If PostgreSQL has a better query optimizer, I think I know of one ex-Interbase developer who's going to have a SERIOUS conniption fit. They were doing really good optimizations on the queries back 6+ years ago, before (I *think*) Postgres even HAD SQL. (Disclaimer, I used to work for Borland/Interbase back around the Delphi (which used IB as a backend) through 4.0 release timeframe, and I distinctly recall them talking about their query engine with some competent pride.)
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I will say I'd be mightily surprised.
Greetings, Yeah... Uh. Geez, since I did the port to Netware that got released, I should comment... The Netware version has gotten a lot better since then? *chuckle*
Seriously though, I'm really curious (and will find out soon!) if the ENTIRE thing is there, or if it's just the Unix + Windows code that's been released. It'd be fascinating if you could actually (with the right tools) go ahead and build it for VMS, or Netware (not that *I* ever want to touch that OS again), or any of the other OS's it was originally released for.
Anyhow, a few quick comments on Interbase, from someone who was deep in the guts of the code...
The source code was desperately ugly when I looked at it, and I was WAY too junior to even think about cleaning it up... I hope that they've gone ahead and cleaned it up before releasing it.
As databases go, it kicked MAJOR butt when I was working there, but they sold it as a 'departmental' RDBMS. They very clearly were NOT going after 'enterprise' level contracts. On the other hand, that may have been a 'choose your battles wisely' strategy.
As for 'trust', well, the entire source code for Interbase was stored in an Interbase DB... 'marion', they called it. It was a pretty good version control system, and it definitely showed that they trusted their own DB one hell of a lot.
For SQL conformance, well, how many open source DB projects do you know of who actually HAD developers on the ANSI commitee? They tracked it pretty closely. It wasn't perfect as I recall, but it was pretty darn close.
The 'SuperServer' was something they were talking about back when I worked there (just pre-5.0), which was basically a HEAVILY threaded version with a lot of performance tuneups. It was one of the things that excited the serious DB developers there, and in the bleaker moments of Borland I wondered if those guys would ever get to do the really cool stuff they wanted to do. I'm REALLY glad that they did!
Frankly, it's a good DB, it's stable, it's been around forever (quite a bit longer than either MySQL or PostgresSQL!), it had some truly devoted developers at Borland, who LOVED database development. It was a second tier database (behind Oracle and Informix), but on that tier system MySQL and PostgresSQL never even show up I'm afraid...
It's always been a very developer-friendly DB, and I will DEFINITELY snag a copy and use it myself, although I do a lot of stuff that wants indexed TEXT fields... *sigh*
If you have any interest at all, don't hesitate, go check it out! You won't be disappointed, I believe.
Greetings, Gee... I've used Swing, and the results look just about like whatever platform I'm using it on. (You DO set your look and feel to whatever the platform is by default, don't you?)
It's so nice having a platform independant language with a UI that adapts to the platform, instead of making the user adapt to the API's UI.
Wanna use Motif? 'Kay! Wanna use Windows? 'Kay! Wanna use Swing's own UI 'Metal'? WHY?!? Wanna use the Mac? Wellllll... But most of the time, it's just that straightforward.
And the widgets don't take noticably long to render. Well, they don't on any of MY boxes, using honestly good JVM's.
Cyberfox!
p.s. And YES, I truly find coding to the Swing API to be a joy! If I could program in that for all my platforms, and run it as machine code, I would in an instant. It would replace GTK, QT, MFC, OWL, and all the other crud out there. Unfortunately, the beauty of it relies in many ways on Java language features. *sigh* Spring forth, my burly GCJ, and save me!
Well, a few things... For video cards, 32 bit color is really RGBA, where A is an alpha channel. Alpha is easiest (although somewhat inaccurately) described as a level of translucence. Your actual color is 24 bits, even in 32 bit mode.
For scanners, colors are often listed as '48 bit' color, and such. Those scanners detect a wider range of color depth (16 bits/color), and then downscale to 8 bits per color, to make up for signal noise, potential variance in the scanning equipment, etc...
More importantly for display, however, RGB is painfully inaccurate for color reproduction. I'm given to understand (from printing houses) that there are levels of purple which are doable with dyes that are impossible to represent, for example. Plus there are scattered zones in 24 bit color where the delta between a given color and any nearby colors are more than the ~5 angstroms of visible light that human perception can notice.
Printing and color management software has always had to be VERY smart in order to color-match what gets drawn onto a screen and what gets drawn onto paper, and there are sets of dye-creatable color that are unreachable on a monitor at present.
We live with it, because nobody has a better answer yet, and not enough people care.
This relates to DVD Audio in that the extra sampling capability finally does give that extra nudge over the top, to perfect audio, where the only limit is your own hearing, and noise from your own equipment. CD's, like monitors currently, are 'Good Enough', but if you really care about the depth of your sound, you want something more.
On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that DVD Audio will ever matter to the mass of men, leading lives of quiet desperation.
If I could get updates on a bi-weekly basis to Windows, I would do it in a f'ing heartbeat. I'd PAY for THAT service. As it is, the company I work for has forked out tens of thousands of dollars in OS licenses and crap for Microsoft Windows NT, and we STILL have to wait a bloody year between service packs, and get only the tiniest fixes in the mean time!
DAMN straight I'd PERSONALLY pay a nominal maintenance contract fee for honest-to-god bugfixes that came out that often from Microsoft! But THEY'll never do that.
Okay, it's obvious that zero cost, AND simultaneously not stepping on anyone's toes (through copyright violations) is a very high up reason for something like this.
On the other hand, this lets us do something we (as a technical community) haven't ever had the opportunity to do: Translate the technical vision of FREEDOM into a real-world political vision.
Linux isn't about communism vs. democracy vs. socialism vs. capitalism... It's about individual freedom to see, change, adapt, learn, and grow. It puts power into the hands of anyone who uses it, and lets them use that power to grow.
To hell with the 'public relations' portion of this. This is an unparalled opportunity for the Linux community to spread the REAL underlying beliefs of Linux to the people of one of the larger oppressive countries in the world.
The freedoms involved are so deeply embedded in the code, in the approach, in the system, and structure of Linux, that they will infect anyone who gets their hands into the system. Which could suddenly be a BILLION people.
I believe in these freedoms, and I believe that if we encourage an action like this, that it will become a catalyst for true social change. Not tomorrow, not in a decade maybe, but over the next quarter century, Linux could free a populace.
Isn't that worth believing in, hoping for, and maybe even fighting for? There's never been an opportunity like this, if it's true. Reach out with both hands and grasp at it!
Boy... I just seem to run into you everywhere. *wry grin* Some well-formed words, but missing the point somewhat.
1) I'm not quite sure why AT&T being a government supported corporation makes it 'okay' that they were massively overcharging for the cost of a phone call... They were a monopoly, without question, and a bad one. They DID act in a predatory fashion towards competing firms, and caused harm to the consumer thereby.
2) I agree completely, Russia is not a capitalist system, it is a BROKEN system. You cannot equate a black market with a free market. In fact, the need for a black market identifies the clear lack of a free market. HOWEVER, minimal government is not a requirement of capitalism. It is a requirement of laissez-faire capitalism as originally defined, but is (like many other social and economic systems) impossible in pure form. Unfettered markets are destructive, over-restrictive markets are stunting. The goal of anti-trust legislation in government is to balance the two, by only punishing those who both HAVE dominance, and ABUSE dominance.
3) I think you meant corporations can't... so I'll run with that. I agree, absolutely, that governments have a larger POTENTIAL for evil. This does not dictate, however, that big business is good. The two points are, in fact, completely orthogonal. The question was:
Why is it that the same people who think that big government is inherently evil think that big business is inherently good?
The question still stands. Demonizing government is not an answer. We already know the ills and potential ills of government. We also have to acknowledge the not-insubstantial dangers of corporations, however. Are they at the same level? No, perhaps, but because they are a lesser evil, does that make them good? Of course not.
I think it's quite likely that BillG is right now hiring lobbyists and publicists to make sure that they don't get screwed over like this again.
Only if they win... If they don't win, then the consumers truly DO win, because Microsoft won't be in the position to try and screw with the legal system anymore.
As for 'planning the attacks', I hate to say it quite like this, but I am a big fan of distributed control. Microsoft is a central point of power, and they have excercised and abused it behind closed doors for too long.
I also substantially disagree with:
...the most important decisions in the future of the computer industry would be decided by government bureoucrats(sp), and they would likely be decided by lobbying and special interest pressures.
The fundamental problem is how Microsoft abuses it's dominant market share to attack companies who are positioned to possibly cause them problems on the bottom line. The real technical innovation is not done by Microsoft, and never has. They've bought every good product they've made, with the possible exception of Word, which I'm not sure of. Real innovation happens in the garages, and the small companies around the world. If they don't have to fear being demolished by the juggernaut of Microsoft, then that results in a higher level of innovation. Those companies don't have to worry about anti-trust legislation, because their market share is *0* when they start.
Anti-trust laws only apply when companies are beyond a certain market share, and then only when those companies start acting in ways that are to the detriment of the consumer. The list of companies to whom this has applied in the past is vanishingly small.
This means there would be no reason for people to squander money on lawyers, lobbyists, etc., unless they were at that level of domination, and are interested in behaving like that, in which case they aren't likely to be innovating anyway.
Your entire argument is completely based on the idea that Microsoft is a major source of innovation. Once you realize that's specious, the rest falls apart entirely.
It's not a matter of technical competence, although my experience with them has been that even that is lacking. It's a question of their right to suppress innovation when it's bad for their business.
I object to that, and always will. If you question whether that actually happens or not, you've not worked in the software business. I can't even count the number of times I've heard, said, or had said to me, 'Damn, this is a great product idea and technically clean, but it'd cause problems for Microsoft, and then we'd have to fight with them. We can't win that battle, let's do something else.'
It HURTS to have to say that. It HURTS to know that a technically good idea has to die, because it's counter to the whim of a dominant company. The only thing the Open Source community has going for it, in that fight, is that it's distributed. Almost no amount of money can stop it, because it's done for love, which is why it's the only real potential threat to Microsoft right now.
They have NO equal competitors in their market segments anymore, everyone else clearly and openly denies that they are competing with them ('We're defining our market segment appeal to focus on X...', where X is a segment that Microsoft isn't addressing), because they're TERRIFIED of fighting with the juggernaut. Is this healthy for the consumer? Is it healthy for the technology field? No, and no.
You probably don't care, because you probably don't think the technology advances that are being held back matter, but I sure as hell do. I want Microsoft punished, and punished clearly, and plainly, so that any other company who considers trying to suppress technological advances, or who acts in a truly predatory manner will have to think very long and hard about it.
It's not religion, it's not politics. It's the personal technical desire to be free to innovate without being crushed by someone because you threaten their market share. If you haven't felt it, if you haven't faced it, if you haven't had to live in that constant, oppressive, professional development world, I guess I can't explain it to you.
Microsoft is a monopoly, they are predatory, they have harmed the consumer by restricting independant innovation, and they need to be clearly and obviously punished for it, so that others hesitate to try the same thing in the future.
That's why this case is so critical. The government must win, or innovation and technical competition will be stifled.
For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
and
For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
are both the same point, suggesting that these commercial companies have no impetus to develop for the Linux platform. Certainly. Therefore, the answer is that since commercial interest isn't forthcoming, it's up to the people with an interest in the community to provide the functionality.
This is how it works, if the functionality is possible, it will be implemented by someone who wants it.
For your first two parts of point three, here's a thought for you. It doesn't MATTER that a commercial company doesn't see an advantage to porting the product to Unix-based platform X. Adobe didn't want to port Photoshop to Linux. What happened? GIMP was created. This is how it works, and I'm proud of it.
The political approach you describe, in what SHOULD have been a seperate point, was only partially tried. No 'letter writing' campaigns, though. Never personally seen one work, when it was against commercial interest though... There was a group attempting to create a 'binary only' DVD player, by licensing the source, and trying to recoup investment through a very inexpensive license fee. This group still exists, but as I recall had some trouble w/ the fact that the DVD consortium wasn't interested in providing any more decryption keys to anyone. I may be misremembering.
In any case, this is counter to the desire of the community, however, in that closed-source systems are of necessity less useful than open source ones. The software would not be able to be distributed on Debian, for example. Thus, a group of people wanting to create an open source version started up. That's where all this comes from.
I shan't go very far into point four. I dislike the term Intellectual Property, because it suggests something which isn't true, but at the core I absolutely acknowledge that the producers of the material have copyright consideration. If anyone uses the DeCSS stuff for distribution of content and gets busted, the law will be in the right. The authors of this program, however, are also in the right. If you believe that the makers of a gun are responsible for how it is used, then you probably also agree with the law under which the authors of this software are being pushed around. I do NOT believe that, however. It could be we have a very simple core disagreement.
For 5, you're simply wrong. I believe that, for commercial reasons, none of the software DVD player companies would be interested in Linux players. This development means that there WILL be a Linux DVD player, no matter what the licensed software companies do.
Now for the part that really got me angry... Flames ahead, so feel free to stop reading now.
More and more, I notice around here (not singling anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thing for free" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
This is utter nonsense. This software has NOTHING to do with that! It's not a matter of the commercial companies releasing binary software DVD players, and people pirating them and passing them around. It's that THEY AREN'T RELEASING THEM, and have not expressed ANY interest in doing so. It's not a matter of copying and passing around copies of the latest DVD, it's about BEING ABLE TO WATCH THEM AT ALL on your computer. While I disagree with Intellectual Property as a concept, there are very few who would actively suggest that reselling, or redistributing commercial DVD's is a good thing. If it were possible to make a player that did NOT make that possible at the same time, I'm quite certain that the individuals involved would have done that. The nature of digital media precludes that potential, however.
Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries okay on releasing spec's (and liability for implementing a playback mechanism) for DVD.
FIRST of all, the attitude that 'Oh, I'll just take whatever the commercial companies give me', is what's not conducive to getting specifications released. If a commercial company were interested in producing such a product, I would most likely buy it, but I'd keep an eye out for an open source version, because I have more confidence in it's future-proofness.
This will never happen in a form that is useful, because the specs and source code CANNOT be made available without the exact same problem (copying) coming up. Therefore the ONLY solution to this problem is development of the sort that we've seen.
Or do you think the answer is that we shouldn't be allowed to watch DVD's under Linux? Or are you not willing to go that far, and just think that an open source DVD player should be illegal...? THAT is the kind of attitude that lets the companies shrug about releasing their specs, because 'everyone wants a commercial implementation, not some hobbyists implementation'.
They can easily view those two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, too."
Utter nonsense. Get it through your head that there is no objection on the basis of cost here, there is solely an objection on the basis of speech. This person developed an application that allows me to use my system to provide a service that other systems have equally. It, by itself, does not violate any copyrights, and by being open source encourages my freedom to adapt and maintain the software, independant of the original authors. It has no effect on my, or my friends, tendency to buy DVDs off the shelf, as opposed to from some guy in a long overcoat in the middle of July standing on a streetcorner whispering, 'Psst! Wanna buy a DVD, cheep?'.
Yes, most people would prefer a cheap or free version of the exact same thing, no matter what it is. I bet even you would. But there's also the very clear recognition in virtually everyone that payment to the original author is a good thing, in order to encourage them to produce more.
Those who do not already believe this will purchase pirated DVDs anyway, whether this technology is open source or not. What, you don't think that the Chinese (the most common source of copyright violations currently, as far as I know) piracy companies didn't already have this capability?
This isn't about piracy, this is about preventing the spread of a technology and using the legal system as a club to try and do that.
It's specious reasoning like this (suggesting that wanting access to the source == willingness to pirate) that encourages the lawyers to believe that the action of publishing software to play a media is in itself copyright violation.
As for the 'stepping on the toes of giants' comment... I, for one, am TIRED of the so-called 'giants' stepping on MY toes, and presuming that the only way I can use their product is to use a popular system. I am willing to pay them money for their product, but I wish to use it on the platform of my choice. They have no rights to deny me the platform choice, they only have the right to deny me the freedom to distribute the material.
My opinion, for better of for worse. I don't expect a lack of flames on this, especially as I've shown the willingness to flame...
Fascinating. I've been a professional programmer for 20 years, and every single programmer I've known disagrees with your statement:
People make better software when they are paid to make it. This is their job, not their hobby.
Every programmer I've ever known acknowledges that the code they write for their own use is generally better, more complete, more interesting, and more extensible than the code they write for work. Remember, THEY have to use it, whereas the code they write for work just has to be used by others.
I also want to make the point that we don't do this because we have self respect. If we 'win' some fight, but we become assholes in the process, how have we benefitted?
My other comment in this thread addresses this also.
Understand that under US law (and international law I believe) you have no rights to use someone else's copyrighted work, unless they grant you a license that gives you those rights.
If source code is licensed using the GPL, then complying with the GPL is the only means by which you have any rights to use the source code.
To comply with the GPL, you must release your source. If the GPL is overburdening to you, your sole option is to remove all GPL'ed source, and replace those portions of your program, either with other people's libraries, or with your own code.
It's all in there. Read the GPL. I have, and repeatedly. I don't always agree with it, but understanding what it allows and disallows is critical in our community.
You CANNOT use the GPL'ed code in your own program without GPL'ing your program. Period.
The 'volume' of code referred to is simply based on how much you're willing to rewrite from scratch.
If I've taken the front end and back-end generation portions of GCC and incorporated them into my source-code search engine as parsers, my code MUST be GPL'ed, or I MUST remove the code that I used that was GPL'ed. Clearly the volume of code is enough that I'm not willing to rewrite it.
On the other hand, if I take a GPL'ed function to copy Vector data cleanly and use it in my program, but I end up not wanting to GPL my program, THAT code is small enough that I can simply rewrite it.
The volume of code that makes your program GPL'ed is based on the volume of code you're willing to rewrite from scratch, not any arbitrarily decided line-count.
You have ZERO rights to use GPL'ed source, UNLESS you follow the GPL with whatever you derive from it. START with that recognition, and then most of the rest of the way the GPL operates will be obvious.
Cyberfox!
p.s. I'm actually not particularly frothy about the GPL. I prefer the LGPL, and still call it Library. Understanding the GPL is important, though, and I hope I help...
For once, I pretty much wholeheartedly agree with Stallman. I won't always use the GPL, because I don't always want my code restricted like that, or because I want to work with others who don't (like X, BSD, etc.), but I KNOW what it's there for, and I know WHY it's there, and I agree with it's fundamental purpose.
My only nit would be his referring to ESR's conception of free software being driven by economic good as 'almost Marxian'. He's right, in a particular sense, that the idea that 'the right thing' (as argued by Marx, altough certainly not by me or by ESR or Stallman) will be done because 'it makes economic sense, in the end'. However Stallman also (clearly) knows the power of words and proximity, and he knows ESR will probably be incensed by the implied (but certainly untrue) rest of the comparison. That seemed unnecessary to me, especially as Stallman has been an equal victim of the same word-association games in the past.
The original article was a piece of trash, though. This once I think RMS hit dead on, otherwise.
Wouldn't this be nice to type into a search window:
'C++ class !(public constructor) && (public static method returning selfclass)'
This would find all C++ classes in all projects that contain no public constructors, and have a public static method (class method) that returns the same class as it's defined in. This would be an adequate 'search for singleton class' function, for anyone who knows Design Patterns. (Yes, it would probably become a macro, so you could search for 'singleton && "config"' to search for singleton classes that contained the word 'config' someplace in them.)
I'm working on this myself, although I've completely surrendered on C, because there are virtually zero projects that don't abuse the pre-processor in ways that make the code unparseable (semantically) without being run through the pre-processor first. (And if you try to do that, you need to know how the project is built, what defines are declared, etc, and your include files need to be the same as X platform, etc... This rapidly becomes a nightmare, trust me.) C can be indexed using 'glimpse' or something similar, but semantic indexing is pretty much just impossible without lots more information, and therefore non-automatable, which is my number-one priority.
C++ is nicer, because fewer people do Stupid Things with the preprocessor. (WHY would you define 'FOREVER' as 'while(1)'?!? Think it's cute, or something? Bleh...)
Java is *GOLDEN* because it's completely semantically parseable with no problems with the preprocessor. It doesn't HAVE one. I love indexing Java.
On the other hand, I have about 1.2G of.tar.bz2'ed source files, and I'm not indexing anywhere NEAR all of them, because a small subset quickly outruns MySQL's 2G file limit, and just a few more quickly outruns ext2's 4G single-file limit. (I have about 40G at home that I'm using to do the indexing on... I bought a pair of 20G drives just to experiment w/ this problem.)
ReiserFS might work, that's on my list to try (if it's stable), but I need to get the indexing working better for C++, and then see if I can't shrink the database files some.
Ahhhhhnyhow, basically, it's a hard problem to properly index and search large source bases, without simply abusive resource utilization problems. If all you want to do is 'glimpse' index it, that's easy, but it loses a lot of what you'd want to search for I feel. (Context isn't preserved, because glimpse indexes non-structured content. This is a great generic solution, but I believe firmly that code can be better indexed with a custom solution.)
On the other hand, you also NEED to 'glimpse' index on the comments, and the non-source files in a project tree. (Figuring out which is which is harder than you might think, sometimes.) This lets you search reasonably for 'This needs to be fixed!' long after it's been forgotten by the original author.
This is my main personal project these days, the coding project that keeps me sane while I'm having to reverse engineer and document what's been done by the hardware engineers (who no longer work there) at my company, instead of programming like I was hired to do.
At least I don't need to be in a server room on New Years. *wry grin*
Anyhow, if you have any suggestions (yeah right, this is sadly already off the radar for most slashdot readers, I guess...) feel free to drop me a line at cyberfox@vixen.com.
I don't know of anyone (outside of commercial companies) working on this kind of problem right now. I think it would be a good resource, and it's a fun project for me... Oh, and of COURSE the code is going to be GPL'ed if/when I ever make it useful to anyone outside myself.
Greetings, As always, I realize people will want more information afterwards and have to respond to my own post.
The NNTP standard referenced is specified in RFC 977, available at http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc977.txt for your perusal. (I would include it as a link, but slashdot always mangles my links.)
Greetings, This falls into a domain I'm QUITE familiar with, oddly enough. NNTP.
The NNTP Specification in section 3.7.1 explicitly states that the closest century is assumed as part of the year (as the NNTP spec uses two digit year dates). In it's exact words:
The date is sent as 6 digits in the format YYMMDD, where YY is the last two digits of the year, MM is the two digits of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate), and DD is the day of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate). The closest century is assumed as part of the year (i.e., 86 specifies 1986, 30 specifies 2030, 99 is 1999, 00 is 2000).
This document was submitted in February, 1986.
Does the patent in question pre-date this prior art? If not, it's invalid, and nobody has to pay them a red nickel. They may have to pay lawyers, but it sure won't cost much. This is quicker to prove than the Compton's silliness, either for 'general harm in allowing the patent' (which I think is what Compton's multimedia patent died under), or this brutally obvious prior art, even.
Everyone always comments, 'Well, I'll just patent 'e' then!' But the truth is that if you BELIEVE there's prior art, that's not as useful as laying it on the table, and saying, 'section X.Y.Z of document FOO published in 19XX says explicitly BAR, which is exactly what is being patented. Give it up.'
Looking up the patent, here's my other comments... It was filed on October 3, 1996, granted September 8. 1998. This patent has obvious prior art in the NNTP package, and the Progress database development package (which implements the identical thing, with a customizable sliding date).
This is, frankly, a nuisance patent. Any company with even the slightest bit of research, will dig up programs from 15 years ago that did this exact same thing. Even had the patent pre-dated THOSE, it would be run out by now. The first company to fight it will win, and win handily.
Nah, it's In My Humble Opinion, definitely. I (and others) often abuse it with 'IMNSHO' which is In My Not So Humble Opinion. (IMAO is another, with 'Arrogant' in place.)
I *think* is 'giant grin', but I'd have to see the context. BEG is usually Big Evil Grin, BFG is Big Grin (or the name of an id Software weapon, equally censored).
IANAL is always I Am Not A Lawyer, although I've seen a few 'IAAL (but this is not legal advice)' here and there on Slashdot.
It's too bad we couldn't have made a solid, open 3D game API spec before MS gave the world its proprietary version. OpenGL is portable, but writing an OpenGL driver is pretty much a bitch. Direct3D may be annoying to program to, but the drivers supposedly aren't quite so hard to write.
Write one before you say that.
Direct 3D driver development sucks rocks hard sideways through moosecock. Can we say Win16 lock boys and girls?
Worse yet, their insane spec tries VERY HARD to encourage hardware developers to directly support the D3D vertex formats in hardware... Gosh, think that's another attempt to underhandedly force people into a Windows-specific driver model?
OpenGL is miles and miles and miles (...) cleaner to build a driver for from an engineering perspective. You don't feel like cold oobleck is dripping down your spine, settling in your stomach, making you want to throw up, as you look at yet another intel-specific, windows-optimized, putridly hacked up, COM-based, piece of garbage sample code.
I'd curse very heavily here, but people might not get the point if I did. Saying that D3D drivers...aren't quite so hard to write. is a whopping, cart-creaking, truly awful smelling load of manure.
It falls into the Rio / MP3 category for me. It's not the best solution, but it's worth giving them money so that other people will see a market and try to build a better solution. I bought about $25 worth of books from them, and I will read them. I've converted long Gutenberg books to Doc format and read them on my Pilot, and don't have any problem with it myself.
On another note... I looked at Rocket Books. WTF?!?! I'm going to pay $350 for a single-purpose item, and they have absolutely JACK for good SF?
From PeanutPress I just bought Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (oh god, a digital version...? I'm absolutely in heaven...), and Slant by Greg Bear (which I've been meaning to read), along with a few other books I was interested in. I also downloaded the free samples, for the hell of it.
Look, if you want to sell an ebook system, whether proprietary or not, get publisher support. That they can offer Fire Upon The Deep (and know to!) gives me faith and confidence in them. That most of Rocket Books SF section looks like it was culled from the Gutenberg project very explicitly does NOT.
Anyhow, I'm impressed. They have selection. That's key for me, and probably most people who seek ebooks. Their cart system needs a bit of help, but it's not terrible.
They DON'T have technical stuff, which is a pity, but livable.
Also, fwiw, I have a Palm3 w/ the TRG 8MB expansion card. I've got plenty of space for these books, even all at once. In the end, though, I'm really dropping $25 as a donation to the cause of 'good things'. As opposed to paying for a RocketBook which doesn't fit in my pocket, burns a hole in my wallet, and doesn't have the selection...
Greetings, That would be fine, I agree... The key distribution problem restricts what you can do with OTPs to a limited set of problems, but if your problem falls within that domain it's acceptable.
However, if you do this, please for gods sake don't use this program! While the encrypt function is trivial (and bad, still, for reasons I briefly explain later), the GenKeyFile as ATROCIOUS. It makes me physically ill to think that anyone would pass that off as an OTP generation function.
The attack on it is trivial, given physical access to the machine. (I.e. it was seized, etc.) Presuming the GenKeyFile program was used, the key file is generated using rand(), seeking through a seed file and generating the bits for the 'true' key file. Even if you wipe the 'true' key file (that gets generated by this program), but keep your initial seed file around (i.e. you're using \winnt\system32\mfc.dll to generate your random bits), here's what your security comes down to:
32 bits of seed (for rand()) n bits of search where 2^n is the number of files in your filesystem (or the next power of two over it).
The assault on this method is as follows: For each file in the system, iterate over the 32 bits of rand(seed) space, and test the resultant file for known plaintext. (What's that, you believe that they don't know any plaintext in your document? Not true! Headers, average character counts, etc., all are telltales!) With only 32 bits of seed for your rand() function (or 64 if somehow you have an extended rand()), the keyspace is not sufficient to produce truly random output. Thus the number of matches that will generate a pattern that is similar to the expected pattern (text, images, etc., all have non-random recognizable patterns) is very small, and might be zero.
There are four components to this 'encryption package':
Seed file (used to build the keyfile)
Generated Keyfile
Plaintext
Resultant ciphertext
If you keep the seed file OR the keyfile around, then this encryption is 100% useless. The seed file can be found, and the rand() function gives you *LESS* protection than DES, and MUCH less than IDEA, 3DES, etc...
Even if you've erased both your keyfile and your seed file, if the attacker can presume that you ever USED GenKeyFile to make your key data, the resultant ciphertext will be encrypted with patterns that are the result of the patterns in the seed file, mixed with the (reasonably well known) patterns of the rand() function. This patterned data can be identified by a sufficiently dedicated attacker, even w/o the original source file. Do not use GenKeyFile!
You're *far* better off using/dev/random to generate your keyfile. If you don't have a/dev/random because you're on an OS that is insufficient, then go out and install one that has it. If you're going to go through the serious difficulties of key management under an OTP, you damn well better spend the effort to get a good random source! (In fact, if you ARE, then I would say you should get an HW random number generator, and hook that up. If you honestly have a use for OTP's, don't mess around with software like this!
Seriously, this is snake oil. Well meaning snake oil, but snake oil nonetheless. Presuming a seized computer, and either the use of GenKeyFile at ALL, or the preservation of your used key file, this gives ABSOLUTELY ZERO PROTECTION FROM A COMPETENT ATTACKER.
Cyberfox!
p.s. While the encrypt program is still useful with an OTP generated from a secure source, it SHOULD be repeatedly wiping the used padbits out of the Psuedo-OTP's filespace as it goes, but it's not... Another example of less-than-stellar competency.
Important related note: You don't use an OTP to encrypt to yourself, because you never ever ever want to keep the OTP bits a millisecond longer than it takes to encrypt it initially.
p.p.s I can't say this enough, but I'll try one more time, please, please, please DO NOT USE GENKEYFILE TO BUILD YOUR KEY FILE!
The rest of the non-rant portion of my post is after the 'read more' button cut it off. That feature sure caught me by surprise.
In any case, the other point I wanted to make is that many of the drawbacks of X are also features for a limited userset. The problem is that to the 'common man' (the average user) of a popular program, those are bugs, not features.
The idea that the windowing system doesn't have direct access to hardware is just plain broken in the modern era of primarily single-user machines, for example. The wonderful thing is that we can FIX that with DRI without breaking the network capabilities of the windowing system also.
Yeah, I kinda learned about the 'comment limit' the hard way less than two minutes ago, before I'd even seen the post about changes... I wrote a whole damn essay on the 'X problems' topic, and when I posted it, the result came up truncated. I quickly noticed the 'click here' button, but the problem was that I'd delimited a section as 'begin/end rant', and only the 'begin rant' portion was above the break, you didn't get to see the useful stuff I'd put after the 'end rant' marker. sigh
Although hey, if you're going to fix bugs, could you possibly fix the one that turns ampersand-lt; into <'s when you're previewing, and then when you submit (w/o changing anything else!) strips out the <'s as bad HTML?
Some of the issues that the first (Network Model) translate to are: Lack of support for hardware accellerated rendering of UI's, lack of windowed 3D accelleration support, high resource usage.
It's worth noticing that the network model IS being worked on in X4, with the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (Interface? I've forgotten already.)
The low level nature of the X protocol is somewhat required, given the design constraints. It's not well suited for remote pixmap display, however. Not well suited at all, but at least it's possible.
Drag'n'Drop being a fundamental part of X would be a good thing too, although I'm not sure it's being addressed in X4. Drag and drop is a special case of the entire concept of transportable data, however.
The problem most often MENTIONED about X is its extraordinarily ugly default interfaces. This can be shown to be 'apparently' fixable by toolkits. The true problem here is a very difficult one, however...
Skip the section between the highlighted begin/end rant blocks if opinionated bastards like me turn your stomach.
<begin rant>
Focus.
We have QT and the GTK, and Motif, and some other toolkits, but there's no unifying conceptual interface. While I 100% agree that choice is one of the strengths of X, Unix, etc., I have to agree that the lack of focus, and the lack of uniform interface that comes from that, is a critical flaw from the users perspective.
As a technophile, you want that choice, you want to be able to fiddle, futz, adjust, modify, tweak, and perturb your interface to your hearts content.
From the perspective of the user, the purpose of a computer is to...(wait for it...)...use it.
Hell, even I as a heavy-duty technophile, sometimes want to 'just use' the computer. Browse slashdot or cnn.com, word process, view pictures, read usenet, send email, do my taxes, play music, watch videos, play games. I USE my computer, as well as programming on it.
If users have to learn several different interfaces just to use their computers, they're going to fall back and say (with righteous anger!) "Why is this so complicated?!?"
Heaven forfend that you have to change window managers to run a particular program, or use a particular feature, and then change back to use a different one...!
There are a lot of slashdotters who believe that these users should 'Go away, and don't bother us He-Men!' I say, gently, you're wrong. These people are our mothers, our fathers, our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our brothers and sisters, and our friends. We know that there are true advantages (stability, cost, performance, for example) to using Linux (or BSD of course). Why should these people be denied those advantages, when WE as the developers of this technology, can make it USEFUL to them as well...?
In the end, it's all about the freedom for more than just the He-Man User-Hating Club of technophiles, programmers, and administrators. In the end it's about freedom for the benefit of everyone. Even those who can't use the core freedoms (to change the code) deserve to reap the benefits.
To get there, I believe we need focus.
With any luck, RedHat (or some large distribution company, should RedHat be replaced) will give us this focus, by having a primary UI that the majority of commercial software companies will support, thus starting the ball rolling, and the open source projects will follow because that UI is the one users are most used to.
This isn't to say that the lesser known toolkits, window managers, or UI hacks should or will go away. However, there needs to be a consistent user interface. The interface to developers, hackers, tweakers, and admins can be whatever they want it to be. But just one default UI for users is an incredibly powerful tool in spreading the power of the system to the public.
I know these are controversial ideas, but before you respond, go to all the non-computer literate people you know, your family, friends, teachers and students, coworkers and doctors... Ask around. See what they think of using a computer where each program has a different UI, each program has different ways of doing things, each application requires a whole new learning curve. Put it in the nicest way you can, and you'll still see them look at you like you're crazy. THOSE are the people who deserve better.
Right now they're stuck with Windows. No freedom, low stability, high cost, low performance. Why leave them like that when WE can do better? Are your friends, family, and social contacts so worthy of contempt that you feel they don't deserve the power of this system? Are you SO willing to relegate them to the 'have nots' of the computing world?
<end rant>
Popping the stack to the issue at hand, one of the primary drawbacks of X in a non-technical sense is that it didn't provide that user orientation from the start.
While I dislike the Motif UI in general, it could have provided that. However, having it be a non-open-source and (worse yet) proprietary project doomed it to not be able to provide the focus necessary.
So, hopefully someone else will summarize the issues with X at this time... Mine looks like this:
Pervasive networking lowers performance for the modern common-case
Lack of commercial hardware company support for drivers
Apparent lack of support for hardware accelleration of common UI actions
Lack of integrated data exchange technology
No underlying UI paradigm to focus development
No apparent interest in the development organization towards slimming/optimizing
Development stagnation over its existence led to its falling behind other UI's in featureset (smoothed fonts being one example)
MANY OF THESE ARE BEING ADDRESSED BY X4.
That's my image of it all, though... I'm not bashing it at all, I'm an XFree86 developer (just got on the list recently), and I hope to help put some of the wonderful things into X4, or at least help by testing them out.
The present X, however, has at least those as apparent limitations, both from a technical and from a usability standpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
Greetings,
If PostgreSQL has a better query optimizer, I think I know of one ex-Interbase developer who's going to have a SERIOUS conniption fit. They were doing really good optimizations on the queries back 6+ years ago, before (I *think*) Postgres even HAD SQL. (Disclaimer, I used to work for Borland/Interbase back around the Delphi (which used IB as a backend) through 4.0 release timeframe, and I distinctly recall them talking about their query engine with some competent pride.)
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I will say I'd be mightily surprised.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Yeah... Uh. Geez, since I did the port to Netware that got released, I should comment... The Netware version has gotten a lot better since then? *chuckle*
Seriously though, I'm really curious (and will find out soon!) if the ENTIRE thing is there, or if it's just the Unix + Windows code that's been released. It'd be fascinating if you could actually (with the right tools) go ahead and build it for VMS, or Netware (not that *I* ever want to touch that OS again), or any of the other OS's it was originally released for.
Anyhow, a few quick comments on Interbase, from someone who was deep in the guts of the code...
The source code was desperately ugly when I looked at it, and I was WAY too junior to even think about cleaning it up... I hope that they've gone ahead and cleaned it up before releasing it.
As databases go, it kicked MAJOR butt when I was working there, but they sold it as a 'departmental' RDBMS. They very clearly were NOT going after 'enterprise' level contracts. On the other hand, that may have been a 'choose your battles wisely' strategy.
As for 'trust', well, the entire source code for Interbase was stored in an Interbase DB... 'marion', they called it. It was a pretty good version control system, and it definitely showed that they trusted their own DB one hell of a lot.
For SQL conformance, well, how many open source DB projects do you know of who actually HAD developers on the ANSI commitee? They tracked it pretty closely. It wasn't perfect as I recall, but it was pretty darn close.
The 'SuperServer' was something they were talking about back when I worked there (just pre-5.0), which was basically a HEAVILY threaded version with a lot of performance tuneups. It was one of the things that excited the serious DB developers there, and in the bleaker moments of Borland I wondered if those guys would ever get to do the really cool stuff they wanted to do. I'm REALLY glad that they did!
Frankly, it's a good DB, it's stable, it's been around forever (quite a bit longer than either MySQL or PostgresSQL!), it had some truly devoted developers at Borland, who LOVED database development. It was a second tier database (behind Oracle and Informix), but on that tier system MySQL and PostgresSQL never even show up I'm afraid...
It's always been a very developer-friendly DB, and I will DEFINITELY snag a copy and use it myself, although I do a lot of stuff that wants indexed TEXT fields... *sigh*
If you have any interest at all, don't hesitate, go check it out! You won't be disappointed, I believe.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Gee... I've used Swing, and the results look just about like whatever platform I'm using it on. (You DO set your look and feel to whatever the platform is by default, don't you?)
It's so nice having a platform independant language with a UI that adapts to the platform, instead of making the user adapt to the API's UI.
Wanna use Motif? 'Kay! Wanna use Windows? 'Kay! Wanna use Swing's own UI 'Metal'? WHY?!? Wanna use the Mac? Wellllll... But most of the time, it's just that straightforward.
And the widgets don't take noticably long to render. Well, they don't on any of MY boxes, using honestly good JVM's.
Cyberfox!
p.s. And YES, I truly find coding to the Swing API to be a joy! If I could program in that for all my platforms, and run it as machine code, I would in an instant. It would replace GTK, QT, MFC, OWL, and all the other crud out there. Unfortunately, the beauty of it relies in many ways on Java language features. *sigh* Spring forth, my burly GCJ, and save me!
Greetings,
Grrrr...
Well, a few things... For video cards, 32 bit color is really RGBA, where A is an alpha channel. Alpha is easiest (although somewhat inaccurately) described as a level of translucence. Your actual color is 24 bits, even in 32 bit mode.
For scanners, colors are often listed as '48 bit' color, and such. Those scanners detect a wider range of color depth (16 bits/color), and then downscale to 8 bits per color, to make up for signal noise, potential variance in the scanning equipment, etc...
More importantly for display, however, RGB is painfully inaccurate for color reproduction. I'm given to understand (from printing houses) that there are levels of purple which are doable with dyes that are impossible to represent, for example. Plus there are scattered zones in 24 bit color where the delta between a given color and any nearby colors are more than the ~5 angstroms of visible light that human perception can notice.
Printing and color management software has always had to be VERY smart in order to color-match what gets drawn onto a screen and what gets drawn onto paper, and there are sets of dye-creatable color that are unreachable on a monitor at present.
We live with it, because nobody has a better answer yet, and not enough people care.
This relates to DVD Audio in that the extra sampling capability finally does give that extra nudge over the top, to perfect audio, where the only limit is your own hearing, and noise from your own equipment. CD's, like monitors currently, are 'Good Enough', but if you really care about the depth of your sound, you want something more.
On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that DVD Audio will ever matter to the mass of men, leading lives of quiet desperation.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
If I could get updates on a bi-weekly basis to Windows, I would do it in a f'ing heartbeat. I'd PAY for THAT service. As it is, the company I work for has forked out tens of thousands of dollars in OS licenses and crap for Microsoft Windows NT, and we STILL have to wait a bloody year between service packs, and get only the tiniest fixes in the mean time!
DAMN straight I'd PERSONALLY pay a nominal maintenance contract fee for honest-to-god bugfixes that came out that often from Microsoft! But THEY'll never do that.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Okay, it's obvious that zero cost, AND simultaneously not stepping on anyone's toes (through copyright violations) is a very high up reason for something like this.
On the other hand, this lets us do something we (as a technical community) haven't ever had the opportunity to do: Translate the technical vision of FREEDOM into a real-world political vision.
Linux isn't about communism vs. democracy vs. socialism vs. capitalism... It's about individual freedom to see, change, adapt, learn, and grow. It puts power into the hands of anyone who uses it, and lets them use that power to grow.
To hell with the 'public relations' portion of this. This is an unparalled opportunity for the Linux community to spread the REAL underlying beliefs of Linux to the people of one of the larger oppressive countries in the world.
The freedoms involved are so deeply embedded in the code, in the approach, in the system, and structure of Linux, that they will infect anyone who gets their hands into the system. Which could suddenly be a BILLION people.
I believe in these freedoms, and I believe that if we encourage an action like this, that it will become a catalyst for true social change. Not tomorrow, not in a decade maybe, but over the next quarter century, Linux could free a populace.
Isn't that worth believing in, hoping for, and maybe even fighting for? There's never been an opportunity like this, if it's true. Reach out with both hands and grasp at it!
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Boy... I just seem to run into you everywhere. *wry grin* Some well-formed words, but missing the point somewhat.
1) I'm not quite sure why AT&T being a government supported corporation makes it 'okay' that they were massively overcharging for the cost of a phone call... They were a monopoly, without question, and a bad one. They DID act in a predatory fashion towards competing firms, and caused harm to the consumer thereby.
2) I agree completely, Russia is not a capitalist system, it is a BROKEN system. You cannot equate a black market with a free market. In fact, the need for a black market identifies the clear lack of a free market. HOWEVER, minimal government is not a requirement of capitalism. It is a requirement of laissez-faire capitalism as originally defined, but is (like many other social and economic systems) impossible in pure form. Unfettered markets are destructive, over-restrictive markets are stunting. The goal of anti-trust legislation in government is to balance the two, by only punishing those who both HAVE dominance, and ABUSE dominance.
3) I think you meant corporations can't... so I'll run with that. I agree, absolutely, that governments have a larger POTENTIAL for evil. This does not dictate, however, that big business is good. The two points are, in fact, completely orthogonal. The question was:
Why is it that the same people who think that big government is inherently evil think that big business is inherently good?
The question still stands. Demonizing government is not an answer. We already know the ills and potential ills of government. We also have to acknowledge the not-insubstantial dangers of corporations, however. Are they at the same level? No, perhaps, but because they are a lesser evil, does that make them good? Of course not.
So...is there an answer to the question?
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
...the most important decisions in the future of the computer industry would be decided by government bureoucrats(sp), and they would likely be decided by lobbying and special interest pressures.
I think it's quite likely that BillG is right now hiring lobbyists and publicists to make sure that they don't get screwed over like this again.
Only if they win... If they don't win, then the consumers truly DO win, because Microsoft won't be in the position to try and screw with the legal system anymore.
As for 'planning the attacks', I hate to say it quite like this, but I am a big fan of distributed control. Microsoft is a central point of power, and they have excercised and abused it behind closed doors for too long.
I also substantially disagree with:
The fundamental problem is how Microsoft abuses it's dominant market share to attack companies who are positioned to possibly cause them problems on the bottom line. The real technical innovation is not done by Microsoft, and never has. They've bought every good product they've made, with the possible exception of Word, which I'm not sure of. Real innovation happens in the garages, and the small companies around the world. If they don't have to fear being demolished by the juggernaut of Microsoft, then that results in a higher level of innovation. Those companies don't have to worry about anti-trust legislation, because their market share is *0* when they start.
Anti-trust laws only apply when companies are beyond a certain market share, and then only when those companies start acting in ways that are to the detriment of the consumer. The list of companies to whom this has applied in the past is vanishingly small.
This means there would be no reason for people to squander money on lawyers, lobbyists, etc., unless they were at that level of domination, and are interested in behaving like that, in which case they aren't likely to be innovating anyway.
Your entire argument is completely based on the idea that Microsoft is a major source of innovation. Once you realize that's specious, the rest falls apart entirely.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
It's not a matter of technical competence, although my experience with them has been that even that is lacking. It's a question of their right to suppress innovation when it's bad for their business.
I object to that, and always will. If you question whether that actually happens or not, you've not worked in the software business. I can't even count the number of times I've heard, said, or had said to me, 'Damn, this is a great product idea and technically clean, but it'd cause problems for Microsoft, and then we'd have to fight with them. We can't win that battle, let's do something else.'
It HURTS to have to say that. It HURTS to know that a technically good idea has to die, because it's counter to the whim of a dominant company. The only thing the Open Source community has going for it, in that fight, is that it's distributed. Almost no amount of money can stop it, because it's done for love, which is why it's the only real potential threat to Microsoft right now.
They have NO equal competitors in their market segments anymore, everyone else clearly and openly denies that they are competing with them ('We're defining our market segment appeal to focus on X...', where X is a segment that Microsoft isn't addressing), because they're TERRIFIED of fighting with the juggernaut. Is this healthy for the consumer? Is it healthy for the technology field? No, and no.
You probably don't care, because you probably don't think the technology advances that are being held back matter, but I sure as hell do. I want Microsoft punished, and punished clearly, and plainly, so that any other company who considers trying to suppress technological advances, or who acts in a truly predatory manner will have to think very long and hard about it.
It's not religion, it's not politics. It's the personal technical desire to be free to innovate without being crushed by someone because you threaten their market share. If you haven't felt it, if you haven't faced it, if you haven't had to live in that constant, oppressive, professional development world, I guess I can't explain it to you.
Microsoft is a monopoly, they are predatory, they have harmed the consumer by restricting independant innovation, and they need to be clearly and obviously punished for it, so that others hesitate to try the same thing in the future.
That's why this case is so critical. The government must win, or innovation and technical competition will be stifled.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
For one, there's a huge installed base of both machines and OS's.
and
For two, there's no way of gauging the Linux installed base. Yeah, there have been so many downloads and so many purchases, but how many people use it on a daily basis, compared to the other two groups?
are both the same point, suggesting that these commercial companies have no impetus to develop for the Linux platform. Certainly. Therefore, the answer is that since commercial interest isn't forthcoming, it's up to the people with an interest in the community to provide the functionality.
This is how it works, if the functionality is possible, it will be implemented by someone who wants it.
For your first two parts of point three, here's a thought for you. It doesn't MATTER that a commercial company doesn't see an advantage to porting the product to Unix-based platform X. Adobe didn't want to port Photoshop to Linux. What happened? GIMP was created. This is how it works, and I'm proud of it.
The political approach you describe, in what SHOULD have been a seperate point, was only partially tried. No 'letter writing' campaigns, though. Never personally seen one work, when it was against commercial interest though... There was a group attempting to create a 'binary only' DVD player, by licensing the source, and trying to recoup investment through a very inexpensive license fee. This group still exists, but as I recall had some trouble w/ the fact that the DVD consortium wasn't interested in providing any more decryption keys to anyone. I may be misremembering.
In any case, this is counter to the desire of the community, however, in that closed-source systems are of necessity less useful than open source ones. The software would not be able to be distributed on Debian, for example. Thus, a group of people wanting to create an open source version started up. That's where all this comes from.
I shan't go very far into point four. I dislike the term Intellectual Property, because it suggests something which isn't true, but at the core I absolutely acknowledge that the producers of the material have copyright consideration. If anyone uses the DeCSS stuff for distribution of content and gets busted, the law will be in the right. The authors of this program, however, are also in the right. If you believe that the makers of a gun are responsible for how it is used, then you probably also agree with the law under which the authors of this software are being pushed around. I do NOT believe that, however. It could be we have a very simple core disagreement.
For 5, you're simply wrong. I believe that, for commercial reasons, none of the software DVD player companies would be interested in Linux players. This development means that there WILL be a Linux DVD player, no matter what the licensed software companies do.
Now for the part that really got me angry... Flames ahead, so feel free to stop reading now.
More and more, I notice around here (not singling anyone out, so don't get down on me too hard) a mentality of "I don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thing for free" or "Who cares about intellectual property".
This is utter nonsense. This software has NOTHING to do with that! It's not a matter of the commercial companies releasing binary software DVD players, and people pirating them and passing them around. It's that THEY AREN'T RELEASING THEM, and have not expressed ANY interest in doing so. It's not a matter of copying and passing around copies of the latest DVD, it's about BEING ABLE TO WATCH THEM AT ALL on your computer. While I disagree with Intellectual Property as a concept, there are very few who would actively suggest that reselling, or redistributing commercial DVD's is a good thing. If it were possible to make a player that did NOT make that possible at the same time, I'm quite certain that the individuals involved would have done that. The nature of digital media precludes that potential, however.
Those attitudes are not condusive to getting the industries okay on releasing spec's (and liability for implementing a playback mechanism) for DVD.
FIRST of all, the attitude that 'Oh, I'll just take whatever the commercial companies give me', is what's not conducive to getting specifications released. If a commercial company were interested in producing such a product, I would most likely buy it, but I'd keep an eye out for an open source version, because I have more confidence in it's future-proofness.
This will never happen in a form that is useful, because the specs and source code CANNOT be made available without the exact same problem (copying) coming up. Therefore the ONLY solution to this problem is development of the sort that we've seen.
Or do you think the answer is that we shouldn't be allowed to watch DVD's under Linux? Or are you not willing to go that far, and just think that an open source DVD player should be illegal...? THAT is the kind of attitude that lets the companies shrug about releasing their specs, because 'everyone wants a commercial implementation, not some hobbyists implementation'.
They can easily view those two statements as saying, "I'd rather watch a free pirated movie than acually buying the DVD, especially if they're the same exact movie... I'll even copy it for all my friends, too."
Utter nonsense. Get it through your head that there is no objection on the basis of cost here, there is solely an objection on the basis of speech. This person developed an application that allows me to use my system to provide a service that other systems have equally. It, by itself, does not violate any copyrights, and by being open source encourages my freedom to adapt and maintain the software, independant of the original authors. It has no effect on my, or my friends, tendency to buy DVDs off the shelf, as opposed to from some guy in a long overcoat in the middle of July standing on a streetcorner whispering, 'Psst! Wanna buy a DVD, cheep?'.
Yes, most people would prefer a cheap or free version of the exact same thing, no matter what it is. I bet even you would. But there's also the very clear recognition in virtually everyone that payment to the original author is a good thing, in order to encourage them to produce more.
Those who do not already believe this will purchase pirated DVDs anyway, whether this technology is open source or not. What, you don't think that the Chinese (the most common source of copyright violations currently, as far as I know) piracy companies didn't already have this capability?
This isn't about piracy, this is about preventing the spread of a technology and using the legal system as a club to try and do that.
It's specious reasoning like this (suggesting that wanting access to the source == willingness to pirate) that encourages the lawyers to believe that the action of publishing software to play a media is in itself copyright violation.
As for the 'stepping on the toes of giants' comment... I, for one, am TIRED of the so-called 'giants' stepping on MY toes, and presuming that the only way I can use their product is to use a popular system. I am willing to pay them money for their product, but I wish to use it on the platform of my choice. They have no rights to deny me the platform choice, they only have the right to deny me the freedom to distribute the material.
My opinion, for better of for worse. I don't expect a lack of flames on this, especially as I've shown the willingness to flame...
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Fascinating. I've been a professional programmer for 20 years, and every single programmer I've known disagrees with your statement:
People make better software when they are paid to make it. This is their job, not their hobby.
Every programmer I've ever known acknowledges that the code they write for their own use is generally better, more complete, more interesting, and more extensible than the code they write for work. Remember, THEY have to use it, whereas the code they write for work just has to be used by others.
Reality doesn't jibe with your preconceptions.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
I also want to make the point that we don't do this because we have self respect. If we 'win' some fight, but we become assholes in the process, how have we benefitted?
We haven't.
The answer is to out-code, and out-educate them.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
My other comment in this thread addresses this also.
Understand that under US law (and international law I believe) you have no rights to use someone else's copyrighted work, unless they grant you a license that gives you those rights.
If source code is licensed using the GPL, then complying with the GPL is the only means by which you have any rights to use the source code.
To comply with the GPL, you must release your source. If the GPL is overburdening to you, your sole option is to remove all GPL'ed source, and replace those portions of your program, either with other people's libraries, or with your own code.
It's all in there. Read the GPL. I have, and repeatedly. I don't always agree with it, but understanding what it allows and disallows is critical in our community.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
You misunderstand.
You CANNOT use the GPL'ed code in your own program without GPL'ing your program. Period.
The 'volume' of code referred to is simply based on how much you're willing to rewrite from scratch.
If I've taken the front end and back-end generation portions of GCC and incorporated them into my source-code search engine as parsers, my code MUST be GPL'ed, or I MUST remove the code that I used that was GPL'ed. Clearly the volume of code is enough that I'm not willing to rewrite it.
On the other hand, if I take a GPL'ed function to copy Vector data cleanly and use it in my program, but I end up not wanting to GPL my program, THAT code is small enough that I can simply rewrite it.
The volume of code that makes your program GPL'ed is based on the volume of code you're willing to rewrite from scratch, not any arbitrarily decided line-count.
You have ZERO rights to use GPL'ed source, UNLESS you follow the GPL with whatever you derive from it. START with that recognition, and then most of the rest of the way the GPL operates will be obvious.
Cyberfox!
p.s. I'm actually not particularly frothy about the GPL. I prefer the LGPL, and still call it Library. Understanding the GPL is important, though, and I hope I help...
Greetings,
For once, I pretty much wholeheartedly agree with Stallman. I won't always use the GPL, because I don't always want my code restricted like that, or because I want to work with others who don't (like X, BSD, etc.), but I KNOW what it's there for, and I know WHY it's there, and I agree with it's fundamental purpose.
My only nit would be his referring to ESR's conception of free software being driven by economic good as 'almost Marxian'. He's right, in a particular sense, that the idea that 'the right thing' (as argued by Marx, altough certainly not by me or by ESR or Stallman) will be done because 'it makes economic sense, in the end'. However Stallman also (clearly) knows the power of words and proximity, and he knows ESR will probably be incensed by the implied (but certainly untrue) rest of the comparison. That seemed unnecessary to me, especially as Stallman has been an equal victim of the same word-association games in the past.
The original article was a piece of trash, though. This once I think RMS hit dead on, otherwise.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
.tar.bz2'ed source files, and I'm not indexing anywhere NEAR all of them, because a small subset quickly outruns MySQL's 2G file limit, and just a few more quickly outruns ext2's 4G single-file limit. (I have about 40G at home that I'm using to do the indexing on... I bought a pair of 20G drives just to experiment w/ this problem.)
Wouldn't this be nice to type into a search window:
'C++ class !(public constructor) && (public static method returning selfclass)'
This would find all C++ classes in all projects that contain no public constructors, and have a public static method (class method) that returns the same class as it's defined in. This would be an adequate 'search for singleton class' function, for anyone who knows Design Patterns. (Yes, it would probably become a macro, so you could search for 'singleton && "config"' to search for singleton classes that contained the word 'config' someplace in them.)
I'm working on this myself, although I've completely surrendered on C, because there are virtually zero projects that don't abuse the pre-processor in ways that make the code unparseable (semantically) without being run through the pre-processor first. (And if you try to do that, you need to know how the project is built, what defines are declared, etc, and your include files need to be the same as X platform, etc... This rapidly becomes a nightmare, trust me.) C can be indexed using 'glimpse' or something similar, but semantic indexing is pretty much just impossible without lots more information, and therefore non-automatable, which is my number-one priority.
C++ is nicer, because fewer people do Stupid Things with the preprocessor. (WHY would you define 'FOREVER' as 'while(1)'?!? Think it's cute, or something? Bleh...)
Java is *GOLDEN* because it's completely semantically parseable with no problems with the preprocessor. It doesn't HAVE one. I love indexing Java.
On the other hand, I have about 1.2G of
ReiserFS might work, that's on my list to try (if it's stable), but I need to get the indexing working better for C++, and then see if I can't shrink the database files some.
Ahhhhhnyhow, basically, it's a hard problem to properly index and search large source bases, without simply abusive resource utilization problems. If all you want to do is 'glimpse' index it, that's easy, but it loses a lot of what you'd want to search for I feel. (Context isn't preserved, because glimpse indexes non-structured content. This is a great generic solution, but I believe firmly that code can be better indexed with a custom solution.)
On the other hand, you also NEED to 'glimpse' index on the comments, and the non-source files in a project tree. (Figuring out which is which is harder than you might think, sometimes.) This lets you search reasonably for 'This needs to be fixed!' long after it's been forgotten by the original author.
This is my main personal project these days, the coding project that keeps me sane while I'm having to reverse engineer and document what's been done by the hardware engineers (who no longer work there) at my company, instead of programming like I was hired to do.
At least I don't need to be in a server room on New Years. *wry grin*
Anyhow, if you have any suggestions (yeah right, this is sadly already off the radar for most slashdot readers, I guess...) feel free to drop me a line at cyberfox@vixen.com.
I don't know of anyone (outside of commercial companies) working on this kind of problem right now. I think it would be a good resource, and it's a fun project for me... Oh, and of COURSE the code is going to be GPL'ed if/when I ever make it useful to anyone outside myself.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
As always, I realize people will want more information afterwards and have to respond to my own post.
The NNTP standard referenced is specified in RFC 977, available at http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc977.txt for your perusal. (I would include it as a link, but slashdot always mangles my links.)
Enjoy the prior art!
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
This falls into a domain I'm QUITE familiar with, oddly enough. NNTP.
The NNTP Specification in section 3.7.1 explicitly states that the closest century is assumed as part of the year (as the NNTP spec uses two digit year dates). In it's exact words:
The date is sent as 6 digits in the format YYMMDD, where YY is the last two digits of the year, MM is the two digits of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate), and DD is the day of the month (with leading zero, if appropriate). The closest century is assumed as part of the year (i.e., 86 specifies 1986, 30 specifies 2030, 99 is 1999, 00 is 2000).
This document was submitted in February, 1986.
Does the patent in question pre-date this prior art? If not, it's invalid, and nobody has to pay them a red nickel. They may have to pay lawyers, but it sure won't cost much. This is quicker to prove than the Compton's silliness, either for 'general harm in allowing the patent' (which I think is what Compton's multimedia patent died under), or this brutally obvious prior art, even.
Everyone always comments, 'Well, I'll just patent 'e' then!' But the truth is that if you BELIEVE there's prior art, that's not as useful as laying it on the table, and saying, 'section X.Y.Z of document FOO published in 19XX says explicitly BAR, which is exactly what is being patented. Give it up.'
Looking up the patent, here's my other comments... It was filed on October 3, 1996, granted September 8. 1998. This patent has obvious prior art in the NNTP package, and the Progress database development package (which implements the identical thing, with a customizable sliding date).
This is, frankly, a nuisance patent. Any company with even the slightest bit of research, will dig up programs from 15 years ago that did this exact same thing. Even had the patent pre-dated THOSE, it would be run out by now. The first company to fight it will win, and win handily.
This is a non-issue.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
Nah, it's In My Humble Opinion, definitely. I (and others) often abuse it with 'IMNSHO' which is In My Not So Humble Opinion. (IMAO is another, with 'Arrogant' in place.)
I *think* is 'giant grin', but I'd have to see the context. BEG is usually Big Evil Grin, BFG is Big Grin (or the name of an id Software weapon, equally censored).
IANAL is always I Am Not A Lawyer, although I've seen a few 'IAAL (but this is not legal advice)' here and there on Slashdot.
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
...aren't quite so hard to write. is a whopping, cart-creaking, truly awful smelling load of manure.
It's too bad we couldn't have made a solid, open 3D game API spec before MS gave the world its proprietary version. OpenGL is portable, but writing an OpenGL driver is pretty much a bitch. Direct3D may be annoying to program to, but the drivers supposedly aren't quite so hard to write.
Write one before you say that.
Direct 3D driver development sucks rocks hard sideways through moosecock. Can we say Win16 lock boys and girls?
Worse yet, their insane spec tries VERY HARD to encourage hardware developers to directly support the D3D vertex formats in hardware... Gosh, think that's another attempt to underhandedly force people into a Windows-specific driver model?
OpenGL is miles and miles and miles (...) cleaner to build a driver for from an engineering perspective. You don't feel like cold oobleck is dripping down your spine, settling in your stomach, making you want to throw up, as you look at yet another intel-specific, windows-optimized, putridly hacked up, COM-based, piece of garbage sample code.
I'd curse very heavily here, but people might not get the point if I did. Saying that D3D drivers
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
It falls into the Rio / MP3 category for me. It's not the best solution, but it's worth giving them money so that other people will see a market and try to build a better solution. I bought about $25 worth of books from them, and I will read them. I've converted long Gutenberg books to Doc format and read them on my Pilot, and don't have any problem with it myself.
On another note... I looked at Rocket Books. WTF?!?! I'm going to pay $350 for a single-purpose item, and they have absolutely JACK for good SF?
From PeanutPress I just bought Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (oh god, a digital version...? I'm absolutely in heaven...), and Slant by Greg Bear (which I've been meaning to read), along with a few other books I was interested in. I also downloaded the free samples, for the hell of it.
Look, if you want to sell an ebook system, whether proprietary or not, get publisher support . That they can offer Fire Upon The Deep (and know to!) gives me faith and confidence in them. That most of Rocket Books SF section looks like it was culled from the Gutenberg project very explicitly does NOT.
Anyhow, I'm impressed. They have selection. That's key for me, and probably most people who seek ebooks. Their cart system needs a bit of help, but it's not terrible.
They DON'T have technical stuff, which is a pity, but livable.
Also, fwiw, I have a Palm3 w/ the TRG 8MB expansion card. I've got plenty of space for these books, even all at once. In the end, though, I'm really dropping $25 as a donation to the cause of 'good things'. As opposed to paying for a RocketBook which doesn't fit in my pocket, burns a hole in my wallet, and doesn't have the selection...
No contest.
Cyberfox!
That would be fine, I agree... The key distribution problem restricts what you can do with OTPs to a limited set of problems, but if your problem falls within that domain it's acceptable.
However, if you do this, please for gods sake don't use this program! While the encrypt function is trivial (and bad, still, for reasons I briefly explain later), the GenKeyFile as ATROCIOUS . It makes me physically ill to think that anyone would pass that off as an OTP generation function.
The attack on it is trivial, given physical access to the machine. (I.e. it was seized, etc.) Presuming the GenKeyFile program was used, the key file is generated using rand(), seeking through a seed file and generating the bits for the 'true' key file. Even if you wipe the 'true' key file (that gets generated by this program), but keep your initial seed file around (i.e. you're using \winnt\system32\mfc.dll to generate your random bits), here's what your security comes down to:
32 bits of seed (for rand())
n bits of search where 2^n is the number of files in your filesystem (or the next power of two over it).
The assault on this method is as follows:
For each file in the system, iterate over the 32 bits of rand(seed) space, and test the resultant file for known plaintext. (What's that, you believe that they don't know any plaintext in your document? Not true! Headers, average character counts, etc., all are telltales!) With only 32 bits of seed for your rand() function (or 64 if somehow you have an extended rand()), the keyspace is not sufficient to produce truly random output. Thus the number of matches that will generate a pattern that is similar to the expected pattern (text, images, etc., all have non-random recognizable patterns) is very small, and might be zero.
There are four components to this 'encryption package':
If you keep the seed file OR the keyfile around, then this encryption is 100% useless. The seed file can be found, and the rand() function gives you *LESS* protection than DES, and MUCH less than IDEA, 3DES, etc...
Even if you've erased both your keyfile and your seed file, if the attacker can presume that you ever USED GenKeyFile to make your key data, the resultant ciphertext will be encrypted with patterns that are the result of the patterns in the seed file, mixed with the (reasonably well known) patterns of the rand() function. This patterned data can be identified by a sufficiently dedicated attacker, even w/o the original source file. Do not use GenKeyFile!
You're *far* better off using
Seriously, this is snake oil. Well meaning snake oil, but snake oil nonetheless. Presuming a seized computer, and either the use of GenKeyFile at ALL , or the preservation of your used key file, this gives ABSOLUTELY ZERO PROTECTION FROM A COMPETENT ATTACKER.
Cyberfox!
p.s. While the encrypt program is still useful with an OTP generated from a secure source, it SHOULD be repeatedly wiping the used padbits out of the Psuedo-OTP's filespace as it goes, but it's not... Another example of less-than-stellar competency.
Important related note: You don't use an OTP to encrypt to yourself, because you never ever ever want to keep the OTP bits a millisecond longer than it takes to encrypt it initially.
p.p.s I can't say this enough, but I'll try one more time, please, please, please DO NOT USE GENKEYFILE TO BUILD YOUR KEY FILE!
Greetings,
Here I go again, replying to my own post...
The rest of the non-rant portion of my post is after the 'read more' button cut it off. That feature sure caught me by surprise.
In any case, the other point I wanted to make is that many of the drawbacks of X are also features for a limited userset. The problem is that to the 'common man' (the average user) of a popular program, those are bugs, not features.
The idea that the windowing system doesn't have direct access to hardware is just plain broken in the modern era of primarily single-user machines, for example. The wonderful thing is that we can FIX that with DRI without breaking the network capabilities of the windowing system also.
Win/Win. Some good, eh?
Cyberfox!
Greetings,
*laugh!*
Yeah, I kinda learned about the 'comment limit' the hard way less than two minutes ago, before I'd even seen the post about changes... I wrote a whole damn essay on the 'X problems' topic, and when I posted it, the result came up truncated. I quickly noticed the 'click here' button, but the problem was that I'd delimited a section as 'begin/end rant', and only the 'begin rant' portion was above the break, you didn't get to see the useful stuff I'd put after the 'end rant' marker. sigh
Although hey, if you're going to fix bugs, could you possibly fix the one that turns ampersand-lt; into <'s when you're previewing, and then when you submit (w/o changing anything else!) strips out the <'s as bad HTML?
BOY that drove me bonkers for a few minutes...
Cyberfox!
Well put.
Some of the issues that the first (Network Model) translate to are: Lack of support for hardware accellerated rendering of UI's, lack of windowed 3D accelleration support, high resource usage.
It's worth noticing that the network model IS being worked on in X4, with the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (Interface? I've forgotten already.)
The low level nature of the X protocol is somewhat required, given the design constraints. It's not well suited for remote pixmap display, however. Not well suited at all, but at least it's possible.
Drag'n'Drop being a fundamental part of X would be a good thing too, although I'm not sure it's being addressed in X4. Drag and drop is a special case of the entire concept of transportable data, however.
The problem most often MENTIONED about X is its extraordinarily ugly default interfaces. This can be shown to be 'apparently' fixable by toolkits. The true problem here is a very difficult one, however...
Skip the section between the highlighted begin/end rant blocks if opinionated bastards like me turn your stomach.
<begin rant>
Focus.
We have QT and the GTK, and Motif, and some other toolkits, but there's no unifying conceptual interface. While I 100% agree that choice is one of the strengths of X, Unix, etc., I have to agree that the lack of focus, and the lack of uniform interface that comes from that, is a critical flaw from the users perspective.
As a technophile, you want that choice, you want to be able to fiddle, futz, adjust, modify, tweak, and perturb your interface to your hearts content.
From the perspective of the user, the purpose of a computer is to...(wait for it...)
Hell, even I as a heavy-duty technophile, sometimes want to 'just use' the computer. Browse slashdot or cnn.com, word process, view pictures, read usenet, send email, do my taxes, play music, watch videos, play games. I USE my computer, as well as programming on it.
If users have to learn several different interfaces just to use their computers, they're going to fall back and say (with righteous anger!) "Why is this so complicated?!?"
Heaven forfend that you have to change window managers to run a particular program, or use a particular feature, and then change back to use a different one...!
There are a lot of slashdotters who believe that these users should 'Go away, and don't bother us He-Men!' I say, gently, you're wrong. These people are our mothers, our fathers, our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our brothers and sisters, and our friends. We know that there are true advantages (stability, cost, performance, for example) to using Linux (or BSD of course). Why should these people be denied those advantages, when WE as the developers of this technology, can make it USEFUL to them as well...?
In the end, it's all about the freedom for more than just the He-Man User-Hating Club of technophiles, programmers, and administrators. In the end it's about freedom for the benefit of everyone. Even those who can't use the core freedoms (to change the code) deserve to reap the benefits.
To get there, I believe we need focus.
With any luck, RedHat (or some large distribution company, should RedHat be replaced) will give us this focus, by having a primary UI that the majority of commercial software companies will support, thus starting the ball rolling, and the open source projects will follow because that UI is the one users are most used to.
This isn't to say that the lesser known toolkits, window managers, or UI hacks should or will go away. However, there needs to be a consistent user interface. The interface to developers, hackers, tweakers, and admins can be whatever they want it to be. But just one default UI for users is an incredibly powerful tool in spreading the power of the system to the public.
I know these are controversial ideas, but before you respond, go to all the non-computer literate people you know, your family, friends, teachers and students, coworkers and doctors... Ask around. See what they think of using a computer where each program has a different UI, each program has different ways of doing things, each application requires a whole new learning curve. Put it in the nicest way you can, and you'll still see them look at you like you're crazy. THOSE are the people who deserve better.
Right now they're stuck with Windows. No freedom, low stability, high cost, low performance. Why leave them like that when WE can do better? Are your friends, family, and social contacts so worthy of contempt that you feel they don't deserve the power of this system? Are you SO willing to relegate them to the 'have nots' of the computing world?
<end rant>
Popping the stack to the issue at hand, one of the primary drawbacks of X in a non-technical sense is that it didn't provide that user orientation from the start.
While I dislike the Motif UI in general, it could have provided that. However, having it be a non-open-source and (worse yet) proprietary project doomed it to not be able to provide the focus necessary.
So, hopefully someone else will summarize the issues with X at this time... Mine looks like this:
MANY OF THESE ARE BEING ADDRESSED BY X4.
That's my image of it all, though... I'm not bashing it at all, I'm an XFree86 developer (just got on the list recently), and I hope to help put some of the wonderful things into X4, or at least help by testing them out.
The present X, however, has at least those as apparent limitations, both from a technical and from a usability standpoint.
Cyberfox!