Gee, anybody think this IBM/Red Hat partnership mighta
had something to do with last week's story,
"Red Hat Abandons Sparc"? Nah, IBM doesn't think of Sun as a competitor, do they?
yup, but VMWare is a heavyweight and you really couldn't consider using it to isolate a bunch of daemons each in their own kernelspace. Also, it is too GUI and not designed for starting and stopping remotely or automatically. One thing that really burns me about it is if you run linux in it, you need to launch XWindows in order to run the VMWare tools. And because it's not open source, I can't...
Re:The ultimate win/lin compatibility already exis
on
User Mode Linux
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the suggestions, though they don't get me what I'm imagining user-mode linux would.
BTW, since VMWare also runs on linux, by your logic you could equally suggest that user-mode linux is not necessary at all.
I run VMWare but it's not as lightweight as I'm picturing user-mode linux. Plus, it's not open source so there's no way to change it to do what I want. I'd like something I could put on a CD so that when I sit down at someone else's machine I could pop it in and launch, with no install. This would be a good way to evangelize linux, and to provide tech support and stuff.
I also use Cygwin a lot and I'm very happy with it. However, it does not have binary compatibility. I'd like to be able to use RPMs and whatnot without thinking about it. BTW, I also don't like the direction Cyg-tools has been going: toward separate Unix-within-Windows and away from integrated-Unix-view-of-Windows. I like to use those tools to make NT palatable, not to hide NT which is not always an option.
Re:The ultimate win/lin compatibility
on
User Mode Linux
·
· Score: 1
by making this not-really-that-funny joke, and moderating it so high, a serious issue is being ignored.
For many people who already have Windows installed, running a linux kerel on top of it would provide an easy path to get the capabilities of linux.
This user-mode linux implementation is not necessarily that easy to port to windows. From what I understand, the way it works is to run the UML kernel the same way a debugger does, with "breakpoints" at all the appropriate spots. These are then thunked to do the right thing.
basically a good idea, but it's harder than that because you've got to virtualize more than x86: if the virtual x86 has access to disk hardware, or net hardware with NFS, then hacked daemons could do real damage to the VM host.
This story would be a non-issue if Time Warner were not a monopoly in these areas. It makes issues so complicated if we always think of the specifics of an industry: let perfect market economics solve the problem automatically.
If we made monopolies illegal (not abuse of monopoly, monopoly), no cable company or any other company could get away with onerous terms unless they made economic sense. If all competitors were forced by the economics of an industry to charge 75%, it would be ok. But if you allow monopoly, you have to go through a complicated process of figuring out what makes economic sense in order to form a judgement, and then decide whether it qualifies as abuse.
From popcorn at a movie theater, to movie prices, to music CD prices, to Microsoft Windows: monopolies (and the equivalent, collusive behavior by competitors) invariably lead to unfair pricing. Make them all illegal and people (working, nonworking, rich and poor alike) will be better off.
there's a theory kicking around, and I don't know how new it is, that Neanderthal did not go extinct. There is evidence that Neanderthal and Cro Magnon coexisted in Europe (ate each oher) and that perhaps both strains intermixed and survived. Part of the evidence is the two different "races" of American Indians and among Asians, typified loosely as short-squat and taller-thinner.
I am not an expert or a proponent, I just heard it a couple of months ago.
It's not that BugTraq has a "policy" of releasing exploits. BugTraq releases what gets submitted, through moderation. The people who submit each report or exploit decide how they want to handle it, and this is how it should be. Freedom of speech means if I have something to say, I can say it.
A lot of the "early" reports are motivated by the desire for credit for finding the bugs. It might seem petty and small minded, but so what? If that's your motivation for putting in useful work and publishing, who are we to criticize: go to it. If the companies/developers that have the security hole in their products enhance the glory for the discoverer, they might get more cooperation.
But early reports with exploits really light a fire under the fixers and create more awareness in the vicitms and potential victims, so in the long run it's a good thing, IMHO. But, MHO opinion doesn't matter: as I said, it's all about free speech.
Re:are copyrights necessary?
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
Capitalism does a better job of getting productivity from each, and supplying goods to fill needs. It's just a question of what forms of property should be allowed.
what they're calling a "bow-tie" is more properly called a "clip-on"... probably a rental, at that. A bowtie does not have two little straps that head around to the back as they have show. A bowtie is a strap that comes around from the back and ties in the front.
But getting the analogy wrong just reflects the simplicity of what they've done. Their categorizations based on number of links in and number of links out could have been made a priori. They did measure the size of each group which was somewhat interesting.
A much more interesting study would be of the paths that people actually follow. Who cares what links the author put up if nobody clicks on them. But, the paths that people take would tell us a lot. Do peoples start at their bookmarks? Do they start at portals? Can they be categorized? And the real question: what paths do the people who buy stuff take?
I'll add something completely unrelated:... and any engineer/scientist who has lost their boyish wonder at the fun of blowing things up, should retire and take up hall patrol or something. This contingency plan would have been a blast to work on:)
What deterrance? Do you think the soviet union would have backed down just because the US...
Yes, I do. The Soviet Union backed down because of U.S. military power on a number of occasions. They would have backed down even more if we didn't have so many sissies on our side who started bawling every time we stood up to them on the playground.
The very same sissies are now thinking, "how can he compare the Cold War to a playground?" Gotcha:) didn't I?:)
yep, "is the phone number yours to keep" is the right question. In light of netJerk solutions claiming it owns our domains, you know what Cisco should introduce? A little box with with an RJ45: plug it in, and your domain is online... and yours to keep till you sell the box:)
If they were paid for their work then the copyright would be owned by the customer, unless their contract said otherwise.
Wrong, and they guy you are replying to is wrong too. The contractor/author owns the copyright unless contract says they give it up. The exception is that employees (not contractors) are not treated as authors.
You can moderate me down, or the funky contract guy, but only one of us is correct. I believe the law works this way:
Authors retain copyrights unless they explicitly give them up in contracts, funky or otherwise.
Employees are not considered authors of their work, their employers are.
Contractors are the authors of their works. The people who pay the contractors only get copyrights if the contractors explicitly give them rights
The last point is the reason that this is a standard clause in a contract. If it gets left out, the copyright belongs to the author, not the payer. You better get a lawyer, my friend, the bad guys have the law on their side this time.
It was Lucy Clarkson's father who first sensed the possibilities. "You'd make a great Lara Croft" he said to his daughter, as he took in yet another Nude Raiders screenshot...
Yes, judge. I suffered irreperable harm to my name when Metallica had my Napster account cancelled. My friends and associates ridiculed me
because now they know I listen to Metallica and am a pathetic looser. I am now outcast."
Every judge on the bench would believe that claim:)
as such a visible website in the opensource world, you missed an opportunity to execute this in a "don't miss a heartbeat" way. Yes, it would have cost more and cost more planning, but the benefits would have been broad and deep. This way looks as lame as any IIS server reboot.
no, I'm not flaming, and no, I'm not trolling. This is serious stuff.
another feature that goes untouted in Java is error handling. The "try{} catch()" method of trapping errors is pure genius.
It's great(!) that you have seen the pure genius, so hopefully you will cheered to hear that there's more genius there than (sadly) the java implementors realized: exception handling is great for errors, but it is also great for other exceptional values. Let me just cut to the chase. How many times have you written code that declares a "temporary" variable simply because you need to test a return value and save the return value? Think of functions like "find this character in a string". It is completely wrong to return -1 for "not found" as java does if you have throw available to you. Using throw, you can simply use the return value of the character index in the normal flow of your code, and then catch the exceptional condition separately. For people who like so-called "strongly typed" languages, this is the only strongly typed way to do it. If you think about it, that -1 return value is a value which is actually a different type. Once you start coding this way, you can never go back, but try it in java and you discover (after reimplementing all of the cheesey libraries java provides) that "try" is completely superfluous. Every line or block of code should be prepared to catch; all those manually inserted trys just add noise.
This concept, BTW, was taught to me in CS class 20 years ago by people who had been thinking about it longer than that (Love ya, Professor Barbara Liskov) and it is a good illustration of the value of studying CS in an academic setting rather than teaching yourself a kluge like perl. Don't get me wrong: teaching yourself C and perl is better than not doing so, but it can be hard for people to see the value of CS degree before getting one. "Type correctness" is an abstract concept that transcends any particular language, and it is depressing to see a very recent language like Java show up and be embraced by the OOP crowd, and at the same time show such a glaring misunderstanding of type correctness.
Your example of catch and throw is one example of genius. Learn about tail-recursion and really get blown away (search for "the ultimate goto").
what have you just proved? Simply because you can use hacks and kludges to simulate objects in Scheme
I didn't read his actual code, so maybe it was a hack or a kluge, but in scheme you can add features to the language because scheme can manipulate itself -- not just manipulate code in the language, but also manipulate the language. Any object oriented feature you want to add, you can add, and it is added in a first-class way. So, your only remaining objection should be worded as "scheme allows you to program in other paradigms in addition to the narrow confines of OOP." I'm not saying that narrow confines are bad, but they are narrow.
I like many things about OOP, but every implementation I've been exposed to (and thus far that's not Smalltalk) has seemed like a huge compromise. Here's an example of a beef I have: If you want to compare two objects for equality, you don't pass "messages" as is the claim... you pass one object to the other object thus giving one object primacy over the definition of equality. To me, str1.equals(str2) is a highly unsatisfactory way to test equality. If you want an OOP you can brag about, the code should read something like: "equality: talk amongst yourselves"... of course, with scheme, you could do it this way:)
actually, isn't it a Chinese curse? "may you live in interesting times" Hemos, people all over the world read slashdot. Be more careful about what you say.
The FSF is a legal entity. What if the FSF got sued for something (maybe something said by Mr. Anonymous Candor) and what if the FSF lost the suit... unable to pay the damages, would the copyrights held by FSF be up for grabs by the plaintiff?
Oh, wouldn't that be just peachy if Microsoft got control of the whole ball of whacks!
3. Kidz copy older and cooler kids. Not all who used it knew the word "gay" meant homosexual, but all knew that it was being used pejoratively. Eventually, the mass market more ignorant usage won out.
Interestingly, this offers a deeper parallel to the hacker/cracker debate.
You're saying stuff that's mostly valid, but I think you are missing a few shades:
the code of ethics is more of a geek code of ethics, not a hacker code of ethics, but hacking originated within that cultural context. When hacking was exported (or even just explained) it was necessary to retrofit the code. My evidence for this would be the example of "moating", the practice of throwing people in the water around the MIT chapel (and also Freshman Shower Night which probably doesn't exist anymore): the person who is about to be submerged is allowed to remove belt, wallet, watch, etc. prior to being dunked. In exchange for this courtesy, the person stops struggling and trying to escape, only to resume the fight after taking off the fragile items. This is not hacking, but it has the ethic of not being irreversibly harmful.
"Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking")."
Cracking is circumventing passwords or other systems designed to limit access. The word had that meaning a long time ago (safe-cracking) and I think the hacker community picked up on that (and a linguist would point out the c/h initial fricatives made it a natural). Hacking is screwing around with things. I think that referring to guru-level coding as hacking is trying to make the point that what would be great feats to mortals are mere games to gods, and that mental activities that dullards find difficult drudgery, smart people often find fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, anybody think this IBM/Red Hat partnership mighta had something to do with last week's story, "Red Hat Abandons Sparc"? Nah, IBM doesn't think of Sun as a competitor, do they?
yup, but VMWare is a heavyweight and you really couldn't consider using it to isolate a bunch of daemons each in their own kernelspace. Also, it is too GUI and not designed for starting and stopping remotely or automatically. One thing that really burns me about it is if you run linux in it, you need to launch XWindows in order to run the VMWare tools. And because it's not open source, I can't...
I run VMWare but it's not as lightweight as I'm picturing user-mode linux. Plus, it's not open source so there's no way to change it to do what I want. I'd like something I could put on a CD so that when I sit down at someone else's machine I could pop it in and launch, with no install. This would be a good way to evangelize linux, and to provide tech support and stuff.
I also use Cygwin a lot and I'm very happy with it. However, it does not have binary compatibility. I'd like to be able to use RPMs and whatnot without thinking about it. BTW, I also don't like the direction Cyg-tools has been going: toward separate Unix-within-Windows and away from integrated-Unix-view-of-Windows. I like to use those tools to make NT palatable, not to hide NT which is not always an option.
For many people who already have Windows installed, running a linux kerel on top of it would provide an easy path to get the capabilities of linux.
This user-mode linux implementation is not necessarily that easy to port to windows. From what I understand, the way it works is to run the UML kernel the same way a debugger does, with "breakpoints" at all the appropriate spots. These are then thunked to do the right thing.
basically a good idea, but it's harder than that because you've got to virtualize more than x86: if the virtual x86 has access to disk hardware, or net hardware with NFS, then hacked daemons could do real damage to the VM host.
If we made monopolies illegal (not abuse of monopoly, monopoly), no cable company or any other company could get away with onerous terms unless they made economic sense. If all competitors were forced by the economics of an industry to charge 75%, it would be ok. But if you allow monopoly, you have to go through a complicated process of figuring out what makes economic sense in order to form a judgement, and then decide whether it qualifies as abuse.
From popcorn at a movie theater, to movie prices, to music CD prices, to Microsoft Windows: monopolies (and the equivalent, collusive behavior by competitors) invariably lead to unfair pricing. Make them all illegal and people (working, nonworking, rich and poor alike) will be better off.
I am not an expert or a proponent, I just heard it a couple of months ago.
A lot of the "early" reports are motivated by the desire for credit for finding the bugs. It might seem petty and small minded, but so what? If that's your motivation for putting in useful work and publishing, who are we to criticize: go to it. If the companies/developers that have the security hole in their products enhance the glory for the discoverer, they might get more cooperation.
But early reports with exploits really light a fire under the fixers and create more awareness in the vicitms and potential victims, so in the long run it's a good thing, IMHO. But, MHO opinion doesn't matter: as I said, it's all about free speech.
Capitalism does a better job of getting productivity from each, and supplying goods to fill needs. It's just a question of what forms of property should be allowed.
But getting the analogy wrong just reflects the simplicity of what they've done. Their categorizations based on number of links in and number of links out could have been made a priori. They did measure the size of each group which was somewhat interesting.
A much more interesting study would be of the paths that people actually follow. Who cares what links the author put up if nobody clicks on them. But, the paths that people take would tell us a lot. Do peoples start at their bookmarks? Do they start at portals? Can they be categorized? And the real question: what paths do the people who buy stuff take?
but those flaws aside, you really had me for a minute there. Thanks for playing.
I'll add something completely unrelated: ... and any engineer/scientist who has lost their boyish wonder at the fun of blowing things up, should retire and take up hall patrol or something. This contingency plan would have been a blast to work on :)
Yes, I do. The Soviet Union backed down because of U.S. military power on a number of occasions. They would have backed down even more if we didn't have so many sissies on our side who started bawling every time we stood up to them on the playground.
The very same sissies are now thinking, "how can he compare the Cold War to a playground?" Gotcha :) didn't I? :)
yep, "is the phone number yours to keep" is the right question. In light of netJerk solutions claiming it owns our domains, you know what Cisco should introduce? A little box with with an RJ45: plug it in, and your domain is online... and yours to keep till you sell the box :)
BTW, toches is spelled toches.
Wrong, and they guy you are replying to is wrong too. The contractor/author owns the copyright unless contract says they give it up. The exception is that employees (not contractors) are not treated as authors.
The last point is the reason that this is a standard clause in a contract. If it gets left out, the copyright belongs to the author, not the payer. You better get a lawyer, my friend, the bad guys have the law on their side this time.
It was Lucy Clarkson's father who first sensed the possibilities. "You'd make a great Lara Croft" he said to his daughter, as he took in yet another Nude Raiders screenshot...
Are you kidding? this case is prima facie:
Every judge on the bench would believe that claim :)
no, I'm not flaming, and no, I'm not trolling. This is serious stuff.
It's great(!) that you have seen the pure genius, so hopefully you will cheered to hear that there's more genius there than (sadly) the java implementors realized: exception handling is great for errors, but it is also great for other exceptional values. Let me just cut to the chase. How many times have you written code that declares a "temporary" variable simply because you need to test a return value and save the return value? Think of functions like "find this character in a string". It is completely wrong to return -1 for "not found" as java does if you have throw available to you. Using throw, you can simply use the return value of the character index in the normal flow of your code, and then catch the exceptional condition separately. For people who like so-called "strongly typed" languages, this is the only strongly typed way to do it. If you think about it, that -1 return value is a value which is actually a different type. Once you start coding this way, you can never go back, but try it in java and you discover (after reimplementing all of the cheesey libraries java provides) that "try" is completely superfluous. Every line or block of code should be prepared to catch; all those manually inserted trys just add noise.
This concept, BTW, was taught to me in CS class 20 years ago by people who had been thinking about it longer than that (Love ya, Professor Barbara Liskov) and it is a good illustration of the value of studying CS in an academic setting rather than teaching yourself a kluge like perl. Don't get me wrong: teaching yourself C and perl is better than not doing so, but it can be hard for people to see the value of CS degree before getting one. "Type correctness" is an abstract concept that transcends any particular language, and it is depressing to see a very recent language like Java show up and be embraced by the OOP crowd, and at the same time show such a glaring misunderstanding of type correctness.
Your example of catch and throw is one example of genius. Learn about tail-recursion and really get blown away (search for "the ultimate goto").
I didn't read his actual code, so maybe it was a hack or a kluge, but in scheme you can add features to the language because scheme can manipulate itself -- not just manipulate code in the language, but also manipulate the language. Any object oriented feature you want to add, you can add, and it is added in a first-class way. So, your only remaining objection should be worded as "scheme allows you to program in other paradigms in addition to the narrow confines of OOP." I'm not saying that narrow confines are bad, but they are narrow.
I like many things about OOP, but every implementation I've been exposed to (and thus far that's not Smalltalk) has seemed like a huge compromise. Here's an example of a beef I have: If you want to compare two objects for equality, you don't pass "messages" as is the claim... you pass one object to the other object thus giving one object primacy over the definition of equality. To me, str1.equals(str2) is a highly unsatisfactory way to test equality. If you want an OOP you can brag about, the code should read something like: "equality: talk amongst yourselves"... of course, with scheme, you could do it this way :)
actually, isn't it a Chinese curse? "may you live in interesting times" Hemos, people all over the world read slashdot. Be more careful about what you say.
Oh, wouldn't that be just peachy if Microsoft got control of the whole ball of whacks!
3. Kidz copy older and cooler kids. Not all who used it knew the word "gay" meant homosexual, but all knew that it was being used pejoratively. Eventually, the mass market more ignorant usage won out.
Interestingly, this offers a deeper parallel to the hacker/cracker debate.
the code of ethics is more of a geek code of ethics, not a hacker code of ethics, but hacking originated within that cultural context. When hacking was exported (or even just explained) it was necessary to retrofit the code. My evidence for this would be the example of "moating", the practice of throwing people in the water around the MIT chapel (and also Freshman Shower Night which probably doesn't exist anymore): the person who is about to be submerged is allowed to remove belt, wallet, watch, etc. prior to being dunked. In exchange for this courtesy, the person stops struggling and trying to escape, only to resume the fight after taking off the fragile items. This is not hacking, but it has the ethic of not being irreversibly harmful.
"Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking")."
Cracking is circumventing passwords or other systems designed to limit access. The word had that meaning a long time ago (safe-cracking) and I think the hacker community picked up on that (and a linguist would point out the c/h initial fricatives made it a natural). Hacking is screwing around with things. I think that referring to guru-level coding as hacking is trying to make the point that what would be great feats to mortals are mere games to gods, and that mental activities that dullards find difficult drudgery, smart people often find fun.