He publishes the magazine 2600. Read the judge's decision he clearly thought Corley was a Hacker/Cracker, and published a magazine for teaching other people how to hack into systems and steal information. Read the decision (it used to be posted on 2600
Become a good lawyer. Spend years practicing the craft. Win several high profile cases (its ok if you lose some too:-). Prove yourself to be both effective and reasonable. And 10 years from now give me a call. Let my generation take care of this one, you get the next. Hopefully we won't screw it up too badly before you get there. And since you're young and idealistic, don't let the negativity of many of the stories on Slashdot and my own post affect you. Nothing serious is lost yet, no matter how upset I am at the EFF.
So they should stop trying to defend people and concentrate on their political agenda?
YES. Absolutely. Their mission isn't to defend people, its to protect Electronic Freedom. Corley, et all, can defend themselves -- and certainly do a better job than the EFF, given their current track record. I guarantee there is no shortage of lawyers to defend any DMCA violator, the EFF needs to concentrate on changing the law. We now have several data points that indicate they are unable to defend individuals, its time for them to revise their tactics.
I have no problem with the ideas and goals of the EFF (and usually I agree with them), but they must be the most incompetent organization known to mankind. Hopefully this is another notice to its members that all the people making decisions at the EFF need to be replaced with folks who have at least an iota of a clue.
If there are "hundreds" of scientists that are afraid to present their research, PRESENT THE DAMN SCIENTISTS. Good grief, this is ridiculous. First they jeopardize my freedom as a coder by pushing the Corley case up to the District Level when it is clear that Corley is completely unsympathetic, now they fubar this one. Someone please take a lesson from Thurgood Marshall who passed up hundreds of chances to challenge civil rights laws until he finally got a case with facts that were clear cut, and prejudice was obvious (Brown v Board of Education for those interested). This is ridiculous, with friends like the EFF, who needs enemies. At this rate we'll have no freedom left by 2010, whereas if they would just let the non radicals get it worked out we'd be fine.
Karma be damned! I am so tired of the idiots at the EFF. Mind their own business, and stay out of technology issues they clearly do not understand, and laws they are too incompetent to affect.
Well performance might not be so much a problem as scaling. Spawning threads and processes has some amount of overhead, and in some OS'es can lead to stability problems. If you were to take this proposal too far you could write applications that essentially became fork bombs, or processor pigs.
I do think it is a good idea to give up the quest for teh single best programming language, currently there are just too many tradeoffs that programming languages and applications need to make for a single programming language to be sufficient, on the other hand I would suggest picking a single programming technique and applying that to your entire application at least. For example, you might use only imperative languages that support real objects, or you might use strictly procedural techniques. But with good enough reason you could vary from that (of course the maintenance costs might skyrocket in that case -- but a prolog based rules system could be cool in a Java business app -- and incredibly slow).
Offtopic: regexp and regcmp are very good parsing utils for C. In general I don't have any problems with Perl, but I am of the opinion that some of its touted advantages don't exist for good C programmers -- of course that is a skillset many do not wish to attain, and I can hardly blame them
That's not fair, the linux community, and many open source projects have flourished without companies paying for all the development. The code is open sourced and should live long and prosper. Don't be so negative, these are the glory days of Linux. I know that Slashdot likes to put negative spins on everything (esp. Michael), but the community is alive and well. A few years ago companies would have never thought of deploying linux, much less maintaining their own distro, but now Linux is widely deployed, its only a matter of time until they must develop linux as part of their core business solutions.
Please spawn more than 256 worker threads using green threads on Solaris jvm. Then you'll see green threads are too dangerous to use (more than 256 concurrent threads, no soup for you).
With java, you either use a restricted portable subset (in that case, what is the point of java), or you need to be prepared for the surprises that are going to occur when you deploy with and without X, with tuned, precompiled db access (ie. sqlJ), floppy access, saving data in binary format, reading binary data. That's all the one's I've personally seen, but I've heard horror stories from other developers, and we certainly did switch to a more portable subset, and JNI for any parts we needed faster.
Yes, but don't standards usually try to codufy existing practice and divergent implementations. WHats the point of standardising something that is intrinsically standardized -- because there is a single reference implementation. I have no problem with MS (other than their crappy API's and hungarian notation), but it seems that they are using standardization as a marketing ploy (of course they are a much better marketing company than a technical company, but I digress), it serves no real purpose. But ANSI doesn't cost me any money, so let the corporate boys fund it, good for me.
(I would also like to point out that MS is notorious for ignoring ANSI standards *cough* C++ *cough*, so what an interesting point that they finally "seen the light" -- but let's give them the benefit of the doubt).
I guess by inference you are saying that Java then is portable, which is a statement my experience directly contradicts. I have no axe to grind with Sun, and I have no real problems with Java, but I haven't experienced the cross platform nirvana it purports. Certainly the threading characteristics for PCs, Sparcs, and Macs are not very similar, especially when you use native threads (enabled by the jvm options). And the awt implementations are not portable, nor are all the applet apis (though in all fairness those could be bugs that I've seen). But much more damning then any of that, is the object reclamations system, garbage collection works completely different depending on the platform, which while not neccesarily a portablility killer, definitely impacts system tuning.
And of course all the third party database bridges are native apps (at least if they go fast), so you are intrinsically dependent on a chunk of code that doesn' claim, or even want to be portable if you are doing any enterprise development.
Again, I have no real problems with java, but to me it is still "Write once, Test anywhere", and I'm not sure if there is any move to make the JVMs more similar (or even if that is a good idea). But what do I know, I'm just a crazy C++ hack:-).
Hmm, is this a troll? Java does not have a specification -- at all. You could argue it has a reference implementation -- but that would be incorrect as well. System.gc() is not guaranteed to do anything when called, and the JVM on solaris certainly implements it exactly that way -- which makes alot of sense wrt to the java threading priority model. unwind-protect is no different than the with-open-file macro (only works on a single lexical block), and I've already explained why that is insufficient. My criticism is valid, no need to try to contradict. Many people do not find the feature useful, however.
I think he did understand the difference when he went on to say that personal religion seemed like a good thing to him. He also managed to make the distinction in 2 sentences rather than 4 paragraphs.
Of course, but in Java there is no guarantee that finalize() will ever be called (some flavors of Dylan and Smalltalk have the same behavior I think). Garbage collection is not guaranteed to occur ever, even if the system exits normally/abnormally. Obviously this isn't a deal breaker for any language, I just think that, imo, no language has a lifetime management scheme as expressive and flexible as C++.
I do like Common Lisp (and more recently I thought Dylan was a nice extension to Common Lisp), my only real complaint is about the lack of finalization semantics, particularly C++ destructors which I think are far and away the best object lifetime management system going. LISP, just like all the languages that have copied its gc system, neglects to understand that there are many other resources I need to manage other than memory (db handles, shared memory regions, mutexes, files, etc.). Macros and closures allow me to emulate this in a single lexical enclosure, but if I wish to do the resource management in different lexical blocks (perhaps using producer/consumer idioms), no way other than manual resource management is offered. I cannot setup a consistent, automatic system. Oh well, I guess I am just one of the unwashed masses who thinks GC causes more headaches than it really solves.
Great interview, probably the best I've seen on Slashdot (or at least that I remember in the last few years)
after reading SICP, it will take you perhaps a week to learn any computer language. highly recommended.
Now, now, a little hyperbole is fine, but this is silly. Many, many (,many!?!) languages develop their expressiveness via keywords and complex idioms, rather than functional constructs and take much longer than a week to learn (I consider someone who has learned a language to be able to write any program they normally could in that language). This is not a bad thing, its just different. Languages such as C++ and especially Ada use keywords to denote many things about the program that languages such as lisp do not bother to enforce, or use convention instead (as far as it goes C is a quite simple language syntax wise, but many of its most powerful idioms could not be learned in a week).
I've got one just called Common Lisp, 3rd Ed. Not great, but not bad. The Paul Graham one is really, really good. Maybe one of the best books on a programming language I've seen. I think the name is simply ANSI Common Lisp. Highly recommended (check the reviews at Amazon I guess to make sure I'm not off my rocker).
That's how it worked for DOS essentially, every game had its own tiny os running on top of DOS. It sucked because each game had its own unique support for hardware -- and if you didn't have the preferred sound card, no sound for you. Same with joysticks etc. It sucked. We don't want to go back there.
The time honored tradition is a tack in your shoe, but I've heard that people have been using ben-gay in their armpits recently to beat lie detectors (if done correctly, harder to detect). Just trying to do my part to educate the masses.
Don't know if this is a troll, but the reason "raw" UNIX sockets are considered bad is because they can be exploited as a tool to hack other machines, they do not open any particular vulnerabilities on the host. At any rate, none of the attacks possible thru a standard posix (raw UNIX) socket is anything to be concerned about, firewalls are quite capable of dealing with them, you just have to have some degree of sophistication when setting up a firewall (like checking the interface the packet comes over rather than just the originating ip, to ensure spoofed packets don't get in).
The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.
IMO, the consortium has a bad track record with the standard. Bad does not go far enough even, it would be a comedy of errors, if it weren't for all the suffereing web developers who have been screwed in the deal. The standards produced by the w3c have been so late in arriving, and, done so little to codify existing practices, that invariably the only implementor that released a browser in the late 90's (MS), had to develop there own unique way of doing things, while at the same time, the other implementor of reknown added similar features with different implementations (i vaguely remember some painful thing called layers), as bug fixes to its existing browser (the glorious 4.10, 4.40, and 4.40 series of nav). The standards were doa. I could go on and on about the partisanship of the standardizing body, but what's the point. The w3c has rendered themselves irrelevant. Now I just wish they would go away. If it weren't for their incompetnece, I wouldn't have to deal with all the javascript browser identifier screens (w3c is probably to blame for the existence of javascript as well) that get screwed up while I use konqueror.
The above isn't intentionally flamebait (hopefully it isn't), but if you've kept up at all with teh w3c, I'm sure you're aware what a pain in the ass they've been for developers. I can give examples if needed, but at this point I would probably be giving the w3c more credit than they deserve by even bothering to acknowledge that they exist. They would serve the community well by going away for a few years. (like we'd notice, they never delivered a standard until 90% of the industry had commited to IE in order to get some functionality anyway, and then telling us we all had to change to be compatible). Bad standards body are worse than the alternatives, at least we have a data point that establishes that now.
Is this an attempt to gain the w3c standards body some amount of credibility, since to this point there standards have been, at best, ignored, or possibly skewed in order to favor tools that would best be labelled as vaporware. What value does the w3c and its standards bring, and what use is there in a sanctioning practice that's only goal is to keep a standards body from completely evaporating due to its standards' lateness, lack of innovation, and irrelevance?
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What specifically makes him unsympathetic?
He publishes the magazine 2600. Read the judge's decision he clearly thought Corley was a Hacker/Cracker, and published a magazine for teaching other people how to hack into systems and steal information. Read the decision (it used to be posted on 2600
Become a good lawyer. Spend years practicing the craft. Win several high profile cases (its ok if you lose some too :-). Prove yourself to be both effective and reasonable. And 10 years from now give me a call. Let my generation take care of this one, you get the next. Hopefully we won't screw it up too badly before you get there. And since you're young and idealistic, don't let the negativity of many of the stories on Slashdot and my own post affect you. Nothing serious is lost yet, no matter how upset I am at the EFF.
So they should stop trying to defend people and concentrate on their political agenda?
YES. Absolutely. Their mission isn't to defend people, its to protect Electronic Freedom. Corley, et all, can defend themselves -- and certainly do a better job than the EFF, given their current track record. I guarantee there is no shortage of lawyers to defend any DMCA violator, the EFF needs to concentrate on changing the law. We now have several data points that indicate they are unable to defend individuals, its time for them to revise their tactics.
I have no problem with the ideas and goals of the EFF (and usually I agree with them), but they must be the most incompetent organization known to mankind. Hopefully this is another notice to its members that all the people making decisions at the EFF need to be replaced with folks who have at least an iota of a clue.
If there are "hundreds" of scientists that are afraid to present their research, PRESENT THE DAMN SCIENTISTS. Good grief, this is ridiculous. First they jeopardize my freedom as a coder by pushing the Corley case up to the District Level when it is clear that Corley is completely unsympathetic, now they fubar this one. Someone please take a lesson from Thurgood Marshall who passed up hundreds of chances to challenge civil rights laws until he finally got a case with facts that were clear cut, and prejudice was obvious (Brown v Board of Education for those interested). This is ridiculous, with friends like the EFF, who needs enemies. At this rate we'll have no freedom left by 2010, whereas if they would just let the non radicals get it worked out we'd be fine.
Karma be damned! I am so tired of the idiots at the EFF. Mind their own business, and stay out of technology issues they clearly do not understand, and laws they are too incompetent to affect.
Well performance might not be so much a problem as scaling. Spawning threads and processes has some amount of overhead, and in some OS'es can lead to stability problems. If you were to take this proposal too far you could write applications that essentially became fork bombs, or processor pigs.
I do think it is a good idea to give up the quest for teh single best programming language, currently there are just too many tradeoffs that programming languages and applications need to make for a single programming language to be sufficient, on the other hand I would suggest picking a single programming technique and applying that to your entire application at least. For example, you might use only imperative languages that support real objects, or you might use strictly procedural techniques. But with good enough reason you could vary from that (of course the maintenance costs might skyrocket in that case -- but a prolog based rules system could be cool in a Java business app -- and incredibly slow).
Offtopic: regexp and regcmp are very good parsing utils for C. In general I don't have any problems with Perl, but I am of the opinion that some of its touted advantages don't exist for good C programmers -- of course that is a skillset many do not wish to attain, and I can hardly blame them
That's not fair, the linux community, and many open source projects have flourished without companies paying for all the development. The code is open sourced and should live long and prosper. Don't be so negative, these are the glory days of Linux. I know that Slashdot likes to put negative spins on everything (esp. Michael), but the community is alive and well. A few years ago companies would have never thought of deploying linux, much less maintaining their own distro, but now Linux is widely deployed, its only a matter of time until they must develop linux as part of their core business solutions.
Please spawn more than 256 worker threads using green threads on Solaris jvm. Then you'll see green threads are too dangerous to use (more than 256 concurrent threads, no soup for you).
With java, you either use a restricted portable subset (in that case, what is the point of java), or you need to be prepared for the surprises that are going to occur when you deploy with and without X, with tuned, precompiled db access (ie. sqlJ), floppy access, saving data in binary format, reading binary data. That's all the one's I've personally seen, but I've heard horror stories from other developers, and we certainly did switch to a more portable subset, and JNI for any parts we needed faster.
Yes, but don't standards usually try to codufy existing practice and divergent implementations. WHats the point of standardising something that is intrinsically standardized -- because there is a single reference implementation. I have no problem with MS (other than their crappy API's and hungarian notation), but it seems that they are using standardization as a marketing ploy (of course they are a much better marketing company than a technical company, but I digress), it serves no real purpose. But ANSI doesn't cost me any money, so let the corporate boys fund it, good for me.
(I would also like to point out that MS is notorious for ignoring ANSI standards *cough* C++ *cough*, so what an interesting point that they finally "seen the light" -- but let's give them the benefit of the doubt).
I guess by inference you are saying that Java then is portable, which is a statement my experience directly contradicts. I have no axe to grind with Sun, and I have no real problems with Java, but I haven't experienced the cross platform nirvana it purports. Certainly the threading characteristics for PCs, Sparcs, and Macs are not very similar, especially when you use native threads (enabled by the jvm options). And the awt implementations are not portable, nor are all the applet apis (though in all fairness those could be bugs that I've seen). But much more damning then any of that, is the object reclamations system, garbage collection works completely different depending on the platform, which while not neccesarily a portablility killer, definitely impacts system tuning.
:-).
And of course all the third party database bridges are native apps (at least if they go fast), so you are intrinsically dependent on a chunk of code that doesn' claim, or even want to be portable if you are doing any enterprise development.
Again, I have no real problems with java, but to me it is still "Write once, Test anywhere", and I'm not sure if there is any move to make the JVMs more similar (or even if that is a good idea). But what do I know, I'm just a crazy C++ hack
Hmm, is this a troll? Java does not have a specification -- at all. You could argue it has a reference implementation -- but that would be incorrect as well. System.gc() is not guaranteed to do anything when called, and the JVM on solaris certainly implements it exactly that way -- which makes alot of sense wrt to the java threading priority model. unwind-protect is no different than the with-open-file macro (only works on a single lexical block), and I've already explained why that is insufficient. My criticism is valid, no need to try to contradict. Many people do not find the feature useful, however.
I think he did understand the difference when he went on to say that personal religion seemed like a good thing to him. He also managed to make the distinction in 2 sentences rather than 4 paragraphs.
Of course, but in Java there is no guarantee that finalize() will ever be called (some flavors of Dylan and Smalltalk have the same behavior I think). Garbage collection is not guaranteed to occur ever, even if the system exits normally/abnormally. Obviously this isn't a deal breaker for any language, I just think that, imo, no language has a lifetime management scheme as expressive and flexible as C++.
I do like Common Lisp (and more recently I thought Dylan was a nice extension to Common Lisp), my only real complaint is about the lack of finalization semantics, particularly C++ destructors which I think are far and away the best object lifetime management system going. LISP, just like all the languages that have copied its gc system, neglects to understand that there are many other resources I need to manage other than memory (db handles, shared memory regions, mutexes, files, etc.). Macros and closures allow me to emulate this in a single lexical enclosure, but if I wish to do the resource management in different lexical blocks (perhaps using producer/consumer idioms), no way other than manual resource management is offered. I cannot setup a consistent, automatic system. Oh well, I guess I am just one of the unwashed masses who thinks GC causes more headaches than it really solves.
Great interview, probably the best I've seen on Slashdot (or at least that I remember in the last few years)
after reading SICP, it will take you perhaps a week to learn any computer language. highly recommended.
Now, now, a little hyperbole is fine, but this is silly. Many, many (,many!?!) languages develop their expressiveness via keywords and complex idioms, rather than functional constructs and take much longer than a week to learn (I consider someone who has learned a language to be able to write any program they normally could in that language). This is not a bad thing, its just different. Languages such as C++ and especially Ada use keywords to denote many things about the program that languages such as lisp do not bother to enforce, or use convention instead (as far as it goes C is a quite simple language syntax wise, but many of its most powerful idioms could not be learned in a week).
I've got one just called Common Lisp, 3rd Ed. Not great, but not bad. The Paul Graham one is really, really good. Maybe one of the best books on a programming language I've seen. I think the name is simply ANSI Common Lisp. Highly recommended (check the reviews at Amazon I guess to make sure I'm not off my rocker).
That's how it worked for DOS essentially, every game had its own tiny os running on top of DOS. It sucked because each game had its own unique support for hardware -- and if you didn't have the preferred sound card, no sound for you. Same with joysticks etc. It sucked. We don't want to go back there.
The time honored tradition is a tack in your shoe, but I've heard that people have been using ben-gay in their armpits recently to beat lie detectors (if done correctly, harder to detect). Just trying to do my part to educate the masses.
Nah, the linux kernel has a solution for that built in, but at any rate you can firewall off the problem.
Don't know if this is a troll, but the reason "raw" UNIX sockets are considered bad is because they can be exploited as a tool to hack other machines, they do not open any particular vulnerabilities on the host. At any rate, none of the attacks possible thru a standard posix (raw UNIX) socket is anything to be concerned about, firewalls are quite capable of dealing with them, you just have to have some degree of sophistication when setting up a firewall (like checking the interface the packet comes over rather than just the originating ip, to ensure spoofed packets don't get in).
The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.
IMO, the consortium has a bad track record with the standard. Bad does not go far enough even, it would be a comedy of errors, if it weren't for all the suffereing web developers who have been screwed in the deal. The standards produced by the w3c have been so late in arriving, and, done so little to codify existing practices, that invariably the only implementor that released a browser in the late 90's (MS), had to develop there own unique way of doing things, while at the same time, the other implementor of reknown added similar features with different implementations (i vaguely remember some painful thing called layers), as bug fixes to its existing browser (the glorious 4.10, 4.40, and 4.40 series of nav). The standards were doa. I could go on and on about the partisanship of the standardizing body, but what's the point. The w3c has rendered themselves irrelevant. Now I just wish they would go away. If it weren't for their incompetnece, I wouldn't have to deal with all the javascript browser identifier screens (w3c is probably to blame for the existence of javascript as well) that get screwed up while I use konqueror.
As if the w3c could be more useless than it already is.
The above isn't intentionally flamebait (hopefully it isn't), but if you've kept up at all with teh w3c, I'm sure you're aware what a pain in the ass they've been for developers. I can give examples if needed, but at this point I would probably be giving the w3c more credit than they deserve by even bothering to acknowledge that they exist. They would serve the community well by going away for a few years. (like we'd notice, they never delivered a standard until 90% of the industry had commited to IE in order to get some functionality anyway, and then telling us we all had to change to be compatible). Bad standards body are worse than the alternatives, at least we have a data point that establishes that now.
Is this an attempt to gain the w3c standards body some amount of credibility, since to this point there standards have been, at best, ignored, or possibly skewed in order to favor tools that would best be labelled as vaporware. What value does the w3c and its standards bring, and what use is there in a sanctioning practice that's only goal is to keep a standards body from completely evaporating due to its standards' lateness, lack of innovation, and irrelevance?
You aspire to being a parasite, feeding off the taxpayer?
Are you certain? (yhb . . .