I don't know about Vista, but I have experience of OSX drivers and of necessity they run in the same address space as the kernel itself just like everything did in the days of DOS except with the complication of multiple threads. There is no way to protect the kernel from a driver writing to an uninitialised pointer (for instance) and shafting your whole operating system.
Many years ago, when NT4 was the MS server operating system of choice and notoriously prone to the BSOD, an experienced sysadmin gave me a sure fire tip to transform its reliability: uninstall the graphics driver and replace it with standard VGA. Graphics were obviously shit, but who cares on a server?
What do you want, for Microsoft to change the rendering engine out from under people? Thousands of websites to stop working in that browser (the one that most people use) until the developers can fix the site?
You make it sound like that would be the end of the World. The fix for most of these broken web sites would be simply to remove the IE specific cruft.
The only way out of this mess is for Microsoft to produce a standards compliant browser. That is, one that is compliant by default, not one where you can turn on compliance if you want to.
The consequences of this would be zero for those of us who don't use IE and initially none for users of IE6 and IE7. However, users of IE the compliant version will have problems and will start complaining to the broken sites, whose owners will eventually be forced to fix the issues as the complaints mount. Once a site is fixed, users of IE6 will start having issues and will be forced to upgrade or move to a different browser. There will be some pain, but it will be over in a few months, whereas the current situation allows web developers (or more accurately, the web site owners who pay them) to be lazy and not bother to fix the bugs and as long as Microsoft implicitly allows this to continue, nothing will change.
Of course, it's not in Microsoft's interest to follow the strategy I defined above because they will inevitably lose some market share as a result.
The CAA [British equivalent of the FAA for you Yanks] announced today that, following the BA038 air crash in which neither pilot was named "David", it will be mandatory that all flight crew on all 777 flights must have at least one "David" amongst them.
"A major opportunity was lost" said a spokesman for the CAA. "We must ensure that this never happens again".
Cut to the cockpit of a 777 on final approach.
Pilot (called David): "The autopilot is in trouble, it has asked for increased thrust, but the engines haven't responded."
Copilot (not called David, only one David is mandatory): "You'd better take over."
Pilot: "Increasing thrust manually..." He moves the throttles forwards.
You need to do a "zpool export" or something before you can unplug a detachable disk to avoid the panic when you unplug it. That's not a bug. It's by design.
No, it's a bug. No software designer deliberately panics the kernel when a disk that is designed to be detachable is accidentally removed from the system while still mounted. If this behaviour is real (I haven't tried it myself), it's a safe bet that the Mac ZFS team consider it a bug.
Beautiful quote from the Microsoft spokesman at the end
"This means we will continue working towards the same goal: enabling as many individuals and schools as possible to benefit from the transformative power of technology at the best possible price."
The meaning of "best possible price" is completely different depending on whether you are a British school or a Microsoft salesman.
All you need to do to set up a direct debit is fill in the form the charity (or utility) gives you with your name and address, the name and address of your bank and your account and sort code and it's done provided the signature is convincing.
The new OS X only pops up a message the first time you run a downloaded application. If you authorise it, it remembers the decision for as long as the application doesn't change on disk. I haven't found it irritating enough to try to turn it off, and in fact it seems quite a sensible idea.
Don't CS courses teach compiler design anymore? That was the most important course I did at University because by necessity it covered pointers and pointer arithmetic, array bounds checking, stack frames, scoping and so on because the higher the level of the language, the more of that stuff has to be done by the compiler.
I thought it was traditional to link to the first page of an article, not the last page. This just makes the submitter look like somebody who just likes to gloat at Microsoft's incompetence. It also ruins the thread of the article.
How many years late was Vista? Three? five? In all that time, nobody managed to grab significant market share off Microsoft. This is the consequence of a monopoly position. In any free market, being several years late and then coming up with the excrement that is Vista would kill your company.
You are an early victim of clockspeeditis. The Z80 had twice the clock speed but the instructions generally took at least twice as many clock cycles to execute.
The force is dependent on how long the camera takes to decelerate from 125m/s to zero when it hits the ground. If it takes 0.5 seconds, the acceleration would be -250m/s/s and the force for a 0.5kg object -125N. Of course 0.5 seconds is a long time for an object hitting the ground to take to come to rest, particularly if the ground is concrete.
PDF has always been a documented standard. The specification has been available on the Adobe web site for many years. The difference is that now it is a standard endorsed by the ISO.
Its perfectly simple. If somebody creates an original work, under UK (where I live) law and US law and the law of lots of other countries it is illegal to copy it.
That is the default position. Legally, you cannot copy the author's work, full stop. However, the author may grant you a licence to copy his/her work under certain conditions. Essentially, a licence is just a declaration by the author that says "I promise not to sue you for breach of copyright as long as you adhere to these conditions...."
So the first observation is that "no particular licence" = "no licence". If you find a piece of code on the web with no licence, you cannot legally copy it.
The second observation is that there is quite often a licence. There might be an implied licence "hey guys, use this fantastic function to turn your knob blue". Or the forum itself might provide a licence "by posting here, you agree any code you post is public domain".
However, the ethical issue is what should guide your actions. Ask yourself how you would feel if your employer let you spend a month writing software and then fired you without paying you for that month. That's pretty much what you are doing if you use somebody else's code in breach of their copyright. And if your company doesn't respect this ethical position, find a new company.
And your non legal advice crashes and burns between points 1 and 2. There's no guarantee that the person who posted the code on the forum is the person that owns the copyright on the code.
Unfortunately, when they've decided to sue you for breach of copyright because they can't be bothered to make an ethical buck, it's legally that counts.
The author of the code may have granted Sony a commercial licence to use it.
The author of the code may have been hired by Sony and reused it while writing the game.
The author of the code may have been an employee of Sony and may have originally written it while writing the game and decided to also release it under the GPL.
I have a DMG with a Java 6 beta that I downloaded from Apple a couple of months ago and haven't installed yet. Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be available on the ADC web site, so they must have pulled it.
You are obviously not aware how Top of the Pops worked. Almost all of the acts on it were just miming. I don't think there's anything culturaly significant about the Beatles miming to a recording of "She Loves You".
Slashdot Mirror
This has been modded insightful?
I don't know about Vista, but I have experience of OSX drivers and of necessity they run in the same address space as the kernel itself just like everything did in the days of DOS except with the complication of multiple threads. There is no way to protect the kernel from a driver writing to an uninitialised pointer (for instance) and shafting your whole operating system.
Many years ago, when NT4 was the MS server operating system of choice and notoriously prone to the BSOD, an experienced sysadmin gave me a sure fire tip to transform its reliability: uninstall the graphics driver and replace it with standard VGA. Graphics were obviously shit, but who cares on a server?
And when they sue you and you pay the damages in either cash or as a cheque they can charge you a licence fee for using their invention.
You make it sound like that would be the end of the World. The fix for most of these broken web sites would be simply to remove the IE specific cruft.
The only way out of this mess is for Microsoft to produce a standards compliant browser. That is, one that is compliant by default, not one where you can turn on compliance if you want to.
The consequences of this would be zero for those of us who don't use IE and initially none for users of IE6 and IE7. However, users of IE the compliant version will have problems and will start complaining to the broken sites, whose owners will eventually be forced to fix the issues as the complaints mount. Once a site is fixed, users of IE6 will start having issues and will be forced to upgrade or move to a different browser. There will be some pain, but it will be over in a few months, whereas the current situation allows web developers (or more accurately, the web site owners who pay them) to be lazy and not bother to fix the bugs and as long as Microsoft implicitly allows this to continue, nothing will change.
Of course, it's not in Microsoft's interest to follow the strategy I defined above because they will inevitably lose some market share as a result.
The CAA [British equivalent of the FAA for you Yanks] announced today that, following the BA038 air crash in which neither pilot was named "David", it will be mandatory that all flight crew on all 777 flights must have at least one "David" amongst them.
"A major opportunity was lost" said a spokesman for the CAA. "We must ensure that this never happens again".
Cut to the cockpit of a 777 on final approach.
Pilot (called David): "The autopilot is in trouble, it has asked for increased thrust, but the engines haven't responded."
Copilot (not called David, only one David is mandatory): "You'd better take over."
Pilot: "Increasing thrust manually..." He moves the throttles forwards.
Computer: "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..."
No, it's a bug. No software designer deliberately panics the kernel when a disk that is designed to be detachable is accidentally removed from the system while still mounted. If this behaviour is real (I haven't tried it myself), it's a safe bet that the Mac ZFS team consider it a bug.
The meaning of "best possible price" is completely different depending on whether you are a British school or a Microsoft salesman.
All you need to do to set up a direct debit is fill in the form the charity (or utility) gives you with your name and address, the name and address of your bank and your account and sort code and it's done provided the signature is convincing.
The new OS X only pops up a message the first time you run a downloaded application. If you authorise it, it remembers the decision for as long as the application doesn't change on disk. I haven't found it irritating enough to try to turn it off, and in fact it seems quite a sensible idea.
Don't CS courses teach compiler design anymore? That was the most important course I did at University because by necessity it covered pointers and pointer arithmetic, array bounds checking, stack frames, scoping and so on because the higher the level of the language, the more of that stuff has to be done by the compiler.
If I had a penny for every time I've found this bug in somebody else's C code (or mine, to be fair):
int fds[2];
pipe(fds) ;
return fds ;
I'd have £2.42
Your average sysadmin needs to be able to check the security of his/her network from the public network because that's where the attacks come from.
That is the price we pay to have a broadcaster where the TV viewers are the customer, not the product.
I thought it was traditional to link to the first page of an article, not the last page. This just makes the submitter look like somebody who just likes to gloat at Microsoft's incompetence. It also ruins the thread of the article.
How many years late was Vista? Three? five? In all that time, nobody managed to grab significant market share off Microsoft. This is the consequence of a monopoly position. In any free market, being several years late and then coming up with the excrement that is Vista would kill your company.
You are an early victim of clockspeeditis. The Z80 had twice the clock speed but the instructions generally took at least twice as many clock cycles to execute.
The force is dependent on how long the camera takes to decelerate from 125m/s to zero when it hits the ground. If it takes 0.5 seconds, the acceleration would be -250m/s/s and the force for a 0.5kg object -125N. Of course 0.5 seconds is a long time for an object hitting the ground to take to come to rest, particularly if the ground is concrete.
Its perfectly simple. If somebody creates an original work, under UK (where I live) law and US law and the law of lots of other countries it is illegal to copy it.
That is the default position. Legally, you cannot copy the author's work, full stop. However, the author may grant you a licence to copy his/her work under certain conditions. Essentially, a licence is just a declaration by the author that says "I promise not to sue you for breach of copyright as long as you adhere to these conditions...."
So the first observation is that "no particular licence" = "no licence". If you find a piece of code on the web with no licence, you cannot legally copy it.
The second observation is that there is quite often a licence. There might be an implied licence "hey guys, use this fantastic function to turn your knob blue". Or the forum itself might provide a licence "by posting here, you agree any code you post is public domain".
However, the ethical issue is what should guide your actions. Ask yourself how you would feel if your employer let you spend a month writing software and then fired you without paying you for that month. That's pretty much what you are doing if you use somebody else's code in breach of their copyright. And if your company doesn't respect this ethical position, find a new company.
That's only the question to ask if you are a blood sucking lawyer.
If you are a programmer making a living by programming, the question to ask is "am I ripping off a fellow programmer?".
And your non legal advice crashes and burns between points 1 and 2. There's no guarantee that the person who posted the code on the forum is the person that owns the copyright on the code.
Unfortunately, when they've decided to sue you for breach of copyright because they can't be bothered to make an ethical buck, it's legally that counts.
Not necessarily.
The author of the code may have granted Sony a commercial licence to use it.
The author of the code may have been hired by Sony and reused it while writing the game.
The author of the code may have been an employee of Sony and may have originally written it while writing the game and decided to also release it under the GPL.
I have a DMG with a Java 6 beta that I downloaded from Apple a couple of months ago and haven't installed yet. Unfortunately, it no longer seems to be available on the ADC web site, so they must have pulled it.
That link gives me "HTTP/1.1 service unavailable" as does the main youtube web site. Is it possible for YouTube to be Slashdotted?
You are obviously not aware how Top of the Pops worked. Almost all of the acts on it were just miming. I don't think there's anything culturaly significant about the Beatles miming to a recording of "She Loves You".