That's probably one of the areas in which C++ is better than C. C++ is strongly typed (it has to be or overloading wouldn't work) and therefore errors like this will always get picked up whether you include stdlib.h or not.
Having said that, if you use the -Wall switch on gcc the error of not including a prototype will be picked up (as a warning).
Personnally, I'm in favour of putting the cast in because it makes the programmer think about the return type of malloc. I have seen too many errors similar to:
char c ;
c = malloc (sizeof (char)) ;
which gives an error if you have included stdlib but not if you haven't.
I guess the fundamental problem is that the whole error checking of C is inadequate and that is one of the few problems I have with that language.
Actually it's probably pretty moronic to have telnet listening on port 23 on a server that's on any public network, or in fact telnet listening on any port on a public network.
If Opera had the functionality of IE5, it would probably also have some of the security holes.
The reason M$ has all these problems is:
a) they have decided to build in all these nice features, like HTML rendering of e-mail and atttachments opening automatically when double clicked. They didn't do all this stuff through spite, they actually wanted to make an interface that was easy to use
b) lots of people use their products, which makes them the top target for a cracker. What's the point of writing a virus that's only going to affect a few Unix geeks?
Didn't NASA do some experiments once where they were using eye movements to operate the controls of space craft. I think they gave up because of the difficulty of stopping the astronauts from looking at things they weren't supposed to i.e.
"don't look at the big red button which vents all the oxygen into outer space."
"which big red button? oh sh..." .
I can't resist adding to this thread about tallness:
Surely Mount Everest is the World's tallest free standing "structure" (in height above sea level). The CN tower only wins if you discount non manmade things.
I've just read the GPL. IMHO it doesn't say anything about binary distros except that you must provide reasonable access to the source code. Nor does it actually say you have to give up the copyright. So I think he may be doing something illegal by distributing somebody else's ISO images (unless they specifically allow it).
Also, these guys are trying to make a living by selling their distro (which they have put a lot of work in on) so if somebody else undercuts them with the same s/w they'll give up doing it so the source of the distro will be suddenly cut off.
This last point is a general failing of the "Free distribution concept". Free software is quite easy to produce because all it requires is some enthusiastic hackers and relatively cheap cmputer hardware and network connectivity. When it comes to professional quality recorded music you need a recording studio stuffed full of lots of expensive equipment with expensive musicians, sound engineers, and producers. You then need to promote it which also costs money. This is why the music industry is upset with Napster.
Programming is not an art, it's probably reached the status of craft by now and we should be aspiring to give it the status of engineering.
The objective of an artist is to produce something that is aesthetically pleasing in some way. The objective of an engineer is to produce something that is functional. As a side effect, it may also have some aethetic qualities, but these should not get in the way of the function.
The above piece of code is a prime example. To me, it's as ugly as sin (speaking as somebody who has a lot of experience of fixing bugs in ther people's code), but the objective was not to produce something beautiful, but something that would decode a DVD in the smallest possible space.
Speaking as somebody who works for one of iPlanet's competitors (Sendmail), I've come across several people who have installed it and none of them seem to like it very much.
For groupware, the only real competitor to Exchange is Lotus Notes. If you just want an IMAP mail server, there are loads in existence (including ours), many of which are open source. There are also separate calendaring suites if you want that functionality.
I don't think the problem is protecting people's intellectual property, it's more the totally stupid laws that governments are coming up with to do this. To pick a completely random example out of the air... a copyright law that makes web proxy caches illegal.
But, is it illegal to buy? The person you get it from is breaking the law, but you are not. Of course, in the UK, if you refuse to name your source, you might be arrested for obstructing the police or something.
I don't think Unix is an evolution of Multics so much as a ground up rewrite. In any case it was not open source originally. Back in the 80s, if you bought a BSD licence *and* you were an academic institution, you got the BSD source code for free.
The first work on sendmail was done by Eric Allman in 1979 in his spare time (he was working at UCB on a database project at the time). I think it probably was open source from the start and it was also the first Internet MTA so I guess you could say it was an innovation. Incidentally, it has been rewritten several times since "the buggy peice [sic] of crap from the old unix days" and is now a pretty solid piece of software.
Can't comment on the others, but I would agree in general with the assertion that most software innovation is done by private individuals or groups (who may or may not then choose to open source the results.
Most of the standard utilities that are bundled with Linux are GNU implementations of the standard Unix tools. e.g. bash is a GNU developed shell, grep is a GNU developed version of the Unix grep. Awk, ls, mkdir, ln and most of the other basic utilities are GNU tools, Gnome is a GNU program.
Probably the majority of individual programs in a (GNU/) Linux distro are part of the the GNU canon and even the percentage lines of source code may be above 50% GNU.
That doesn't mean that the distro should necessarily be called GNU/Linux since there are usually many things in it that are not either GNU or Linux e.g. Sendmail, KDE, openssl, Berkeley DB, etc etc.
all the great technology inovations have come from America
The internal combustion engine - a prerequisite for cars and aeroplanes - invented by the Germans. The jet engine - invented by the British (and a German simultaneously, but they lost the war). The stored program computer - invented by the British (C Babbage), the electronic computer - first one built by a team of British people. Virtual memory - invented by the British. The television, radar, sonar - all invented by the British. The World Wide Web - invented in Europe. The telephone - invented in America by a Scotsman. Linux - written by a Finn
The electric chair - invented in America. Gun crime - invented in America. The Police Academa series of films - invented in America. Windows 1, 2, 3.x, 9x, 2K, NT - invented in America
Yep you Americans sure lead the World technologically and we'll all be wonderfully safe as long as we let Uncle Sam piss all over us
They've answered your question. Netscape Messenger is an e-mail client which supports Verisign X509 certs, so does M$ Outlook but that doesn't run on Linux.
Now Netscape likes its certs in PKCS12 format, so you may need to use openssl to do the conversion
It's probably not a good idea to use PGP because 90% of e-mail users on this planet use M$ Outlook which only supports S/MIME and the point of e-mail is to be able to send it to and receive it from other people.
I graduated from the Univeristy of York in 1987. One of the things I learnt there was C programming. I spent today writing C code. That seems more than three years.
Actually, the kind of stuff you learn on a computer science degree has remarkable longevity. The major concepts behind operating system design haven't changed for 30-40 years (e.g. virtual memory and paging were invented in the 50s). A graduate who learned to program on Algol 60 wouldn't have much problem with modern block structured languages although the OO concepts behind Java and C++ might be a bit confusing at first.
Avoid degrees with too specific courses. e.g. if you get taught "programming in Java" you will be able to program in Java. If you get taught "programming" and you get exposure to several different languages you will realise that the skill is programming and any individual language can be learned in an afternoon with a good book on the subject.
Hiring from outside is expensive. Somebody from higher up will have to spend time sifting through applications and interviewing. If you interview 8 people that's at least a day gone, maybe two. There may be fees to pay a recruitment agency for the successful candidate.
There's also the risk involved in hiring somebody you don't know. They may be very good at job interviews and very bad at managing an IT department.
Don't forget the timescales. In the UK it's normal for somebody changing jobs to have to give one month's notice to their previous employer. If you hire from within the company, you have filled the position straight away. The person who fills the position was probably working with several other people who could cover while their replacement is sought (or not sought if the company wants to reduce headcount a bit).
British Government is packet sniffing your Internet connection at the ISP and discovering that it can't read anything going across it.
British governement analyses the IP headers and discovers that they're destined for an offshore data haven well known for providing encrypted data facilities....
The answer to point 2 is that you can get a lot of intelligence just by analysing who is talking to who and where and when. This is called traffic analysis and was used very effectively by the Allies in WW2 even during the periods when they couldn't crack the German ciphers.
Re:That is a silly thing to say
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 1
How does that stop the crypto-OS people from decrypting the communication if they want to.
If government has no reason to fear the citizenry it has no reason to be honest.
The British government has every reason to fear its citizenry. The citizenry has the right to sack it after five years, if things aren't going well. Losing your job is admittedly not as frightening as having your brains blown out, but it's less messy and when you are overthrowing a government by force, a lot of innocent bystanders tend to get caught in the crossfire.
Would the US military ever obey orders to fire on US civilians? I think they would. The soldiers in every army are conditioned to obey orders unquestioningly, that's why they will do what their superiors tell them even though it would result in certain death. Any squad of US soldiers will not be told "here is a band of outraged citizenry trying to get justice and overthrow the forces of evil." They will be told "here is a mob trying to overthrow the forces of law and order and the lawful elected government of the good ol' US of A." They may stop and question the order, but not if it turned out that the citenzry were armed to the teeth with assault rifles.
The idea is not to log the *content* of e-mail and voice calls (at least not according to Roger Gaspar who was interviewed on radio by the BBC this morning), but only the fact that the said communication has occurred. The phone companies already log this information for the purpose of billing and ISPs probably have a log of all e-mail communications, or they they could have one by enabling some logging flag in their SMTP server. So the only extra cost will be to keep this information for seven years and disk is cheap. This cost will not be born by the tax payer, but by the service subscriber and will probably only amount to a few pence per month.
Of course it doesn't alter the fact that the whole idea is currently illegal and should remain so in my opinion.
My source was "The Secret War" by Brian Johnson which was published more than 20 years ago (soon after some of the information was declassified by the British). There's probably some truth to both of those reasons. My point was that people often ignore (or are ignorant of) the fact that the Poles made the initial crucial breakthrough, not us (the Brits).
Maths would be about as easy as it is now. *Arithmetic* would be much harder.
My post was in answer to the point that the previous poster seemed to be making which was "hey, let's use XML then I won't need the Bat Book (Sendmail, O'Reilly)" Unfortunately, he will probably be disappointed because Sendmail configuration is inherently very complex because of the functionality of the product. I'm just saying that XML is not a panacea
In general, inappropriate choice of notation makes tasks harder for human beings. Computers can just translate whatever notation into something that is convenient for them (which is precisely what happens with high level language compilers), so let's make config files easy for *us* to understand. My gut feeling is that for *most* config files, XML is over-engineering and for the others, it will allow you to use generic tools to view the files in a pretty way (which is good), but apart from that does not offer huge benefits compared with, say, a common API for config files, something along the lines of what is provided to Windows MFC programmers (you use the same set of function calls no matter whether your config is in the registry or an ini file).
Slashdot Mirror
That's probably one of the areas in which C++ is better than C. C++ is strongly typed (it has to be or overloading wouldn't work) and therefore errors like this will always get picked up whether you include stdlib.h or not.
Having said that, if you use the -Wall switch on gcc the error of not including a prototype will be picked up (as a warning).
Personnally, I'm in favour of putting the cast in because it makes the programmer think about the return type of malloc. I have seen too many errors similar to:
char c ;
c = malloc (sizeof (char)) ;
which gives an error if you have included stdlib but not if you haven't.
I guess the fundamental problem is that the whole error checking of C is inadequate and that is one of the few problems I have with that language.
Actually it's probably pretty moronic to have telnet listening on port 23 on a server that's on any public network, or in fact telnet listening on any port on a public network.
If Opera had the functionality of IE5, it would probably also have some of the security holes.
The reason M$ has all these problems is:
a) they have decided to build in all these nice features, like HTML rendering of e-mail and atttachments opening automatically when double clicked. They didn't do all this stuff through spite, they actually wanted to make an interface that was easy to use
b) lots of people use their products, which makes them the top target for a cracker. What's the point of writing a virus that's only going to affect a few Unix geeks?
Didn't NASA do some experiments once where they were using eye movements to operate the controls of space craft. I think they gave up because of the difficulty of stopping the astronauts from looking at things they weren't supposed to i.e.
"don't look at the big red button which vents all the oxygen into outer space."
"which big red button? oh sh..." .
This story may be apocryphal.
I can't resist adding to this thread about tallness:
Surely Mount Everest is the World's tallest free standing "structure" (in height above sea level). The CN tower only wins if you discount non manmade things.
I've just read the GPL. IMHO it doesn't say anything about binary distros except that you must provide reasonable access to the source code. Nor does it actually say you have to give up the copyright. So I think he may be doing something illegal by distributing somebody else's ISO images (unless they specifically allow it).
Also, these guys are trying to make a living by selling their distro (which they have put a lot of work in on) so if somebody else undercuts them with the same s/w they'll give up doing it so the source of the distro will be suddenly cut off.
This last point is a general failing of the "Free distribution concept". Free software is quite easy to produce because all it requires is some enthusiastic hackers and relatively cheap cmputer hardware and network connectivity. When it comes to professional quality recorded music you need a recording studio stuffed full of lots of expensive equipment with expensive musicians, sound engineers, and producers. You then need to promote it which also costs money. This is why the music industry is upset with Napster.
Whereas with unix type systems the admin is assumed to know what they are doing
which in my experience, is often wrong.
Programming is not an art, it's probably reached the status of craft by now and we should be aspiring to give it the status of engineering.
The objective of an artist is to produce something that is aesthetically pleasing in some way. The objective of an engineer is to produce something that is functional. As a side effect, it may also have some aethetic qualities, but these should not get in the way of the function.
The above piece of code is a prime example. To me, it's as ugly as sin (speaking as somebody who has a lot of experience of fixing bugs in ther people's code), but the objective was not to produce something beautiful, but something that would decode a DVD in the smallest possible space.
Speaking as somebody who works for one of iPlanet's competitors (Sendmail), I've come across several people who have installed it and none of them seem to like it very much.
For groupware, the only real competitor to Exchange is Lotus Notes. If you just want an IMAP mail server, there are loads in existence (including ours), many of which are open source. There are also separate calendaring suites if you want that functionality.
I don't think the problem is protecting people's intellectual property, it's more the totally stupid laws that governments are coming up with to do this. To pick a completely random example out of the air... a copyright law that makes web proxy caches illegal.
But, is it illegal to buy? The person you get it from is breaking the law, but you are not. Of course, in the UK, if you refuse to name your source, you might be arrested for obstructing the police or something.
I don't think Unix is an evolution of Multics so much as a ground up rewrite. In any case it was not open source originally. Back in the 80s, if you bought a BSD licence *and* you were an academic institution, you got the BSD source code for free.
The first work on sendmail was done by Eric Allman in 1979 in his spare time (he was working at UCB on a database project at the time). I think it probably was open source from the start and it was also the first Internet MTA so I guess you could say it was an innovation. Incidentally, it has been rewritten several times since "the buggy peice [sic] of crap from the old unix days" and is now a pretty solid piece of software.
Can't comment on the others, but I would agree in general with the assertion that most software innovation is done by private individuals or groups (who may or may not then choose to open source the results.
Most of the standard utilities that are bundled with Linux are GNU implementations of the standard Unix tools. e.g. bash is a GNU developed shell, grep is a GNU developed version of the Unix grep. Awk, ls, mkdir, ln and most of the other basic utilities are GNU tools, Gnome is a GNU program.
Probably the majority of individual programs in a (GNU/) Linux distro are part of the the GNU canon and even the percentage lines of source code may be above 50% GNU.
That doesn't mean that the distro should necessarily be called GNU/Linux since there are usually many things in it that are not either GNU or Linux e.g. Sendmail, KDE, openssl, Berkeley DB, etc etc.
Why did they stop going? It's very expensive to send people to the moon and they just weren't making the TV ratings anymore.
Why did the flag wave? Well cloth can wave without any kind of breeze e.g. pick up a towel and jiggle it about a bit.
all the great technology inovations have come from America
The internal combustion engine - a prerequisite for cars and aeroplanes - invented by the Germans. The jet engine - invented by the British (and a German simultaneously, but they lost the war). The stored program computer - invented by the British (C Babbage), the electronic computer - first one built by a team of British people. Virtual memory - invented by the British. The television, radar, sonar - all invented by the British. The World Wide Web - invented in Europe. The telephone - invented in America by a Scotsman. Linux - written by a Finn
The electric chair - invented in America. Gun crime - invented in America. The Police Academa series of films - invented in America. Windows 1, 2, 3.x, 9x, 2K, NT - invented in America
Yep you Americans sure lead the World technologically and we'll all be wonderfully safe as long as we let Uncle Sam piss all over us
They've answered your question. Netscape Messenger is an e-mail client which supports Verisign X509 certs, so does M$ Outlook but that doesn't run on Linux.
Now Netscape likes its certs in PKCS12 format, so you may need to use openssl to do the conversion
openssl pkcs12 -in cert_from_verisign -inkey your_private_key -out something.p12 -export
should do it.
It's probably not a good idea to use PGP because 90% of e-mail users on this planet use M$ Outlook which only supports S/MIME and the point of e-mail is to be able to send it to and receive it from other people.
I graduated from the Univeristy of York in 1987. One of the things I learnt there was C programming. I spent today writing C code. That seems more than three years.
Actually, the kind of stuff you learn on a computer science degree has remarkable longevity. The major concepts behind operating system design haven't changed for 30-40 years (e.g. virtual memory and paging were invented in the 50s). A graduate who learned to program on Algol 60 wouldn't have much problem with modern block structured languages although the OO concepts behind Java and C++ might be a bit confusing at first.
Avoid degrees with too specific courses. e.g. if you get taught "programming in Java" you will be able to program in Java. If you get taught "programming" and you get exposure to several different languages you will realise that the skill is programming and any individual language can be learned in an afternoon with a good book on the subject.
And another thing...
Hiring from outside is expensive. Somebody from higher up will have to spend time sifting through applications and interviewing. If you interview 8 people that's at least a day gone, maybe two. There may be fees to pay a recruitment agency for the successful candidate.
There's also the risk involved in hiring somebody you don't know. They may be very good at job interviews and very bad at managing an IT department.
Don't forget the timescales. In the UK it's normal for somebody changing jobs to have to give one month's notice to their previous employer. If you hire from within the company, you have filled the position straight away. The person who fills the position was probably working with several other people who could cover while their replacement is sought (or not sought if the company wants to reduce headcount a bit).
British Government is packet sniffing your Internet connection at the ISP and discovering that it can't read anything going across it.
British governement analyses the IP headers and discovers that they're destined for an offshore data haven well known for providing encrypted data facilities....
The answer to point 2 is that you can get a lot of intelligence just by analysing who is talking to who and where and when. This is called traffic analysis and was used very effectively by the Allies in WW2 even during the periods when they couldn't crack the German ciphers.
How does that stop the crypto-OS people from decrypting the communication if they want to.
If government has no reason to fear the citizenry it has no reason to be honest.
The British government has every reason to fear its citizenry. The citizenry has the right to sack it after five years, if things aren't going well. Losing your job is admittedly not as frightening as having your brains blown out, but it's less messy and when you are overthrowing a government by force, a lot of innocent bystanders tend to get caught in the crossfire.
Would the US military ever obey orders to fire on US civilians? I think they would. The soldiers in every army are conditioned to obey orders unquestioningly, that's why they will do what their superiors tell them even though it would result in certain death. Any squad of US soldiers will not be told "here is a band of outraged citizenry trying to get justice and overthrow the forces of evil." They will be told "here is a mob trying to overthrow the forces of law and order and the lawful elected government of the good ol' US of A." They may stop and question the order, but not if it turned out that the citenzry were armed to the teeth with assault rifles.
The idea is not to log the *content* of e-mail and voice calls (at least not according to Roger Gaspar who was interviewed on radio by the BBC this morning), but only the fact that the said communication has occurred. The phone companies already log this information for the purpose of billing and ISPs probably have a log of all e-mail communications, or they they could have one by enabling some logging flag in their SMTP server. So the only extra cost will be to keep this information for seven years and disk is cheap. This cost will not be born by the tax payer, but by the service subscriber and will probably only amount to a few pence per month.
Of course it doesn't alter the fact that the whole idea is currently illegal and should remain so in my opinion.
My source was "The Secret War" by Brian Johnson which was published more than 20 years ago (soon after some of the information was declassified by the British). There's probably some truth to both of those reasons. My point was that people often ignore (or are ignorant of) the fact that the Poles made the initial crucial breakthrough, not us (the Brits).
Maths would be about as easy as it is now. *Arithmetic* would be much harder.
My post was in answer to the point that the previous poster seemed to be making which was "hey, let's use XML then I won't need the Bat Book (Sendmail, O'Reilly)" Unfortunately, he will probably be disappointed because Sendmail configuration is inherently very complex because of the functionality of the product. I'm just saying that XML is not a panacea
In general, inappropriate choice of notation makes tasks harder for human beings. Computers can just translate whatever notation into something that is convenient for them (which is precisely what happens with high level language compilers), so let's make config files easy for *us* to understand. My gut feeling is that for *most* config files, XML is over-engineering and for the others, it will allow you to use generic tools to view the files in a pretty way (which is good), but apart from that does not offer huge benefits compared with, say, a common API for config files, something along the lines of what is provided to Windows MFC programmers (you use the same set of function calls no matter whether your config is in the registry or an ini file).