However, the reality of it is that our current environment still favors closed source software. With any luck, people will slowly start to wake up and realize that source code needs to be open for all software projects. Think about it. If it was normal to receive source with binaries, nobody would really think twice about it. It's only seen as a bad thing because it's not what Microsoft does.
Please! I'm no MS apologist, but this is getting plain stupid. This isn't just about MS, believe it or not. The fact is, open source as a business model is seen as a bad thing because it's not what a huge number of companies making billions of dollars a year do. Have you heard of Oracle? IBM? Sun? Apple (our latest hero)? I could go on... the fact is, there are a TON of companies out there making big bucks selling closed source software. And more power to them!
In the real world, closed source is, apparently, a viable business model. And thus far, open source isn't. Honestly, how many companies are actually making some real money making products which they also release the source to? Until this starts happening, closed source is going to be predominant... and there's nothing wrong with that!
Personally, yes, I agree that open source is a good thing. But assuming that all software should be open based purely on some moralistic view is ridiculous. The world is far more complicated than that. Statements like "source code needs to be open for all software projects" is just plain naive, IMHO.
And how would giving guns to the law-abiding masses help in this situation? Do you think *you* could take down a terrorist who's aiming an AK-47 at you?
This is really a bit of a niche domain (in that, system administrators and other folks are interested, most other people aren't).
Basically, in the world, there are many scenarios where it would be VERY useful to be able to enable access controls on various resources in a system. By "access controls", I mean rules which define who can perform actions on given resources. This sounds so general because it is very general. The purpose of XACML is to provide a language which allows you to specify these rules, or policies, in a nice format independant of the rest of the system (data storage, etc) for any number of domains, and provides software to implement the required components for such a system.
As a solid example, you could use XACML, a central PDP, and a PEP on a set of firewalls to control which IPs have access to what. You'd have to write a PEP for the firewalls, and set up a PDP to handle the requests, but once this is done, you could use XACML to write firewall rules!
Another example, suppose you have a user trying to access their email. You could have a PEP in the client which talks to a PDP to determine if the user is allowed to perform various actions on the mailbox (read, write, etc). In this case, you'd use XACML to determine who can perform what actions on the mailbox.
In both of these cases, XACML defines the language PEPs use to talk to PDPs, and also specifies a common XML language for defining the policies to determine who can do what.
In essence, XACML abstracts these concepts of policy enforcement, rule definitions, etc, and wraps them up in a nice XML language which can be used in any component which implements the XACML specificiations for a PDP and PEP. Why would you want to do this? Well, first, it allows you to use plug in in an access control system, rather than having to roll your own. This is good. Second, anyone who implements the XACML standard can interwork. So, I can write a PEP for my email client, and use Joe's PDP to enforce policy in my system. Third, because all your systems now use a single language, you can centralize the policy database and use common tools to manage all of them. An administrators dream!
Now, this is really important people, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH DRM! Or Palladium! Or any other conspiracy theory you want to come up with. This is simply a tool for software developers and system administrators to easily integrate a standard access control framework into their systems.
* Note, in the previous, PDP - Policy Decision Point, and PEP - Policy Enforcement Point.
This will change once SKAS mode goes into the mainline UML distribution. To quote from the UML website:
"In short, the changes cause the UML kernel to run in an entirely different host address space from its processes. This solves the security and honeypot fingerprinting problems by making the UML kernel totally inaccessible to UML processes. Their address spaces are identical to what they would be on the host. This also provides a noticable speedup by eliminating the signal delivery that used to happen for every UML system call."
So, there you have it. It requires a kernel patch, but basically solves all the old UML security issues. I don't believe it's quite ready for primetime, though.:) The SKAS page can be read here.
"...is permit the user to make custom changes and apply security hot-fixes. Whether or not this happens in practice depends far more on the attitude of the company deploying the SS than on the license itself."
Actually, according to the article (if you want to call it that) (I haven't read the license), you can't even do this. The license prohibits you from even compiling the code! So, no custom changes and no hot-fixes for YOU!:)
Just as a side note, the "really neat" security improvements you list are simply the IPSec stuff found in a standard IPv6 stack. These same features are available in any IPv4 stack with IPSec tacked on. The difference is that, in v6, IPSec is manadatory, and in v4, it's optional.
The point of my post is that listing IPSec as an advantage to using v6 is misleading. List true advantages and people in the know will actually listen. Otherwise, you just sound like another clueless advocate.
No offense, but this is the exact sort of thing that's turned me OFF of the Simpsons in recent years. The writing has seriously dived into the realm of poop jokes and low-brow humour. The stuff which made the Simpsons a winner, IMHO, was the cleverness of the writing. But as of late, they've been relying more and more on the kind of crap you expect to hear in a high school locker room. Why anyone thinks this stuff is funny (really funny, as opposed to *groan* funny) is beyond me...
Ahh, you are quite correct about background mirroring/copying. I forgot about that. As for the number of available missiles, other posts seem to contradict yours, but I'm no expert, so I'm not getting into an argument...:)
Oh, and an addendum to my post... you, of course, weren't limited to writing to VRAM during the hblank. You could (and I'm assuming many did) write the VRAM as the electron gun was scanning the line...
Actually, the 2600 had enough "VRAM" to store background data for a single line on the screen. So, you had to write out the data for each successive line during the horizontal blanking period of the video display. This also means that, even if the screen is static, you still have to do all this work, just to keep it there.
Now, this all had to be done just to keep the background of the display intact. The programmer also got 2 player objects and 2 missile objects to work with... basically primitive sprites. 'course, with such limited resources, writing any kind of advanced game is a challenge. As they mention in the article, the Defender! programmer(s) tried to get around the sprite limitation by changing the sprite objects during even/odd frames to simulate more of them.
Uhhh, I don't know about this. It's one thing to have variety in personality... after all, multiple points of view are a great thing. And there's definitely nothing wrong with developers being assertive and arguing with the top dogs from time to time (it happens all the time on LKML). But it's another thing entirely to keep an abusive or insulting developer around for the sake of "diversity". It's developers like this which scare off newcomers from contributing to code. It's developers like this who force other developers to leave the project because they're sick of dealing with all the crap. The fact is, you can be different without being a total dick about it.
And WTF is the parent poster modded as a troll? Granted, it's poorly worded (antagonistic), but he has a good point. Do moderaters even *read* the posts before moderating them these days??
Nicotine occurs naturally in tobacco, so yes, there is a need to genetically engineer. But, you are correct, in that nicotine is a pesticide. It just happens to occur naturally in the plant... probably to protect it from pests!:)
"No computer can or ever will be able to precompute the infinite number of games."
My point is that this is wrong. No, it really is. This statement was predicated on the assumption that there are an infinite number of "games", which there isn't. There are a finite number of board configurations, period. So, given enough computing power and enough space, you can, in fact, precompute all the possible games.
So, to you, yes, the number of configurations is practically infinite, but to a computer with enough resources, it's not. Thus, given that you could precompute all board configurations, you most definitely can play a perfect game, beginning, middle, and end. 'course, this isn't really AI in the intuitive sense... it's just data processing. But that wasn't really the point of the original comment.:)
Note, I never said this task was practical, at least with todays technology. My point is that it's possible, and that the grandparent's assertion that it wasn't (due to the "infiniteness" of chess) was clearly false.
Noo... there is a finite number of chess board configurations, and THAT is the part that really matters. I could care less about move combinations. The point is that, if I know about all the board configurations available, then, given a particular configuration, I can always select the perfect move which will allow me to win (assuming I play first, of course). The heuristics which a chess program uses simply allow it to "guess" which move is best in the absence of this information.
As an example from the checkers world, Chinook, the top checkers program in the world, contains a database of all the endgames up to, IIRC, 7 levels deep. So, once it's at the point where it recognizes a board configuration from it's endgame database, it's guaranteed to win.
Umm... okay, the mobile phone programming stuff, etc, is understandable. But, when you mentioned "check out a file, or synch my calendar etc" and "browse the web from my bathroom", wouldn't an 802.11 linked high-end PDA make a lot more sense? These devices are MEANT for these sort of tasks, whereas a phone is really designed (form factor, etc) to be a phone. Plus, 802.11 gives you better range and bandwidth. Just MHO.
'course, one could argue that phones and PDAs are converging, and I'd agree with you. But they aren't there yet, and I figure, it's better to use a hammer when you're pounding nails. *shrug*
One should note that comparing this phone to the GBA isn't exactly fair, given the massive difference in price point. Based on another post here, this phone retails for about $900??? That's almost an order of magnitude more expensive than a GBA. I'd hope this thing is more powerful!
Umm, I think it's pretty clear that gravity is not the limiting factor. Millions of years ago, insects MUCH larger than what we have now existed (eg, dragonflys the size of birds). So, unless gravity has changed (seems unlikely), something else must have changed.
My understanding is that a larger insect would be unable to survive today because it would be incapable of absorbing enough oxygen to support such a large body. This is because, barring some recent discoveries, insects by-and-large respirate simply by diffusion (there was a recent article in SciAm which showed that there are insects which use a pumped mechanism as well). As a result, they would be unable to transfer enough oxygen into their blood to survive.
The hypothesis that I've read which explains the change in insect size is that, in the past, oxygen concentration in the atmosphere was higher than it is now (and this is supported by ice core sample evidence, IIRC). As a result, larger insects could survive, as their respiratory needs would be met. This may also help to explain why other "giant" creatures, like the dinosaurs, were able to survive, and yet nothing on the same scale exists today.
Isn't this akin to the stunt RAMBUS tried to pull in JEDEC? They knew they had patents on SDRAM-related technology, but allowed them to go into the standard. Then, years later, lawsuits everywhere!
Unfortunately, I can't really recommend SWT, at least in my experience, if you want to do standalone applications. I began working on a project recently which is fairly intensive, graphically. Swing was a bit of a pig on my first go-around, and this was a rewrite, so I looked at SWT. The basic widget set is nice... it does what you'd expect. But the minute you want more advanced things, like a file dialog, things get really complicated *really* quickly. This is because many of these features are present in jface, which assumes your app will be integrated as a plugin into Eclipse. 'course, this is great if that is, in fact, what you're doing! Otherwise, it's a huge pain in the ass... so, I immediately abandoned and went back to Swing.:)
Well, we did dump "the whole Queen thing", in that the Queen and the British government in general have no power over Canada as a nation. This happened a while ago (before WWII... can't remember the exact date). However, the Queen is still included in much of our government "rituals" and so forth strictly as a matter of tradition.
He does make a point, though. Because you can lose your appointments, or get kicked out of the party, MPs are much less likely to voice dissent in parliament. After all, the fact is, at least in my experience, that most people, when they vote, vote by party, not by politician... so, getting kicked out of the party is really akin to political suicide.
For those who are wondering, this practice is referred to as party discipline. It basically ensures that any legislation put forth in parliament and supported by the PM is passed. Assuming it's a majority government, that is. This is what most people are referring to when they complain about the concentration of power in the PMO (amongst other things).
Interestingly, the existance of party discipline likely enforces the aforementioned voting behaviour. After all, if you know a given MP is just going to vote along party lines, who gives a damn who it actually is? Mmm... vicious circle.
As a side note, as I understand it, the practice of party discipline is starting to show up in the British government as well. Specifically, Tony Blair is using the practice to keep members of his party (the Labour Party) in line.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the reality of it is that our current environment still favors closed source software. With any luck, people will slowly start to wake up and realize that source code needs to be open for all software projects. Think about it. If it was normal to receive source with binaries, nobody would really think twice about it. It's only seen as a bad thing because it's not what Microsoft does.
Please! I'm no MS apologist, but this is getting plain stupid. This isn't just about MS, believe it or not. The fact is, open source as a business model is seen as a bad thing because it's not what a huge number of companies making billions of dollars a year do. Have you heard of Oracle? IBM? Sun? Apple (our latest hero)? I could go on... the fact is, there are a TON of companies out there making big bucks selling closed source software. And more power to them!
In the real world, closed source is, apparently, a viable business model. And thus far, open source isn't. Honestly, how many companies are actually making some real money making products which they also release the source to? Until this starts happening, closed source is going to be predominant... and there's nothing wrong with that!
Personally, yes, I agree that open source is a good thing. But assuming that all software should be open based purely on some moralistic view is ridiculous. The world is far more complicated than that. Statements like "source code needs to be open for all software projects" is just plain naive, IMHO.
And how would giving guns to the law-abiding masses help in this situation? Do you think *you* could take down a terrorist who's aiming an AK-47 at you?
This is really a bit of a niche domain (in that, system administrators and other folks are interested, most other people aren't).
Basically, in the world, there are many scenarios where it would be VERY useful to be able to enable access controls on various resources in a system. By "access controls", I mean rules which define who can perform actions on given resources. This sounds so general because it is very general. The purpose of XACML is to provide a language which allows you to specify these rules, or policies, in a nice format independant of the rest of the system (data storage, etc) for any number of domains, and provides software to implement the required components for such a system.
As a solid example, you could use XACML, a central PDP, and a PEP on a set of firewalls to control which IPs have access to what. You'd have to write a PEP for the firewalls, and set up a PDP to handle the requests, but once this is done, you could use XACML to write firewall rules!
Another example, suppose you have a user trying to access their email. You could have a PEP in the client which talks to a PDP to determine if the user is allowed to perform various actions on the mailbox (read, write, etc). In this case, you'd use XACML to determine who can perform what actions on the mailbox.
In both of these cases, XACML defines the language PEPs use to talk to PDPs, and also specifies a common XML language for defining the policies to determine who can do what.
In essence, XACML abstracts these concepts of policy enforcement, rule definitions, etc, and wraps them up in a nice XML language which can be used in any component which implements the XACML specificiations for a PDP and PEP. Why would you want to do this? Well, first, it allows you to use plug in in an access control system, rather than having to roll your own. This is good. Second, anyone who implements the XACML standard can interwork. So, I can write a PEP for my email client, and use Joe's PDP to enforce policy in my system. Third, because all your systems now use a single language, you can centralize the policy database and use common tools to manage all of them. An administrators dream!
Now, this is really important people, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH DRM! Or Palladium! Or any other conspiracy theory you want to come up with. This is simply a tool for software developers and system administrators to easily integrate a standard access control framework into their systems.
* Note, in the previous, PDP - Policy Decision Point, and PEP - Policy Enforcement Point.
Not this version... it only let's you run Linux (or other "complient" software. Basically, code that doesn't use x86 non-virtualizable features).
This will change once SKAS mode goes into the mainline UML distribution. To quote from the UML website:
:) The SKAS page can be read here.
"In short, the changes cause the UML kernel to run in an entirely different host address space from its processes. This solves the security and honeypot fingerprinting problems by making the UML kernel totally inaccessible to UML processes. Their address spaces are identical to what they would be on the host. This also provides a noticable speedup by eliminating the signal delivery that used to happen for every UML system call."
So, there you have it. It requires a kernel patch, but basically solves all the old UML security issues. I don't believe it's quite ready for primetime, though.
"...is permit the user to make custom changes and apply security hot-fixes. Whether or not this happens in practice depends far more on the attitude of the company deploying the SS than on the license itself."
:)
Actually, according to the article (if you want to call it that) (I haven't read the license), you can't even do this. The license prohibits you from even compiling the code! So, no custom changes and no hot-fixes for YOU!
Just as a side note, the "really neat" security improvements you list are simply the IPSec stuff found in a standard IPv6 stack. These same features are available in any IPv4 stack with IPSec tacked on. The difference is that, in v6, IPSec is manadatory, and in v4, it's optional.
The point of my post is that listing IPSec as an advantage to using v6 is misleading. List true advantages and people in the know will actually listen. Otherwise, you just sound like another clueless advocate.
How the heck is this "interesting"? Trollish flame-bait, more like it... I mean, come on, "mean-spirited 1% of voters"?
No offense, but this is the exact sort of thing that's turned me OFF of the Simpsons in recent years. The writing has seriously dived into the realm of poop jokes and low-brow humour. The stuff which made the Simpsons a winner, IMHO, was the cleverness of the writing. But as of late, they've been relying more and more on the kind of crap you expect to hear in a high school locker room. Why anyone thinks this stuff is funny (really funny, as opposed to *groan* funny) is beyond me...
Ahh, you are quite correct about background mirroring/copying. I forgot about that. As for the number of available missiles, other posts seem to contradict yours, but I'm no expert, so I'm not getting into an argument... :)
Oh, and an addendum to my post... you, of course, weren't limited to writing to VRAM during the hblank. You could (and I'm assuming many did) write the VRAM as the electron gun was scanning the line...
Actually, the 2600 had enough "VRAM" to store background data for a single line on the screen. So, you had to write out the data for each successive line during the horizontal blanking period of the video display. This also means that, even if the screen is static, you still have to do all this work, just to keep it there.
Now, this all had to be done just to keep the background of the display intact. The programmer also got 2 player objects and 2 missile objects to work with... basically primitive sprites. 'course, with such limited resources, writing any kind of advanced game is a challenge. As they mention in the article, the Defender! programmer(s) tried to get around the sprite limitation by changing the sprite objects during even/odd frames to simulate more of them.
Uhhh, I don't know about this. It's one thing to have variety in personality... after all, multiple points of view are a great thing. And there's definitely nothing wrong with developers being assertive and arguing with the top dogs from time to time (it happens all the time on LKML). But it's another thing entirely to keep an abusive or insulting developer around for the sake of "diversity". It's developers like this which scare off newcomers from contributing to code. It's developers like this who force other developers to leave the project because they're sick of dealing with all the crap. The fact is, you can be different without being a total dick about it.
Wrong... the article says, and I quote:
"While the console space is littered with disappointments like the Sega Master System and the Jaguar"
Forgot to read the article, eh?
And WTF is the parent poster modded as a troll? Granted, it's poorly worded (antagonistic), but he has a good point. Do moderaters even *read* the posts before moderating them these days??
Nicotine occurs naturally in tobacco, so yes, there is a need to genetically engineer. But, you are correct, in that nicotine is a pesticide. It just happens to occur naturally in the plant... probably to protect it from pests! :)
Okay, the grandparent poster said:
:)
"No computer can or ever will be able to precompute the infinite number of games."
My point is that this is wrong. No, it really is. This statement was predicated on the assumption that there are an infinite number of "games", which there isn't. There are a finite number of board configurations, period. So, given enough computing power and enough space, you can, in fact, precompute all the possible games.
So, to you, yes, the number of configurations is practically infinite, but to a computer with enough resources, it's not. Thus, given that you could precompute all board configurations, you most definitely can play a perfect game, beginning, middle, and end. 'course, this isn't really AI in the intuitive sense... it's just data processing. But that wasn't really the point of the original comment.
Note, I never said this task was practical, at least with todays technology. My point is that it's possible, and that the grandparent's assertion that it wasn't (due to the "infiniteness" of chess) was clearly false.
Noo... there is a finite number of chess board configurations, and THAT is the part that really matters. I could care less about move combinations. The point is that, if I know about all the board configurations available, then, given a particular configuration, I can always select the perfect move which will allow me to win (assuming I play first, of course). The heuristics which a chess program uses simply allow it to "guess" which move is best in the absence of this information.
As an example from the checkers world, Chinook, the top checkers program in the world, contains a database of all the endgames up to, IIRC, 7 levels deep. So, once it's at the point where it recognizes a board configuration from it's endgame database, it's guaranteed to win.
Umm... okay, the mobile phone programming stuff, etc, is understandable. But, when you mentioned "check out a file, or synch my calendar etc" and "browse the web from my bathroom", wouldn't an 802.11 linked high-end PDA make a lot more sense? These devices are MEANT for these sort of tasks, whereas a phone is really designed (form factor, etc) to be a phone. Plus, 802.11 gives you better range and bandwidth. Just MHO.
'course, one could argue that phones and PDAs are converging, and I'd agree with you. But they aren't there yet, and I figure, it's better to use a hammer when you're pounding nails. *shrug*
One should note that comparing this phone to the GBA isn't exactly fair, given the massive difference in price point. Based on another post here, this phone retails for about $900??? That's almost an order of magnitude more expensive than a GBA. I'd hope this thing is more powerful!
Umm, I think it's pretty clear that gravity is not the limiting factor. Millions of years ago, insects MUCH larger than what we have now existed (eg, dragonflys the size of birds). So, unless gravity has changed (seems unlikely), something else must have changed.
My understanding is that a larger insect would be unable to survive today because it would be incapable of absorbing enough oxygen to support such a large body. This is because, barring some recent discoveries, insects by-and-large respirate simply by diffusion (there was a recent article in SciAm which showed that there are insects which use a pumped mechanism as well). As a result, they would be unable to transfer enough oxygen into their blood to survive.
The hypothesis that I've read which explains the change in insect size is that, in the past, oxygen concentration in the atmosphere was higher than it is now (and this is supported by ice core sample evidence, IIRC). As a result, larger insects could survive, as their respiratory needs would be met. This may also help to explain why other "giant" creatures, like the dinosaurs, were able to survive, and yet nothing on the same scale exists today.
Isn't this akin to the stunt RAMBUS tried to pull in JEDEC? They knew they had patents on SDRAM-related technology, but allowed them to go into the standard. Then, years later, lawsuits everywhere!
Unfortunately, I can't really recommend SWT, at least in my experience, if you want to do standalone applications. I began working on a project recently which is fairly intensive, graphically. Swing was a bit of a pig on my first go-around, and this was a rewrite, so I looked at SWT. The basic widget set is nice... it does what you'd expect. But the minute you want more advanced things, like a file dialog, things get really complicated *really* quickly. This is because many of these features are present in jface, which assumes your app will be integrated as a plugin into Eclipse. 'course, this is great if that is, in fact, what you're doing! Otherwise, it's a huge pain in the ass... so, I immediately abandoned and went back to Swing. :)
Well, we did dump "the whole Queen thing", in that the Queen and the British government in general have no power over Canada as a nation. This happened a while ago (before WWII... can't remember the exact date). However, the Queen is still included in much of our government "rituals" and so forth strictly as a matter of tradition.
He does make a point, though. Because you can lose your appointments, or get kicked out of the party, MPs are much less likely to voice dissent in parliament. After all, the fact is, at least in my experience, that most people, when they vote, vote by party, not by politician... so, getting kicked out of the party is really akin to political suicide.
For those who are wondering, this practice is referred to as party discipline. It basically ensures that any legislation put forth in parliament and supported by the PM is passed. Assuming it's a majority government, that is. This is what most people are referring to when they complain about the concentration of power in the PMO (amongst other things).
Interestingly, the existance of party discipline likely enforces the aforementioned voting behaviour. After all, if you know a given MP is just going to vote along party lines, who gives a damn who it actually is? Mmm... vicious circle.
As a side note, as I understand it, the practice of party discipline is starting to show up in the British government as well. Specifically, Tony Blair is using the practice to keep members of his party (the Labour Party) in line.