From the site: It is open-source (under the well know GPL) and available for non-commercial use. If you need a commercial license please email...
Ok, so someone enlighten me: Can a GPL'd program be released for non-commercial use with a separate license for commercial use, or does the GPL pretty much cover all use of the code? I checked the GPL FAQ, and the only case that comes close says that the license under which you received the code is the license that controls how you use the code. But that doesn't really cover the case where "This code is GPL for non-commercial use." Does the GPL permit that?
but it can never be explained in a way that speaks to my inner geek.
Let me rise to the challenge (and probably crash badly while trying..)
Forth rocks for embedded apps because:
Forth is threaded (interpreted Forth, anyway). A given expression is not compiled into equivalent machine code, but as pointers to subexpressions involved. Of course, those subexpressions are compiled in the same manner, until we arrive at the primatives -- the bits that are implemented as actual machine code. This sort of architecture results in very compact code.
Forth is extensible. As pointed out previously, you can define any sort of behavior you want in the language. You can add compile time or run time features as needed.
Forth is allows for incremental development. Forth applications are built from the ground up. Low level bits (primitatives and other bits) are built and tested first, then used by increasingly more complex bits. Testing goes hand in hand with development, since the distinction between editor/compiler/interpreter is somewhat blurry.
Forth is cross platform. To port the environment, all one needs to do is re-implement the primatives on the new platform. Most primatives translate into a handful of machine instructions. This makes it easy to move to small or embedded systems.
There's probably other reasons why Forth rocks, but that's all I could think of. FWIW, Forth was my third language (right behind Basic and UCSD Pascal) on my trusty old Apple II. Byte magazine did a feature on threaded languages in (August?) 1979, and that really piqued my interest in the language. I did some pretty cool stuff with it on my old Apple, but I haven't touched it in years. But given the compact size of a Forth system, I'd say there's a stong case for considering it when building apps that require some sort of embedded scripting language.
At first glance I thought to myself, "Wow, you got screwed." But then I got to thinking: The courts have seen to it (in the U.S. anyway, just ask M$) that email is not as private as some want to think. When was the last time we got outraged by someone reporting that their employer instituted all sorts of no-privacy policies with regard to corporate email? Not recently, because we've all come to accept that when playing on someone else's network, we have to play by their rules. And more often than not, their rules mean our email is not inviolate, and that sys admins probably can read it anytime they want. From there, it's only a very short stretch to what you described. The only leg you would have had to stand on would be if your former employer had a written policy ensuring the privacy of electronic communications, and I doubt they did.
One of the key benefits is SMS can install apps in the background using a service running with elevated privs on Windows NT. No user interaction is required.
My nVidia GForce Ultra's fan kept working, but the heatsink/fan combination managed to vibrate itself loose from the card. Toasted it in short order. The replacement was a GForce MX I had lying around. No fan, and does a decent enough job I might not replace it.
Not a tax for the entertinament industry, but...
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 1
...a tax for the porn entertainment industry.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The quickest way to solidify public support against this sort of legislation is to make sure people know that it will benefit the porn industry.
That the porn industry is only a small part of the total entertainment industry is a mere detail. The important point is that if enough people believe that this legislation is for the benefit of the porn industry -- and they will if enough of us tell our family & friends that's what it's really all about -- it will die in committee.
Brian Valentine, senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, has made a grim admission to the Microsoft Windows Server.net developer conference in Seattle, USA.
"I'm not proud," he told delegates yesterday (5 September). "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security," admitted Valentine, who since 1998 has headed Microsoft's Windows division.
In August the company put out eight security bulletins. This month it has released two, so far, with the latest urging users to patch a flaw in its digital certificate technology that could allow attackers to steal a user's credit card details.
Microsoft's regular stream of security bulletins has continued despite Bill Gates company-wide Trustworthy Computing Initiative, announced earlier this year.
The Initiative was launched with a memo from Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, and saw the company halt production on new code in all of its products while employees scanned every line of existing code in search of vulnerabilities.
"We realised that we couldn't continue with the way we were building software and expect to deliver secure products," Valentine said.
But the company is dealing with a problem that is not easily resolved. Valentine told developers at the conference that as the company works to shore up its products the security dilemma will evolve as hackers become more sophisticated.
"It's impossible to solve the problem completely," Valentine said. "As we solve these problems there are hackers who are going to come up with new ones. There's no end to this."
Microsoft has also been employing new tools developed by Microsoft Research that are designed to detect errors in code during the development process, Valentine said.
According to Chandra Mugunda, a software consultant with Dell who attended Valentine's presentation, buggy software is "an industry-wide problem, not just a Microsoft problem. But they're the leaders, and they should take the lead to solve them," he said.
Dude, you've got a wonderful idea. It lacks the magic ingredient: $. Lots of $. Not to build the software. No, big $ -- cubic $ -- to pay for the bandwidth of a chunk of the world's name resolution traffic. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at least some of the businesses that have the cash to make it happen, have an interest in keeping the system the way it is. It's easy to say "chuck the whole ICANN monopoly, let's build our own," but it's something entirely different to actually make it work.
The opinions expressed above do not necessarily represent the views of the poster. The voices in the poster's head though, are pretty sure that's what they meant.
...would be one to silently, in the background, pull as many ads as possible to keep the impression counts high and the projects funded, without having to subject anyone to actually looking at the ads. There's something in the back of my mind that tells me this model won't last long...
...I used to work at a beltway bandit that had some of the initial contracts with DOE to study the site. One of my coworkers came back from a site visit reporting that there was no way they could build there. She said that while on site there was a minor earthquake, and that locals report they happen with some frequency.
10K years is a long time. The stuff is emitting particles and radiation which will change the structure, if not the composition of anything containing it. So what's gonna happen when the big one hits and the now brittle storage drums rupture? Can you say "accidental criticality?"
...that with all the money the recording industry sucks in, they could have the very best geek talent available to create something truly wonderous on-line. And all they can come up with is a site that no one wants to be a part of, including the backers?
And they think that the computer & electronics industry -- people with little to no vested interest in the recording industy's profit -- are going to magically produce a DRM system for them, a la the CBDTPA?
It's clear that there is a huge vacuum in the market place right now: people obviously want to be able to retrieve their music electronically. People are obviously accustomed to the freedom they currently have with the music they own. As long as the recording industry ignores this basic fact, anything they create is utterly and completely doomed to failure.
The unfortunate side effect is that they will blame the failure not on a flawed business model that fails to address market realities, but on piracy and the evil internet, and they will use this as justification for buying ever increasingly draconian legislation.
But the article further goes to mention how important the Internet is to our economy. Is this true?? I don't really think of the internet as critical infrastructure.
Why of course it's important to the economy! Ask Hillary Rosen or Jack Vallenti, and they'll tell you that just as soon as they can strip our ability to move bits from here to there, they'll stand to gain Billions in lost revenue. That isn't important to the economy?
c.f., Drum Memory. A portion of the stored instruction contained the address of the next instruction. By knowing how many CPU cycles a given instruction took, you could place the next sequential machine instuction at the location on the drum which would be available the instant the current instruction finished.
Yes, we the geeks can play the spin game, too! And what everyone has missed, is this: What's the easiest way to reach the largest number of gullible people? Besides the Fox Network?
E-Mail!
How many copies of that stupid ps602 Internet Email Tax hoax have you received in your lifetime? Ever notice that it keep resurfacing every six months or so? It works because it hits people at an emotional level.
What I'm proposing is this: one or more e-mail letters are drafted that specifically paint the SSSCC as pork barrel that benefits the porn industry. Let people know that many of their congresscritters have already come out in favor of this piece of legislation. Let people know that if passed, it will severly limit what they can do with legitimate material, including child-safe Disney cartoons -- ALL TO BENEFIT THE PORN INDUSTRY!
We need to start circulating this now, to everyone you know. Aunt Sally. Uncle Fred. Grandma. Your dog. Everyone. Hit the minivan moms. Everyone. With the proper social engineering, this could sweep the nation, and then resurface in six months or a year or so.
Gawd, this is a brilliant stroke of inspiration! It's got to work!
This may be true, but if protection becomes law, then it will be illegal to make such modifications.
Or more precisely, illegal in the U.S. We'll still be able to find circumvention methods on-line, but it will be from non-US sources. And then there will be a black market in off-shore non-compliant devices.
Imagine your first day in prison.
You: So what are you in for?
Cellmate: 5-10. I sold weapons grade plutonium to a terrorist group that enabled them to build their first nuke. You?
You: Life. I sold a hard disk without an embedded copy protection device.
This whole thing is just plain stupid.
Hello, Choir? This is the preacher speaking... Imagine: You buy a book, and the very first time you open that book, it's immediately registered so that it will only work with your eyes. You can't loan it to a friend, because their eyeballs can be used to read it. Now imagine that your eyeballs have a finite lifetime -- shorter than your own -- an that you can easily buy a new set of eyeballs when yours don't work anymore. Suddenly, you can't read your books anymore, because your new eyeballs aren't the eyeballs were registered with your books.
I called my Senator, Sen Rockefeller IV. I let them know how I feel. It was painless. Jesus, people, get off your ASSES and take part in Democracy! Politicians do listen to the people, believe it or not.
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Good description, but you missed the politics of the situation:
Rock: The FCC. They control the airwaves & decide what the Broadcast Industry can and can't do with them.
Paper: The Broadcast Industry (aka, the "Media"). They exercise strong influence over Congress (just TRY getting elected without significant media exposure).
Scissors: Congress. They are responsible for oversight of the FCC.
So basically, Congress won't step in to clean up the mess, because that will upset the Media. The FCC won't step in and clean up the mess, because that will upset Congress. And the Media won't step in and clean up the mess, because that will cost them money, and they like the free bandwidth, thank you!
Suppose you post on a web page some email addresses that were "encrypted" by inserting the string "NOSPAM" somewhere in the email address. Suppose further, that the page contains a suitable copyright notice to protect the "encrypted" content of the page. It's not entirely unreasonable to think that the harvesters are smart enough to strip out the "NOSPAM" from the email address, right? So suddenly, the spammer is using information gained by illegally circumventing an encryption device (illegal if they haven't been granted a license to do so, right?). Hence, the spammer is in violation of the DMCA.
Can anyone that IAL comment on whether this is a viable approach for dealing with spammers?
Um, when I was at the University of Illinois in the early '80s, they had a decidely low-tech but nonetheless effective technique: very lightweight paper and bright lights.
Fully half of the class of 400 failed the final project -- a particularly tough one at that -- in the assembly language class I took. The TA's noted an awful lot of assignments that looked similar. Sure enough, a bright light was all it took to see that there were a lot of identical printouts. There were even a dozen or so that didn't even have sense enough to remove the name of the author of the code from the comments!
I mean, with more and more CD's being released in a "won't play on my computer" format, what good is having an on-line database for content that you can't play anyway?
Is there actually a "spam lobby" anywhere that could prevent (read give money to) politicans from supporting or passing such bills in other states?
Actually, there is. Perhaps the most well know is the Direct Marketing Association. Yeah, they've got money, and yeah, they slather it around in D.C. They're not a spam lobby per se, but that is definitely a area in which they're active.
This is the best proposal ever for eradicating spambots from the web! Think about it: you set up your robots file to point to a directory that isn't even linked to your site -- only the poorly behaved spiders would dare enter. A little URL re-writing, and you route the rouge spambot harvesters into a sort of honeypot-firehose (honeyhose?), ramming page after page after page of bogus email addresses back to them. Then wait for the check to arrive in the mail. I love it!
I was all ready to offer up for sale or trade my pair of Qume 8" DSQD floppy drives & 8 boxes of orginal factory shrink-wrapped 3M brand 8" SSSD diskettes, when I saw the Harper reference...
Gawd that brings back memories! Volunteering as a terminal aid in -- what was it? D building? -- for the free terminal time. Accoustic couplers... Teletype Model 33... DecWriters... None of this energy efficiency mamby-pamby stuff, no sirree! We're talking real equipment, the kind that would dim the lights when switched on, and could heat small houses. And 300 baud was so fast, so cool. Who could want faster than that? Boy, those were the days.
...I'm stopping now. The geeze-alarm just started going off...
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From the site: It is open-source (under the well know GPL) and available for non-commercial use. If you need a commercial license please email...
Ok, so someone enlighten me: Can a GPL'd program be released for non-commercial use with a separate license for commercial use, or does the GPL pretty much cover all use of the code? I checked the GPL FAQ, and the only case that comes close says that the license under which you received the code is the license that controls how you use the code. But that doesn't really cover the case where "This code is GPL for non-commercial use." Does the GPL permit that?
Let me rise to the challenge (and probably crash badly while trying..)
Forth rocks for embedded apps because:
There's probably other reasons why Forth rocks, but that's all I could think of. FWIW, Forth was my third language (right behind Basic and UCSD Pascal) on my trusty old Apple II. Byte magazine did a feature on threaded languages in (August?) 1979, and that really piqued my interest in the language. I did some pretty cool stuff with it on my old Apple, but I haven't touched it in years. But given the compact size of a Forth system, I'd say there's a stong case for considering it when building apps that require some sort of embedded scripting language.
At first glance I thought to myself, "Wow, you got screwed." But then I got to thinking: The courts have seen to it (in the U.S. anyway, just ask M$) that email is not as private as some want to think. When was the last time we got outraged by someone reporting that their employer instituted all sorts of no-privacy policies with regard to corporate email? Not recently, because we've all come to accept that when playing on someone else's network, we have to play by their rules. And more often than not, their rules mean our email is not inviolate, and that sys admins probably can read it anytime they want. From there, it's only a very short stretch to what you described. The only leg you would have had to stand on would be if your former employer had a written policy ensuring the privacy of electronic communications, and I doubt they did.
Sounds like BackOrifice ought to do the trick!
My nVidia GForce Ultra's fan kept working, but the heatsink/fan combination managed to vibrate itself loose from the card. Toasted it in short order. The replacement was a GForce MX I had lying around. No fan, and does a decent enough job I might not replace it.
...a tax for the porn entertainment industry.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The quickest way to solidify public support against this sort of legislation is to make sure people know that it will benefit the porn industry.
That the porn industry is only a small part of the total entertainment industry is a mere detail. The important point is that if enough people believe that this legislation is for the benefit of the porn industry -- and they will if enough of us tell our family & friends that's what it's really all about -- it will die in committee.
Google has most, if not all, of the content cached. Let's see Verizon's lawyer's shut that one down, too!
Dude, you've got a wonderful idea. It lacks the magic ingredient: $. Lots of $. Not to build the software. No, big $ -- cubic $ -- to pay for the bandwidth of a chunk of the world's name resolution traffic. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at least some of the businesses that have the cash to make it happen, have an interest in keeping the system the way it is. It's easy to say "chuck the whole ICANN monopoly, let's build our own," but it's something entirely different to actually make it work.
The opinions expressed above do not necessarily represent the views of the poster. The voices in the poster's head though, are pretty sure that's what they meant.
...would be one to silently, in the background, pull as many ads as possible to keep the impression counts high and the projects funded, without having to subject anyone to actually looking at the ads. There's something in the back of my mind that tells me this model won't last long...
10K years is a long time. The stuff is emitting particles and radiation which will change the structure, if not the composition of anything containing it. So what's gonna happen when the big one hits and the now brittle storage drums rupture? Can you say "accidental criticality?"
And they think that the computer & electronics industry -- people with little to no vested interest in the recording industy's profit -- are going to magically produce a DRM system for them, a la the CBDTPA?
It's clear that there is a huge vacuum in the market place right now: people obviously want to be able to retrieve their music electronically. People are obviously accustomed to the freedom they currently have with the music they own. As long as the recording industry ignores this basic fact, anything they create is utterly and completely doomed to failure.
The unfortunate side effect is that they will blame the failure not on a flawed business model that fails to address market realities, but on piracy and the evil internet, and they will use this as justification for buying ever increasingly draconian legislation.
Why of course it's important to the economy! Ask Hillary Rosen or Jack Vallenti, and they'll tell you that just as soon as they can strip our ability to move bits from here to there, they'll stand to gain Billions in lost revenue. That isn't important to the economy?
c.f., Drum Memory. A portion of the stored instruction contained the address of the next instruction. By knowing how many CPU cycles a given instruction took, you could place the next sequential machine instuction at the location on the drum which would be available the instant the current instruction finished.
E-Mail!
How many copies of that stupid ps602 Internet Email Tax hoax have you received in your lifetime? Ever notice that it keep resurfacing every six months or so? It works because it hits people at an emotional level.
What I'm proposing is this: one or more e-mail letters are drafted that specifically paint the SSSCC as pork barrel that benefits the porn industry. Let people know that many of their congresscritters have already come out in favor of this piece of legislation. Let people know that if passed, it will severly limit what they can do with legitimate material, including child-safe Disney cartoons -- ALL TO BENEFIT THE PORN INDUSTRY!
We need to start circulating this now, to everyone you know. Aunt Sally. Uncle Fred. Grandma. Your dog. Everyone. Hit the minivan moms. Everyone. With the proper social engineering, this could sweep the nation, and then resurface in six months or a year or so.
Gawd, this is a brilliant stroke of inspiration! It's got to work!
Or more precisely, illegal in the U.S. We'll still be able to find circumvention methods on-line, but it will be from non-US sources. And then there will be a black market in off-shore non-compliant devices.
Imagine your first day in prison.
You: So what are you in for?
Cellmate: 5-10. I sold weapons grade plutonium to a terrorist group that enabled them to build their first nuke. You?
You: Life. I sold a hard disk without an embedded copy protection device.
This whole thing is just plain stupid.
Hello, Choir? This is the preacher speaking... Imagine: You buy a book, and the very first time you open that book, it's immediately registered so that it will only work with your eyes. You can't loan it to a friend, because their eyeballs can be used to read it. Now imagine that your eyeballs have a finite lifetime -- shorter than your own -- an that you can easily buy a new set of eyeballs when yours don't work anymore. Suddenly, you can't read your books anymore, because your new eyeballs aren't the eyeballs were registered with your books.
I called my Senator, Sen Rockefeller IV. I let them know how I feel. It was painless. Jesus, people, get off your ASSES and take part in Democracy! Politicians do listen to the people, believe it or not.
Slap my pee-pee for contributiing to this off-topic thread, but...
Good description, but you missed the politics of the situation:
Rock: The FCC. They control the airwaves & decide what the Broadcast Industry can and can't do with them.
Paper: The Broadcast Industry (aka, the "Media"). They exercise strong influence over Congress (just TRY getting elected without significant media exposure).
Scissors: Congress. They are responsible for oversight of the FCC.
So basically, Congress won't step in to clean up the mess, because that will upset the Media. The FCC won't step in and clean up the mess, because that will upset Congress. And the Media won't step in and clean up the mess, because that will cost them money, and they like the free bandwidth, thank you!
Suppose you post on a web page some email addresses that were "encrypted" by inserting the string "NOSPAM" somewhere in the email address. Suppose further, that the page contains a suitable copyright notice to protect the "encrypted" content of the page. It's not entirely unreasonable to think that the harvesters are smart enough to strip out the "NOSPAM" from the email address, right? So suddenly, the spammer is using information gained by illegally circumventing an encryption device (illegal if they haven't been granted a license to do so, right?). Hence, the spammer is in violation of the DMCA.
Can anyone that IAL comment on whether this is a viable approach for dealing with spammers?
Like they need a computer program to do this?
Um, when I was at the University of Illinois in the early '80s, they had a decidely low-tech but nonetheless effective technique: very lightweight paper and bright lights.
Fully half of the class of 400 failed the final project -- a particularly tough one at that -- in the assembly language class I took. The TA's noted an awful lot of assignments that looked similar. Sure enough, a bright light was all it took to see that there were a lot of identical printouts. There were even a dozen or so that didn't even have sense enough to remove the name of the author of the code from the comments!
I mean, with more and more CD's being released in a "won't play on my computer" format, what good is having an on-line database for content that you can't play anyway?
Actually, there is. Perhaps the most well know is the Direct Marketing Association. Yeah, they've got money, and yeah, they slather it around in D.C. They're not a spam lobby per se, but that is definitely a area in which they're active.
This is the best proposal ever for eradicating spambots from the web! Think about it: you set up your robots file to point to a directory that isn't even linked to your site -- only the poorly behaved spiders would dare enter. A little URL re-writing, and you route the rouge spambot harvesters into a sort of honeypot-firehose (honeyhose?), ramming page after page after page of bogus email addresses back to them. Then wait for the check to arrive in the mail. I love it!
Gawd that brings back memories! Volunteering as a terminal aid in -- what was it? D building? -- for the free terminal time. Accoustic couplers... Teletype Model 33... DecWriters... None of this energy efficiency mamby-pamby stuff, no sirree! We're talking real equipment, the kind that would dim the lights when switched on, and could heat small houses. And 300 baud was so fast, so cool. Who could want faster than that? Boy, those were the days.
...I'm stopping now. The geeze-alarm just started going off...