and wonder how they are going to deal with the debugging issues associated with all of the threads to keep those processors churning.
Functional programming offers an alternative viewpoint that is arguably much better suited to handle multiple CPUs working on large datasets. A case for this was recently reiterated by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames fame who said "in a concurrent world, imperative is the wrong default!" http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/edu/seminare/2005/advan ced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf.
Haskell has brought Software Transactional Memory (STM) into play offering an alternative approach to traditional mutexes and locks that is compositional in nature unlike locking models. This is an approach that isn't readily emulable in an imperative setting because of the lack of guarantees about side effects. http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/stm/ index.htm.
These are solutions to real problems that we are experiencing today, not some academic sideshow, and they arise from a school of thought that he helped bring a great deal of attention to.
If you want to do something to remember Backus take the time to learn OCaml or Haskell or even just take the time to learn how to effectively use the map and fold functions in Perl, PHP or Ruby.
It is his willingness to turn his back on what was percieved as his greatest work when confronted with a better idea for which I will remember him and I am a better programmer today for having learned what I could from his ideas.
Well, news flash, .js files can do the same thing through windows scripting host, and its not that unreasonable to try to open one to edit and view it and accidentally launch it through WSH instead because your browser has nicely decided to execute it locally.
.js/.cpp/.h files etc. I don't want it launching WSH. I don't want it opening Visual Studio. I don't even want it to open !@&*#( Notepad. I just want to view it in the browser, click the back arrow and move on.
Not a huge stretch for someone to make that malicious. I find myself more annoyed than not that you can't configure browsers these days to intelligently handle things that you just want to be able to view like
If you want to calibrate to a large TV just build a simple rig with a couple of IR LEDs and a battery. You can then set the LEDs as far apart as you want to scale up the 'virtual' screen size.
Microsoft is the ultimate cybersquatter; they have SiteFinder after all.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/27/221524 6
I love how everyone pitched a fit over Verisign or Earthlink redirecting typos, then rolled over when Microsoft started the same thing.
I'm sure the impact on their business had nothing to do with them frothing at the mouth and raving like a pack of lunatics since 2003 while threatening to sue their own customers over using Linux.
Nope, not a bit.
It, like Groklaw, must all be part of a Scientology-level conspiracy by IBM to discredit them and make them look bad.
*sigh*
A good design by contract system can and should catch a lot of these errors at compile time.
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That is the difference.
If you only catch something at runtime with an assert it is already too late.
Among the Haskell programming community there is a tongue-in-cheek saying, "if it compiles it is correct." This happens because the type system is so strong, it is hard to write a program that compiles, but doesn't do what it is designed to do.
Design by contract offers similar benefits to more imperative languages.
Though, even the Haskell community sees benefits in contracts: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nx200/research/escH-hw.p
I personally find classic Eiffel style contracts or Extended Static Checking dovetail nicely with unit testing, improving coverage.
The problem is that offering total control out of the box goes against one of their design concerns. You can't rely on a little kid to respond intelligently to a dialog box asking for explicit permission management when they can't yet read.
You would prefer total control over initial application permissions. There doesn't appear to be anything fundamental preventing an advanced user from enabling that sort of thing in a security GUI so that every time a package is installed they get prompted, its just not a viable default.
Read more closely.
The document said that it was not possible for the application to request P_DOCUMENT_RO access and network access simultaneously during installation.
But it also said that it was perfectly OK for a user to go in and explicitly grant P_NET access via the GUI to an application with P_DOCUMENT_RO access, thereby giving you an application that is able to read your images and mass upload them to teh interweb, but only to those users who know enough to explicitly use the security interface.
Also the OLPC or local government could issue a signed XO package that offered that functionality to younger children.
Just what my sietch needs.
But can this model stand up to coriolis storms?
And how easily is it concealed from orbital surveillance?