Yet more evidence that information is in fact a quantifiable property. We're starting to see hints that information and energy are flip sides of the same coin.
I'm not just spewing. There are serious theoretical problems associated with how information "disappears" when it falls into a black hole. Fortunately, you get the information back again from Hawking radiation, as the hole converts mass into energy. From a theoretical standpoint it's really starting to look like "information == energy," or to put it more precisely, there is a specific equivalence between information and energy like the equivalence between matter and energy.
We've already got space == time, matter == energy, why not also information == energy? There are starting parallels between Shannon's information theory, and the theory of thermodynamics. There is some mysterious shit going on here.
Another boost to my pet theory of the universe: everything is equal to everything else, and we delude ourselves into perceiving imaginary distinctions between things.
This is a serious question. I could just ask Google but I'd like to see discussion on it.
What was the last exploitable problem in the Linux KERNEL? No need to mention the backdoor attempt from last week, we all know about that one. A) The last LOCAL exploit, and B) The last REMOTE exploit?
I have a vague recollection of some kind of ptrace() race condition that could get you root sometimes. As far as I know that's LONG been fixed. I seriously can't think of a single other thing.
That's the way corporations work; committees and boards of trustees don't have any kind of hive-morality, only a concern for their company's bottom line.
Unfortunately they have little choice in the matter. If the bottom line does not increase as fast as possible, the corporate shareholders will attempt to sue the board members into oblivion. Even if they wanted to take a "time out" from ruthlessly increasing their bottom line, they can't. The company would be wrested away from them, and they'd be left with NOTHING.
The fault lies not only with the corporate management, but with the sue-happy shareholders who insist that the corporations grow as fast as possible. All of America is at fault here. It's a cultural DEFECT.
if I needed to make a decision to base my business on a project where the main contributors have been shown to violate the GPL license I'd be exposing myself to a law suit.
But isn't that saying something extremely negative about free software proponents? You're saying that if something like that DID happen, then the free software copyright holders would jump out of the woodwork to start suing everyone who was infringing, knowingly or not.
And that's what pisses me off about this whole thing. The idea that free software is no different than anything else in this world, and that the authors of free software are just as greedy as hardcore capitalists. Suing people who acted in good faith? You could just cut your losses and be charitable to those who were vicitmized by someone else's blunder. What purpose would it serve to sue those people? It's childish, cruel, and selfish. "You should have known better and checked harder." I thought we weren't about that shit.
Now that I read the Apache license, I see that you have a point. I had assumed some things I shouldn't have assumed about the strictness (or lack thereof) of their license.
However I somehow doubt that JBoss is truly motivated in that way. If a company really wanted to steal their code, they could just take it without consideration toward the license, and make it closed. So yes, putting pressure on Apache would keep the "casual" copyright infringer from abusing the code, but anyone really set on it could probably get away with it. To me this smacks of law for the sake of lawyers.
Right. And I'm sure you'll point me to the long list of ways in which Apache licensed software has already been exploited? Let me guess, it's at www.apachecodethatsbeenrapedandpillaged.com.
This just goes to show that neither JBoss nor ASF are truly "open source" entities in the philosophical sense.
It is my opinion that, for open source organizations, the primary benefit of copyright is to prevent a third party from taking code, making it closed, and profitting from it. It's SOLE purpose should be to defend against capitalistic exploitation. Unless the JBoss people can convince me that Apache is maliciously and willfully trying to damage their project, I will count them among the SCO-like hordes.
One open project threatening another? The whole thing makes me sick. Shame on JBoss.
And yes, if it were my code, and another open project took it, I wouldn't care. No really, I WOULD NOT CARE. I thought this was about scratching the itch, not money, not ego, not fame or fortune.
This is actually a bad thing since IE's idiot customer base was actually still generating some decent revenue for the popup spammers.
My God, why can't people like you just shut up? Calling people idiots is not only extremely rude, but very counterproductive. Let's pretend for a moment that the Open Source movement speaks with a single voice (sometimes it does, but in general, it does not). Supposedly, the goal of this movement is to get the general public to understand the ideals behind Open Source and the reason for its existence. And perhaps, just perhaps, to get these people to USE Open Source software.
Now tell me, which of the following persuasive arguments do you think is more effective toward that end:
1. "Hi. Allow me to explain the benefits of an open development model. [cogent list of arguments for Open Source following]."
or...
2. "Hi. You use Microsoft software. You are clearly a fucking idiot who should be shot. You suck, and I hope your child is born with a serious birth defect."
Let me send you a hint, and I'll even pay the postage on it: people generally don't respond well to being called "idiots," "retards," "sheep," or any other such thing. They use software because it's there and it works (maybe not perfectly, but it does). I think we both agree that the world would be better with less Microsoft software in it. But your comments are not helping us toward that goal.
I was trying to find the Belkin stock ticker symbol, so I can see how far their stock has plummeted since this started. Alas, Belkin appears to be privately held.
I wasn't criticizing Expose, I was just saying that I personally don't care about that sort of functionality, however, I do appreciate some of the under-the-hood things Apple has changed for Panther. I was saying I like the new OS! To each his own, sir.
So, I don't own an Apple machine myself, but my girlfriend has a 17" Powerbook and my friend has a dual G5. Both of them upgraded to Panther in the last week.
My biggest complaint about X used to be that it's latent as hell. It just can't stand up to Linux with the preemptible kernel patches. You'd push the "Increase volume" key on the keyboard at it would lag for over a second before popping the volume icon. If you use the visualizer in iTunes and start messing around with other stuff it's choppy as hell. Basically, whatever application you are not currently using has ridiculous latency and choppiness. That particular peeve doesn't happen anymore.
The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with everything sitting on a Mach kernel I don't think MacOS X will ever achieve the low latency that Linux pulls off. Mach's cool but you pay a price.
They are also doing this thing called "prebinding" which I assume is equivalent to "prelinking" in the Linux world -- performing dynamic linking a single time and saving the intermediate results so that applications can launch faster. If you look through the installation logs for Panther you see that it includes a new dynamic linker and there are many log messages of the ilk: "Prebinding xxx application."
If you look at the process list in top or with ps you see that there are FAR fewer system processes than before. I'm not sure whether this is because they really aren't running, or if the OS is somehow hiding them (which would be very un-UNIX-like).
I don't personally give a shit about the new bells and whistles such as Expose. But the improvement to latencies and the general snappy feel are enough for me to justify a $130 price tag. The improvements are mainly under the hood but as a developer I really appreciate that (heh, and I don't even develop for Mac).
The difference here is that your TV remote is not sending any confidential information. HTTP requests often contain all kinds of secret info (in the form of POST requests). The analogy with the TV remote doesn't go far enough.
Imagine that that you are about to post a message on your private blog about some hot sex session you had a few nights ago (yeah, unlikely I know). As is the norm, the information will be transmitted in an HTTP POST request. This request is the one that happens to get rerouted to Belkin. Now Belkin knows all about your hot sex escapades.
Where I come from, this is known as wiretapping, eavesdropping, snooping, or something like that. It's highly fucking illegal and whoever at Belkin thought this was a wise idea should be clapped in irons. I'm seriously considering writing a letter to a law enforcement agency about this, I'm just not sure which one to pick!
I request that it route packets to and from a given IP address, and instead it routes them to/from another. That meets my definition of a defective router.
Not just defective, it's fucking CRIMINAL. Imagine that you about to send a HTTP POST request containing some extremely sensitive information to your private web site. The HTTP connection magically redirects to Belkin. Now you've sent your extremely confidential information to Belkin.
This is known as eavesdropping, wiretapping, computer crime, what have you. The people who did this should be thrown behind bars.
(And by the way, the question of whether it is wise to send confidential info via a HTTP POST is irrelevant. They are still snooping on secret traffic.)
And how exactly does this VPN scheme work in an environment where a user has one computer connected through a wireless base station and nothing else?
Simple, the WAP has the VPN server built into its firmware and uses NAT to make the VPN address appear to be the same as the hard line address. It's not that hard to have the user install the VPN client, since they already need to install the wireless driver in the first place.
All I was doing was describing an example of how I would implement a system using a VPN. That doesn't mean all VPN-based solutions necessarily have to be overly technical. It can all be hidden inside the wireless driver and access point. Point being, the cryptography is no longer fixed in the wireless protocol.
I love how everyone so confidently states "The parens are there to prevent a warning." Clearly none of you know anything at all about the C language.
The assignment operator is very low precedence, therefore without the parentheses around the assignment the entire subexpression to the left of the '=' operator will be treated as the lvalue, except that it's not a freaking valid lvalue. If you actuall TESTED THIS OUT to verify your (wrong) theory you would find that the code WON'T COMPILE AT ALL without those parens:
I'm not posting anonymously at this point since I already screwed up below, so there's not much point.
What I don't understand is how your company still has the check if it was "immediately donated to the Sisters of the Road Cafe?"
We still have the check MS sent to Chaney. What was donated to SotR was the $7100 purchase price, along with $2500 matched by Chaney. We encouraged MS to also contribute but they didn't.
Are you saying the guy who held the ebay auction donated the 7000.00 to Sisters of the Road Cafe...and your company still has the check?
As far as I know, he never sent the money to Chaney but donated it directly. I actually went down to SotR with a few other people later that day and got my face in the newspaper:-)
That whole deal sounds fishy to me, as I fail to see why anyone would pay 7000.00 for a check worth 500.00, with no guarantee at all that the person who held the Ebay auction would really donate the money to charity.
Mr. Chaney's name was well known, he is a consultant of some kind, and we didn't see any reason that he would risk destroying his professional reputation to get $7000.
It seems to me that if your company just wanted to be charitable, it would have been better just to pick out a charity and donate to it. At least that way you knew where the money would go AND been able to take it as a tax deduction.
We wanted to be charitable but let's not kid ourselves here, we got a lot of PR for a relatively low price. CNet was on the phone literally within seconds of the auction close. The reason we selected SotR for the donation is because one of the company cofounders already knew about that particular charity, and I assume he's made donations to them in the past. Whether or not it was tax deductible wasn't an issue. I don't think anyone was even thinking about that.
And as someone else already pointed out, Microsoft saved 500.00 bucks because the check was never cashed!!!
We couldn't have cashed it even if we wanted to since the check was never endorsed and it was made out to Michael Chaney, not us.
Ah, this all explains why Slashdot decided TO REPORT the fact that the Linux kernel almost got backdoored yesterday. Thanks for the fucking enlightenment.
As for why it's news worthy, it's news worthy because MS made this mistake BEFORE, in 1999, with the UNITED STATES Hotmail. Regardless of the fact that the company is Microsoft that is both hilarious and pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not just spewing. There are serious theoretical problems associated with how information "disappears" when it falls into a black hole. Fortunately, you get the information back again from Hawking radiation, as the hole converts mass into energy. From a theoretical standpoint it's really starting to look like "information == energy," or to put it more precisely, there is a specific equivalence between information and energy like the equivalence between matter and energy.
We've already got space == time, matter == energy, why not also information == energy? There are starting parallels between Shannon's information theory, and the theory of thermodynamics. There is some mysterious shit going on here.
Another boost to my pet theory of the universe: everything is equal to everything else, and we delude ourselves into perceiving imaginary distinctions between things.
What was the last exploitable problem in the Linux KERNEL? No need to mention the backdoor attempt from last week, we all know about that one. A) The last LOCAL exploit, and B) The last REMOTE exploit?
I have a vague recollection of some kind of ptrace() race condition that could get you root sometimes. As far as I know that's LONG been fixed. I seriously can't think of a single other thing.
Unless they plan on banning telemarketing altogether, which would make me extremely happy, this is one of the biggest bonehead ideas I've ever heard.
Unfortunately they have little choice in the matter. If the bottom line does not increase as fast as possible, the corporate shareholders will attempt to sue the board members into oblivion. Even if they wanted to take a "time out" from ruthlessly increasing their bottom line, they can't. The company would be wrested away from them, and they'd be left with NOTHING.
The fault lies not only with the corporate management, but with the sue-happy shareholders who insist that the corporations grow as fast as possible. All of America is at fault here. It's a cultural DEFECT.
But isn't that saying something extremely negative about free software proponents? You're saying that if something like that DID happen, then the free software copyright holders would jump out of the woodwork to start suing everyone who was infringing, knowingly or not.
And that's what pisses me off about this whole thing. The idea that free software is no different than anything else in this world, and that the authors of free software are just as greedy as hardcore capitalists. Suing people who acted in good faith? You could just cut your losses and be charitable to those who were vicitmized by someone else's blunder. What purpose would it serve to sue those people? It's childish, cruel, and selfish. "You should have known better and checked harder." I thought we weren't about that shit.
However I somehow doubt that JBoss is truly motivated in that way. If a company really wanted to steal their code, they could just take it without consideration toward the license, and make it closed. So yes, putting pressure on Apache would keep the "casual" copyright infringer from abusing the code, but anyone really set on it could probably get away with it. To me this smacks of law for the sake of lawyers.
I thought not.
It is my opinion that, for open source organizations, the primary benefit of copyright is to prevent a third party from taking code, making it closed, and profitting from it. It's SOLE purpose should be to defend against capitalistic exploitation. Unless the JBoss people can convince me that Apache is maliciously and willfully trying to damage their project, I will count them among the SCO-like hordes.
One open project threatening another? The whole thing makes me sick. Shame on JBoss.
And yes, if it were my code, and another open project took it, I wouldn't care. No really, I WOULD NOT CARE. I thought this was about scratching the itch, not money, not ego, not fame or fortune.
Implement the wheel.
I'll have you know, if your implementation appears similar to mine, you'll hear from my attorney.
My God, why can't people like you just shut up? Calling people idiots is not only extremely rude, but very counterproductive. Let's pretend for a moment that the Open Source movement speaks with a single voice (sometimes it does, but in general, it does not). Supposedly, the goal of this movement is to get the general public to understand the ideals behind Open Source and the reason for its existence. And perhaps, just perhaps, to get these people to USE Open Source software.
Now tell me, which of the following persuasive arguments do you think is more effective toward that end:
1. "Hi. Allow me to explain the benefits of an open development model. [cogent list of arguments for Open Source following]."
or...
2. "Hi. You use Microsoft software. You are clearly a fucking idiot who should be shot. You suck, and I hope your child is born with a serious birth defect."
Let me send you a hint, and I'll even pay the postage on it: people generally don't respond well to being called "idiots," "retards," "sheep," or any other such thing. They use software because it's there and it works (maybe not perfectly, but it does). I think we both agree that the world would be better with less Microsoft software in it. But your comments are not helping us toward that goal.
Kindly either shut up, or change your approach.
I cannot express how disappointed this makes me.
I wasn't criticizing Expose, I was just saying that I personally don't care about that sort of functionality, however, I do appreciate some of the under-the-hood things Apple has changed for Panther. I was saying I like the new OS! To each his own, sir.
My biggest complaint about X used to be that it's latent as hell. It just can't stand up to Linux with the preemptible kernel patches. You'd push the "Increase volume" key on the keyboard at it would lag for over a second before popping the volume icon. If you use the visualizer in iTunes and start messing around with other stuff it's choppy as hell. Basically, whatever application you are not currently using has ridiculous latency and choppiness. That particular peeve doesn't happen anymore.
The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with everything sitting on a Mach kernel I don't think MacOS X will ever achieve the low latency that Linux pulls off. Mach's cool but you pay a price.
They are also doing this thing called "prebinding" which I assume is equivalent to "prelinking" in the Linux world -- performing dynamic linking a single time and saving the intermediate results so that applications can launch faster. If you look through the installation logs for Panther you see that it includes a new dynamic linker and there are many log messages of the ilk: "Prebinding xxx application."
If you look at the process list in top or with ps you see that there are FAR fewer system processes than before. I'm not sure whether this is because they really aren't running, or if the OS is somehow hiding them (which would be very un-UNIX-like).
I don't personally give a shit about the new bells and whistles such as Expose. But the improvement to latencies and the general snappy feel are enough for me to justify a $130 price tag. The improvements are mainly under the hood but as a developer I really appreciate that (heh, and I don't even develop for Mac).
Customer: "Great! I'd like a cup of the soup please."
[Waiter takes out a hammer, thwaps customer on skull]
Customer: "WTF was that for?"
Waiter: "Sir, I'll stop thwapping you on the head as soon as you TELL me to stop."
Customer: "Why the hell would I have to TELL you to stop?"
[Waiter thwaps customer once more]
Customer: "GOD DAMMIT!"
Waiter: "Just say 'Stop,' sir, and this will all be over..."
Imagine that that you are about to post a message on your private blog about some hot sex session you had a few nights ago (yeah, unlikely I know). As is the norm, the information will be transmitted in an HTTP POST request. This request is the one that happens to get rerouted to Belkin. Now Belkin knows all about your hot sex escapades.
Where I come from, this is known as wiretapping, eavesdropping, snooping, or something like that. It's highly fucking illegal and whoever at Belkin thought this was a wise idea should be clapped in irons. I'm seriously considering writing a letter to a law enforcement agency about this, I'm just not sure which one to pick!
Not just defective, it's fucking CRIMINAL. Imagine that you about to send a HTTP POST request containing some extremely sensitive information to your private web site. The HTTP connection magically redirects to Belkin. Now you've sent your extremely confidential information to Belkin.
This is known as eavesdropping, wiretapping, computer crime, what have you. The people who did this should be thrown behind bars.
(And by the way, the question of whether it is wise to send confidential info via a HTTP POST is irrelevant. They are still snooping on secret traffic.)
1. Client initiates a connection to www.my-private-site.org on HTTP port.
2. Client is silently redirected to Belkin's site.
3. Unknowing client sends the HTTP request, a POST request which contains some sensitive information.
4. Belkin has now hijacked a connection and received sensitive information that was not intended to go to Belkin.
Logically the thing to do is prosecute Belkin under federal wiretapping and computer crime laws.
Simple, the WAP has the VPN server built into its firmware and uses NAT to make the VPN address appear to be the same as the hard line address. It's not that hard to have the user install the VPN client, since they already need to install the wireless driver in the first place.
All I was doing was describing an example of how I would implement a system using a VPN. That doesn't mean all VPN-based solutions necessarily have to be overly technical. It can all be hidden inside the wireless driver and access point. Point being, the cryptography is no longer fixed in the wireless protocol.
At first I thought this was an article about the moon ejecting huge LUNAR FLARES at Earth. Whew.
The assignment operator is very low precedence, therefore without the parentheses around the assignment the entire subexpression to the left of the '=' operator will be treated as the lvalue, except that it's not a freaking valid lvalue. If you actuall TESTED THIS OUT to verify your (wrong) theory you would find that the code WON'T COMPILE AT ALL without those parens:
foo.c:6: invalid lvalue in assignment
What I don't understand is how your company still has the check if it was "immediately donated to the Sisters of the Road Cafe?"
We still have the check MS sent to Chaney. What was donated to SotR was the $7100 purchase price, along with $2500 matched by Chaney. We encouraged MS to also contribute but they didn't.
Are you saying the guy who held the ebay auction donated the 7000.00 to Sisters of the Road Cafe...and your company still has the check?
As far as I know, he never sent the money to Chaney but donated it directly. I actually went down to SotR with a few other people later that day and got my face in the newspaper :-)
That whole deal sounds fishy to me, as I fail to see why anyone would pay 7000.00 for a check worth 500.00, with no guarantee at all that the person who held the Ebay auction would really donate the money to charity.
Mr. Chaney's name was well known, he is a consultant of some kind, and we didn't see any reason that he would risk destroying his professional reputation to get $7000.
It seems to me that if your company just wanted to be charitable, it would have been better just to pick out a charity and donate to it. At least that way you knew where the money would go AND been able to take it as a tax deduction.
We wanted to be charitable but let's not kid ourselves here, we got a lot of PR for a relatively low price. CNet was on the phone literally within seconds of the auction close. The reason we selected SotR for the donation is because one of the company cofounders already knew about that particular charity, and I assume he's made donations to them in the past. Whether or not it was tax deductible wasn't an issue. I don't think anyone was even thinking about that.
And as someone else already pointed out, Microsoft saved 500.00 bucks because the check was never cashed!!!
We couldn't have cashed it even if we wanted to since the check was never endorsed and it was made out to Michael Chaney, not us.
As for why it's news worthy, it's news worthy because MS made this mistake BEFORE, in 1999, with the UNITED STATES Hotmail. Regardless of the fact that the company is Microsoft that is both hilarious and pathetic.
It would never stick, not even in today's climate. The judge would have to be evil and incompetent to allow someone to even go to trial for that.
Our current batch of candidates may be a little dim when it comes to technology, but not ALL hope is lost. It happened once, and it can happen again.
I dunno, was that true back in 1999 though? It's already ancient history by now.