This is what I was thinking to. I might be missing something here but isn't this almost certainly going to happen in the case where you have a substance through which microaves travels faster than they do through the atmosphere?
It works better if nobody knows you are using it. If people do find out, you're cooked to a large degree. It'd be much easier to just have a bar code with an encrypted version of the results. Given how little data are in the answers to a test, the encryption algorithm could effectively be the result of XOR'ing a hash of the passphrase.;-)
On the CPU side, just about anything besides an AMD or Intel CPU will get you better milage. PowerPC Mac's would be a good place to start. If you are willing to run Linux in the labs, a Netwinder or some of the MIPS-based Cobalt Micro systems would be an option. If you can find a Transmeta CPU powered system you could even run Windows and get decent power.
On the disk side, the really energy efficient way to go is to use solid-state memory of some kind. That's kind of pricey though, so the next strategy is to use low power hard disks and software which will shut down when not in use.
On the RAM side, I understand both DDR memory and RDRAM have lots of power saving features, although I don't know of a motherboard that is taking advantage of them yet.
More important than RAM though is the display. I think you'll find that going with LCD displays will save you significant amounts of energy.
Gee, doesn't it sound like G4 PowerBook's might be the answer to your problems?;-)
One other thing to consider is software which will do it's best to shutdown idle components of the system. DPMS, ACPI, APM, etc. are all important aspects of getting this right.
Either you can find a lawyer who will take your case on contigency, or you can sell the rights to your software to someone who'll do it just for the potential revnue from the law suit.
Nobody likes either of those parties, but sometimes they perform a vital societal function.
I hate to tell you this, but the G4 is not a 64-bit chip by any measure I'm familiar with. It has 32-bit registers, a 32-bit address space, etc. It does support special 128-bit operations for Altivec, but I have no idea where you are pulling 64-bit from.
The specific failings of WEP are documented here. If your boss is concerned about WEP security, he/she should read this document, and make an assessment as to whether adding WEP to your network significantly increases the security risk.
Assuming you use 128-bit WEP, you have a reasonable chance of blocking attackers. While you could be compromised, it's important to compare the risk vs. the risk of your wired LAN being compromised. For example, do you allow visitors to plug in their computers into your LAN? If so, 802.11b is not going to increase your security risk.
Even if 802.11b would increase the security risk, you need to asses if it's a good trade-off in return for your benefits. Finally, if you can't accept the risk, then just run IPSec (or the poor-man's IPSec: SSH;-) for communications over 802.11b. Indeed, you could have an IPSec gateway on whatever is plugged in to your 802.11b access point. Sure, it's a bit more work to setup, but the benefits would be substancial.
I don't quite get what's so breakthrough about CSI for John here. I mean, when you think about Profiler, Quincy, etc. there is a lot of precedent for this type of show. As for the leads, I think if you stack them up against the leads on say ER, they look about as attractive.
I like the show, and I think it's pretty well put together, but I definitely don't look at it and go, "wow, there's something totally different". It is, at it's core, a mystery/sleuth show. No big deal.
Okay, so just so that I'm clear on this. The BSD code contributions were made freely by volunteers, who were not compensated for their contributions, nor did they hold on to the source code. (Indeed, as your own quote clearly states, BSD was never distributed without source code.) BSD was built off of the AT&T source code and for most of it's early history the developers never seperated the BSD code from the AT&T code, and a consequence, you needed the AT&T source code license to get it. This is all consistent with what I've said before.... so I'm not sure I understand what your point is.
The BSD distribution certainly included many, many innovations over the original AT&T code base. Nobody paid for those innovations, and the innovations were distributed in source form without requiring the source be kept proprietary. Certainly, the AT&T source code license didn't include a license for the BSD code.
I think it's a pretty good counter example to Microsoft's argument that innovation will not occur without the benefit of being able to keep the source code proprietary.
Please reread my posts. I never claimed that GCC was the living embodiment of the latest compiler theory. If your going to apply that kind of criteria there really isn't any software in the Windows or Macintosh world at least that qualifies as "innovative". As I've said before, GCC was one of the first cross-platform compilers, and later iterations included the innovation of being a cross-language compiler as well. On top of that, despite being so old and unsophisticated, GCC still manages to generate more efficient code than the most popular compilers out there. (I seem to recall the Metrowerks compiler has been hailed by the Macintosh community as innovative several times, yet GCC generates far more efficient code.) If you're going to continue to just say, "that's not innovative," I'd like to suggest you present the innovation that supports your point.
You say my statements about Timbuktu and X/Windows are unsupported, but you have not provided any supporting data. You're consistently stating that I'm making false, and yet you're making claims that you are not even sure of yourself. As I said before, I am sure of my claims about Timbuktu. I was there when it first came out.
So, let's review that one. First, Timbuktu is the same kind of technology as X/Windows. Timbuktu allows remote control of a GUI desktop. X/Windows' key capabilities aren't about remote control (although one could implement remote control using it's capabilities). X/Windows is a cross platform network GUI.
Now, since you couldn't be bothered to check up on X/Window's history, but it in fact was first developed at MIT in 1984. It was developed to solve problems they were facing with Project Athena. There was a lot of interest from the outside world for a standardized/hardend/freezon release. In 1988 MIT released version 11 release 2 to the general public. You can find documentation of this here.
Timbuktu was of course not developed in 1984. Indeed, it's resource requirements were far too much for the original Macintosh. I was unable to find any clear documentation about the origins of Timbuktu remote. However, rather than assuming that your claims are false, and despite the fact that I distinctly remember that X/Windows existed when Timbuktu came out, I checked for some kind of documentation. I finally found version 1.0.1 winning a 1989 Eddy award. I guess the product wasn't quite as early as you'd imagined.
So, to review, you're wrong about both when X/Windows was created, and when Timbuktu was created. You're also missing the point about the differences between X/Windows and Timbuktu.
Now on to the TeX link. I'm surprised that someone who's been around in the business as long as you would not know anything about Donald Knuth (author of The Art of Computer Programming). He's the original author of TeX, and he very much always intended it to be available to anyone who wanted it, source code included. He started work on to assist with his development of The Art of Computer Programming books. He took a 10 year hiatus from working on it after publishing volume 3 of the series, during which time he focused on the development of TeX (and Metafont). Check his CV. I noticed while looking at the CV that he actually published a book on TeX in 1979.
I also can't believe that you think that the first sentence on the home page of the TeX user's group would being in error about when the group was formed, particularly given the fact that you have no evidence to suggeset this was wrong.
Again, the specific date of TeX's development really doesn't matter anyway. TeX was (and still is) very innovative in the field of typesetting. So much so that it continues to be used today despite the fact that Knuth hasn't done much work on it since the 80's.
Finally, a comment about flames. Let's review your own postings. Despite your apparent ignorance of the history of computer science you are consistently claiming I'm making false statements (without providing any evidence to suggest your claims). When I do provide evidence, you seem to be either ignoring it, or in one case claiming it is incorrect (again, without counter-claiming evidence). For whatever rason, you seem to be clinging to your own revisionist history where software innovation has only occured in proprietary software; this is an increadible claim considering all the innovation that occured in the software industry both before the concept of source code existed, let alone the notion of copyrighting source code and providing binary-only licenses. On top of all that, you write a paragraph treatise about the tastes of the open source development being for 20 year old technology, while simultaneously disputing that any of the technologies I've brought up existed that long ago.
Don't presume that I'm a "UNIX youngster". You'd be wrong.
If you were hacking on UNIX kernels back then, then you'd know that a huge amount of the BSD code base implemented innovations which significantly improved Unix's capabilities. You would also know that the BSD code base was widely distributed and included source from a wide variety of sources. As such, it had to employ a source code licensing model consistent with the BSD license. The only problem was the AT&T code base that lay underneath, as it was still restricted.
I'm very familiar with Timbuktu. It came out well after the X/Windows system did, and it's capabilities are not the same as X/Windows. Timbuktu gives you remote access to a local GUI, which is not the same as as network GUI. If you're remotely familiar with how X/Windows works, you'd know the difference. For example: you can't, and never could, buy Timbuktu Display Servers.
As for your comments on GCC, am I to assume that by your statement that there have been no innovations in C compilers since the orginal work of Kernigan & Ritchie? That seems rather limiting. As far as GCC being developer-facing... I guess you think developers don't use computers or something.;-) I guess it depends what is meant by "user-facing", but I presume it means that users directly interact with the software (Microsoft I'm sure would acknowledge that there are tons of network server innovations which were done without closing the source code base). As for GCC being antiquated by today's standards, it still seems to be able to generate very efficient code compared to it's commercial competition. (Indeed, Be's decision to switch to GCC was entirely driven by performance improvements.)
I didn't slap GUI's, I'm just saying it's unfair to suggest that they are the only way to go. I just said that there are lots of TeX people who argue it's a better way to go than with traditional word processors you see today. I'm trying to point out that presuming that software has to have a fancy GUI to be an innovation is exteremly close minded. Come to think of it Emacspeak is a stunning exmaple of this;-)
I guess you didn't look very hard doing your TeX research. I did a quick check on Amazon and found that Knuth's *2nd* book on Tex was published in 1986. As I recall, his first book, "the TeXbook" was published a couple of years earlier (Amazon shows the date it was reprinted). Presumably, Knuth would have had to convince the publishers that there was a sizeable user base before he published the book. Of course, this wouldn't have been too hard because the TeX Users Group had been existence since 1980. Knuth started working on TeX shortly after publishing Volume 3 of "The Art of Computer Programming", which was originally published in 1973. While TeX did take a lot of time to finish, like all good software projects (particularly proprietary software), there were several usuable versions of TeX around for years before it was "finished". (I believe he finished it before he wrote any more books, so that must have been some time around 1982-3.)
Taking some license to rephrase what you said: This is one of the odd things about Macintosh users. They declare themselves to be revolutionary, but they are in fact reactionary. They have a set of tastes laid down 15 years ago and have not moved forward in any significant way since then. In the meantime, mainstream computing and even the popular taste have passed them by.
As for privatly funded OpenSource, I guess it depeneds on your definition. To me Open Source=Developed by people for free, and made free.
Well, as long as your reinventing the meaning of terms here I guess we can define "innovate" as "make money".;-)
Seriously, Microsoft's arguement is against the government funding development of GPL'd software. So "people doing work for free" isn't relevant. The whole argument presupposes that someone is being paid by the government to do the work.
Actually, the BSD license has now been changed and as such it now addresses concerns raised by RMS. Either way, the advertising clause is certainly not relevant to Microsoft's claims about innovation.
BTW, I believe a good chunk of that stuff was either available under GPL, X license, or similar licenses which the FSF would be happy to dub "free" software license.
Limiting yourself to the GPL is unfair though, as the GPL really just seeked to recreate conditions which had existed earlier in computing history. The GPL didn't even exist until 1985 I think, and it took it a while to get much momentum (think for a minute... what did Microsoft "innovate" in it's first 15 years of existence?). However, the concept of doing software development and releasing the source code alongside it was basically how programming was DONE until the late 70's.
I did zero research, as I said, however, neither apparently did you. Apparently you also didn't read my post clearly. I can't help it if you're not familiar with this stuff. I really don't have the time to research this for your benefit.
BSD software was developed under the BSD license. Source code was distributed, and you free to make changes. While the FSF took issue with the original license's attribution requirement, that is irrelevant with regards to Microsoft's claims. Indeed, Microsoft's Winsock library is derived from that code base, as is basically every implementation of sockets. The reason this is the case is nobody had to pay to get a source code license.
I did indeed name two chess clients: xboard & winboard. If you good to ICS or similar places you'll find the history of these things.
I never said X/Windows was the first GUI. It was innovative because it was the first cross platform network GUI. That's something that Macintosh still doesn't do.
GCC is much more than a clone of CC. The original version of GCC was one of the most impressive cross-platform compilers around. It has scores of innovations that allow it to generate very efficient code (indeed, for quite some time gcc generated faster SPARC code than Sun's own compiler... that might even be true today) and doing so while supporting a wide variety of platforms. I think you'd be hard pressed today to find a compiler which supported as many different platforms (or as well). GCC has since been improved to also support a wide variety of of language front ends as well as back ends. It is the closest thing that the computer industry has to a Rosetta stone.
Just because something doesn't have a GUI doesn't mean that it's not innovative. There are those who would argue (particularly those in the TeX camp) that most GUI wordprocessors were a regression. Innovation just means that you've done something different from what was done before. Regardless of that, I believe TeX existed in 1980 (I have no idea when it was actually created, but I believe work started on this sometime in the 60's). I think you'd be hard pressed to suggest the GUI revolution had occured before that. Irregardless, for the longest time TeX had the most sophisticated typesetting algorithms inside it (indeed, TeX has been used and continues to be used for book publishing to this day, so it must be usefull to someone).
Name on of the items on that list which was not released on an open source compliant license. I'm betting you won't even try, so I'll go over some of the obvious ones:
X/Windows is released under the X Consortium license
PEX is also released under the X license
Prior to the 70's the concept of software being owned was pretty much unheard of, and of course most source code was the actual machine code...
Nethack is BSD licensed I believe
Xconq is GPL'd
TeX released under some kind of BSD style license as I recall
Most of the chess clients (xboard, winboard, etc.) I know of are free software in one form or another.
PGP was released with source code.
Most of the standard network services were presented to the IETF with sample source code for both the client and server side of the conversation
GCC is GPL'd (surprise)
Amazingly, GNU software is released under either the GPL or LGPL. BSD software is released under a BSD license.
It's worth emphasizing the size of innovation by the BSD group. After AT&T changed the licensing for Unix, you still had almost all the necessary components of a Unix system available from BSD under the BSD license. That's pretty significant "innovation".
I have no idea why "user-facing" has to get thrown in there (like it's not innovation if it's not facing the user), but let's go with it.
X/Windows was a pretty innovative concept of a cross-platform network GUI
I think PEX was one of the first 3D network GUI's.
The Zephyr instant messaging service predates AIM
Almost any software written before the 70's
Nethack
Xconq (one of the first turn-based strategy games)
The first NNTP/News readers
The first e-mail clients
The first web browser (CERN's line-mode browser)
The first SNMP viewers
I could be wrong, but I believe Andrew was one of the first systems that allowed live object embedding in a document editor
Fractal renderer's.;-)
Then there's the whole TeX typesetting system
Network chess clients
PGP
The first telnet client
The first ftp client
The first secure remote shell
The first gopher client
While it wasn't the first compiler, gcc was pretty innovative
Many of the GNU and BSD implementations of those little services that come with Unix tend to be significant improvements over what was part of the original proprietary Unix services.
Excercise for the reader: try to make a comperable list of innovations that Microsoft has made.;-)
A really imporant point here is that the growth and improvement of Unix during the 70's is directly attributable to it being made "free" software and then incorporating free patches.
Now, I think what Allchin was focusing on was all the "GUI innovations" which have been done by proprietary software vendors. Now, most of those GUI innovations occured somewhere between the mid 80's to mid 90's. Guess what, that just happens to coincide with the times when proprietary software was most dominant in the industry. It stands to reason that most of the innovations from that time would be embodied by proprietary software.
The bottom line is that the "GUI" era far from covers the bulk of innovation in the computer industry. More importantly, I'd argue that the amount of effort necessary to come up with innovations like "menu bars" is not comperable to say coming up with quicksort.
I think Microsoft is basically making some assumptions about copyright that don't add up. Let's take a simple scenario: the government develops some software, and releases it under the GPL.
Now, if the government made it, they own the copyright, and as such can sell the code to interested parties such as Microsoft under a different license. Alternatively, Microsoft can get the code under the terms of the GPL gratis.
If instead the government had released the code under a traditional proprietary license, then Microsoft can still license the code if they want to "extend" it. They just don't have the option of extending it under the terms of the GPL.
Now, of course, if people make GPL'd contributions to the government's code, and the government incorporates those changes without getting copyright, then the "proprietary license" option disappears to a certain degreee. That being said, those are improvements that wouldn't exist at all under the traditional proprietary license, so I still don't see how this can be seen as a problem.
So, can someone tell me the scenario under which the GPL would give Microsoft, or any other "innovator" fewer options than if the code was released in the more common manner?
Hmm... Based on your statements I am forced to draw one of three conclusions:
I have completely misunderstood the meaning of the first amendment.
The first amendment is actually not part of the consitution, despite the fact that it is regularly cited in consitutional law cases, and it it's described as an amendment to "the Consitution".
You got it wrong.
FYI,the War Powers Act of 1917 is considered by most to be a bill which effectively suspends the Consitution during a declared national emergency. There are certainly many who consider it to be unconsitutional, and therefore, illegal.
It's the standard's committee's fault for a) stating that WEP provided security equivalent to a wired connection and b) claiming that normal enterprise security mechanisms would mitigate the threat anyway. Having WEP and not having WEP doesn't make much difference in terms of securing your data, and that's the truth.
He stated that normal enterprise security should protect data in the event that someone crack's WEP, and that's total BS, because the potential for snooping with WEP on a normal enterprise security environment (and I don't know of many enterprises that use encrypted-network filesystems) is much larger than in a wired network (where for starters switches make it much harder to snoop out random traffic).
First of all, I dispute that a lot of resources are required to crack these systems. You basically need a laptop, a 2.4GHz receiver, and an antenna. The laptop (assuming it's new) should provide more than enough computing power for this job. Sure you need some software, but really, how much longer do you think it'll be before script kiddies will have access to software to do this for them?
I also dispute that your average enterprise network provides adequate security to protect it's data even in the event that WEP is compromised. Most corporate security systems I know essentially assume that unwanted parties cannot join the network and listen in on traffic. If I break the WEP key for a network, this assumption becomes invalid. The attacker can then watch as proprietary documents get passed over the network (normally documents move unencrypted) and read them.
As for the "wired-equivalent" aspect of this. I can't remember a wired network that I could compromise without having to get physical access to a network jack. Corporations could increase their security based on how hard they made it to get to those jacks. Indeed, in some cases there are no controls, but in most companies, there are at least some controls and companies have the option of significantly increasing the physical access security. WEP does not provide an equivalent to this (indeed, I'm not sure there's a clear standard meant by "wired-equivalent").
Finally, after reading over the material on this, I have to say that the WEP group just went about this fundamentally the wrong way. They tried to use RC4 for authorization, which it's not particularly well suited for. They also effectively tried to use a single key for both authorization and encryption. They used 24-bits of variability to protect against RC4 compromise, even though that's significantly less than one would need. All of these are no-no's, and the WEP group should have been aware of these problems (and made some effort to address them).
It is possible, today, to do wireless communications securely. WEP could have employed existing proven approaches, but instead they rolled their own. Guess what happens when you do this boys and girls?
Well, those suggestions were mostly a joke. However, I'd point out that "GNU" is not considered to infringe on UNIX, so I think GNASSH would be considered safe as well.
As for the ASS thing, I think you completely miss the cynical sense of humor that most people have. Admittedly, ASS is not a good brand name to establish yourself in the general populace, but it's probably a great name to establish yourself in the IT community.
Bonus question: How on earth can you copyright a three letters acronym? I'll try copyrighting "IBM".
He didn't copyright SSH, he trademarked it. You can indeed do this, and IBM is indeed a registered trademark.
Actually, when you look at this case, it's a pretty clear example of why trademarks were created in the first place: to avoid customer confusion about branding. I'd say this guy is well within his rights.
Actually, the Cyrus IMAP Server is open source and takes a similar approach. It's been deployed and in use at Carnegie Mellon for quite some time, and I believe that the older version of the engine has the bases for a number of commercial web servers out there, including the iPlanet mail server.
I think if you look around you'll find that Java is well supported on a wide variety of platforms. It will certainly require fewer source code changes as you move from one platform to another than C. You will find that most OS vendors will provide you with a Java VM for their platform, even for embedded OS's like VxWorks and QNX. The one area where Java is not well supported is on free operating systems, where if you stray much from x86 or PowerPC on Linux your choices are fairly limited (although Kaffe is a very nice VM).
As far as your weak references case goes, while I don't know specifically what you are trying to accomplish, I've never needed weak references for any dynamically loaded modules I've done in Java. I've found that Java's ClassLoader allows you to neatly modularize your code so that modules can be easily and safely be loaded and unloaded.
When you compare this stuff to what's standardly available in C (let alone which is portable to a wide variety of platforms), and I'm hard pressed to think of how C could be advantageous in this situation.
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This is what I was thinking to. I might be missing something here but isn't this almost certainly going to happen in the case where you have a substance through which microaves travels faster than they do through the atmosphere?
It works better if nobody knows you are using it. If people do find out, you're cooked to a large degree. It'd be much easier to just have a bar code with an encrypted version of the results. Given how little data are in the answers to a test, the encryption algorithm could effectively be the result of XOR'ing a hash of the passphrase. ;-)
On the CPU side, just about anything besides an AMD or Intel CPU will get you better milage. PowerPC Mac's would be a good place to start. If you are willing to run Linux in the labs, a Netwinder or some of the MIPS-based Cobalt Micro systems would be an option. If you can find a Transmeta CPU powered system you could even run Windows and get decent power.
;-)
On the disk side, the really energy efficient way to go is to use solid-state memory of some kind. That's kind of pricey though, so the next strategy is to use low power hard disks and software which will shut down when not in use.
On the RAM side, I understand both DDR memory and RDRAM have lots of power saving features, although I don't know of a motherboard that is taking advantage of them yet.
More important than RAM though is the display. I think you'll find that going with LCD displays will save you significant amounts of energy.
Gee, doesn't it sound like G4 PowerBook's might be the answer to your problems?
One other thing to consider is software which will do it's best to shutdown idle components of the system. DPMS, ACPI, APM, etc. are all important aspects of getting this right.
Either you can find a lawyer who will take your case on contigency, or you can sell the rights to your software to someone who'll do it just for the potential revnue from the law suit.
Nobody likes either of those parties, but sometimes they perform a vital societal function.
I hate to tell you this, but the G4 is not a 64-bit chip by any measure I'm familiar with. It has 32-bit registers, a 32-bit address space, etc. It does support special 128-bit operations for Altivec, but I have no idea where you are pulling 64-bit from.
The specific failings of WEP are documented here. If your boss is concerned about WEP security, he/she should read this document, and make an assessment as to whether adding WEP to your network significantly increases the security risk.
Assuming you use 128-bit WEP, you have a reasonable chance of blocking attackers. While you could be compromised, it's important to compare the risk vs. the risk of your wired LAN being compromised. For example, do you allow visitors to plug in their computers into your LAN? If so, 802.11b is not going to increase your security risk.
Even if 802.11b would increase the security risk, you need to asses if it's a good trade-off in return for your benefits. Finally, if you can't accept the risk, then just run IPSec (or the poor-man's IPSec: SSH ;-) for communications over 802.11b. Indeed, you could have an IPSec gateway on whatever is plugged in to your 802.11b access point. Sure, it's a bit more work to setup, but the benefits would be substancial.
I don't quite get what's so breakthrough about CSI for John here. I mean, when you think about Profiler, Quincy, etc. there is a lot of precedent for this type of show. As for the leads, I think if you stack them up against the leads on say ER, they look about as attractive.
I like the show, and I think it's pretty well put together, but I definitely don't look at it and go, "wow, there's something totally different". It is, at it's core, a mystery/sleuth show. No big deal.
Okay, so just so that I'm clear on this. The BSD code contributions were made freely by volunteers, who were not compensated for their contributions, nor did they hold on to the source code. (Indeed, as your own quote clearly states, BSD was never distributed without source code.) BSD was built off of the AT&T source code and for most of it's early history the developers never seperated the BSD code from the AT&T code, and a consequence, you needed the AT&T source code license to get it. This is all consistent with what I've said before.... so I'm not sure I understand what your point is.
The BSD distribution certainly included many, many innovations over the original AT&T code base. Nobody paid for those innovations, and the innovations were distributed in source form without requiring the source be kept proprietary. Certainly, the AT&T source code license didn't include a license for the BSD code.
I think it's a pretty good counter example to Microsoft's argument that innovation will not occur without the benefit of being able to keep the source code proprietary.
Please reread my posts. I never claimed that GCC was the living embodiment of the latest compiler theory. If your going to apply that kind of criteria there really isn't any software in the Windows or Macintosh world at least that qualifies as "innovative". As I've said before, GCC was one of the first cross-platform compilers, and later iterations included the innovation of being a cross-language compiler as well. On top of that, despite being so old and unsophisticated, GCC still manages to generate more efficient code than the most popular compilers out there. (I seem to recall the Metrowerks compiler has been hailed by the Macintosh community as innovative several times, yet GCC generates far more efficient code.) If you're going to continue to just say, "that's not innovative," I'd like to suggest you present the innovation that supports your point.
You say my statements about Timbuktu and X/Windows are unsupported, but you have not provided any supporting data. You're consistently stating that I'm making false, and yet you're making claims that you are not even sure of yourself. As I said before, I am sure of my claims about Timbuktu. I was there when it first came out.
So, let's review that one. First, Timbuktu is the same kind of technology as X/Windows. Timbuktu allows remote control of a GUI desktop. X/Windows' key capabilities aren't about remote control (although one could implement remote control using it's capabilities). X/Windows is a cross platform network GUI.
Now, since you couldn't be bothered to check up on X/Window's history, but it in fact was first developed at MIT in 1984. It was developed to solve problems they were facing with Project Athena. There was a lot of interest from the outside world for a standardized/hardend/freezon release. In 1988 MIT released version 11 release 2 to the general public. You can find documentation of this here.
Timbuktu was of course not developed in 1984. Indeed, it's resource requirements were far too much for the original Macintosh. I was unable to find any clear documentation about the origins of Timbuktu remote. However, rather than assuming that your claims are false, and despite the fact that I distinctly remember that X/Windows existed when Timbuktu came out, I checked for some kind of documentation. I finally found version 1.0.1 winning a 1989 Eddy award. I guess the product wasn't quite as early as you'd imagined.
So, to review, you're wrong about both when X/Windows was created, and when Timbuktu was created. You're also missing the point about the differences between X/Windows and Timbuktu.
Now on to the TeX link. I'm surprised that someone who's been around in the business as long as you would not know anything about Donald Knuth (author of The Art of Computer Programming). He's the original author of TeX, and he very much always intended it to be available to anyone who wanted it, source code included. He started work on to assist with his development of The Art of Computer Programming books. He took a 10 year hiatus from working on it after publishing volume 3 of the series, during which time he focused on the development of TeX (and Metafont). Check his CV. I noticed while looking at the CV that he actually published a book on TeX in 1979.
I also can't believe that you think that the first sentence on the home page of the TeX user's group would being in error about when the group was formed, particularly given the fact that you have no evidence to suggeset this was wrong.
Again, the specific date of TeX's development really doesn't matter anyway. TeX was (and still is) very innovative in the field of typesetting. So much so that it continues to be used today despite the fact that Knuth hasn't done much work on it since the 80's.
Finally, a comment about flames. Let's review your own postings. Despite your apparent ignorance of the history of computer science you are consistently claiming I'm making false statements (without providing any evidence to suggest your claims). When I do provide evidence, you seem to be either ignoring it, or in one case claiming it is incorrect (again, without counter-claiming evidence). For whatever rason, you seem to be clinging to your own revisionist history where software innovation has only occured in proprietary software; this is an increadible claim considering all the innovation that occured in the software industry both before the concept of source code existed, let alone the notion of copyrighting source code and providing binary-only licenses. On top of all that, you write a paragraph treatise about the tastes of the open source development being for 20 year old technology, while simultaneously disputing that any of the technologies I've brought up existed that long ago.
In short, you are flaming.
Don't presume that I'm a "UNIX youngster". You'd be wrong.
If you were hacking on UNIX kernels back then, then you'd know that a huge amount of the BSD code base implemented innovations which significantly improved Unix's capabilities. You would also know that the BSD code base was widely distributed and included source from a wide variety of sources. As such, it had to employ a source code licensing model consistent with the BSD license. The only problem was the AT&T code base that lay underneath, as it was still restricted.
I'm very familiar with Timbuktu. It came out well after the X/Windows system did, and it's capabilities are not the same as X/Windows. Timbuktu gives you remote access to a local GUI, which is not the same as as network GUI. If you're remotely familiar with how X/Windows works, you'd know the difference. For example: you can't, and never could, buy Timbuktu Display Servers.
As for your comments on GCC, am I to assume that by your statement that there have been no innovations in C compilers since the orginal work of Kernigan & Ritchie? That seems rather limiting. As far as GCC being developer-facing... I guess you think developers don't use computers or something. ;-) I guess it depends what is meant by "user-facing", but I presume it means that users directly interact with the software (Microsoft I'm sure would acknowledge that there are tons of network server innovations which were done without closing the source code base). As for GCC being antiquated by today's standards, it still seems to be able to generate very efficient code compared to it's commercial competition. (Indeed, Be's decision to switch to GCC was entirely driven by performance improvements.)
I didn't slap GUI's, I'm just saying it's unfair to suggest that they are the only way to go. I just said that there are lots of TeX people who argue it's a better way to go than with traditional word processors you see today. I'm trying to point out that presuming that software has to have a fancy GUI to be an innovation is exteremly close minded. Come to think of it Emacspeak is a stunning exmaple of this ;-)
I guess you didn't look very hard doing your TeX research. I did a quick check on Amazon and found that Knuth's *2nd* book on Tex was published in 1986. As I recall, his first book, "the TeXbook" was published a couple of years earlier (Amazon shows the date it was reprinted). Presumably, Knuth would have had to convince the publishers that there was a sizeable user base before he published the book. Of course, this wouldn't have been too hard because the TeX Users Group had been existence since 1980. Knuth started working on TeX shortly after publishing Volume 3 of "The Art of Computer Programming", which was originally published in 1973. While TeX did take a lot of time to finish, like all good software projects (particularly proprietary software), there were several usuable versions of TeX around for years before it was "finished". (I believe he finished it before he wrote any more books, so that must have been some time around 1982-3.)
Taking some license to rephrase what you said: This is one of the odd things about Macintosh users. They declare themselves to be revolutionary, but they are in fact reactionary. They have a set of tastes laid down 15 years ago and have not moved forward in any significant way since then. In the meantime, mainstream computing and even the popular taste have passed them by.
As for privatly funded OpenSource, I guess it depeneds on your definition. To me Open Source=Developed by people for free, and made free.
;-)
Well, as long as your reinventing the meaning of terms here I guess we can define "innovate" as "make money".
Seriously, Microsoft's arguement is against the government funding development of GPL'd software. So "people doing work for free" isn't relevant. The whole argument presupposes that someone is being paid by the government to do the work.
Actually, the BSD license has now been changed and as such it now addresses concerns raised by RMS. Either way, the advertising clause is certainly not relevant to Microsoft's claims about innovation.
BTW, I believe a good chunk of that stuff was either available under GPL, X license, or similar licenses which the FSF would be happy to dub "free" software license.
Limiting yourself to the GPL is unfair though, as the GPL really just seeked to recreate conditions which had existed earlier in computing history. The GPL didn't even exist until 1985 I think, and it took it a while to get much momentum (think for a minute... what did Microsoft "innovate" in it's first 15 years of existence?). However, the concept of doing software development and releasing the source code alongside it was basically how programming was DONE until the late 70's.
I did zero research, as I said, however, neither apparently did you. Apparently you also didn't read my post clearly. I can't help it if you're not familiar with this stuff. I really don't have the time to research this for your benefit.
BSD software was developed under the BSD license. Source code was distributed, and you free to make changes. While the FSF took issue with the original license's attribution requirement, that is irrelevant with regards to Microsoft's claims. Indeed, Microsoft's Winsock library is derived from that code base, as is basically every implementation of sockets. The reason this is the case is nobody had to pay to get a source code license.
I did indeed name two chess clients: xboard & winboard. If you good to ICS or similar places you'll find the history of these things.
I never said X/Windows was the first GUI. It was innovative because it was the first cross platform network GUI. That's something that Macintosh still doesn't do.
GCC is much more than a clone of CC. The original version of GCC was one of the most impressive cross-platform compilers around. It has scores of innovations that allow it to generate very efficient code (indeed, for quite some time gcc generated faster SPARC code than Sun's own compiler... that might even be true today) and doing so while supporting a wide variety of platforms. I think you'd be hard pressed today to find a compiler which supported as many different platforms (or as well). GCC has since been improved to also support a wide variety of of language front ends as well as back ends. It is the closest thing that the computer industry has to a Rosetta stone.
Just because something doesn't have a GUI doesn't mean that it's not innovative. There are those who would argue (particularly those in the TeX camp) that most GUI wordprocessors were a regression. Innovation just means that you've done something different from what was done before. Regardless of that, I believe TeX existed in 1980 (I have no idea when it was actually created, but I believe work started on this sometime in the 60's). I think you'd be hard pressed to suggest the GUI revolution had occured before that. Irregardless, for the longest time TeX had the most sophisticated typesetting algorithms inside it (indeed, TeX has been used and continues to be used for book publishing to this day, so it must be usefull to someone).
Name on of the items on that list which was not released on an open source compliant license. I'm betting you won't even try, so I'll go over some of the obvious ones:
It's worth emphasizing the size of innovation by the BSD group. After AT&T changed the licensing for Unix, you still had almost all the necessary components of a Unix system available from BSD under the BSD license. That's pretty significant "innovation".
I have no idea why "user-facing" has to get thrown in there (like it's not innovation if it's not facing the user), but let's go with it.
Excercise for the reader: try to make a comperable list of innovations that Microsoft has made. ;-)
A really imporant point here is that the growth and improvement of Unix during the 70's is directly attributable to it being made "free" software and then incorporating free patches.
Now, I think what Allchin was focusing on was all the "GUI innovations" which have been done by proprietary software vendors. Now, most of those GUI innovations occured somewhere between the mid 80's to mid 90's. Guess what, that just happens to coincide with the times when proprietary software was most dominant in the industry. It stands to reason that most of the innovations from that time would be embodied by proprietary software.
The bottom line is that the "GUI" era far from covers the bulk of innovation in the computer industry. More importantly, I'd argue that the amount of effort necessary to come up with innovations like "menu bars" is not comperable to say coming up with quicksort.
I think Microsoft is basically making some assumptions about copyright that don't add up. Let's take a simple scenario: the government develops some software, and releases it under the GPL.
Now, if the government made it, they own the copyright, and as such can sell the code to interested parties such as Microsoft under a different license. Alternatively, Microsoft can get the code under the terms of the GPL gratis.
If instead the government had released the code under a traditional proprietary license, then Microsoft can still license the code if they want to "extend" it. They just don't have the option of extending it under the terms of the GPL.
Now, of course, if people make GPL'd contributions to the government's code, and the government incorporates those changes without getting copyright, then the "proprietary license" option disappears to a certain degreee. That being said, those are improvements that wouldn't exist at all under the traditional proprietary license, so I still don't see how this can be seen as a problem.
So, can someone tell me the scenario under which the GPL would give Microsoft, or any other "innovator" fewer options than if the code was released in the more common manner?
Hmm... Based on your statements I am forced to draw one of three conclusions:
FYI,the War Powers Act of 1917 is considered by most to be a bill which effectively suspends the Consitution during a declared national emergency. There are certainly many who consider it to be unconsitutional, and therefore, illegal.
It's the standard's committee's fault for a) stating that WEP provided security equivalent to a wired connection and b) claiming that normal enterprise security mechanisms would mitigate the threat anyway. Having WEP and not having WEP doesn't make much difference in terms of securing your data, and that's the truth.
He stated that normal enterprise security should protect data in the event that someone crack's WEP, and that's total BS, because the potential for snooping with WEP on a normal enterprise security environment (and I don't know of many enterprises that use encrypted-network filesystems) is much larger than in a wired network (where for starters switches make it much harder to snoop out random traffic).
First of all, I dispute that a lot of resources are required to crack these systems. You basically need a laptop, a 2.4GHz receiver, and an antenna. The laptop (assuming it's new) should provide more than enough computing power for this job. Sure you need some software, but really, how much longer do you think it'll be before script kiddies will have access to software to do this for them?
I also dispute that your average enterprise network provides adequate security to protect it's data even in the event that WEP is compromised. Most corporate security systems I know essentially assume that unwanted parties cannot join the network and listen in on traffic. If I break the WEP key for a network, this assumption becomes invalid. The attacker can then watch as proprietary documents get passed over the network (normally documents move unencrypted) and read them.
As for the "wired-equivalent" aspect of this. I can't remember a wired network that I could compromise without having to get physical access to a network jack. Corporations could increase their security based on how hard they made it to get to those jacks. Indeed, in some cases there are no controls, but in most companies, there are at least some controls and companies have the option of significantly increasing the physical access security. WEP does not provide an equivalent to this (indeed, I'm not sure there's a clear standard meant by "wired-equivalent").
Finally, after reading over the material on this, I have to say that the WEP group just went about this fundamentally the wrong way. They tried to use RC4 for authorization, which it's not particularly well suited for. They also effectively tried to use a single key for both authorization and encryption. They used 24-bits of variability to protect against RC4 compromise, even though that's significantly less than one would need. All of these are no-no's, and the WEP group should have been aware of these problems (and made some effort to address them).
It is possible, today, to do wireless communications securely. WEP could have employed existing proven approaches, but instead they rolled their own. Guess what happens when you do this boys and girls?
Oooh! I really like this one. Clever, humorous, and on top of all that, quite convenient to use.
Well, those suggestions were mostly a joke. However, I'd point out that "GNU" is not considered to infringe on UNIX, so I think GNASSH would be considered safe as well.
As for the ASS thing, I think you completely miss the cynical sense of humor that most people have. Admittedly, ASS is not a good brand name to establish yourself in the general populace, but it's probably a great name to establish yourself in the IT community.
Bonus question: How on earth can you copyright a three letters acronym? I'll try copyrighting "IBM".
He didn't copyright SSH, he trademarked it. You can indeed do this, and IBM is indeed a registered trademark.
Actually, when you look at this case, it's a pretty clear example of why trademarks were created in the first place: to avoid customer confusion about branding. I'd say this guy is well within his rights.
Actually, the Cyrus IMAP Server is open source and takes a similar approach. It's been deployed and in use at Carnegie Mellon for quite some time, and I believe that the older version of the engine has the bases for a number of commercial web servers out there, including the iPlanet mail server.
I think if you look around you'll find that Java is well supported on a wide variety of platforms. It will certainly require fewer source code changes as you move from one platform to another than C. You will find that most OS vendors will provide you with a Java VM for their platform, even for embedded OS's like VxWorks and QNX. The one area where Java is not well supported is on free operating systems, where if you stray much from x86 or PowerPC on Linux your choices are fairly limited (although Kaffe is a very nice VM).
As far as your weak references case goes, while I don't know specifically what you are trying to accomplish, I've never needed weak references for any dynamically loaded modules I've done in Java. I've found that Java's ClassLoader allows you to neatly modularize your code so that modules can be easily and safely be loaded and unloaded.
When you compare this stuff to what's standardly available in C (let alone which is portable to a wide variety of platforms), and I'm hard pressed to think of how C could be advantageous in this situation.
How embarassing, "...for them to motive the legal terms..." should read, "...for them to modify the legal tersm..."