Tcl runs webservers, robotic manufacturing equipment, and even monitors spacecraft. Odds are that you have probably used a Tcl/Tk application and never even knew it. (If you've watched NBC since 1998, you've seen the results of a Tcl application on screen.)
I'm an unabashed Tcl fanboy, and this release is great.
Re:Tcl language vs. Tcl environment
on
Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Tcl's internals are well done, and the QA is exemplary - a Tcl alpha is as good as anybody else's beta.
I've noticed that some people don't like Tcl as a language, but can't personally understand why. Tcl seems to be a favorite of a lot of well experienced people who can make it stand up and sing.
I used to think that Tcl-aversion was due to extreme syntactic simplicity, but now I think the simplicity is deceptive, and Tcl is just too hard for some programmers: you need a deep stack to write Tcl well.
The more bilateral treaties the US can sign which contain DMCA, Software Patent and Big Pharma-friendly provisions, the less chance it will have of repealing such laws.
The U.S. executive will be able to point to these bilateral treaties and shrug - we couldn't change them even if we wanted to.
THAT is why GW Bush signed the treaty just now (http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1168 234.htm) with unseemly haste. Not because Australia matters economically to the U.S., but because it helps to entrench these obscene laws in the U.S. and put them beyond the reach of future legislation.
If the conservatives are voted out, the provisions can be watered down or ignored in new 'enabling' legislation, much as the US will ignore their side of the bargain.
XML is a kinder, gentler SGML. I'm sure it has its place. I even like it, and like what it stands for. But...
Why is there no standard XML DTD to express DTDs?
alternate rendering of question: I understand that XML was trying to keep as close as possible to SGML but... if either language is a good choice for representing structured data, and a DTD is itself structured data, why is XML not a good choice for representing DTDs?
Yes, good point, steganography in text could trap a mole.
However, isn't there a Windows worm, though, which sends a randomly selected file to some email address? Aren't there exploits in IE which permit a web server to load arbitrary files from your disk?
Couldn't any of these vectors have leaked the email from any infected machine within microsoft.com? Wouldn't a serious mole be sure to have such a virus installed on his machine? (just in case he was caught)
In matters of industrial espionage, Microsoft's security may be your best final line of defence:)
This is without doubt the lamest, most ignorant post yet to ever grace/.
You're new here, aren't you.
... angry and mean at the mere thought that your ideas are not immediately embraced by a corporate computing community that has no use for you or your trash code
On the contrary, it seems to me that innovations are often `immediately embraced by the corporate computing community' (if hyenas can be said to form communities.)
Those innovations are then extended by the soulless, to be sold to the clueless by the ruthless.
So the `story' is `metaphoric' or `symbolic', is it? No, it's not. It's bullshit. It's been professionally prepared to influence your opinions, feelings and reactions, and its intended effect is to pacify you while you're being repressed in your own country, it is only peripherally about Afghanistan.
Firstly, I would just like to congratulate the author: this story is the most transparent example of propaganda I've been privileged to see.
Something over a million people are at risk of starvation in Afghanistan because of the US' air invasion but little Timmy has never had it so good because of the magic of western technology and baywatch?
The intent of whoever writes propaganda is to appeal to our prejudices (technology good, food is something you get out of the fridge.) In this case, we are distracted from any issues that we might conceivably do something about. Its overt project here is to pacify the readers.
In that first aim, it has largely failed: good propaganda hooks straight into deeply held beliefs and anxieties, and bypasses the critical faculties, it seeks a direct emotional effect, which in this case (due to the overdeveloped critical faculties of computer weenies) it has not directly achieved.
Look at the subtext, though, look at what's not being said directly, think of it as a fable, or a just-so story: ``Technology thrives even through the most repressive regime. Little Timmy kept the spirit of innovation and connectedness alive even through 5 years of political and social repression.''
Consider, for a moment, that you geeks in the US, and probably we geeks on the periphery, are witnessing exactly the kind of erosion of civil liberties that the Taliban would approve of, and in the same cause (godless heathens at the gates, pull the wagons in a circle, accept arbitrary rule to preserve your culture.)
Consider the buried message in this piece of propaganda: If little Timmy could survive the Taliban by burying his C64 in chickenshit, then surely *I* can survive the radical restrictions of a US at `war', the GW Putsch, the suppression of free speech, by just keeping my head down - burying my processing power under the warm pile of steaming chickenshit which is JKatz's story.
Hell, I can even download porn and videos under martial law. Good deal! Where do I sign?
Of course he's serious. A CRO and a few bits of output can be very useful:
1) you can set/reset the bits to indicate some condition you're interested in, using a small fixed-time routine (so it impacts as little as possible on the behavior of the code under test.)
2) the CRO as an output device is very sensitive, and completely unintrusive.
Using logic analysers is ok, too, but I've found that you need to know what part of the execution is likely to give you the information you seek before you use one (they're like using a microscope, you have to prepare your slides carefully.)
An unrelated point, from the ddd hints pages:
`A good debugger is no substitute for careful thought, but careful thought is no substitute for a good debugger' (or words to that effect.)
Your position would be more credible if you also boycotted MicroSoft for being based in a country which has been repressing people in mezo and South America for at least 100 years, and most vigorously in the last 25.
I wonder if you'd stop to consider why a human rights activist would concentrate on a distant country's excesses while ignoring those of a closer, putatively more democratic country?
Could be that drawing attention to Tibet takes it away from Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and the support western governments (and in particular, the US) lend their bloody dictator/clients?
>The key, legally, to the whole issue is, well, the KEY people! >The key is a unique sequence of binary numbers. This sequence is the original work and the IP of someone. The KEY is covered by copyright law.
A key's not an `original work', it's a random number. I'd be prepared to argue that couldn't be copyrightable.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I thought a little more on the question:
If Employee is producing a derivative work from a GPL'd work under instruction from Employer. That derivative work is already GPL'd (by the agreement Employee necessarily made before modifying the original.)
If Employee is producing a derivative work without instruction from Employer, Employee is still bound by GPL, and Employee's contractual obligation to assign copyright to Employer is limited to those rights Employee has: those granted by GPL.
So it would seem to me that so long as you're working on a GPL derivative work, your employer can refuse to allow distribution of the work, but cannot de-GPL the work, even if you're bound by one of those horrible 24/7 `we own your soul' agreements.
If the work is distributed at all by Employer (even to employees) the GPL goes along with it.
A company giving a copy of a program to its employee (for whatever purpose) is making a copy under license. How else could M$ charge site-license or per-seat license fees?
The license in this case is GPL, so the author of the program in this case (who is also an employee, and is being given a copy of his own program under GPL) would have the same rights as any other recipient: to redistribute under GPL terms.
I don't recall any specific exclusion in the GPL for distribution to employees, so it would seem that you can't take away GPL-granted rights merely by employing someone else to do the work.
The MPAA put up the piracy as a stalking horse, and every fool with IP access is following along.
The suit is *not* about piracy, and the (indisputable fact) that DeCSS is not being used to pirate is *no* defense against 1201(1) or 1201(2) of the act under which the MPAA is bringing suit.
The DMCA, as you can read (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyrigh t/legislation/hr2281.pdf) makes it illegal to read anything (even if you've bought it, even if you're not breaking copyright) which has been scrambled, encrypted, or otherwise `access protected', unless you're using an authorised reader.
So, if I give you a.pdf file, and you dare to quote it in ASCII, you can be $500K poorer, and spend two years as the wife of the guy with most cigarettes.
Please don't fall for the MPAA's trojan horse: it's not about piracy, it's about your rights under the copyright act to fair use. The only reason piracy was mentioned was to get the injunction - they have to show immediate harm, and piracy's plausible.
In 1998, Congress passed and the president signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
... Right so far...
which expressly made it illegal to traffic in "any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. WRONG.
No, it didn't. Those words aren't in the fucking act. Go and read the damn thing, don't quote the MPAA's bullshit version.
Here's the Library of Congress' Copyright Office's copy:
The DMCA prohibits "any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."
No, it doesn't. Read the damn thing, *please*, don't rely on Valenti's PR machine to give you the clue - they lie.
Again, it's absolutely not about piracy, as the judge said in the hearing transcript. The MPAA don't have to prove that the intent of DeCSS is to make illicit copies, they just have to prove that the intent of DeCSS is to read the DVDs.
Copyright owners do not have the right or protection claimed, except under the DMCA. It's a very bad law, and needs to be overturned.
You can apply for exemption for DeCSS, though, here: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html
If the MPAA speaks for the manufacturers of these products then they were sold to me fradulently.
I agree with you. You bought the DVDs expecting that you were buying the right to watch them. The DMCA tries to limit your rights, by creating `authorised' means of access.
The DMCA speaks of copyright owners' authorizing means of access. As far as I can tell, that authority can be revoked ad lib. So what have you actually been sold? Absolutely nothing - certainly not the right to watch what you've bought.
You should check this out http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html and make your comments clearly heard.
The comment period closes in a couple of days, but with enough comments, DeCSS may be granted an exemption.
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There's some great new stuff for Tcl in this release. Built-in dict type http://wiki.tcl.tk/dict, Functional Application http://wiki.tcl.tk/apply, built-in arbitrary precision integers http://wiki.tcl.tk/10942, at last a sanctioned OO framework http://wiki.tcl.tk/TclOO.
New Tk looks beautiful.
Tcl runs webservers, robotic manufacturing equipment, and even monitors spacecraft. Odds are that you have probably used a Tcl/Tk application and never even knew it. (If you've watched NBC since 1998, you've seen the results of a Tcl application on screen.)
I'm an unabashed Tcl fanboy, and this release is great.
Tcl's internals are well done, and the QA is exemplary - a Tcl alpha is as good as anybody else's beta.
I've noticed that some people don't like Tcl as a language, but can't personally understand why. Tcl seems to be a favorite of a lot of well experienced people who can make it stand up and sing.
I used to think that Tcl-aversion was due to extreme syntactic simplicity, but now I think the simplicity is deceptive, and Tcl is just too hard for some programmers: you need a deep stack to write Tcl well.
A Uraguan I met made exactly this point to me, and told me they call citizens of the USA 'unistaters'.
:)
It's either that, or damn yanquis, I guess
Ghandi lead people to collect salt from the Indian Ocean in defiance of the UK salt tax. The UK government arrested 100 people and shot 20.
Ghandi may have been a pacificist, but he wasn't a pussy.
The more bilateral treaties the US can sign which contain DMCA, Software Patent and Big Pharma-friendly provisions, the less chance it will have of repealing such laws. The U.S. executive will be able to point to these bilateral treaties and shrug - we couldn't change them even if we wanted to. THAT is why GW Bush signed the treaty just now (http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1168 234.htm) with unseemly haste. Not because Australia matters economically to the U.S., but because it helps to entrench these obscene laws in the U.S. and put them beyond the reach of future legislation.
As Thoreau said: Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just
man is in jail.
Organised civil disobedience.
If the conservatives are voted out, the provisions can be watered down or ignored in new 'enabling' legislation, much as the US will ignore their side of the bargain.
Why is there no standard XML DTD to express DTDs?
alternate rendering of question: I understand that XML was trying to keep as close as possible to SGML but ... if either language is a good choice for representing structured data, and a DTD is itself structured data, why is XML not a good choice for representing DTDs?
I'm trying to keep out of this, but ... IIRC Italy as a country didn't exist until sometime in the 1860s, so they could hardly have imprisoned Galileo.
Yeah, ok, so my religion is pedantry.
Yes, good point, steganography in text could trap a mole.
:)
However, isn't there a Windows worm, though, which sends a randomly selected file to some email address? Aren't there exploits in IE which permit a web server to load arbitrary files from your disk?
Couldn't any of these vectors have leaked the email from any infected machine within microsoft.com? Wouldn't a serious mole be sure to have such a virus installed on his machine? (just in case he was caught)
In matters of industrial espionage, Microsoft's security may be your best final line of defence
You're new here, aren't you.
On the contrary, it seems to me that innovations are often `immediately embraced by the corporate computing community' (if hyenas can be said to form communities.)
Those innovations are then extended by the soulless, to be sold to the clueless by the ruthless.
Which are you?
Very informative. Only one question: why only `foreign', in the above definition?
So the `story' is `metaphoric' or `symbolic', is it? No, it's not. It's bullshit. It's been professionally prepared to influence your opinions, feelings and reactions, and its intended effect is to pacify you while you're being repressed in your own country, it is only peripherally about Afghanistan.
Firstly, I would just like to congratulate the author: this story is the most transparent example of propaganda I've been privileged to see.
Something over a million people are at risk of starvation in Afghanistan because of the US' air invasion but little Timmy has never had it so good because of the magic of western technology and baywatch?
The intent of whoever writes propaganda is to appeal to our prejudices (technology good, food is something you get out of the fridge.) In this case, we are distracted from any issues that we might conceivably do something about. Its overt project here is to pacify the readers.
In that first aim, it has largely failed: good propaganda hooks straight into deeply held beliefs and anxieties, and bypasses the critical faculties, it seeks a direct emotional effect, which in this case (due to the overdeveloped critical faculties of computer weenies) it has not directly achieved.
Look at the subtext, though, look at what's not being said directly, think of it as a fable, or a just-so story: ``Technology thrives even through the most repressive regime. Little Timmy kept the spirit of innovation and connectedness alive even through 5 years of political and social repression.''
Consider, for a moment, that you geeks in the US, and probably we geeks on the periphery, are witnessing exactly the kind of erosion of civil liberties that the Taliban would approve of, and in the same cause (godless heathens at the gates, pull the wagons in a circle, accept arbitrary rule to preserve your culture.)
Consider the buried message in this piece of propaganda: If little Timmy could survive the Taliban by burying his C64 in chickenshit, then surely *I* can survive the radical restrictions of a US at `war', the GW Putsch, the suppression of free speech, by just keeping my head down - burying my processing power under the warm pile of steaming chickenshit which is JKatz's story.
Hell, I can even download porn and videos under martial law. Good deal! Where do I sign?
Of course he's serious. A CRO and a few bits of output can be very useful:
1) you can set/reset the bits to indicate some condition you're interested in, using a small fixed-time routine (so it impacts as little as possible on the behavior of the code under test.)
2) the CRO as an output device is very sensitive, and completely unintrusive.
Using logic analysers is ok, too, but I've found that you need to know what part of the execution is likely to give you the information you seek before you use one (they're like using a microscope, you have to prepare your slides carefully.)
An unrelated point, from the ddd hints pages:
`A good debugger is no substitute for careful thought, but careful thought is no substitute for a good debugger' (or words to that effect.)
Good on you, SLOGEN. The most sensible technical response-post I've seen on /. in an age.
Your position would be more credible if you also boycotted MicroSoft for being based in a country which has been repressing people in mezo and South America for at least 100 years, and most vigorously in the last 25.
I wonder if you'd stop to consider why a human rights activist would concentrate on a distant country's excesses while ignoring those of a closer, putatively more democratic country?
Could be that drawing attention to Tibet takes it away from Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, and the support western governments (and in particular, the US) lend their bloody dictator/clients?
Just a thought.
Q: isn't there something fundamentally wrong with middle aged men wearing hair extensions?
Q: How many chords does metallica know, or know of?
Q: When i was in high school 90% of your fans were neanderthal gay bashing rednecks. Oh wait, that's not a question, is it?
Q: if the number of people pirating your music is greater than the number buying it, what does that tell you?
Q: have you considered trademarking the `metallica standard' of usability? ``So easy to use even metallica gets it.''
>The key, legally, to the whole issue is, well, the KEY people!
>The key is a unique sequence of binary numbers. This sequence is the original work and the IP of someone. The KEY is covered by copyright law.
A key's not an `original work', it's a random number. I'd be prepared to argue that couldn't be copyrightable.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I thought a little more on the question:
If Employee is producing a derivative work from a GPL'd work under instruction from Employer. That derivative work is already GPL'd (by the agreement Employee necessarily made before modifying the original.)
If Employee is producing a derivative work without instruction from Employer, Employee is still bound by GPL, and Employee's contractual obligation to assign copyright to Employer is limited to those rights Employee has: those granted by GPL.
So it would seem to me that so long as you're working on a GPL derivative work, your employer can refuse to allow distribution of the work, but cannot de-GPL the work, even if you're bound by one of those horrible 24/7 `we own your soul' agreements.
If the work is distributed at all by Employer (even to employees) the GPL goes along with it.
A company giving a copy of a program to its employee (for whatever purpose) is making a copy under license. How else could M$ charge site-license or per-seat license fees?
The license in this case is GPL, so the author of the program in this case (who is also an employee, and is being given a copy of his own program under GPL) would have the same rights as any other recipient: to redistribute under GPL terms.
I don't recall any specific exclusion in the GPL for distribution to employees, so it would seem that you can't take away GPL-granted rights merely by employing someone else to do the work.
Oh yeah. I was wandering around Xerox Parc's website, and found something which illustrates this beautifully: http://www.parc.xerox.com/i stl/groups/nltt/default.html
Notice who's at the top of the hierarchy? The administrator and manager sit above the researchers, in a research center!
You are absolutely correct. You are so right!
.pdf file, and you dare to quote it in ASCII, you can be $500K poorer, and spend two years as the wife of the guy with most cigarettes.
The MPAA put up the piracy as a stalking horse, and every fool with IP access is following along.
The suit is *not* about piracy, and the (indisputable fact) that DeCSS is not being used to pirate is *no* defense against 1201(1) or 1201(2) of the act under which the MPAA is bringing suit.
The DMCA, as you can read (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyrigh t/legislation/hr2281.pdf) makes it illegal to read anything (even if you've bought it, even if you're not breaking copyright) which has been scrambled, encrypted, or otherwise `access protected', unless you're using an authorised reader.
So, if I give you a
Please don't fall for the MPAA's trojan horse: it's not about piracy, it's about your rights under the copyright act to fair use. The only reason piracy was mentioned was to get the injunction - they have to show immediate harm, and piracy's plausible.
I'm getting really sick of this.
...
In 1998, Congress passed and the president signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
... Right so far
which expressly made it illegal to traffic in "any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. WRONG.
No, it didn't. Those words aren't in the fucking act. Go and read the damn thing, don't quote the MPAA's bullshit version.
Here's the Library of Congress' Copyright Office's copy:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyrigh t/legislation/hr2281.pdf Please go and read it.
Congress' intent appears to have been actually much *much* worse than merely protecting copyright.
The DMCA prohibits "any technology, product, service, device, component or part thereof that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner."
No, it doesn't. Read the damn thing, *please*, don't rely on Valenti's PR machine to give you the clue - they lie.
Again, it's absolutely not about piracy, as the judge said in the hearing transcript. The MPAA don't have to prove that the intent of DeCSS is to make illicit copies, they just have to prove that the intent of DeCSS is to read the DVDs.
Copyright owners do not have the right or protection claimed, except under the DMCA. It's a very bad law, and needs to be overturned.
You can apply for exemption for DeCSS, though, here: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html
If the MPAA speaks for the manufacturers of these products then they were sold to me fradulently.
I agree with you. You bought the DVDs expecting that you were buying the right to watch them. The DMCA tries to limit your rights, by creating `authorised' means of access.
The DMCA speaks of copyright owners' authorizing means of access. As far as I can tell, that authority can be revoked ad lib. So what have you actually been sold? Absolutely nothing - certainly not the right to watch what you've bought.
You should check this out http://www.loc.gov/copyright/1201/anticirc.html and make your comments clearly heard.
The comment period closes in a couple of days, but with enough comments, DeCSS may be granted an exemption.