Why? So they can sit on it and sweep it under the rug for another month or so? Have a good look at bugtraq for awhile. You'll see this is exactly what companies do when they're babied. Surely, they deserve whatever is coming to them putting a rinky-dink crypto algorithm in cash machines.
If it were true, then clearly, it would not be possible to release any software package that runs under Linux without it being GPL'd. For example, any c program that opens a file (glibc is GPL'd), links to GPL'd code. One could easily argue that accessing system calls directly is in effect linking to a library.
Clearly this is not the case, Apache and Perl are my examples, they are not GPL, yet link to glibc. OKOKOK but they are free software please, no back-pedaling on this one. There are plenty of commercial software offerings available, that are not free, that run under Linux.
It's karma. I don't mean in the traditional sense, but in the/. sense. Too many karma whores. Geeks seeking external validation via their +1 posting bonus. Not pointing fingers, either. I routinely check my user info to see how many points I have.
I'm sure we all agree anonymity means being able to conceal one's identity. To me, it also means selflessness - accepting (not necessarily agreeing with) other people regardless of who they are. This second, less common definition of anonymity, rings a lot truer to me.
On/. we have this "noise filter" that has essentially contributed to making a monster of each of us. Nobody wants their voice silenced by posting at 1, so we do what it takes to be treated as equals. If/. were truly an anonymous forum (see my second definition), it is likely that far fewer of us would be exhibiting this behavior.
I am speaking for myself, perhaps some others will identify with this. How many times have I read an article on/. and thought, "what is an insightful or informative response?". The next question I ask myself after realizing all my reponses would be redundant: "OK, what will be funny?" Translation: "how can I increase my karma by posting?". How many time have I thought to myself "Dang, that is what I was going to post".
On one of my other UIDs I felt the other side of the moderation system. I made a funny post and got marked down. The first post under that UID. Very discouraging. See with that post, the moderation system made me an outsider. As a geek, my answer to rejection is rebellion. Perhaps this effect has a bit to do with trolling and grits et.al.
And no, I won't jump on the Slashdot-is-dead bandwagon, either. This thing is what we make of it, well, what we make of what those andover boys think is appropriate "News for Nerds, stuff that matters". There's that rebellion kicking in again =)
Bitching about the moderation system isn't going to change things either. My first UID is < 20000 and people have been bitching ever since I've been around here. I'll bet they were bitching before I got here too, hence the "new" moderation system. Aboloshing moderation altogether just might change things...but that's a whole other post.
Handhelds facilitating cheaters is a moot point. It would be patently obvious that one kid was beaming something to another in class. (The range on a Palm Pilot IR is about 2-3', so forget about bouncing it off the windows) Outside of the class, the kids are already emailing, IRC'ing and AIM'ing their homework to each other anyway. Not to mention storing notes in their calculators, etc. I have also observed educators step up as counterinsurgents, using automated test generation tools to create different versions of tests.
about 21% are Microsoft based, or 2,742,931 servers - that's the good news.
Another interesting info point: with such small marketshare, IIS consistently accounts for 50-70% of reported defacements on attrition.org OS Statistics
Spare us the generalizations. Some ma & pa shops are fly-by-night, others are not. I have consistently bought systems from the same ma & pa shop in town for over 9 years. They charge about $5-$10 more per component than the "rock bottom" price. Typically, I can drive by their store, and tell them I've got a failure in a new system, I think it is 1 or 3 parts. They hand me 1 of each of those 3 parts and tell me to being the pieces back to them when I "get around to it". All this with no paperwork.
I'm not trolling. This is my personal opinion. I've written plenty of device drivers over the years, for many a different OS, however I have _never_ written a Linux driver yet. I did read the book on it, though.
Call me old fashioned, but not only do I object to the performance decreases introduced by these types of "porting" tools, I object to writing drivers in anything other than assembler. --seriously, I'm not trolling-- I strongly believe it is the device driver authors job to wring every last bit of performance out of the device, while causing the least impact on the rest of the system. Make the system as fast as possible for the user. The authors' time is miniscule compared to the collective seconds of other peoples' lives that would be spent watching disk lamps, wristwatches, hourglasses (pick your poison). It is so easy to squander a computers' resources, anyway, I suppose I am preaching to the choir about that.
For a cross-platform OS like Linux, I believe the slight performance penalty for authoring in C is a bargain of a trade-off to multiply device support across platforms. Like I said, call me old fashioned. If I were writing drivers for Linux, I'd probably write it in C, then make an assembler version or two for chosen platforms, that, ahem, I happen to use regularly.
IANEASL [I am not even a Street Lawyer(tm)] "The DMCA was never intended for companies like Napster." Call me cynical, but my translation of that is "The DMCA was never intended for small, upstart companies that are not owned by our rich friends".
Clever defense. I'll bet Napster lawyers have some "free enterprise" arguments to add to their arsenal, too. This case could have the key (read: constitutional) ingredients to unseat the DMCA. If the DMCA can be shown to stifle free enterprise, it will likely see the curb.
I knew it! Moore's law would not spell the end of the microprocessor as we know it. Some other guy had an "effect" that limited transmission rates to 33.6 over standard phone lines.
Reminds me of that high school teach of mine. One day, he was telling me about his 1K RAM card he got for his Altair. Came with 1-256 byte chip. He told me (as we were installing the 48K RAM card) that he thought if he ever fully populated that 1K card, he would have more RAM than he would know what to do with.
Seems that most "barriers" in the computer industry are not real; they are merely perceived.
IANAL. I know part of the CDA (Communications Decency Act) got tossed by the Supreme Court, but I am pretty sure that the part about transmitting Illegal or obscene material stuck. Even if not, every ISP acceptable use policy I have seen, has some clause in it to that effect. Bottom line, Freenet sysops can be held accountable for their transmissions by the Man and ISPs. I understand Freenet data is encrypted, supposedly to free the sysop from "knowingly" making transmissions. That ends as soon as a cease and dissist letter is issued to sysop, wherein they are put on notice that they are in fact transmitting illegal or "obscene" (whatever that means) material. Besides, I think that since the keys to the encrypted data are readily available, it would not require a law-equivalent of a Rocket Scientist(tm) to argue some type of negligance on behalf of sysops.
What I see is the bigger question, can common people enjoy the same type of immunity that the big telecom companies enjoy? Obviously, ISPs are never held accountable for forwarding warez, et.al. via usenet. My call on that is those with the deep pockets win.
Sorry I didn't have the opportunity to raise this issue at the appropriate time.
IANAL, that said, the First Amendment does not protect all forms of speech. For example, shouting this word: "FIRE!" in a crowded public place is not protected by the 1st. If you were to shout "FIRE!" when indeed there was no danger whatsoever, you could face a civil suit for any damages caused, and may be subject to criminal prosecution, depending on local laws. Of course, using "FIRE!" in an appropriate context is fine. I don't know if it is "protected", though.
Liberty and creative freedom are side effects of the First Amendment, IMO. The real purpose of the 1st is to enable citizens to speak out against laws and against the government.
I really don't think we will have to worry about any script kiddies getting off scott free by claiming they wrote an exploit (*laughs*) and that their use of said expoit is now protected by the First Amendment.
the only non preemptive multitasking OS in wide use now is MacOS
dude, contrary to popular belief, windows 9x is not a pre-emptive multitasking environment. sure, it has threads, and applications can multitask somewhat. still, most application-level tasks are serialized via the event queue. and definitely things running in ring 0 (read: using VMM services) are single-thread, execute to completion tasks that can block all other processes on the machine.
as for nt/2k, i've never written any device drivers there, so i don't know. it would not surprise me at all for there to be kludgey legacy-type code in there that forces execute to completion
My name is Alan, and I am a recovering VxD author.
I'm 34 now, but when I was in High School, I would likely have been targetted by this type of program. A punk rocker that hung around with the Fantasy Role Playing Games Society. By cutting classes regularly, I had High Score on the attendance system.
I was headed in a bad direction at that time. My computer teacher intervened in perhaps the best way a teacher can. He fostered an environment that nurtured, challenged and stimulated me to grow. See, when I was cutting class, a lot of the time I was in the computer "lab", a section of one of the science classrooms where he taught all day. (At other times, cutting meant smoking dope and knocking back some fo-dee's, but that's another story) The school brass caught on and told him he had to cut it out--not let me stay in the lab during my other classes.
I arrived at the lab one day after school, and he told me to go clean out this room across the hall. It was a "wet" lab that the school had not used in years. I remember feeling as though it was some kind of punishment...besides, I had some important BASIC program I was writing. When I was done cleaning, he then told me to move the entire computer system (a multiuser box w/ terminals) into the other room. I was then able to cut classes and sit in the lab, without the teach being held responsible. He would lock the door when the bell rang (and after I was in there) to maintain his due dilligence.
See, he understood me more than the school brass. He knew the only reason I even came to school any more was to get on the computer, and cutting class doing that was far better than what I might do instead.
My actions eveuntally forced me into a situation where I decided to drop out. Shortly after that, I was offered a job as a programmer working with my best friend's girlfriend's dad. I was able to impress my first boss not just by recognizing his S-100 based computer gear, but also understanding what it meant when he said it was a multiprocessor system. The teach taught me all that too. That was a good while before the IBM PC-AT and NetWare, you gut-dang whipper-snappers!:-)
I sit here all teary-eyed thinking about what that man did for me. I love writing code, and getting paid for it is cool too. I might just as easily be doing time in the pen right now behind some form of grand larceny, had the teach not shown me I could be myself and succeed.
Ok, I read the Unisys patent in you sig...Doesn't Unisys also hold the patent on the.GIF format? Shit, now I've got all this code to rewrite in preparation for the soon-to-be impending "burn all linked lists day".
Isn't NT or 2K what you really want to run on one of these? I mean, think about it, you can reboot the OS without taking out the whole machine. Just a thought. Ok, maybe the mainframe could only run 5000 copies of NT or 2800 of 2K. Still, by setting up fail-over "clusters" of these virtual windows servers, you could even simulate Real World Reliability
Sorry to reply to my own post. I got interrupted by the plumbers, returned to my computer, and hit submit without reviewing my post
Now, on to that missing paragraph: See, what I am talking about is freedom. I would much rather have a smaller company, and the freedom to be creative, do things, like change direction, tell an abusive customer to go fsck themselves, take risks. Money is nice, but it does not create happiness or satisfaction.
If you sell the site, after uncle sams' bite (assuming you're in the US), you'll be left with a tad more than a years' salary in this industry. For me, I would be feeling pretty used after 5 years of hard work, even if it was "hobby" time. There is probably untapped potential in what you have. Thinking you can use the money to go build a different web venture needs some careful thought. Establishing a name and a reputation is probably one of the most challenging things for an internet venture, and this is likely what your suitors want from your site.
Look at what some of the "newer" startups are doing to build a name. They throw all this money at PR, TV and Radio spots, billboards. And for what? They need to do this because their product is not unique, and they are a late entry into the business. I believe is is commonplace for V.C. to "own" these concerns, and their founders are nothing more than modern-day Lexus driving serfs. I was driving past a large ISP in my city at around 2:00am one night. This ISP was purchased by a telecom giant in recent history. I nearly collided with a brand new Mercedes 500 Series pulling out of the lot. Who do you think that was in that car?
See, what I am talking about is freedom. I would
A wise man once said to me, if you were given the choice of two plots of land, next door to each, both empty, except one had the footings for a house already, which one would you chose?
IANAL and I've not read the agreement. The Wired article sez the agreement assigns all rights, if any. They may have sandbagged Mattel, but it doesn't sound to me like they lied.
(smiles) Stories like this are the foundation of a Good Day(tm). I'll bet some Mattel lawyers lose sleep tonight. 8-) I don't think I could have kept a straight face while signing that agreement.
If GPL is challenged by Mattel, they will likely argue that it infringes their copyrights/license agreement. Since they will be unable to eradicate all copies of cphack anway, the obvious remedy for Mattel becomes to rewrite CP and try to sue Skala and Jannson for the costs. Oh no, they signed off and let the lads off scott free. DOH!
Good show, lads! It's been awhile since a story of the little guy getting Corporate America to do themselves has warmed my heart as much The Swindo has. FFEITM! (Fist fuck 'em in the mouth)
Slashdot Mirror
Why? So they can sit on it and sweep it under the rug for another month or so? Have a good look at bugtraq for awhile. You'll see this is exactly what companies do when they're babied. Surely, they deserve whatever is coming to them putting a rinky-dink crypto algorithm in cash machines.
If it were true, then clearly, it would not be possible to release any software package that runs under Linux without it being GPL'd. For example, any c program that opens a file (glibc is GPL'd), links to GPL'd code. One could easily argue that accessing system calls directly is in effect linking to a library.
Clearly this is not the case, Apache and Perl are my examples, they are not GPL, yet link to glibc. OKOKOK but they are free software please, no back-pedaling on this one. There are plenty of commercial software offerings available, that are not free, that run under Linux.
I'm sure we all agree anonymity means being able to conceal one's identity. To me, it also means selflessness - accepting (not necessarily agreeing with) other people regardless of who they are. This second, less common definition of anonymity, rings a lot truer to me.
On /. we have this "noise filter" that has essentially contributed to making a monster of each of us. Nobody wants their voice silenced by posting at 1, so we do what it takes to be treated as equals. If /. were truly an anonymous forum (see my second definition), it is likely that far fewer of us would be exhibiting this behavior.
I am speaking for myself, perhaps some others will identify with this. How many times have I read an article on /. and thought, "what is an insightful or informative response?". The next question I ask myself after realizing all my reponses would be redundant: "OK, what will be funny?" Translation: "how can I increase my karma by posting?". How many time have I thought to myself "Dang, that is what I was going to post".
On one of my other UIDs I felt the other side of the moderation system. I made a funny post and got marked down. The first post under that UID. Very discouraging. See with that post, the moderation system made me an outsider. As a geek, my answer to rejection is rebellion. Perhaps this effect has a bit to do with trolling and grits et.al.
And no, I won't jump on the Slashdot-is-dead bandwagon, either. This thing is what we make of it, well, what we make of what those andover boys think is appropriate "News for Nerds, stuff that matters". There's that rebellion kicking in again =)
Bitching about the moderation system isn't going to change things either. My first UID is < 20000 and people have been bitching ever since I've been around here. I'll bet they were bitching before I got here too, hence the "new" moderation system. Aboloshing moderation altogether just might change things...but that's a whole other post.
Handhelds facilitating cheaters is a moot point. It would be patently obvious that one kid was beaming something to another in class. (The range on a Palm Pilot IR is about 2-3', so forget about bouncing it off the windows) Outside of the class, the kids are already emailing, IRC'ing and AIM'ing their homework to each other anyway. Not to mention storing notes in their calculators, etc. I have also observed educators step up as counterinsurgents, using automated test generation tools to create different versions of tests.
Gun manufacturer != murderer as Napster != thief
That's a typo, right? You meant when win2005 comes out, didn't you?
Another interesting info point: with such small marketshare, IIS consistently accounts for 50-70% of reported defacements on attrition.org OS Statistics
Spare us the generalizations. Some ma & pa shops are fly-by-night, others are not. I have consistently bought systems from the same ma & pa shop in town for over 9 years. They charge about $5-$10 more per component than the "rock bottom" price. Typically, I can drive by their store, and tell them I've got a failure in a new system, I think it is 1 or 3 parts. They hand me 1 of each of those 3 parts and tell me to being the pieces back to them when I "get around to it". All this with no paperwork.
Call me old fashioned, but not only do I object to the performance decreases introduced by these types of "porting" tools, I object to writing drivers in anything other than assembler. --seriously, I'm not trolling-- I strongly believe it is the device driver authors job to wring every last bit of performance out of the device, while causing the least impact on the rest of the system. Make the system as fast as possible for the user. The authors' time is miniscule compared to the collective seconds of other peoples' lives that would be spent watching disk lamps, wristwatches, hourglasses (pick your poison). It is so easy to squander a computers' resources, anyway, I suppose I am preaching to the choir about that.
For a cross-platform OS like Linux, I believe the slight performance penalty for authoring in C is a bargain of a trade-off to multiply device support across platforms. Like I said, call me old fashioned. If I were writing drivers for Linux, I'd probably write it in C, then make an assembler version or two for chosen platforms, that, ahem, I happen to use regularly.
Overcome by improvisation, Alan emits a new rendition of a favorite NYC Street Sign:
+----------+
| NO:|
| FLAMING|
| TROLLING |
| PARKING|
| KIDDING|
+----------+
Clever defense. I'll bet Napster lawyers have some "free enterprise" arguments to add to their arsenal, too. This case could have the key (read: constitutional) ingredients to unseat the DMCA. If the DMCA can be shown to stifle free enterprise, it will likely see the curb.
Reminds me of that high school teach of mine. One day, he was telling me about his 1K RAM card he got for his Altair. Came with 1-256 byte chip. He told me (as we were installing the 48K RAM card) that he thought if he ever fully populated that 1K card, he would have more RAM than he would know what to do with.
Seems that most "barriers" in the computer industry are not real; they are merely perceived.
What I see is the bigger question, can common people enjoy the same type of immunity that the big telecom companies enjoy? Obviously, ISPs are never held accountable for forwarding warez, et.al. via usenet. My call on that is those with the deep pockets win.
Sorry I didn't have the opportunity to raise this issue at the appropriate time.
Gotta admire Chuck D. for putting a little backbone behind his lyrics...
Liberty and creative freedom are side effects of the First Amendment, IMO. The real purpose of the 1st is to enable citizens to speak out against laws and against the government.
I really don't think we will have to worry about any script kiddies getting off scott free by claiming they wrote an exploit (*laughs*) and that their use of said expoit is now protected by the First Amendment.
dude, contrary to popular belief, windows 9x is not a pre-emptive multitasking environment. sure, it has threads, and applications can multitask somewhat. still, most application-level tasks are serialized via the event queue. and definitely things running in ring 0 (read: using VMM services) are single-thread, execute to completion tasks that can block all other processes on the machine.
as for nt/2k, i've never written any device drivers there, so i don't know. it would not surprise me at all for there to be kludgey legacy-type code in there that forces execute to completion
My name is Alan, and I am a recovering VxD author.
I was headed in a bad direction at that time. My computer teacher intervened in perhaps the best way a teacher can. He fostered an environment that nurtured, challenged and stimulated me to grow. See, when I was cutting class, a lot of the time I was in the computer "lab", a section of one of the science classrooms where he taught all day. (At other times, cutting meant smoking dope and knocking back some fo-dee's, but that's another story) The school brass caught on and told him he had to cut it out--not let me stay in the lab during my other classes.
I arrived at the lab one day after school, and he told me to go clean out this room across the hall. It was a "wet" lab that the school had not used in years. I remember feeling as though it was some kind of punishment...besides, I had some important BASIC program I was writing. When I was done cleaning, he then told me to move the entire computer system (a multiuser box w/ terminals) into the other room. I was then able to cut classes and sit in the lab, without the teach being held responsible. He would lock the door when the bell rang (and after I was in there) to maintain his due dilligence.
See, he understood me more than the school brass. He knew the only reason I even came to school any more was to get on the computer, and cutting class doing that was far better than what I might do instead.
My actions eveuntally forced me into a situation where I decided to drop out. Shortly after that, I was offered a job as a programmer working with my best friend's girlfriend's dad. I was able to impress my first boss not just by recognizing his S-100 based computer gear, but also understanding what it meant when he said it was a multiprocessor system. The teach taught me all that too. That was a good while before the IBM PC-AT and NetWare, you gut-dang whipper-snappers! :-)
I sit here all teary-eyed thinking about what that man did for me. I love writing code, and getting paid for it is cool too. I might just as easily be doing time in the pen right now behind some form of grand larceny, had the teach not shown me I could be myself and succeed.
Does this mean those wise guys with the "short term personal loans" website can sell one-click assassinations?
Ok, I read the Unisys patent in you sig...Doesn't Unisys also hold the patent on the .GIF format? Shit, now I've got all this code to rewrite in preparation for the soon-to-be impending "burn all linked lists day".
Isn't NT or 2K what you really want to run on one of these? I mean, think about it, you can reboot the OS without taking out the whole machine. Just a thought. Ok, maybe the mainframe could only run 5000 copies of NT or 2800 of 2K. Still, by setting up fail-over "clusters" of these virtual windows servers, you could even simulate Real World Reliability
Now, on to that missing paragraph: See, what I am talking about is freedom. I would much rather have a smaller company, and the freedom to be creative, do things, like change direction, tell an abusive customer to go fsck themselves, take risks. Money is nice, but it does not create happiness or satisfaction.
Look at what some of the "newer" startups are doing to build a name. They throw all this money at PR, TV and Radio spots, billboards. And for what? They need to do this because their product is not unique, and they are a late entry into the business. I believe is is commonplace for V.C. to "own" these concerns, and their founders are nothing more than modern-day Lexus driving serfs. I was driving past a large ISP in my city at around 2:00am one night. This ISP was purchased by a telecom giant in recent history. I nearly collided with a brand new Mercedes 500 Series pulling out of the lot. Who do you think that was in that car?
See, what I am talking about is freedom. I would
A wise man once said to me, if you were given the choice of two plots of land, next door to each, both empty, except one had the footings for a house already, which one would you chose?
(smiles) Stories like this are the foundation of a Good Day(tm). I'll bet some Mattel lawyers lose sleep tonight. 8-) I don't think I could have kept a straight face while signing that agreement.
If GPL is challenged by Mattel, they will likely argue that it infringes their copyrights/license agreement. Since they will be unable to eradicate all copies of cphack anway, the obvious remedy for Mattel becomes to rewrite CP and try to sue Skala and Jannson for the costs. Oh no, they signed off and let the lads off scott free. DOH!
Good show, lads! It's been awhile since a story of the little guy getting Corporate America to do themselves has warmed my heart as much The Swindo has. FFEITM! (Fist fuck 'em in the mouth)
Only in the driver's seat.
Is it just me, or do these guys with "Propaganda" in their .sig always come on with hostility?