Borland C++ Builder 5.0 has the same text in its license, but below, under the title "GENERAL TERMS THAT APPLY TO COMPILED PROGRAMS AND REDISTRIBUTABLES" it reads:
The Software might include source code, redistributable files, and/or other files provided by a third party vendor (Third Party Software). Since use of Third Party Software might be subject to license restrictions imposed by the third party vendor, you should refer to the on-line documentation (if any) provided with Third Party Software for any license restrictions imposed by the third party vendor. In any event, any license restrictions imposed by a third party vendor are in addition to, not in lieu of, the terms and conditions of the License Agreement.
All Inprise libraries, source code, Redistributables and other files remain Inprise's exclusive property. Regardless of any modifications that you make, you may not distribute any files (particularly Inprise source code and other non-executable files) except those that Inprise has expressly designated as Redistributables. Nothing in the License Agreement permits you to derive the source code of files that Inprise has provided to you in executable form only, or to reproduce, modify, use, or distribute the source code of such files. You are not, of course, restricted from distributing source code or byte code that is entirely your own. Source code which you generate with an Inprise source code generator, such as an Application Wizard, is considered by Inprise to be your code.
So, if you can distribute source code from a third-party vendor, in case the latter doesn't oppose, you can sure distribute your own. What you can't do is redistribute what Borland gave to you, other than the "redistributables" that appear on their list.
OK, I overreacted. Post #8 says that the guy isn't supposed to be taken seriously because he is not an expert (an OS guru or a hot lawyer, I suppose) and my point is that he behaved fairly during the whole thing. And by fair I mean not trying to take malicious advantage, which he could. That gives him at least the right to be taken seriously while suggesting MS to GPL their Kerberos extensions.
But I'm not making anybody's point. What does unethical mean? It means not ethical! Come on, if it is false that something is not, than it is true that it is!
Just because it wasn't "unethical" doesn't make it an "ethical" action.
What kind of logic is that?
As to what may have driven his actions, Ethics are not about motivations, but about behaviour. The fee was overdue, so the domain was available, he took it, so as to read his e-mail, and gave it back, for he considered it not to be fair to keep the domain. Otherwise, he could have:
Struggled to keep it or sell it to someone else
Settled for a good amount of cash
Framed the check
Auctioned the check and kept the money
He may have gotten a lot of exposure out of this thing, no doubt, but he played pretty fair against MS, and that fully entitles him to ask MS to follow suit.
I don't know the PCD format, but if may have some compression scheme. In theory, a maliciously ill-formed file can lead a dumb decompressor to go crazy and cause a stack overflow condition. This is particularly valid because decompressors tend to be highly optimized code (at source level), often choosing to "trust" the data for validity.
I'm currently writing a program that has to read and write TIFF files. While prototyping, my TIFF's could be read by Corel PhotoPaint and GIMP. I could read their TIFF's too, but upon trying to read my own TIFFS I got core dumps while on Linux and systems crashes on Windows. It turned out that my TIFF's were wrong because I misinterpreted some of the specification. The images were ill-formed, but that condition could be used, again, in theory, to make the machine execute malicious code.
I discussed this with RMS a long time ago. He said that a GPL-only license would be sufficient.
What if RMS is wrong? The paragraph in question says:
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Now, suppose people write code based on this patents and the owner decides to revoke the GPL-use license. Fine, we can't write new code based on that patent any longer. But what happens to GPL code already written? So one can't use the algorithm but can re-use the code? Doesn't make sense. So, my interpretation is that when the GPL says "licensed for everyone's free use" what it means is that there may be no restriction or any room for future restrictions. From this angle, any patent, unless irrevocably free, doesn't fit the GPL.
Unfortunately, the moment that Slashdot directly or indirectly removes a post due to content, Slashdot becomes responsible, both in conventional and legal terms, for all user-submitted content on the site.
Yes, yes, yes! Which reason, if I were one of the guys who posted the copyrighted stuff I would request/authorize/. to remove the posts, so as to make things easier.
Jon Katz could really use some lessons from this guy
I bet JonKatz is, even as I post, writing some article that is bad enough to turn an interesting event like this into a boring dull atempt at reflection.
May I suggest you sell slashdot and slashdot comments copyrights to Microsoft? Better selling them than removing them.
Slashdot doesn't own comment copyright; see the fine print at the bottom of this page you are reading. OK, maybe you were just trolling.
As to what should be done, it's about time/. establishes formal guidelines on dealing with copyrighted stuff posted here, and makes these known to all readers, whatever they be. The site is growing by the hour, getting more and more exposure and becoming easier to spot and attack.
Now, Roblimo, "forgetting" to remove Mr. Weston e-mail address would have been a nice touch...
Interesting how MS translated "News for nerds, stuff that matters" into their asseptic lingo: "topical issues of interest."
OK, so bashing hotmail.com in/. is pretty easy, but there is one single aspect that I think makes hotmail the best free web-based e-mail service: they do close spam generating accounts or drop-in box accounts. You guys in this thread seem not to pay much attention to this.
I used to receive about 5 spam messages a day and never have I sent a complaint with a full header to abuse@hotmail.com I got spam from the same address again. I can't say the same about any other web-mail.
In a way, a scientific background can be a limitation. It forces you to always do the logical next step. Someone without a scientific background on the other hand, might come up with an idea thats totally ridiculous at first to any scientist, but thats revolutionary enough to be worth trying to implement anyway.
I quoted most of your post because I have a feeling it is going to moderated as flamebait...:^)
Now, seriously, scientific background can never be a limitation. Narrow mindness can, and I think that's what you are addressing, the perception that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you.
While it is true that someone with no scientific background can have revolutionary ideas, the same holds true for scientists. The advantage a scientist has resides in the fact that a good one can spot an unfeasible idea right away. I've worked with engine design for some years and I received a lot of suggestions for new ideas, many with patents and price tags attached. I don't remember receiving a single one worth investigation. And yes, I've had ideas that the chief engineers considered ridiculous (and I still believe they're damn good), but just because it was too different from what the industry is being doing for decades. And that's narrow mindness.
There's nothing wrong with the "next logical step", evolution works better than revolution most of the times.
On a more realistic level, I wonder how come nobody has yet come up with a popular VR file manager like the one show in Disclosure. That must be trivial for a game programmer.
Impassionate diatribes? Except for "frequent use of mass destruction weapons" his/her point is very good. I would rather say "inexcusable occasional use of...". Why should one assume that the weapon technology the U.S. has is in the right hands? That's pretty subjective, and that is the main point of the post you replied to. The rest may be offtopic, but not impassionate diatribes.
I understand people getting enthusiastic facing the possibility of controlling hardware with their thoughts, but that implies the existence of hardware that can detect thoughts. And one may not have control on whether the hardware does so or not.The enthusiasm certainly comes from the assumption that the hardware input would be thought-controlled, but such a beast would be software-controlled, just like every piece of information hardware.
Picture a situation in which your company installs a very user-friendly thought interface for you to work. You will type and sweep a lot less, but what prevents your employer from receiving daily reports on what you've been thinking during the day? And so on...
The actuall language used doesn't really matter the ideas are the power of programming,... the creativity. Porting it over to another language or platform is just simple mechanics.
Are you serious? Would you write a heat exchange simulator in Perl, or grep in FORTRAN?
Bjarne Stroustrup wrote something like "a computer language is not only the code in which we express what we want the machine to do, but also the framework in which we model our understanding of the problem". It's been a couple of months since I read this, but the general idea is along that line. Some problems are *so* obviously better modeled and solved in certain languages.
OTOH, maybe you mean that the better (clearer) your code is, the easier it will be to port it to another language. I agree with that. Brian Kernighan says that porting a program to another language is the "ultimate portability test", altough that doesn't mean he encourages porting per se.
Slashdot Mirror
Borland C++ Builder 5.0 has the same text in its license, but below, under the title "GENERAL TERMS THAT APPLY TO COMPILED PROGRAMS AND REDISTRIBUTABLES" it reads:
All Inprise libraries, source code, Redistributables and other files remain Inprise's exclusive property. Regardless of any modifications that you make, you may not distribute any files (particularly Inprise source code and other non-executable files) except those that Inprise has expressly designated as Redistributables. Nothing in the License Agreement permits you to derive the source code of files that Inprise has provided to you in executable form only, or to reproduce, modify, use, or distribute the source code of such files. You are not, of course, restricted from distributing source code or byte code that is entirely your own. Source code which you generate with an Inprise source code generator, such as an Application Wizard, is considered by Inprise to be your code.
So, if you can distribute source code from a third-party vendor, in case the latter doesn't oppose, you can sure distribute your own. What you can't do is redistribute what Borland gave to you, other than the "redistributables" that appear on their list.
Well, didn't help much...
You didn't scare me, you *embarassed* me! : ^)
I wasn't going to talk about this in public because of /. silence about the DDoS, for I thought things could be somewhat related.
This is what I got this morning when I asked for www.slashdot.org:
<html>
//-->
? name=slahsdot.org&channel=www"
<head>
<title>Not Slashdot.org</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="description" content="">
</head>
<script language="javascript">
<!--
if (top.frames.length != 0)
{
top.location=document.location
}
</script>
<frameset
rows="*,90" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"
framespacing=0 frameborder=no border=0
>
<frame
marginwidth="5" marginheight="2"
src="http://slashdot.org"
name=thepage framespacing=0 frameborder=no border=0
>
<frame
marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"
src="http://red.namezero.com/strip2/strip.jhtml
name=pb scrollbars=no scrolling=no
framespacing=0 frameborder=no border=0
>
</frameset>
<noframes>
Sorry
</noframes>
</html>
Weird. Did anybody else see this?
OK, I overreacted. Post #8 says that the guy isn't supposed to be taken seriously because he is not an expert (an OS guru or a hot lawyer, I suppose) and my point is that he behaved fairly during the whole thing. And by fair I mean not trying to take malicious advantage, which he could. That gives him at least the right to be taken seriously while suggesting MS to GPL their Kerberos extensions.
But I'm not making anybody's point. What does unethical mean? It means not ethical! Come on, if it is false that something is not, than it is true that it is!
Just because it wasn't "unethical" doesn't make it an "ethical" action.
What kind of logic is that?
As to what may have driven his actions, Ethics are not about motivations, but about behaviour. The fee was overdue, so the domain was available, he took it, so as to read his e-mail, and gave it back, for he considered it not to be fair to keep the domain. Otherwise, he could have:
He may have gotten a lot of exposure out of this thing, no doubt, but he played pretty fair against MS, and that fully entitles him to ask MS to follow suit.Struggled to keep it or sell it to someone else
Settled for a good amount of cash
Framed the check
Auctioned the check and kept the money
does that really make him an expert on anything?
Yes, on Ethics.
How can PhotoCD Images execute malicious code?
It may contain it disguised as data.I don't know the PCD format, but if may have some compression scheme. In theory, a maliciously ill-formed file can lead a dumb decompressor to go crazy and cause a stack overflow condition. This is particularly valid because decompressors tend to be highly optimized code (at source level), often choosing to "trust" the data for validity.
I'm currently writing a program that has to read and write TIFF files. While prototyping, my TIFF's could be read by Corel PhotoPaint and GIMP. I could read their TIFF's too, but upon trying to read my own TIFFS I got core dumps while on Linux and systems crashes on Windows. It turned out that my TIFF's were wrong because I misinterpreted some of the specification. The images were ill-formed, but that condition could be used, again, in theory, to make the machine execute malicious code.
In fact I think it is. He has user #3872.
Including me and five moderators! But, seriously, doesn't the troll spell BrucePerens. ?
I discussed this with RMS a long time ago. He said that a GPL-only license would be sufficient.
What if RMS is wrong? The paragraph in question says:
Now, suppose people write code based on this patents and the owner decides to revoke the GPL-use license. Fine, we can't write new code based on that patent any longer. But what happens to GPL code already written? So one can't use the algorithm but can re-use the code? Doesn't make sense. So, my interpretation is that when the GPL says "licensed for everyone's free use" what it means is that there may be no restriction or any room for future restrictions. From this angle, any patent, unless irrevocably free, doesn't fit the GPL.
Especially the black background with the white table in front?
Which makes it awfully hard to select text...
Unfortunately, the moment that Slashdot directly or indirectly removes a post due to content, Slashdot becomes responsible, both in conventional and legal terms, for all user-submitted content on the site.
Yes, yes, yes! Which reason, if I were one of the guys who posted the copyrighted stuff I would request/authorize /. to remove the posts, so as to make things easier.
Jon Katz could really use some lessons from this guy
I bet JonKatz is, even as I post, writing some article that is bad enough to turn an interesting event like this into a boring dull atempt at reflection.
I dare anyone to find an app with a more wasted UI.
Not to mention the absurd amount of memory it takes!
May I suggest you sell slashdot and slashdot comments copyrights to Microsoft? Better selling them than removing them.
Slashdot doesn't own comment copyright; see the fine print at the bottom of this page you are reading. OK, maybe you were just trolling.
As to what should be done, it's about time /. establishes formal guidelines on dealing with copyrighted stuff posted here, and makes these known to all readers, whatever they be. The site is growing by the hour, getting more and more exposure and becoming easier to spot and attack.
Now, Roblimo, "forgetting" to remove Mr. Weston e-mail address would have been a nice touch...
Interesting how MS translated "News for nerds, stuff that matters" into their asseptic lingo: "topical issues of interest."
OK, so bashing hotmail.com in /. is pretty easy, but there is one single aspect that I think makes hotmail the best free web-based e-mail service: they do close spam generating accounts or drop-in box accounts. You guys in this thread seem not to pay much attention to this.
I used to receive about 5 spam messages a day and never have I sent a complaint with a full header to abuse@hotmail.com I got spam from the same address again. I can't say the same about any other web-mail.
And I could sure use a Cherry 3000...
In a way, a scientific background can be a limitation. It forces you to always do the logical next step. Someone without a scientific background on the other hand, might come up with an idea thats totally ridiculous at first to any scientist, but thats revolutionary enough to be worth trying to implement anyway.
I quoted most of your post because I have a feeling it is going to moderated as flamebait... :^)
Now, seriously, scientific background can never be a limitation. Narrow mindness can, and I think that's what you are addressing, the perception that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you.
While it is true that someone with no scientific background can have revolutionary ideas, the same holds true for scientists. The advantage a scientist has resides in the fact that a good one can spot an unfeasible idea right away. I've worked with engine design for some years and I received a lot of suggestions for new ideas, many with patents and price tags attached. I don't remember receiving a single one worth investigation. And yes, I've had ideas that the chief engineers considered ridiculous (and I still believe they're damn good), but just because it was too different from what the industry is being doing for decades. And that's narrow mindness.
There's nothing wrong with the "next logical step", evolution works better than revolution most of the times.
On a more realistic level, I wonder how come nobody has yet come up with a popular VR file manager like the one show in Disclosure. That must be trivial for a game programmer.
This has been said before, but Katz still has not found the "1" key in his keyboard.
Impassionate diatribes? Except for "frequent use of mass destruction weapons" his/her point is very good. I would rather say "inexcusable occasional use of ...". Why should one assume that the weapon technology the U.S. has is in the right hands? That's pretty subjective, and that is the main point of the post you replied to. The rest may be offtopic, but not impassionate diatribes.
I don't like this.
I understand people getting enthusiastic facing the possibility of controlling hardware with their thoughts, but that implies the existence of hardware that can detect thoughts. And one may not have control on whether the hardware does so or not.The enthusiasm certainly comes from the assumption that the hardware input would be thought-controlled, but such a beast would be software-controlled, just like every piece of information hardware.
Picture a situation in which your company installs a very user-friendly thought interface for you to work. You will type and sweep a lot less, but what prevents your employer from receiving daily reports on what you've been thinking during the day? And so on...
Would we still have privacy?
You won't get flamed alone. IIRC, Windows 3.0 already had some sort of "magnifying lens" cursor.
A long time ago I thought of a package of 3 really boring games:
- Library simulator (where you play a librarian who is asked to fetch books).
- Home brewing simulation.
- Golf.
Incidentally, someone indeed did the last one!
The actuall language used doesn't really matter the ideas are the power of programming, ... the creativity. Porting it over to another language or platform is just simple mechanics.
Are you serious? Would you write a heat exchange simulator in Perl, or grep in FORTRAN?
Bjarne Stroustrup wrote something like "a computer language is not only the code in which we express what we want the machine to do, but also the framework in which we model our understanding of the problem". It's been a couple of months since I read this, but the general idea is along that line. Some problems are *so* obviously better modeled and solved in certain languages.
OTOH, maybe you mean that the better (clearer) your code is, the easier it will be to port it to another language. I agree with that. Brian Kernighan says that porting a program to another language is the "ultimate portability test", altough that doesn't mean he encourages porting per se.