If those projects are all GPL'd or similarly open sourced, why does anyone care if they use the code for their product?
Because the authors of the code said that they were releasing it under the GPL. And the users of the code are bound by that license.
I hate to say it, but this is another instance of where the BSD license is far superior to the GPL since it allows commercial redistribution.
By that metric, public domain is superior to the BSD license, since you can rip off people's code and not even give them credit. You seem to be missing the point, which is that the GPL forbids distribution of derived works without releasing the source. You might not like it, but guess what? It doesn't matter what you think. You didn't write the code. Presumably, the authors of mpg123, mplayer, etc. found the redistribution restriction of the GPL to be a positive thing.
Your sentiment is entirely correct - that it's better to try to settle these sorts of disputes privately before going public and making a big row.
However, if you would have RTFA, you would have seen that:
They tried to discuss it privately, and were unable to come to a satisfactory conclusion
Kiss Technology failed to answer our inquiry for their source files (which they are obligated to provide), so this news entry is posted.
KISS is apparently a serial offender in this respect, the MPlayer folks claim to have found fingerprints from MAD, mpg123, and libjpeg in the KISS firmware. This is apparently not an isolated incident, but a pattern of repeated abuse. (Note, this point is based on one-sided evidence. Although it looks bad for the KISS folks, I would give them a chance to explain themselves before damning them.)
So actually the last one, you couldn't clearly express what you meant. Look, the first time I read what you were posting, I thought you were saying that regression to the mean was false. Instead, you were just being pedantic.
Nevermind that we need that energy to go about our daily business whatever the cost so demand isn't reduced anyway, nevermind that those same progressive governments put exactly zilch of that tax revenue back into alternative energy research and nevermind that it doesn't make any difference anyway because the rest of the world is still polluting at least as much as they ever did, so....
If you think high energy costs have no effect on energy use, you've never tried to buy anything that uses energy in the US. Here, we have cars that suck down gas like it's going out of style. The device that heats your hot water keeps it hot all the time, thus putting off huge amounts of waste heat that you remove with your inefficient air conditioner. Clothes are apparently best washed by immersing them in a veritable ocean of hot water.
European appliances and cars, on the other hand hare suitably efficient. Cars are typically efficient diesels, hot water is on-demand, washing machines use minimal water. You can complain all you want about how your governments spend the tax money, but the energy taxes are having their desired effect. (But before you complain too much, you might consider that being unemployed and sick in the US is often a life-threatening situation.)
Parent is overrated, should probably be modded to 0.
Aardpig's poorly-stated "point" is that the range of the averages of a bunch of repeated samples goes up as the number samples increases. My golly, you mean, that if I flip a coin twice a thousand times, than my range of number of heads (0-2) will be smaller than if I flip a coin 10 times a thousand times (0-10)!? Aardpig's claims that s/he does not claim that the average does not regress to the mean, but that's not entirely clear.
Aardpig's also makes the astounding point that independent probabilities exist. Shock.
It's hard to tell if s/he being purposefully unclear, made a mistake and is now trying to justify themselves, or is just incapable of clearly expressing an idea. In any case, there's no reason for anyone to see that post.
The law specifically disallows laptops in the car "if the device is located in the motor vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver's seat, or is visible to the driver while operating the motor vehicle." I'm a bit confused by this. The language used is quite sloppy - is it okay if there's a screen in the front seat that's pointed away from the driver? The article seemed to imply that the law merely applied to driver-visible displays, but the law seems ambiguous. Is it OR or XOR?
If OSS is going to be successful over the long run, remember that the market responds to what IT wants -- not what the OSS community wants.
Ah, but what do you mean by "successful?" You clearly mean "achieving large market share," but who cares? Do you contribute to OSS? If so, then people care. If not, your opinion doesn't matter. You're just sitting by the sidelines cheering/jeering.
See, for a publicly traded software company, it's real simple. They have an obligation to increase shareholder value. They must expand their company, typically by expanding market share and raising prices.
With OSS, it's a bit more complex. There are many participants who have many different goals. For many, they want to produce the software that they want, IT be damned. They could be successful with nearly zero market penetration.
The only reason I say this is because most of the replies seem to go something like this, "yes, but forking is good for software". Well, it may be good for the people producing the software but it really sucks for customers.
"Customers." What do you mean by customers? I've written and released OSS. Why? `Cause I thought it was vaguely useful and maybe someone else would like it. Were the people who downloaded it my "customers?" Hell no.
Anyway, in addition to being not even wrong, your argument is also wrong. Is the existence of OpenBSD something that sucks for these so-called customers? In the short term, forking hurts. But to avoid this temporary pain is to locally hill-climb, and miss the lofty peaks over yonder. You argument is equivalent to saying that we should all be protozoa, because switching over to sexual reproduction was really sucky. In the end, good software is good for IT.
At least with OSS forking, at least both variants will be supported as long as someone is willing to put in the time. With closed-source, if the original developers decide to stop supporting something, it's gone.
Re:Wait a second
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know what kind of "security people" you deal with, but they're clearly a bunch of snake-oil selling morons. Frankly, I don't think you've ever seen a real security person, I think you see a bunch of programmers who are responding in a disorganized manner to a directive from management to "add security."
The people who "designed" these systems are not people who are used to thinking about security, or even know how to think about security. Criticizing the entire field of security professionals based on these systems is like complaining about doctors being incompetent because the miracle cure you bought off the internet made you sick.
Tog's criticisms are valid, but he aimed wide in directing his ire. Similarly, I suggest that your statement "security people are like PHB's" is incorrect, and you actually mean "security frauds are like PHB's."
Unless I'm mistaken, this law would make pricewatch and its ilk illegal.
This is probably some of the motivation behind the bill, in fact. The point is that free information exchange increases competition, competition reduces profits, and profit is the American way. Ergo. free exchange of information (facts) is un-American, and must be stopped. Apparently market economies are no longer in vogue...
1) Sure, putting the government in control of something is the perfect solution. After all, look at the level of competition, ethics, and innovation in the auto industry! And hey, how `bout that patent bureau. Your "there otta be a law" rambling is great, as long as you only want to run software made large companies. No open-source of shareware software makers could afford to get certified. And what the hell good would it do? Criminals break the law, it's *what they do*, they'll write their malware no matter what. Or do you think compilers should be carefully controlled? 2) Run ad-aware all you like, it won't protect you from a custom-made worm that targets you, because if you don't know about it, lavasoft can't get a sample. The only solution is for you to secure your damn computer. If you don't do that, you're just a target waiting to be hit.
You say 61% of defaced sites run linux? Well, 64% of web sites are running Apache, according to netcraft. I will now wave my hands wildly and assert that those are all running on linux. Well, maybe not, but I suspect that a big chunk of that 15% "other" is linux. So, from stats (and hand-waving) alone, once should deduce that Linux is more secure than Windows.
I thought the cool bit about Vignette was the CMS workflow, and the serving part was just a decent cache implementation. Anyway, the other thing to note about Vignette was that they were doing the caching thing a long time ago, when you coulnd't just grab some free software to do it. I expect that CNN doesn't really have a lot of interest in trashing all the infrastructure that they've built around Vignette.
Czmyt writes:
How do you run out of TCP ports? If my Web server has 1,000,000 requests pending, they may be coming from random ports on various IP addresses, but they're all coming to port 80 on my machines' IP addresses.
Blah, nevermind, I was confused. I almost remembered how TCP works, but not quite. Running out of TCP ports is a problem on the database client, not the server. Each time you make a connection, the two machines negotiate a port to use on the machine that initiated the connection, in this case the web server, not the db server. There are only 16 bits worth of ports, afaik, so a max of ~32,000. Running out of ports might still be a problem in this example, but only if you have a really cool web server that can manage to support enough users to spawn 32k+ connections to the db server.
Mea culpa for using terms with 2 definitions. The definitions I was using (which, AFAIK, are fairly widespread) are: 1st world: industrialized 3rd world: not so industrialized, aka "developing" (I hate that term, and the silly optimism contained therein, do you really think they're always becoming more industrialized?) 2nd world: transitional, typically either moving up (Brazil, India) or down (some former USSR aligned countries and republics).
JeanBaptiste writes:
well there you go... having a massive amount of bandwidth will allow you to survive a slashdotting. In most cases of slashdotting, I dont think the server was the bottleneck... its no problem for a server to dish out static pages... its the bandwidth, especially for serving pictures or videos....
With static web pages, server power is rarely a problem, it's all about the pipes. However, if the pages are dynamically generated, and don't have a lot of caching, then you've got yourself a big problem.
So take, for example, loading a forum page in UltimateBB. AntiOnline handily tells you how many db requests it takes to create a page, and how long it took. This one over here says 61 requests and.3 seconds. Now, the poster claims to be peaking at ~37000 page views/hour, which is 10 hits per second. Now in that.3 seconds, where 61 database connections were established, there were another 3 requests coming in, making it an average of 240 database connections every.3 seconds. That's not an unreasonable number of connections, but what if your DB server can't keep up? What if, due to the load, the queries take 10x longer than usual? At that point, over.3 seconds, you get 240 connections, but only service 24 of them. Over the next.3 seconds, you get another 240 requests, but service only another 24, leaving you with 436 pending. After 30 seconds, you've serviced 2400 requests, but have another 21,600 pending. before too long, you're out of possible TCP ports.
There are ways to keep your servers from crapping out under heavy load. One is to buy a studly, fire-breathing DB server that can process requests faster than your web servers can send them. Another (cheaper) solution would be to pool and marshall your DB requests, being sure to remove requests from the queue when the remote user times out (either by clicking the stop button or running up against a built-in limit of their browser). This way, your site may get slow, but nothing will crash. A final method is to use enough caching on the web server that you pages are, essentially, static. This is, for instance, what Vignette does, which is why all the major news sites use it. This method combines the flexibility of database-backed CMS systems with the database load of static web pages.
So, essentially, there are many ways to let your database-backed web site survive a slashdoting, but embedding a bunch of PHP SQL queries against a locally-running installation of MySQL is not one of them. Unless you have a big honkin' cluster.
So lately there's been a couple stories about SuSE and German institutions hooking up, and also the perennial outsourcing development to 2nd-world countries discussion. On a gut instinct level, I'm for the former (down with The Man!) and against the latter (wait! I want that job!). However, my feelings about both are a bit more complicated.
You see, it's hard not to see that SuSE stuff as largely influenced by nationalism. This is not to day it's a bad choice, presumably the clients like the fact that the SuSE folks speak fluent German, which you probably can't say for Mandrake, RedHat, or Redflag. But, you know, it still has that aura of "help our boys, damn those 3v1l feriners."
The outsourcing development to 2nd-world companies is, OTOH, a-nationalistic. Much of the debate about it is full of people wrapping themselves in the flag and the like. Very much like labor unions when manufacturing jobs go overseas. The fact of the matter, however, is that those folks in India need that job much more than you do. You wouldn't think of doing the job for $4k/year, whereas they'll jump at the opportunity. And if you're a 1st worlder whose job has *not* been shipped overseas, you directly benefit from this, as development costs are (allegedly) lower.
So, the economist in me is like "Hoo-ah! Ship those jobs overseas. I can always get a job as a plumber (probably making more than I am now)." But, of course, it's not that simple. First off, you really need to be a big corp to start outsourcing overseas. You need a certain amount of infrastructure &c. Also note that due to increasing returns to investment and the like, big commercial software firms tend to become monopolies. This is much worse for the consumer than subsidizing overpriced, lazy 1st world developers. So to a large extent, buying from the local business is a sound economic decision, as it prevents you from getting locked in to a monopolist. This is especially true for organizations like governments, who have an obligation to protect their citizens from failures in the market.
So I come to my concluding paragraph with no conclusion. I'm still of two minds on the whole economic nationalism thing. If perfect competition could be insured, a policy of buying locally would be folly. However, power laws create huge distortions of market economics. Hard to say, at least for me.
The author notes that the Nokia comes with a removable NiHM battery. He then complains that NiMH's suck, because they have memory effects. This is not the case. NiCd batteries have a memory effect, not NiMH's.
I was going to moderate, but I didn't see the right answer. So here's the skinny.
You can use pretty much any DVD writer you want, however, it has to be internal. That's it. iDVD checks for a DVD writer, then checks to see if it's on the internal bus. If both of these are true, you're good to go.
Slashdot Mirror
However, if you would have RTFA, you would have seen that:
And like most pendants, you totally miss the point. You're measuring the wrong.
So actually the last one, you couldn't clearly express what you meant. Look, the first time I read what you were posting, I thought you were saying that regression to the mean was false. Instead, you were just being pedantic.
European appliances and cars, on the other hand hare suitably efficient. Cars are typically efficient diesels, hot water is on-demand, washing machines use minimal water. You can complain all you want about how your governments spend the tax money, but the energy taxes are having their desired effect. (But before you complain too much, you might consider that being unemployed and sick in the US is often a life-threatening situation.)
Parent is overrated, should probably be modded to 0.
Aardpig's poorly-stated "point" is that the range of the averages of a bunch of repeated samples goes up as the number samples increases. My golly, you mean, that if I flip a coin twice a thousand times, than my range of number of heads (0-2) will be smaller than if I flip a coin 10 times a thousand times (0-10)!? Aardpig's claims that s/he does not claim that the average does not regress to the mean, but that's not entirely clear.
Aardpig's also makes the astounding point that independent probabilities exist. Shock.
It's hard to tell if s/he being purposefully unclear, made a mistake and is now trying to justify themselves, or is just incapable of clearly expressing an idea. In any case, there's no reason for anyone to see that post.
The law specifically disallows laptops in the car "if the device is located in the motor vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver's seat, or is visible to the driver while operating the motor vehicle." I'm a bit confused by this. The language used is quite sloppy - is it okay if there's a screen in the front seat that's pointed away from the driver? The article seemed to imply that the law merely applied to driver-visible displays, but the law seems ambiguous. Is it OR or XOR?
Ah, but what do you mean by "successful?" You clearly mean "achieving large market share," but who cares? Do you contribute to OSS? If so, then people care. If not, your opinion doesn't matter. You're just sitting by the sidelines cheering/jeering.
See, for a publicly traded software company, it's real simple. They have an obligation to increase shareholder value. They must expand their company, typically by expanding market share and raising prices.
With OSS, it's a bit more complex. There are many participants who have many different goals. For many, they want to produce the software that they want, IT be damned. They could be successful with nearly zero market penetration.
"Customers." What do you mean by customers? I've written and released OSS. Why? `Cause I thought it was vaguely useful and maybe someone else would like it. Were the people who downloaded it my "customers?" Hell no.
Anyway, in addition to being not even wrong, your argument is also wrong. Is the existence of OpenBSD something that sucks for these so-called customers? In the short term, forking hurts. But to avoid this temporary pain is to locally hill-climb, and miss the lofty peaks over yonder. You argument is equivalent to saying that we should all be protozoa, because switching over to sexual reproduction was really sucky. In the end, good software is good for IT.
At least with OSS forking, at least both variants will be supported as long as someone is willing to put in the time. With closed-source, if the original developers decide to stop supporting something, it's gone.
I don't know what kind of "security people" you deal with, but they're clearly a bunch of snake-oil selling morons. Frankly, I don't think you've ever seen a real security person, I think you see a bunch of programmers who are responding in a disorganized manner to a directive from management to "add security."
The people who "designed" these systems are not people who are used to thinking about security, or even know how to think about security. Criticizing the entire field of security professionals based on these systems is like complaining about doctors being incompetent because the miracle cure you bought off the internet made you sick.
Tog's criticisms are valid, but he aimed wide in directing his ire. Similarly, I suggest that your statement "security people are like PHB's" is incorrect, and you actually mean "security frauds are like PHB's."
Unless I'm mistaken, this law would make pricewatch and its ilk illegal.
This is probably some of the motivation behind the bill, in fact. The point is that free information exchange increases competition, competition reduces profits, and profit is the American way. Ergo. free exchange of information (facts) is un-American, and must be stopped. Apparently market economies are no longer in vogue...
Mod parent differently!
YM "Insightful". HTH, HAND.
Seriously, I even kinda understand how the linux development process works, and that poster doesn't make any sense at all.
1) Sure, putting the government in control of something is the perfect solution. After all, look at the level of competition, ethics, and innovation in the auto industry! And hey, how `bout that patent bureau. Your "there otta be a law" rambling is great, as long as you only want to run software made large companies. No open-source of shareware software makers could afford to get certified. And what the hell good would it do? Criminals break the law, it's *what they do*, they'll write their malware no matter what. Or do you think compilers should be carefully controlled?
2) Run ad-aware all you like, it won't protect you from a custom-made worm that targets you, because if you don't know about it, lavasoft can't get a sample. The only solution is for you to secure your damn computer. If you don't do that, you're just a target waiting to be hit.
You say 61% of defaced sites run linux? Well, 64% of web sites are running Apache, according to netcraft. I will now wave my hands wildly and assert that those are all running on linux. Well, maybe not, but I suspect that a big chunk of that 15% "other" is linux. So, from stats (and hand-waving) alone, once should deduce that Linux is more secure than Windows.
We can but hope...
I thought the cool bit about Vignette was the CMS workflow, and the serving part was just a decent cache implementation. Anyway, the other thing to note about Vignette was that they were doing the caching thing a long time ago, when you coulnd't just grab some free software to do it. I expect that CNN doesn't really have a lot of interest in trashing all the infrastructure that they've built around Vignette.
Mea culpa for using terms with 2 definitions. The definitions I was using (which, AFAIK, are fairly widespread) are:
1st world: industrialized
3rd world: not so industrialized, aka "developing" (I hate that term, and the silly optimism contained therein, do you really think they're always becoming more industrialized?)
2nd world: transitional, typically either moving up (Brazil, India) or down (some former USSR aligned countries and republics).
With static web pages, server power is rarely a problem, it's all about the pipes. However, if the pages are dynamically generated, and don't have a lot of caching, then you've got yourself a big problem.
So take, for example, loading a forum page in UltimateBB. AntiOnline handily tells you how many db requests it takes to create a page, and how long it took. This one over here says 61 requests and .3 seconds. Now, the poster claims to be peaking at ~37000 page views/hour, which is 10 hits per second. Now in that .3 seconds, where 61 database connections were established, there were another 3 requests coming in, making it an average of 240 database connections every .3 seconds. That's not an unreasonable number of connections, but what if your DB server can't keep up? What if, due to the load, the queries take 10x longer than usual? At that point, over .3 seconds, you get 240 connections, but only service 24 of them. Over the next .3 seconds, you get another 240 requests, but service only another 24, leaving you with 436 pending. After 30 seconds, you've serviced 2400 requests, but have another 21,600 pending. before too long, you're out of possible TCP ports.
There are ways to keep your servers from crapping out under heavy load. One is to buy a studly, fire-breathing DB server that can process requests faster than your web servers can send them. Another (cheaper) solution would be to pool and marshall your DB requests, being sure to remove requests from the queue when the remote user times out (either by clicking the stop button or running up against a built-in limit of their browser). This way, your site may get slow, but nothing will crash. A final method is to use enough caching on the web server that you pages are, essentially, static. This is, for instance, what Vignette does, which is why all the major news sites use it. This method combines the flexibility of database-backed CMS systems with the database load of static web pages.
So, essentially, there are many ways to let your database-backed web site survive a slashdoting, but embedding a bunch of PHP SQL queries against a locally-running installation of MySQL is not one of them. Unless you have a big honkin' cluster.
So lately there's been a couple stories about SuSE and German institutions hooking up, and also the perennial outsourcing development to 2nd-world countries discussion. On a gut instinct level, I'm for the former (down with The Man!) and against the latter (wait! I want that job!). However, my feelings about both are a bit more complicated.
You see, it's hard not to see that SuSE stuff as largely influenced by nationalism. This is not to day it's a bad choice, presumably the clients like the fact that the SuSE folks speak fluent German, which you probably can't say for Mandrake, RedHat, or Redflag. But, you know, it still has that aura of "help our boys, damn those 3v1l feriners."
The outsourcing development to 2nd-world companies is, OTOH, a-nationalistic. Much of the debate about it is full of people wrapping themselves in the flag and the like. Very much like labor unions when manufacturing jobs go overseas. The fact of the matter, however, is that those folks in India need that job much more than you do. You wouldn't think of doing the job for $4k/year, whereas they'll jump at the opportunity. And if you're a 1st worlder whose job has *not* been shipped overseas, you directly benefit from this, as development costs are (allegedly) lower.
So, the economist in me is like "Hoo-ah! Ship those jobs overseas. I can always get a job as a plumber (probably making more than I am now)." But, of course, it's not that simple. First off, you really need to be a big corp to start outsourcing overseas. You need a certain amount of infrastructure &c. Also note that due to increasing returns to investment and the like, big commercial software firms tend to become monopolies. This is much worse for the consumer than subsidizing overpriced, lazy 1st world developers. So to a large extent, buying from the local business is a sound economic decision, as it prevents you from getting locked in to a monopolist. This is especially true for organizations like governments, who have an obligation to protect their citizens from failures in the market.
So I come to my concluding paragraph with no conclusion. I'm still of two minds on the whole economic nationalism thing. If perfect competition could be insured, a policy of buying locally would be folly. However, power laws create huge distortions of market economics. Hard to say, at least for me.
http://www.dansdata.com/gz011.htm
True memory effect doesn't happen in Real Life. NiCd's suffer from voltage drops after partial discharging, NiMH's may, as well, but much less so.
The author notes that the Nokia comes with a removable NiHM battery. He then complains that NiMH's suck, because they have memory effects. This is not the case. NiCd batteries have a memory effect, not NiMH's.
I was going to moderate, but I didn't see the right answer. So here's the skinny.
You can use pretty much any DVD writer you want, however, it has to be internal. That's it. iDVD checks for a DVD writer, then checks to see if it's on the internal bus. If both of these are true, you're good to go.
Mostly the Florida Election Commission, though, and they care because they're looking forward to doing some real election fraud!