Back up, most unix-ish C code can be compiled on any vaguely unix-like system with very little modification. I'd call that platform independence, wouldn't you?
You do realize that C doesn't include a standard GUI API, and that many programs require GUIs these days?
Spam is a social exploit (people wasting other people's time and resources in an attempt to gain profit) made practical by a technical problem (lack of authentication in email protocols).
I think Linux has won the performance battle, but what about the stability battle? You need to win both to win the war.
I imagine a good solution to this might be the cluster approach, where you replace your Sun megalith with a large number of vanilla x86 boxes connected via a high speed network. This allows you to use commodity parts, but also to swap out failed components without taking down the system... the difference is you now swap out an entire PC at a time instead of just a SIMM. This way you get the reliability of the Sun for the price of N cheap PCs.
When did you try it? I doubt it'd be very impressive on todays hardware
Given that BeOS code ran fast on (relatively) slow hardware, it stands to reason that it would run like a bat out of hell on modern pumped-up hardware. (Given proper drivers, of course... and there's the rub)
[By sharing copyrighted material] you're not going to help anyone but Rosen and her cronies by downloading and sharing more media.
I think what's actually more likely is that current copyright law will go the way of Prohibition -- by the time they get around to "really cracking down", so many people will be used to doing it that there will be a public outcry and the laws will be changed to accomodate the new reality.
Let's face it, restricting the exchange of files on the Internet is just about as smart and practical as restricting the swimming of fish in the ocean.
For the stuff out of print, I can't buy it, so no loss to the industry.
If we assume that you have only so many hours in a month that you can devote listening to music, then it follows that if you are spending your listening time listening to free out-of-print music, you'll be less motivated to investigate and buy the new music the RIAA is selling. So they lose income that they would otherwise have got from you.
(not that their hypothetical loss of income bothers me in the least, of course -- but this would explain why the RIAA doesn't want people to have easy access to out-of-print music)
The problem is that many (most?) corporations allow Windows machines to run inside their firewall. Which means that when Joe Pointyhair brings his infected laptop to work, the virus is then loose behind the firewall and able to wreak havoc via the internal LAN.
Well, if we're going to be anal about it, the primary definition of the word "company" is: "A group of persons". So a non-commercial company is not an oxymoron.
Roughly: A program's stack is where it keeps its temporary information, a sort of "scratch pad" if you will. Stack smashing is when the program has a bug that causes it to "scribble outside the lines", such that it overwrites info in its scratch pad in an unexpected way.
A common bug in programs is that when they are receiving input (from the disk, from the keyboard, but most relevantly, from the Internet), they forget to make sure that they have enough room to "write down" the input they are receiving, and so they end up writing right past the end of their scratch area and over other stuff. Typically, this will cause the program to malfunction and/or crash soon afterwards.... BUT:
Years ago, crafty nasty little hax0rs realized they could use this type of bug to gain control of a computer remotely via the Internet. What they do is they find a computer running a program that has this sort of bug, and then send it input that is too big for the program's buffer, and contains a little program. The buggy program duly writes the input onto its stack, munging some of its other data -- and the hacker has formed the input "just so", so that the data it overwrites is the data governing what the computer will do next. So instead of just crashing, the program then executes the hacker's program. The program then usually "unlocks the front door" of the computer to the hacker, allowing the hacker to control the computer by remote.
Making the stack non-executable means the the computer doesn't allow itself to execute any code that is located in the stack. This means that the hacker can upload his evil program, but he can't trick the computer into running it.
Why this feature hasn't been standard in all OS's since the invention of the MMU, I cannot fathom.
could it be a good idea to start thinking about DRM in free video formats
You understand that DRM and open source don't mix? If you put DRM in an open source video codec, it will be about 5 minutes before someone recompiles the codec to ignore the DRM "rules".
Like it or not, 'DVD Jon' and his work, DeCSS, do aid pirates.
So do web sites, FTP, and email. Shall we make it illegal to write web browsers too?
many people do use it to break the encryption scheme so they can rip and distribute movies. Is this necessarily what we want? If movie companies don't get paid for there work they'll stop making movies, blahda blahda
I'd much rather live in a world with fewer movies than in a world where Hollywood is allowed to dictate what programs I can write or use on my own computer.
Additionally, while this is not a popular idea around here, isn't it the companies right to decide that they only want their disks to play on windows systems?
Companies have every right to decide what is done with their property. However, once they sell a disk to me, it becomes my property, and at that point it should be up to me (and only me) how I use it.
I don't see anyone saying that people should be allowed to hack popular windows only games to run on liniux, so why should movies be different?
There is no argument about that because everybody agrees that it should be allowed. Products such as WineX and VMWare allow you to play windows-only games under Linux.
What is a problem (perhaps hypothetically) is linking to the content of a page without retaining the interface that identifies it with the original owner. As an example, what if I happened to have a perl script that showed me all of my favorite web comics whenever they were updated, but without the ads that keep those sites going? What if I made that script open to the public, and put my own ads on it instead?
That is a problem, but it is a problem that can and should be solved by technical, not legal means. When someone puts a file onto their web server with no password, they are essentially saying to the world, "here is a file for you to download". They shouldn't be surprised, then, when people DO download it, from various contexts. If they wanted people to only download it from the context of their own web page, there are many technical ways to implement that: dynamically generated URLs, passwords, embed the entire page into a single image, etc. People who call out the lawyers are either too lazy or too unimaginative to solve the problem on their own, and would rather destroy the entire structure of the web through legal means, than use the web the way it was intended to be used.
There could be ways to verify the files you downloaded from the p2p net. In the simplest scenario, you could contact the 'original' web server to get an md5 checksum for the files.
Someone please integrate the NetHack game engine with the Quake rendering engine. Then the "full 3d zoomable interface" mentioned at the end of the first article will be realized!:^)
J.R.R. Tolkien's family doesn't have the right to own copyright on the Lord of the Ring's. Why? Why should his work become public domain? What gives you the right to it?
Without a public domain, Lord of the Rings would never have been seen by the public. Tolkien would have been sued by the descendants of the creators of the mythology he drew its elements from, and forced to remove it from the market.
We've never truly seen Google behaving in an aggressive, competitive way
It's ironic that creating a superior product at a low price (free, in this case) is no longer considered "competitive behaviour". These days, you aren't considered "competitive" unless you are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour (customer lock-in, standards pollution, collusion, etc).
You guys are missing the fact that this is a DEMO, not a production vehicle. It's meant to show what is possible, not to be driven by actual human beings. Rest assured that the production models will be a bit more traditional, at least for a few years...
Not necessarily all that stupid... as I understand it, one of the advantages of an electric motor over a gas engine is that the electric motor can accelerate quickly from a stop. So for drag racing over short distances, you'll be all set...
Slashdot Mirror
Ja, Herr trmj. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Your papers, please?
You do realize that C doesn't include a standard GUI API, and that many programs require GUIs these days?
Yeah, like the US Patent Office is really choosy about what they'll accept in the way of patents.
Everybody happy now?
win the war.
I imagine a good solution to this might be the cluster approach, where you replace your Sun megalith with a large number of vanilla x86 boxes connected via a high speed network. This allows you to use commodity parts, but also to swap out failed components without taking down the system... the difference is you now swap out an entire PC at a time instead of just a SIMM. This way you get the reliability of the Sun for the price of N cheap PCs.
Why stop there? Port it back to the AT&T Hobbit chip!!
Given that BeOS code ran fast on (relatively) slow hardware, it stands to reason that it would run like a bat out of hell on modern pumped-up hardware. (Given proper drivers, of course... and there's the rub)
dead in the water
I love OS/X as much as anyone, but I just haven't had any luck getting it to run well on my P2/400...
Pedantic boy to the rescue: the word you are looking for is penes.
I think what's actually more likely is that current copyright law will go the way of Prohibition -- by the time they get around to "really cracking down", so many people will be used to doing it that there will be a public outcry and the laws will be changed to accomodate the new reality.
Let's face it, restricting the exchange of files on the Internet is just about as smart and practical as restricting the swimming of fish in the ocean.
If we assume that you have only so many hours in a month that you can devote listening to music, then it follows that if you are spending your listening time listening to free out-of-print music, you'll be less motivated to investigate and buy the new music the RIAA is selling. So they lose income that they would otherwise have got from you.
(not that their hypothetical loss of income bothers me in the least, of course -- but this would explain why the RIAA doesn't want people to have easy access to out-of-print music)
The problem is that many (most?) corporations allow Windows machines to run inside their firewall. Which means that when Joe Pointyhair brings his infected laptop to work, the virus is then loose behind the firewall and able to wreak havoc via the internal LAN.
Well, if we're going to be anal about it, the primary definition of the word "company" is: "A group of persons". So a non-commercial company is not an oxymoron.
A common bug in programs is that when they are receiving input (from the disk, from the keyboard, but most relevantly, from the Internet), they forget to make sure that they have enough room to "write down" the input they are receiving, and so they end up writing right past the end of their scratch area and over other stuff. Typically, this will cause the program to malfunction and/or crash soon afterwards.... BUT:
Years ago, crafty nasty little hax0rs realized they could use this type of bug to gain control of a computer remotely via the Internet. What they do is they find a computer running a program that has this sort of bug, and then send it input that is too big for the program's buffer, and contains a little program. The buggy program duly writes the input onto its stack, munging some of its other data -- and the hacker has formed the input "just so", so that the data it overwrites is the data governing what the computer will do next. So instead of just crashing, the program then executes the hacker's program. The program then usually "unlocks the front door" of the computer to the hacker, allowing the hacker to control the computer by remote.
Making the stack non-executable means the the computer doesn't allow itself to execute any code that is located in the stack. This means that the hacker can upload his evil program, but he can't trick the computer into running it.
Why this feature hasn't been standard in all OS's since the invention of the MMU, I cannot fathom.
You understand that DRM and open source don't mix? If you put DRM in an open source video codec, it will be about 5 minutes before someone recompiles the codec to ignore the DRM "rules".
A couple of years? Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to see the Windows source code available for download on the p2p networks by next month...
So do web sites, FTP, and email. Shall we make it illegal to write web browsers too?
many people do use it to break the encryption scheme so they can rip and distribute movies. Is this necessarily what we want? If movie companies don't get paid for there work they'll stop making movies, blahda blahda
I'd much rather live in a world with fewer movies than in a world where Hollywood is allowed to dictate what programs I can write or use on my own computer.
Additionally, while this is not a popular idea around here, isn't it the companies right to decide that they only want their disks to play on windows systems?
Companies have every right to decide what is done with their property. However, once they sell a disk to me, it becomes my property, and at that point it should be up to me (and only me) how I use it.
I don't see anyone saying that people should be allowed to hack popular windows only games to run on liniux, so why should movies be different?
There is no argument about that because everybody agrees that it should be allowed. Products such as WineX and VMWare allow you to play windows-only games under Linux.
That is a problem, but it is a problem that can and should be solved by technical, not legal means. When someone puts a file onto their web server with no password, they are essentially saying to the world, "here is a file for you to download". They shouldn't be surprised, then, when people DO download it, from various contexts. If they wanted people to only download it from the context of their own web page, there are many technical ways to implement that: dynamically generated URLs, passwords, embed the entire page into a single image, etc. People who call out the lawyers are either too lazy or too unimaginative to solve the problem on their own, and would rather destroy the entire structure of the web through legal means, than use the web the way it was intended to be used.
There could be ways to verify the files you downloaded from the p2p net. In the simplest scenario, you could contact the 'original' web server to get an md5 checksum for the files.
Someone please integrate the NetHack game engine with the Quake rendering engine. Then the "full 3d zoomable interface" mentioned at the end of the first article will be realized! :^)
Actually, Google is profitable. Please get your facts straight before accusing other people of spouting crap.
Without a public domain, Lord of the Rings would never have been seen by the public. Tolkien would have been sued by the descendants of the creators of the mythology he drew its elements from, and forced to remove it from the market.
It's ironic that creating a superior product at a low price (free, in this case) is no longer considered "competitive behaviour". These days, you aren't considered "competitive" unless you are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour (customer lock-in, standards pollution, collusion, etc).
You guys are missing the fact that this is a DEMO, not a production vehicle. It's meant to show what is possible, not to be driven by actual human beings. Rest assured that the production models will be a bit more traditional, at least for a few years...
Not necessarily all that stupid... as I understand it, one of the advantages of an electric motor over a gas engine is that the electric motor can accelerate quickly from a stop. So for drag racing over short distances, you'll be all set...