User: Vapula

Re:This isn't really about MySQL

On: Widenius Warns Against MySQL Falling Into Oracle's Hands

I don't think that MySQL has any importance... Now that the split has been announced for some time and blocked by the EU, Sun is falling down...

So, either the merge completes and SUN survives or the merge stop and SUN disappear...

In the first option, some project may have to leave SUN (GPL project may always fork) and some will be saved... In the second option, all project will become homeless...

I think that the biggest issue is from IBM and Microsoft...

IBM zSerie + zOS + DB2
MS windows + MS SQL server (+IIS)
SUN + Oracle

We have 3 different platforms... Right now, Oracle is the preferred DB over DB2 and MS SQL... But they don't provide end to end support. If Oracle gets SUN (which is the preferred platform for Oracle), they'll be able to sell "black boxes" with all inside : Hardware (SUN), OS (Solaris), DB (Oracle), Framework (J2EE + Oracle PL/SQL)... this would be a big hurt to MS business (they would get a little more "out of the server room") and to IBM... Instead of having 2 actors, we'd have 3... better for the concurrence and for the consumers... But IBM and MS lobbying is quite powerful

MySQL will live anyway... Maybe it'll have a name change if a fork is needed, but it won't disappear...

Pirated or Free ?

On: BSA Says 41% of Software On Personal Computers Is Pirated

Now that there are free alternatives likes OpenOffice, Gimp, Audacity, Blender, ... and that every personnal PC comes with Windows preinstalled and prelicenced, is it really 42% pirated or 42% "not bought from Microsoft and other" ?

Re:My first thought

On: Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement

This is clearly after the first MUD (dikuMUD)... prior art ?

Prior Art : MUD, BBS Doors, ... ?

On: Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement

I didn't check the date of the pattent, but it may be interresting to check if MUD preclude this patent... Another kind of program that may preclude is some BBS doors and some programs that may have existed during the Spectrum/Commodore/Amstrad/... time

Re:Now patched?

On: Mac OS X Users Vulnerable To Major Java Flaw

The bug affect Java up to 1.6.10... And current J2SE is 1.6.13... Which means that there are 3 updates since that bug has been found...

If you updated your JVM, you should be safe from that issue... One way to check it is to run "java -version" you'll get a line with the current Java Version

What if Lessig did want the notice

On: Warner Music Forces Lessig Presentation Offline

His presentation may be willingfully at the fringe between Fair Use and Copyright violation.
He may want to have this case brought to court and use the opportunity to show his whole presentation to the court in order to educate the judges.

Re:My PSP is hacked.

On: Piracy and the PSP

Well, I modchipped my PS2, this allowed me to use HDLoader+HDD (I know, I could also use Independance Exploit), SMS (to watch DivX on the TV) but I still own more ORIGINAL games than I've time to play with. (for example, I'm still in middle of vol2 of .HACK and already own the 4 vol)

I got a flashed PSP, bought 2 UMD... And it is now taking the dust... because I don't find games that are interresting enough...

I got a Wii, basically for the Wii Fit... I installed the Homebrew Channel and don't plan to upgrade the firmware... I own 4 original Wii games (well, including Wii Play/Wii Sport) but I never played them... Only using Wii Fit...

I like to have the hardware open... It's not a matter of pirating, it's a matter of principle !!!

I found great games on the PS2 (I mean, great games that I didn't find on the PC), Wii has it unique gameplay and WiiFit... But I didn't find anything worth for the PSP... Only things I found of interrest is Midway classics, old arcade games !!!

XSLT is the key

On: Apple Sued Over iPhone Browser

Easy prior art :
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3c.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">

</xsl:stylesheet>

XSLT clearly existed in 1999... And if you use an empty stylesheet, you get a (very) simplified document which only contains the text nodes, without any HTML (or other) tags...

That can easily be displayed on text-only devices.

If you add a

<xsl:template select="a">
    <xsl:copy-of select="." />
</xsl:template>

The links are preserved (but are the only kind of formatting preserved)... That's basic XSLT and I guess that many teachers who give XML lessons have used similar examples...

Long Term evolution...

On: Blizzard Introduces One-Time Password Devices For WoW

Phase 1 : OTP is a plus that you may buy
Phase 2 : A free OTPtoken with each WoLK extension sold
Phase 3 : A collector edition with WoW+BC+WoLK+token
Phase 4 : Mandatory token for all accounts

That way, they cut the grass under the feet of the chinese farmers who sell ready to play accounts and to the reselling of accounts on E-Bay and such...

Re:Will surely only delay the h4x0rz?

On: Blizzard Introduces One-Time Password Devices For WoW

No, it'll be an OTP token, once the password has been used, it can't be anymore...

and there will be no physical connexion with the computer,only a small LCD display which will show a 6-digit number...

Re:Wish i could see what you see..

On: Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War

I stopped using the Grammar Checker since the day it said me that there was a problem with my name...

It told me that there was an error because my surname was singular and my name was plural !!!

Spell checkers can sometimes spot typos, Grammar checkers make many false alerts (even more when you use long sentences).

Maybe it's not so terrible in English than in French, after all, french is a rather complicated langage...

Keep it simple

On: PhD Research On Software Design Principles?

Well, from my own experience (which is in no way related to huge programs),and from common sense, I'd say

1) Keep it simple.
No need for convoluted algorithms that noone can understand or for complex class hierarchy. If it can't be easily understood and need complex documentation, it's going to fail in the long term
2) Don't over-feature it.
Useless features takes time to be programmed and are source of bugs which could easily have been avoided by NOT implementing these...
3) Functions/méthods/procedures should be understandable
If you need lots of comments and documentation to understand what a procedure do, it's time to rethink it. Meaningful function name, consistent coding (loop index using the same variable set in the same order everywhere, consistent indentation, ...)
4) Use the proper tool/langage
Programming a text-parser from scratch in C/C++/... can be "fun" but doing it using Lex/Yacc is much more efficient, less prone to errors and easier to maintain. Using C/C++ for web coding when a simple PHP script could do the same is looking for trouble, ...
5) Avoid marginal or zealot langages
If can be cool to program in WinDev, Forth, Lisp, ... but these langages are definitively not mainstream. It's better to concentrate on stable well known langages and avoid those with too much zealotery behind them (like .NET, Python, ...)
Langages like C/C++/Java/PHP can solve most of the problems, share a common syntax and are not rewrotten every second year.
6) beware of OOP
Object Oriented programming often allows reusing the same components again and again... But this has a cost : each class is like a new library added to the program, with it's API and so on...
Newcomers to the projects could easily need to have to study half of the code to make a minor change (or to read tons of documentation).
Inheritance (and worse, multiple inheritance) can easily make the program hard to understand and bring cascades of bugs if the base class has to be changed.

PS2's EyeToy anyone ?

On: Taking the Wii Controller to the Next Level

What this is doing is basically the same than the PS2 EyeToy... Maybe with a better accuracy (but, well, the hardware is more recent).

I wonder What Sony will think about that... I guess their patent lawyers will be ready to jump on the case...

For Information, EyeToy Antigrav tracks
- both arms for character's arms movements
- head movements for the character direction change
- jump/duck to make the character do the same things...

That exists in Guild Wars for ages

On: World of Warcraft Achievement System Rumored

In Guild Wars, you already have that system for a long time...
- Cartographer titles (exploring more than X% of the territory)
- Survivor title (reaching level 20 without dying)
- Lucky/Unlucky (related to random events like lottery or keeping/losing lockpick kits)
- Protector (having done all the "cooperative missions" (like the instances) with their bonus
- Drunk title (for being drunk more than x minutes)
and so on...

There are also meta-titles (like for having all protector titles), PvP titles, ...

When you're in a city, you may display one of these title along with your name.

From 3" to 3"1/2

On: Retrieving Data From Old Amstrad Floppies?

Well, to recover the data from your amstrad disks, you'll either need to put a 3" disk drive on a PC or to have an Amstrad 664/6128 or a Spectrum+3

I'd recommend the latter solution as you'd probably have to rip an Amstrad/Spectrum to get that disk drive anyway...

Check that the drive is working OK. When I bought my Spectrum +3 on E-Bay, all was fine except for the disk drive...

The drive belt had to be replaced. You may find some brand new belt at "thesinclairshop" (also on E-Bay + has it's web site) or find some compatible belt. From various forums, it appears to be a very common problem.

To replace the belt, you won't need special tools, standard screwdrivers are all what you'll need... And lots of patience. Just be careful to not lose the Write-protect switch pin...

Then, you'll need to connect a 3"1/2 drive to the amstrad/spectrum. Here, you'll have a second problem. One of the pins used to have a READY signal and now have a DISC PRESENT signal (or the opposite ?). Some floppy drives will be unusable, other will need to change a jumper... The fun part is that now, these jumpers are SMD jumpers SOLDERED to the floppy control board...

You'll have to make your own floppy cable too ad you'll need to force the level of the "density select" pin (Amstrad only knows Double Density and not High Density), the side select pin (some use a switch to be able to use both sides of the floppy) and to be sure that you've the right wiring order.

From now, you'll be able to format the 3"1/2 disks in Amstrad format, copy the 3" disk to the 3"1/2 and use some tools to extract the .DSK file from the 3"1/2 disk on your PC.

You may also use tools that allows to write to FAT floppies on the amstrad... your choice... Lots of other messages here already told about these tools so I won't repeat them.

Re:Competition laws

On: eBay Australia Makes PayPal Mandatory

In Europe, I think the "forced bound sale" prohibition could also be used...

They sell two services : EBay (sellers have fees to list items + fee on the money amount) and Paypal (where you've a fee whenever you get some money). Binding them would be quite illegal AFAIK...

As a seller, I NEVER propose PayPal, I got burned once with the extra costs and Banking in Belgium is very easy (net-banking, self-banikng, phone-banking, ...) I guess they are pushing their "monopoly" a little too far...

Re: No Script

On: Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost

Except that Mozilla relies on HTML, CSS, XUL and JavaScript for it's whole user interface, for it's extension system, ...

So, even with NoScript which stops the webside JS, there is still tons of JS to execute...

Re:This just in...

On: Hostile ta Vista, Baby

I already had the reverse situation :
I had bought a second hand laptop with nothing on it's hard drive. I first stuck a Linux DVD in it's drive, it booted up, detected all my hardware (Sound Card, Wifi, Network, Video) and installed all relevant drivers (my Linux istribution includes Nvidia proprietary drivers).

Then, I went to install Windows XP... and the nightmare began...

1) HDD are SATA, Windows didn't see them... And the only way to feed them to the windows installer was a floppydrive... inexistent on my laptop
After more than a day busy searching on the web how to include the drivers on an install CD, I managed to do it... Basically, you need
- one software to extract the Windows install boot image
- copy all the files from your XP CD to the disk drive, remove the read-only
- compress the driver files (XYZ.SYS -> XYZ.SY_)
- put the drivers in the CD tree
- edit 3-4 files from the install system to say that Windows need to try these drivers at the textmode phase, what files are making the driver and that these drivers need to be copied to the hard drive
- write a new install CD
2) Network card and Wifi were not recognized. I needed to download them on my other computer and use some USB key to move hem on the laptop. (no way to download them directly from the laptop as it had no connectivity at all)
3) Needed to download nVidia drivers to have an improved graphic resolution (and 3D acceleration). Please note that ALL Linux distribution do have non-accelerated nVidia drivers (you only need the proprietary one if you want OpenGL)
4) Tried to install sound card... Windows told me that it was impossible... After some search on internet, it looks like you have to install the SP2 before these drivers will be able to work.

Basically, if I only had the laptop, I'd have been plainly unable to install Windows XP. Same if I didn't have some computer literacy...

An average user would *NOT* have been able to install windows at all...

Re:How does that work?

On: Microsoft Under Third EU Investigation for OOXML

Their way of "gaming the voting" is called bribery... and, as far as I know, it's a criminal offense in most countries (including USA and most european countries).

So, basically, they are criminal (it's not about anti-trust, patent violation or other business-related misdeed anymore but about something that would lead you to prison in most democratic countries).

The reason why they care so much about getting OOXML an ISO standard is quite easy to understand :

Now that there is a document standard defined in ISO, many governments (and school, companies, ...) will be or feel compelled to switch to that standard (with a phase in period). If OOXML don't get the ISO certification, it means that the lock-in will disappear. In other word, the monopoly over Office application would be dead and Microsoft will have to follow the market laws (which means lower prices, no more worldwide version change every second year, and lots of other compatible applications available).

To go further, if they lose their Office monopoly, their OS monopoly would also be in a bad condition. Right now, companies have to buy MS Windows to be able to run MS Office... Should Office application be available with other (cheaper) OS, companies would be able to switch away from MS windows... At least, every computer which is only used for Office application, Java application (no wonder MS tried to kill JAVA), Web applications (plain HTML, DHTML or AJAX) and other cross-platform programs.

>>> "I'd be much more impressed with EU anti-trust efforts if they weren't pretty much aimed at non-EU companies."
Well, if the US had been caring more about trust problems creating by US companies, EU would not have to care so much about US companies... US courts have found Microsoft guilty of misusing their monopoly... But the reactions were more a slap on the wrist than something that would stop the infringement.

Re:Easy Answer

On: Where Linux Gained Ground in 2007

1) running Windows games on Linux
I've personnal experience of playing GuildWars flawlessly under Linux using Cedega. Cedega also supports World of Warcraft and other games making it probably much better than Wine (well, I should check on this one, lots of progress have been done) and CrossOver Office (which wasn't meant for games in the first place)

About Linux commercial games, you forgot about NeverWinterNights, and some promising products like Planeshift. And the upcoming "project Apricot" (Blender Foundation and CrystalSpace).

2) Audio
Very few sound engineers rely on only ONE program. Most of the time, they switch from one to another depending on the task they've to do. Don't forget that SAE is behind Ardour... They would not lose their time and money with it if it was useless...

3) compatibility
Linux rely on some standard components like openGL, X11 and the kernel. If you want to distribute some closed source binary, you may statically link those libraries which may be a problem.
Source distribution don't have many problems thanks to the autoconf and automake.
Did you already try to run some old Windows 3.1 softwares on Windows XP or Vista ? Often, Windows 98 applications don't run under Windows 2000 or XP.

4) ESD, aRTS, JACK,...
Well, ESD was GNOME, aRTS was KDE and JACK was for Realtime with low latency... You forgot about OSS and ALSA, GNOME/KDE and lots of other similar duplicate efforts.
GNU/Linux is also about choice... something lots of people have forgotten since the old ages...
COMMAND.COM or 4DOS.COM ?
Sound Blaster or GUS (now, most of the time, it's the onboard sound card)
EMM386 or QEMM386 ?

If you're "computer illiterate", you don't mind about what's installed and go with what the system install (aRTS, ESD, what are those things ?)
If you know what you're doing, well, you will choose the one which suits the best your needs...

I agree that there is still lots of place for improvement, but when I look back to the old time of Linux 0.99pl10, yggdrasil (CDROM) or SLS/Slockware/MCC (floppy) installs, the X11 Config file to build by hand (with a calculator and the specs of your monitor), very basic keyboard support (US qwerty, FR azerty and DE qwertzu, nothing more),... the way behind is much bigger than the way ahead...

Lately, I had to install a brand new computer in dual-boot Windows/Linux. Linux didn't need any extra driver but Windows needed lots of extra drivers (Video, sound, network,...). Security updates were also much faster to install under linux (and they included lots of apps, unlike Windows)... So, unless you need some specific software or plan to use the computer for gaming, Linux is going to become a better choice than Windows... Truly PnP !!!

Old foes may come to help...

On: Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic

Blizzard, which has already been pointed out as "bad" for things like their actions against Bnetd (Battle.net "emulation" server) could come to help here...

As far as I know (it may have changed since then), their World of Warcraft client updater uses Bittorrent to download the big updates... and WoW weights several million people around the world...

By banning Bit Torrent, they will prevent people from updating their WoW client and to connect to the game itself... And blizzard has the $$$ to weight in the balance and make Bitorrent restored...

Re:no alternative

On: Alternatives To Adobe's Creative Suite?

$2500 is about 1 month 1/2 of salary for me...
I guess I'll stay with TheGimp...

Some Prior Art... from Fidonet

On: Microsoft Deems Emotiflags Patent-Worthy

Long ago, before I got my first E-Mail address, I used to have a FidoNet address (2:293/32--.-- (last digits removed)).

This was a computer mailing system including EchoMail (quite similar to Usenet Newsgroups) and NetMail (quite similar to E-Mail). BBS used to phone each other every night to exchange the mail packets.

Several Fidonet Mail reader were able to use the "MOOD:" header, an header whose use was to tell the mood of the writer of the message... All headers were (if I remind well) lines beginning with 0x01 then the header name, ":" then the content (origin address, subject, ... like our E-Mail headers).

This emotiflag is nothing more than the MOOD header there used to be on Fidonet... I live in Europe but if someone wants to submit that as Prior Art, I know for sure that the "Terminate v4.0" Terminal + Point system (system to get and read Fidonet mail for end-users) under MS-DOS did manage these MOOD header (I don't know for the other Fidonet readers)

Is Microsoft afraid of Open Source Patents ?

On: Red Hat Rejects Microsoft Patent Deal Overtures

Several companies, including IBM, Novell and RedHat, made a patent pool with a few very well selected patents whose aim is to protect key opensource projects against patents attacks.
Some of these patents would cover part of .NET and other MS technologies. Projects protecteds by the patent pool include the kernel, OpenOffice and MONO (the open source .NET system).

Maybe Microsoft is trying to make deals with the companies around that patent pool so they could *NOT* sue him should Microsoft make an attack on one of the protected projects... Defangs those who protect the key projects then sur the projects for patent infringement...

I should get back to my Linux France Mag issue explaining that patent pool to get more info...

A job you like is the most important

On: Choosing Your Next Programming Job — Perl Or .NET?

Your first priority is that you should like your work... If going to work is like going to hell everyday, then it's time to look for another job...

Don't forget that what is the most important is YOU and not your job... Your job is going to take nearly 1/4th of your total time, which is nearly as much as your sleep and more than any other thing you'll do...

In the long term, I'm not sure that Microsoft technologies are such an asset... Because they are everchanging... A few years ago, you'd have to be an MFC wizard, now it's .NET, in a few year, .NET will be obsolete and it'll be another Microsoft technology. On the other side, you've PERL which has evolved but remained basically PERL...

There are a few "stable" technology, which stayed after many years... C, PERL, PHP, JAVA,... And some whose future is unknown as they are mostly used by Zealots (Python, Pike,...). Old school VB was such a stable technology, until Microsoft decided to wipe it for VB.NET...

You've the choice between a job where you'll be someone, you'll have your own projects, your colleagues will probably become friends, and a job where you'll be a number in an inhuman environment...