I agree that 99% of all projects don't have precise enough specification for this. I would even agree with a higher percentage. However, producing that precise specifications isn't very high priority now because they aren't used for correctness proofs in the current world.
Proving two programs are equivalent indeed is undecidable in the general case. However I'd say that for any practical program you have much bigger problems if you can't even reason about it's correctness and conformance to the specification. Humans tend to write easy programs that should be easily proved conformant, probably even by computers. Yet the first step would probably be to create a way for a human to write that proof. Computerized verification of a detailed enough proof certainly shouldn't be intractable for any problem.
I think your third point only emphasizes why proving correctness is important. We tend to make assumptions about how the domain interacts with our program and therefore fail to consider the marginal cases. We should rather aim for a program whose functionality is specified and proved even for the marginal cases so we can at least read a "what would it do if X" report.
While I agree with almost everything you said in your comment, I wouldn't throw out the idea of provably correct designs.
You are right that one cannot prove that a design matches real-world requirements - that's the domain that truly is outside our control. The key thing to realize here is that the domains are recursive - you start by proving that the leaf nodes (i.e. the most low level modules) satisfy some properties, and then you can infer from those properties and higher level design some more properties, and so on. Until at last you can prove some properties of the design of the entire system, which should certainly be useful even in real world.
Why not? At least you have a spec for a HTTP protocol, which is pretty precise as such spec go. If you cannot offer a proof in the case where a precise spec exists, what hope is there for other software?
You seem to think about it the wrong way. You don't go and write software and then start to think about its correctness. Rather the program must be designed so that it can be proven to be correct. Big difference there.
Finally at most you can prove with a program that the program works according to its specification. But what about the correctness of the specification itself?
Well, the point of the (in this case formal) specification is that it's a lot simpler than the implementation. Of course you can never prove that the specified problem is the one that your customers ask you to solve, but a lot more you can. And if the specifications of some SW module are usable as a abstract component in the specification of a larger system, they can be further verified to be consistent with what the larger system is doing, thus drastically reducing the possibility of having specified something that doesn't make any sense.
Abstraction is the key to specification, just as in traditional software design.
It really escapes me why proving SW correctness for properly designed software should be intractable. While it's true that formal methods for correctness proving may not yet be advanced enough, there's no reason why they couldn't be.
A good design process is of course expensive, but with complex projects I think it might be worth it as you save lots of debugging time. And just think about critical applications where the software just HAS TO work, like just about anything that gets sent to space, medical equipment that people rely their lives on, aeroplane controlling systems, missiles and other military technology and so on. Or just think about the added value for a third party library when you get a precise specification and a guarantee that the library works as specified.
Actually I think that saying "you can never produce provably correct complex software" is a lot like saying "there's no software without bugs". It's easy to say, but saying it doesn't make it so.
Here in Finland we pay perhaps about 50% (average) in taxes. That probably means our economy is something between socialism and full capitalism. Well, just like in the USA, but we're a bit further away from capitalism.
Here that money is used to create a social welfare system, a kind of that I don't think exists anywhere in the world outside a few countries in Scandinavia (but I might be mistaken). Basically for our taxes we get medical care, education from primary school to the university level, study grants so we can eat and live while studying, unemployment securities, guaranteed pension and a good number of other benefits. If we become unable to do our job because of a medical condition we get sickness allowance, or in case of more permanent disabilities or some jobs just disappearing (outsourced, replaced by computers, anything) the government funds retraining for another job.
Of course in practice it doesn't work that ideally, but it works fairly well. It works well enough for me to be very satisfied with the system. I see it as the system giving some value to individual humans too, not only companies and money.
Funny, I wouldn't want to get rid of the social security system, even if that would mean getting almost twice the pay. Nowadays I'm a programmer and could make a living, but coming from a fairly poor background and having had the system support me this far, I really sympathise for anyone who doesn't get that because of a lacking or inexistent social security system. Too bad the system is slowly being scrapped here too:-(
I mean, if someone thinks that they are more politically savvy than the Founding Fathers, what can you say to that?
I think most of us non-Americans have never quite understood the way many Americans (at least judging from slashdot) worship the Founding Fathers and your Constitution, esp. the First Amendment. From my POV the FF were mere mortals, and the Constitution is a mere document prepared by humans that are prone to err. Definitely I don't believe it has some Divine Intrinsic Value.
I hold these assumptions entirely reasonable, at least as long as they concern only things like the fundamental laws of physics and as long as "since the beginning" is defined to mean "from a certain point on" (just like the big bang theory). Yet the concrete evidence based on these assumptions only to disprove the young earth theory and specification by devolution hasn't been found. Furthermore, specification by devolution can give reasonable explanations to a great amount of evidence discovered that just doesn't seem to fit into evolution theory, as well as the lack of evidence for lots of things evolution theory is fundamentally based on and for which evidence should rationally thinking have been found.
There is no such thing as a biblical proof for a geocentric universe. The fact that biblical accounts have been used by Christians to "prove" things like this (and to legitimize lots of wrongdoing) proves only that we Christians are humane and prone to err just as any other people.
1- Which Bible? Do you include revelations? 2- What version? 3- What language? 4- From what language?
The original Bible, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, of which the current versions in those languages are quite accurate copies and of which there are many more or less accurate translations in a number of languages. Specifically, "the Bible" does not mean any random translation X with all its translation and copying errors.
And note, there ARE contradictions. There are statements that can't possibly be seen as true by any reasonnable person. The flood, the earth on four pillars... come on! And of course, the classic "earth is 4000 years old".
I guess you are talking about this:
"He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S, and he hath set the world upon them.", I Samuel 2:8 (KJV).
If you read the context, you notice it's part of the prayer of a woman named Hannah, who is human, humane and therefore prone to err. Also you underestimate the biblical people if you think they can't talk in a figurative sense. When they do, it's usually clear from the context, as it is in this case. Contrast to
"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.", Job 26:7 (KJV).
I for one believe in a young (say <10000 years old) earth. It's all quite explainable scientifically if you don't start from the assumption that everything had to start from nothing and evolve gradually (e.g. specification by devolution).
If you go around saying/writing such silly things as this apparent contradiction being due to my inability to understand them, you must think I'm a moron.
I don't think you're a moron. I think you're just a victim of a clever deceit. Satan is so powerful that none of us would have any chance of escaping his webs if it weren't for Christ.
Or perhaps someone will tell me this is not the first time a distro has created a risk for hardware, and this will all be moot.
Not a Linux distro, but some years ago there was a bug where booting Windows 95 overwrote BIOS in a certain MSI mainboard model (can't remember which one, probably one of the first ones from MSI; Google for it if interested). IIRC it turned out to be some PnP detection code. In any case, as much I'd like to blame Windows for this;), I can't. The MB model was total crap anyway, it ran without crashing only for a few days at a time (running Debian stable).
I actually fried two mainboards and the people at the shop that sold me it told they fried 7 more while trying to fix my computer until they ran out of those mainboards. I'm actually even ready to believe they'd be stupid enough in that shop to fry 9 mainboards:-)
Somehow I get the feeling that it's mostly Americans who refuse to accept that kilo=10^3, mega=10^6, giga=10^9. (Please read on before moderating as troll/fb.)
I guess that's because you aren't used to kilo, mega and giga, except to the (incorrect) power-of-2 definitions. To someone who lives pretty much anywhere else in the world (ie. where metric units are used), kilo has always been 10^3 and mega has always been 10^6. Well, except in most fields of CS (but not telecommunications or HDD capacity).
What's happening is that several different fields of science are slowly starting to overlap, and suddenly there's real confusion: for someone, kilo=10^3, for someone else it's 10^3 EXCEPT in some cases it's 2^10.
This source of confusion should be fixed now when it's still possible. It may seem to this audience that Computer Science == Life (and most of you probably don't need to think about data in terms of telecommunications) and therefore you think kilo=2^10 is standard, but for a huge majority of people it simply is not so.
Kilo has always been 1000 and will always be 1000. It's us the computer people who have made a mess of it, and we're also responsible for cleaning it up.
Even among nonbelievers prayer is known for what they call its "psychological effect". I really can see no reason why it should be off-topic and things like meditation, yoga or positive thinking on-topic.
Yet I'll be the first one to admit that lots of prayer is just psychological effect. Though I'll never admit its only effect is psychological;)
It also helps to "remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy", Exodus 20:8. Whether it be Saturday, Sunday or some other day, I believe the important thing is to have the day once a week and to actually share time with God on that day, and to refrain from working on that day. Very important for the peace of mind and concentration. (I have found this very different from just "remember to rest".)
Remember, the Law is for our own good, not because God just happened to decide it should be so.
At least as much as keeping up with patches is a responsibility of the admins, keeping such vulnerabilities out of the software is the responsibility of the developers. It's really an undue burden to require the admins to keep track of hundreds of patches, especially because there's much room for improvement in the SW development process.
It's already possible to write real application code in safe languages, yet the code is most often still written in unsafe languages for performance reasons. I think the current mentality of the SW market is to blame for requiring everything to be faster than the competing product while in most cases it would be possible to make a feature-wise superior or at least matching but performance-wise only a bit worse product using some safe language.
With the current exponential growth of processing power I'd go so far as to say that a 2-3 times slower application known to be relatively free of buffer overflows (by far the most common vulnerability) is preferable to one written in an unsafe language. It's only the marketing that makes features and speed priority number one and security priority number two.
Well, I'll state the obvious and say that I consider it an essential feature to be able to copy out (securely) any and all keys the chip has generated, and if the chip does not have that feature then I certainly must question the motives of the designer. There, I said it would be obvious.
Given the current weak security of most systems running on top of x86, I'm not so sure. Not having direct access to your own secret key also implies the malicious process running on your cracked box not having direct access to the key, which is only good. Of course they still would be able to use the key as long as they have access to your box, but not after you notice and cut it. I think of it a bit like the privilege separation in OpenSSH and friends (network code running as a normal user and only acting as a layer to privileged code that doesn't consider the network code trusted), just the separation is done in hardware so not even a vulnerable kernel can leak your secret keys.
Of course this means you won't be able to copy the keys even if you wanted to, but as someone wiser than I said, security is inconvenient. And I can imagine the same technology being used for DRM, but it's not the technology that is bad, but some of the uses.
In addition to the rather obvious non-free nature of this license (because the field of endeavour issue, because it mandates strong cryptography and forbids "filtering", even because of horrible vaguety, etc) this license has more problematic clauses, some of which are (in no particular order):
1. The license claims that dual licensing under the GPL and HESSLA has the advantage "that it will enable developers to produce hybrid software packages (combining the functionality available through, say, Hacktivismo's Six-Four APIs, with some of the functionality of one or more popular GPL-licensed communications programs) and to release the hybrid packages under the HESSLA, without causing those developers to run afoul of the GPL, the HESSLA or both."
Am I just reading the text wrong, or have they just claimed you're allowed to take non-dual-licensed GPL code from a communications program, bundle it with some GPL&HESSLA code and some HESSLA-only code and release it under HESSLA? That's just plain wrong and absurd, since HESSLA is obviously nyt GPL compatible.
2. In several places, the license text claims you essentially must have accepted the license agreement even before having obtained the software (and therefore the accompanying license _agreement_). This is not how agreements work, especially if it's possible to obtain the software in a way which doesn't otherwise infringe the exclusive rights of the copyright owner (e.g. by buying).
3. You may not use the software for "10.1.5 censorship or "filtering" of any published information or expression."
This seems to forbid even things like parents installing filters for their children, and even more obviously ethical uses (how about setting up a filter just for yourself, to protect yourself?).
And the worst:
4. "15. Subsequent Versions of HESSLA. Hacktivismo may publish revised and/or new versions of the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. Each version is given a distinguishing version number. Any Program released by Hacktivismo under a version of this License Agreement prior to Version 1.0, shall be considered released under Version 1.0 of the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement, once Version 1.0 is formally released."
In other words, "we believe there's a binding contract between us, and by this clause we are allowed to change the terms of our contract whenever we so wish". This is plainly unacceptable (and probably even unenforceable), whether the license be an open source license or a horribly non-free one. Note that this is very different from the way GPL is usually applied; with GPL, the _licensee_ can decide which version to use (e.g. "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version").
Especially because of the last point, I believe that nobody should touch software released under this license. I would of course recommend staying away from it even after license version 1.0 is released, but especially before that
Pine is not open source, at least by the common definition.
This is because you are not allowed to distribute modified versions. You can distribute Pine sources + patches separately, but you're not allowed to distribute even modified binaries at all.
Having been given information does NOT give you the right to (re)publish it.
And what makes you think so?
By default, you have the right to (re)publish any information you happen to have. It's not a matter of the company permitting or forbidding it. Copyright is an exception, but it protects the form of expression, not the expressed information itself.
Bottom line: If you didn't explicitly agree to not publish the information, you can do whatever you want with it.
Or perhaps you do not view them as unreasonable, but I myself see this kind of patenting of existing things plus litigating against large corporations as an ethically bankrupt "revenue stream".
Not to defend software patents, but this case was not about patenting existing things. The patent is _older than JPEG itself_.
It's terribly easy to change resolution on the fly in X -- ctrl alt kp+ and ctrl alt kp-. Changing the desktop resolution during runtime isn't supported (though if you had to you could hack it up via DGA modes)...but why would you want to do this?
This is the one point where I have to agree with the original poster. Sometimes it's necessary to change the resolution - it might be that some program just wasn't designed with 1600x1200 or even 1200x1024 in mind (esp. when you don't have a 24" monitor). And I for one don't much like reading 5 pixel high fonts at 1200x1024, pretty much regardless of the monitor size. Generally, I like my text a bit bigger than most users - for example, my default font on Konqueror is a 15 or 16 point one at 1400x1050 on a 19" monitor, antialiased of course.
Another example: I just finished a game of FreeCiv, and even the largest tilesets are a bit too small for my taste on my monitor and preferred resolution.
In those cases, I can use ctrl-alt-kp[-+], but if I actually have to use the program with mouse, it's really a pain to have the viewport scroll whenever I hit the border with my mouse pointer. Or if I have to reach the panel, but that's less of a problem since I'd usually change back to my default resolution before that anyway.
Then there's the situation where my default resolution is one that gives me a nice flicker-free screen, and just that I sometimes have to use programs which are quite unusable (too crammed) at that resolution. In those cases, it would be helpful to be able to change into a bigger video mode just for using that program, but without having to tolerate something like 75Hz for all work.
Not that it would be much better on Windows, AFAICT (I only use Windows at work), but this is one area which definitely could use some improving. I can live with it, just it's not quite perfect yet.
That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release.
Makes one wonder why you don't dual license (e.g. the current POV license & GPL) those parts of the code for which you do have the permission to do so (I guess there's still quite a lot of that?). There are certainly a lot of capable people in the OSS community who would be happy to contribute something to replace the missing pieces - probably even several implementations from which you could pick the one you consider most fit for the official distribution, or failing that, still write your own taking the best ideas from the best contributions. This way, it seems to me, POV-Ray could gradually evolve into a fully open sourced product.
Only one obstacle comes to my mind right now: As far as there remains any POV-licensed code in the code base, the contributions must also comply with that license - effectively, the contributions would also have to be dual-licensed (GPL+POV) until no POV-licensed code remains, at which point the POV license could be entirely dropped from further modifications. I still believe quite a lot of people would be willing to contribute their code under GPL+POV dual license after seeing a nice amount of original POV code released under the GPL in good faith.
On Windows 95, you weren't able any more to write programs that controlled the hardware directly.
This is called abstraction, and is a good thing (although I don't think win9x did this). A program that controls the hardware directly is a program that can crash your computer. You don't want a buggy program to crash your computer, do you?
BTW, can you name a REAL operating system where user-space programs can directly control hardware? (Well, OK, on Linux you can do something if you're root and specifically request the IO perms, but that's limited - no interrupt handling or DMA, just IO port access. And that's not the way to go, anyway.)
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I agree that 99% of all projects don't have precise enough specification for this. I would even agree with a higher percentage. However, producing that precise specifications isn't very high priority now because they aren't used for correctness proofs in the current world.
Proving two programs are equivalent indeed is undecidable in the general case. However I'd say that for any practical program you have much bigger problems if you can't even reason about it's correctness and conformance to the specification. Humans tend to write easy programs that should be easily proved conformant, probably even by computers. Yet the first step would probably be to create a way for a human to write that proof. Computerized verification of a detailed enough proof certainly shouldn't be intractable for any problem.
I think your third point only emphasizes why proving correctness is important. We tend to make assumptions about how the domain interacts with our program and therefore fail to consider the marginal cases. We should rather aim for a program whose functionality is specified and proved even for the marginal cases so we can at least read a "what would it do if X" report.
While I agree with almost everything you said in your comment, I wouldn't throw out the idea of provably correct designs.
You are right that one cannot prove that a design matches real-world requirements - that's the domain that truly is outside our control. The key thing to realize here is that the domains are recursive - you start by proving that the leaf nodes (i.e. the most low level modules) satisfy some properties, and then you can infer from those properties and higher level design some more properties, and so on. Until at last you can prove some properties of the design of the entire system, which should certainly be useful even in real world.
Why not? At least you have a spec for a HTTP protocol, which is pretty precise as such spec go. If you cannot offer a proof in the case where a precise spec exists, what hope is there for other software?
You seem to think about it the wrong way. You don't go and write software and then start to think about its correctness. Rather the program must be designed so that it can be proven to be correct. Big difference there.
Finally at most you can prove with a program that the program works according to its specification. But what about the correctness of the specification itself?
Well, the point of the (in this case formal) specification is that it's a lot simpler than the implementation. Of course you can never prove that the specified problem is the one that your customers ask you to solve, but a lot more you can. And if the specifications of some SW module are usable as a abstract component in the specification of a larger system, they can be further verified to be consistent with what the larger system is doing, thus drastically reducing the possibility of having specified something that doesn't make any sense.
Abstraction is the key to specification, just as in traditional software design.
It really escapes me why proving SW correctness for properly designed software should be intractable. While it's true that formal methods for correctness proving may not yet be advanced enough, there's no reason why they couldn't be.
A good design process is of course expensive, but with complex projects I think it might be worth it as you save lots of debugging time. And just think about critical applications where the software just HAS TO work, like just about anything that gets sent to space, medical equipment that people rely their lives on, aeroplane controlling systems, missiles and other military technology and so on. Or just think about the added value for a third party library when you get a precise specification and a guarantee that the library works as specified.
Actually I think that saying "you can never produce provably correct complex software" is a lot like saying "there's no software without bugs". It's easy to say, but saying it doesn't make it so.
Here in Finland we pay perhaps about 50% (average) in taxes. That probably means our economy is something between socialism and full capitalism. Well, just like in the USA, but we're a bit further away from capitalism.
:-(
Here that money is used to create a social welfare system, a kind of that I don't think exists anywhere in the world outside a few countries in Scandinavia (but I might be mistaken). Basically for our taxes we get medical care, education from primary school to the university level, study grants so we can eat and live while studying, unemployment securities, guaranteed pension and a good number of other benefits. If we become unable to do our job because of a medical condition we get sickness allowance, or in case of more permanent disabilities or some jobs just disappearing (outsourced, replaced by computers, anything) the government funds retraining for another job.
Of course in practice it doesn't work that ideally, but it works fairly well. It works well enough for me to be very satisfied with the system. I see it as the system giving some value to individual humans too, not only companies and money.
Funny, I wouldn't want to get rid of the social security system, even if that would mean getting almost twice the pay. Nowadays I'm a programmer and could make a living, but coming from a fairly poor background and having had the system support me this far, I really sympathise for anyone who doesn't get that because of a lacking or inexistent social security system. Too bad the system is slowly being scrapped here too
If you haven't tried 2.6 yet, you really should. I noticed a considerable increase in X response time with it.
:P
I hope you didn't mean what you wrote.
I mean, if someone thinks that they are more politically savvy than the Founding Fathers, what can you say to that?
I think most of us non-Americans have never quite understood the way many Americans (at least judging from slashdot) worship the Founding Fathers and your Constitution, esp. the First Amendment. From my POV the FF were mere mortals, and the Constitution is a mere document prepared by humans that are prone to err. Definitely I don't believe it has some Divine Intrinsic Value.
Perhaps someone would care to explain?
I hold these assumptions entirely reasonable, at least as long as they concern only things like the fundamental laws of physics and as long as "since the beginning" is defined to mean "from a certain point on" (just like the big bang theory). Yet the concrete evidence based on these assumptions only to disprove the young earth theory and specification by devolution hasn't been found. Furthermore, specification by devolution can give reasonable explanations to a great amount of evidence discovered that just doesn't seem to fit into evolution theory, as well as the lack of evidence for lots of things evolution theory is fundamentally based on and for which evidence should rationally thinking have been found.
There is no such thing as a biblical proof for a geocentric universe. The fact that biblical accounts have been used by Christians to "prove" things like this (and to legitimize lots of wrongdoing) proves only that we Christians are humane and prone to err just as any other people.
1- Which Bible? Do you include revelations?
2- What version?
3- What language?
4- From what language?
The original Bible, written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, of which the current versions in those languages are quite accurate copies and of which there are many more or less accurate translations in a number of languages. Specifically, "the Bible" does not mean any random translation X with all its translation and copying errors.
And note, there ARE contradictions. There are statements that can't possibly be seen as true by any reasonnable person. The flood, the earth on four pillars... come on! And of course, the classic "earth is 4000 years old".
I guess you are talking about this:
"He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S, and he hath set the world upon them.", I Samuel 2:8 (KJV).
If you read the context, you notice it's part of the prayer of a woman named Hannah, who is human, humane and therefore prone to err. Also you underestimate the biblical people if you think they can't talk in a figurative sense. When they do, it's usually clear from the context, as it is in this case. Contrast to
"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.", Job 26:7 (KJV).
I for one believe in a young (say <10000 years old) earth. It's all quite explainable scientifically if you don't start from the assumption that everything had to start from nothing and evolve gradually (e.g. specification by devolution).
If you go around saying/writing such silly things as this apparent contradiction being due to my inability to understand them, you must think I'm a moron.
I don't think you're a moron. I think you're just a victim of a clever deceit. Satan is so powerful that none of us would have any chance of escaping his webs if it weren't for Christ.
Or perhaps someone will tell me this is not the first time a distro has created a risk for hardware, and this will all be moot.
;), I can't. The MB model was total crap anyway, it ran without crashing only for a few days at a time (running Debian stable).
:-)
Not a Linux distro, but some years ago there was a bug where booting Windows 95 overwrote BIOS in a certain MSI mainboard model (can't remember which one, probably one of the first ones from MSI; Google for it if interested). IIRC it turned out to be some PnP detection code. In any case, as much I'd like to blame Windows for this
I actually fried two mainboards and the people at the shop that sold me it told they fried 7 more while trying to fix my computer until they ran out of those mainboards. I'm actually even ready to believe they'd be stupid enough in that shop to fry 9 mainboards
Somehow I get the feeling that it's mostly Americans who refuse to accept that kilo=10^3, mega=10^6, giga=10^9. (Please read on before moderating as troll/fb.)
I guess that's because you aren't used to kilo, mega and giga, except to the (incorrect) power-of-2 definitions. To someone who lives pretty much anywhere else in the world (ie. where metric units are used), kilo has always been 10^3 and mega has always been 10^6. Well, except in most fields of CS (but not telecommunications or HDD capacity).
What's happening is that several different fields of science are slowly starting to overlap, and suddenly there's real confusion: for someone, kilo=10^3, for someone else it's 10^3 EXCEPT in some cases it's 2^10.
This source of confusion should be fixed now when it's still possible. It may seem to this audience that Computer Science == Life (and most of you probably don't need to think about data in terms of telecommunications) and therefore you think kilo=2^10 is standard, but for a huge majority of people it simply is not so.
Kilo has always been 1000 and will always be 1000. It's us the computer people who have made a mess of it, and we're also responsible for cleaning it up.
Even among nonbelievers prayer is known for what they call its "psychological effect". I really can see no reason why it should be off-topic and things like meditation, yoga or positive thinking on-topic.
;)
Yet I'll be the first one to admit that lots of prayer is just psychological effect. Though I'll never admit its only effect is psychological
No, really. It helps.
It also helps to "remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy", Exodus 20:8. Whether it be Saturday, Sunday or some other day, I believe the important thing is to have the day once a week and to actually share time with God on that day, and to refrain from working on that day. Very important for the peace of mind and concentration. (I have found this very different from just "remember to rest".)
Remember, the Law is for our own good, not because God just happened to decide it should be so.
At least as much as keeping up with patches is a responsibility of the admins, keeping such vulnerabilities out of the software is the responsibility of the developers. It's really an undue burden to require the admins to keep track of hundreds of patches, especially because there's much room for improvement in the SW development process.
It's already possible to write real application code in safe languages, yet the code is most often still written in unsafe languages for performance reasons. I think the current mentality of the SW market is to blame for requiring everything to be faster than the competing product while in most cases it would be possible to make a feature-wise superior or at least matching but performance-wise only a bit worse product using some safe language.
With the current exponential growth of processing power I'd go so far as to say that a 2-3 times slower application known to be relatively free of buffer overflows (by far the most common vulnerability) is preferable to one written in an unsafe language. It's only the marketing that makes features and speed priority number one and security priority number two.
No, I'm not an admin (but a programmer).
Well, I'll state the obvious and say that I consider it an essential feature to be able to copy out (securely) any and all keys the chip has generated, and if the chip does not have that feature then I certainly must question the motives of the designer. There, I said it would be obvious.
Given the current weak security of most systems running on top of x86, I'm not so sure. Not having direct access to your own secret key also implies the malicious process running on your cracked box not having direct access to the key, which is only good. Of course they still would be able to use the key as long as they have access to your box, but not after you notice and cut it. I think of it a bit like the privilege separation in OpenSSH and friends (network code running as a normal user and only acting as a layer to privileged code that doesn't consider the network code trusted), just the separation is done in hardware so not even a vulnerable kernel can leak your secret keys.
Of course this means you won't be able to copy the keys even if you wanted to, but as someone wiser than I said, security is inconvenient. And I can imagine the same technology being used for DRM, but it's not the technology that is bad, but some of the uses.
Thank God this guys is norwegian and didn't drop by the USA.
Actually he did. He even testified at a New York court. See e.g. this press release.
In addition to the rather obvious non-free nature of this license (because the field of endeavour issue, because it mandates strong cryptography and forbids "filtering", even because of horrible vaguety, etc) this license has more problematic clauses, some of which are (in no particular order):
1. The license claims that dual licensing under the GPL and HESSLA has the advantage "that it will enable developers to produce hybrid software packages (combining the functionality available through, say, Hacktivismo's Six-Four APIs, with some of the functionality of one or more popular GPL-licensed communications programs) and to release the hybrid packages under the HESSLA, without causing those developers to run afoul of the GPL, the HESSLA or both."
Am I just reading the text wrong, or have they just claimed you're allowed to take non-dual-licensed GPL code from a communications program, bundle it with some GPL&HESSLA code and some HESSLA-only code and release it under HESSLA? That's just plain wrong and absurd, since HESSLA is obviously nyt GPL compatible.
2. In several places, the license text claims you essentially must have accepted the license agreement even before having obtained the software (and therefore the accompanying license _agreement_). This is not how agreements work, especially if it's possible to obtain the software in a way which doesn't otherwise infringe the exclusive rights of the copyright owner (e.g. by buying).
3. You may not use the software for "10.1.5 censorship or "filtering" of any published information or expression."
This seems to forbid even things like parents installing filters for their children, and even more obviously ethical uses (how about setting up a filter just for yourself, to protect yourself?).
And the worst:
4. "15. Subsequent Versions of HESSLA. Hacktivismo may publish revised and/or new versions of the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. Each version is given a distinguishing version number. Any Program released by Hacktivismo under a version of this License Agreement prior to Version 1.0, shall be considered released under Version 1.0 of the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement, once Version 1.0 is formally released."
In other words, "we believe there's a binding contract between us, and by this clause we are allowed to change the terms of our contract whenever we so wish". This is plainly unacceptable (and probably even unenforceable), whether the license be an open source license or a horribly non-free one. Note that this is very different from the way GPL is usually applied; with GPL, the _licensee_ can decide which version to use (e.g. "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version").
Especially because of the last point, I believe that nobody should touch software released under this license. I would of course recommend staying away from it even after license version 1.0 is released, but especially before that
Pine is not open source, at least by the common definition.
This is because you are not allowed to distribute modified versions. You can distribute Pine sources + patches separately, but you're not allowed to distribute even modified binaries at all.
This makes Pine non-free.
Having been given information does NOT give you the right to (re)publish it.
And what makes you think so?
By default, you have the right to (re)publish any information you happen to have. It's not a matter of the company permitting or forbidding it. Copyright is an exception, but it protects the form of expression, not the expressed information itself.
Bottom line: If you didn't explicitly agree to not publish the information, you can do whatever you want with it.
What, by the way, makes you think sprintf() is only a problem on Linux? You do have that on Windows too, don't you?
Or perhaps you do not view them as unreasonable, but I myself see this kind of patenting of existing things plus litigating against large corporations as an ethically bankrupt "revenue stream".
Not to defend software patents, but this case was not about patenting existing things. The patent is _older than JPEG itself_.
It's terribly easy to change resolution on the fly in X -- ctrl alt kp+ and ctrl alt kp-. Changing the desktop resolution during runtime isn't supported (though if you had to you could hack it up via DGA modes)...but why would you want to do this?
This is the one point where I have to agree with the original poster. Sometimes it's necessary to change the resolution - it might be that some program just wasn't designed with 1600x1200 or even 1200x1024 in mind (esp. when you don't have a 24" monitor). And I for one don't much like reading 5 pixel high fonts at 1200x1024, pretty much regardless of the monitor size. Generally, I like my text a bit bigger than most users - for example, my default font on Konqueror is a 15 or 16 point one at 1400x1050 on a 19" monitor, antialiased of course.
Another example: I just finished a game of FreeCiv, and even the largest tilesets are a bit too small for my taste on my monitor and preferred resolution.
In those cases, I can use ctrl-alt-kp[-+], but if I actually have to use the program with mouse, it's really a pain to have the viewport scroll whenever I hit the border with my mouse pointer. Or if I have to reach the panel, but that's less of a problem since I'd usually change back to my default resolution before that anyway.
Then there's the situation where my default resolution is one that gives me a nice flicker-free screen, and just that I sometimes have to use programs which are quite unusable (too crammed) at that resolution. In those cases, it would be helpful to be able to change into a bigger video mode just for using that program, but without having to tolerate something like 75Hz for all work.
Not that it would be much better on Windows, AFAICT (I only use Windows at work), but this is one area which definitely could use some improving. I can live with it, just it's not quite perfect yet.
That (the rewrite) is slated to happen for the next major release.
Makes one wonder why you don't dual license (e.g. the current POV license & GPL) those parts of the code for which you do have the permission to do so (I guess there's still quite a lot of that?). There are certainly a lot of capable people in the OSS community who would be happy to contribute something to replace the missing pieces - probably even several implementations from which you could pick the one you consider most fit for the official distribution, or failing that, still write your own taking the best ideas from the best contributions. This way, it seems to me, POV-Ray could gradually evolve into a fully open sourced product.
Only one obstacle comes to my mind right now: As far as there remains any POV-licensed code in the code base, the contributions must also comply with that license - effectively, the contributions would also have to be dual-licensed (GPL+POV) until no POV-licensed code remains, at which point the POV license could be entirely dropped from further modifications. I still believe quite a lot of people would be willing to contribute their code under GPL+POV dual license after seeing a nice amount of original POV code released under the GPL in good faith.
On Windows 95, you weren't able any more to write programs that controlled the hardware directly.
This is called abstraction, and is a good thing (although I don't think win9x did this).
A program that controls the hardware directly is a program that can crash your computer. You don't want a buggy program to crash your computer, do you?
BTW, can you name a REAL operating system where user-space programs can directly control hardware? (Well, OK, on Linux you can do something if you're root and specifically request the IO perms, but that's limited - no interrupt handling or DMA, just IO port access. And that's not the way to go, anyway.)
Think about that, a Pledge, which is a solem oath and a Prayer which is susposed to have been authored by God himself
Huh, never heard about that claim. Probably because I'm not American myself. Do some people really claim this?