I like that idea, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a fund which would negotiate a purchase price for certain software and then release it under GPL? I'd pledge the first $100 to it.:)
There is a lot of software for Linux, and quite a chunk of that is better than the software Windows has to offer. (1) I like to use Linux because it's advantages outweigh it's disadvantages for me - however there are distinct disadvantages, for example access to certain types of media, games etc. With a tool like this, some of the disadvantages disappear, and as a result Linux market share might further increase.
I think with a greater market share, the incentive for developers to target Linux would also increase. Realistically you always have a benefit from writing a native version, e.g. speed or integration with other apps. If the market is big enough you might consider providing that benefit to your users.
Also some developers particularly enjoy developing for (and in) Linux. Their commercial efforts become more viable with an increased market share, and this could then also lead to more software being written for Linux.
Well, from archeaology lectures I remember the claim that humans are essentially genetically unchanged for the last 40000 years, so any adaptation of this kind would take a very long time.
Also we have to keep in mind that evolution does not necessarily work to improve the species(1), it's not a planned process in any way. For it to advance the
appearance of certain features, people who have those features need to have more descendants than those who do not.
I don't think this is happening at all,
at least not in western societies. Since pretty much everybody has access to sufficient food and shelter the likelihood of propagating one's genes seems to be almost entirely tied to inclination and maybe (somewhat) to attractiveness.
Today it's so much easier for us to change our environment than to adapt to it, I don't think evolution will have much of a role to play anymore.
(1) Think of the many species with ridiculous and impractical horns or tail feathers etc.
Well, I still think there's a difference: what goes on on slashdot is (almost) per definition "grassroot" - there is no large company involved which is driving it.
It is basically the difference between two people saying they waited for a green light when one of them drove through. The statements are very similar, sure, but one of them is a lie.
So me suggesting "DMCA Sucks" letters and some MS
marketing person suggesting "DMCA is great" letters are similar actions, but his certainly is not grass root. If he claims it is, then he's lying.
Yes there is one, it's in the "astroturf" link -
just move your cursor over it and you can read it.
I'm not suggesting that you click on it for verification purposes...:)
Well, nobody can fault you for trying to save your life, that's for sure. So I can understand the Brazilian government (and others in the same position). Obviously it's not right to prevent someone needing a drug from getting access to it.
On the other hand, developing a new drug costs extraordinary amounts of money, the companies who are in the business of making them deserve their reward, too. Someone needs to pay the bill, it's not entirely fair to stick these companies with it. After all, the work they do there is very valuable. There is also the danger, that that loss
of profits would decrease the effort which goes into AIDS research.
It would be nice if some developed countries would
be prepared to finance part of the drug costs - obviously the pharmaceutical companies would have to be expected to be reasonable in their demands, too.
While Unix supports to switch Workstations much better, it has problems too: neither CDE (SUN) nor
KDE (Linux) handle different screen sizes very well - the panel can be all over the place, sometimes well off the screen.
Admit it, how many people are prepared
to dedicate their careers to a single piece of software? not many. so can you understand why
commercial companies are less than eager to use open source for critical/production systems?
That's true, but commercial development has the
same problems - programmers don't stick around
for ever, and it can be tough to maintain someone else's code. (1)
Similar problems apply to companies as a whole, you don't really know how long they will be around either, or whether they'll continue to support their product (at least not for the 10 year timeframe).
That's a good argument to chose the market leader,
I suppose, but on the other hand open source has
an advantage there too, since at least you can hire someone to fix the problems you're experiencing.
Having the source is an insurance in a way.
(1) Everyone is suffering from the
documentation problem: either because you're forced to write it, or because the other guy didn't write any.:)
Why is it that I can look at the attachments on my emails and plainly see an attachment that ends with.vbs, yet somehow others cannot?
That is because some people have "hide extensions" enabled - that's the default setting.:)
I agree with you about the origins of the problem:
monoculture of mail clients and scripting. However most engineers when adding scripting to an email tool would give security a thought. Why not implement a sandbox? Why not write sensible warning messages which *only* apply to executables?
You could put the effort in to implement scripting
in a mail client while maintaining security.
Just compare Sun's approach when they introduced java. They realized when you execute code coming from the web you need a security system - and it had one right from start.
Sure, just having such a system is not enough, it's implementation might be flawed, there could be holes which can be exploited. However Microsoft put no effort in at all. I think it's fair to put the blame on them, too. Outlook is sub-standard engineering, MS should take responsibility for the damage they cause to customers.
Wipe the software from the face of the earth. Absolutely impossible. Under the GPL license,
people can create derivative works from versions
already existing, unless I have misunderstood
the GPL.
I wonder whether that's true. I think for the
GPL to take effect the person releasing a piece
of software under it, would need to have the
right to do so. E.g. if I were to somehow obtain
the source for Adobe Illustrator and "release"
it under GPL, nobody would actually gain the
right to modify the code, as it was never legal
for me to grant that right.
So while the demands of these lawyers seem ludicrous they'd probably argue that it was never
lawful to release the software in the first place.
Hmmm - actually one thing you may want to consider
is the 6 weeks vacation which you get e.g. in
Germany. So you'll have a lot more time to
travel around in Europe. Plus there are the weekends and public holidays which you can use to explore. Anyway actually working with people in Europe and experiencing how everyday life there works will give you a much better understanding of a country than a vacation would.
The other thing to keep in mind is that working in some other country doesn't necessarily have anything to do with emigrating there. Enjoy it for a year or two and then decide where you want to go next.:)
Well lots of the communications of the Medici was lost: some of the really important stuff was never put on paper - is there a record of every spoken word?
Besides, data formats are nothing, historians have decoded long forgotten scripts and languages which no-one speaks anymore. I think it will be comparatively easy to get at the files
on a CDROM, 500 years from now.
They'll just put the thing into some sort of a 3-D scanner and work on the computer copy... "Oh lock these dents are 1's, and those are 0's and they write them in a spiral." Sure it may be tough work (file system, data formats), but they'll also have very sophisticated technology to analyze these things. They might just have to click on the "unknown media wizzard" and get all the files.;)
Another problem is deteriorating media, but on a
historic level I don't think it matters much. Current data recovery companies can do amazing things already: restoring hard drives from totally burned-out PCs, or restoring data which has been overwritten multiple times.
It's one problem to keep your data so you can readily access it in 50 years, but I think on the scale interesting for historians we have no problem at all.
Actually - power failures are much more common in
the US than in Germany. The reason is the higher
population density, so you also have a more finely meshed power network.
One of the reasons this might well take of in
Germany is also mentioned in the article: Deutsche Telecom sells a lot of DSL lines, but
it installs less than 50% of them.:)
Well ok, there are many steps before this *might* become law, but isn't one of the points of the process that you could get involved *right now* before the crap passes?
My biggest beef with it is:
This will increase the costs of PCs for most people who don't want to run censorware
Assuming people are too incompetent to install censorware, then they are too incompetent to configure it too (e.g. to switch it off).
Following the laws' logic this would mean the state creates an impenetrable barrier for anyone over 30 to access "censored" sites. That has to be unconstitutional. (Or the 30+ is crap, then the bill is too.)
Just a comment on platform compatibility - X11 is pretty damn good, but in some cases it will still break there. I think one of the problems is the font handling. E.g. if I try to run SUN's "admintool" setting the DISPLAY to my Linux machine with XFree 4.02 it will just crash - where is does just fine dsiplaying to XFree 3.xx. In this case I could fix it by using the old XFree fonts, but I got an editor (Esprimo, an older customized version of Vslick) which will
still crash after a little while - no idea what could be causing this one.
<P>
Sorry for the length of this, basically what I want to say is: yes X11 is pretty great, but there are limits to the compatibility...
I disagree, the article's headline refers exclusively to the Bundeswehr, the article's content does not. The text just below states "wollen das Auswärtige Amt und die Bundeswehr Sicherheitslücken schließen" - so that refers to the Bundeswehr and the foreign ministry, both.
It also states "In Computern, die in sensiblen Bereichen eingesetzt werden" - which means "computers which are used in sensitive areas" - that's a very long way from a general "ban".
The headline is pretty confusing in that respect...
Well, war is not the only international interaction in which you might want to preserve secrets. Lets say you try to negotiate some form of international agreement. Now you want to tell your ambassador "You can conceded point A and B, as long as you get C, but try hard to get us A and B, too."
Obviously if the other country learns of these instructions he'll not negotiate A and B... They'd know exactly how hard they can press him.
I remember there was a news story a while back: the Irish government had used an encryption system from an American company. As it turned out while negotiating over Northern Ireland with the UK their communications with their ambassadors were known to the UK government. The system contained a backdoor for the US secret service and they were passing the data to the UK.
I can't say I blame them, this is what intelligence work is about. On the other hand, this is the danger you face when you have insufficient control over your security systems.
Here is an
article
about it from the c't website. (This article is in German.)
The interesting part is that copyright law was given priority over the Teledienstgesetz
which is supposed to limit responsibility of
ISPs for the activities of their users.
The work of the AMULET group is closely related to
Sutherland's. They were researching his micropipeline approach, among other approaches to
asynchronous design.
One interesting result of the AMULET group's
The main proreasearch was in power consumption: the likelyhood that all elements of the circuit switch at the same time is basically zero, however, the likelyhood that 90% of all elements switch at the same time is quite high. This puts a limit on the power-dissipation advantage that was thought to be a benefit of asynchronous logic. However asynchronous design is still usefull if you want to save energy rather than power, which would be the case, e.g. in portable devices. I think Phillips has some chips for CD players which are asynchronous.
Another problem for traditional synchronous design was clock skew, and the resulting need for large clock buffers - however there are some interesting approaches to handling this, too.
There is a company which actually uses the clock skew to aid timing between interfacing blocks - sort of turning the problem on it's head and treating it as a benefit.:)
(That's as much research as Sutherland's work, though.)
The main problem with asynchronous design is the lack of tools: you can't design multi-million gate ASICs by hand, and there is no support from the tool vendors.
Right now the possible advantages of asynchronous design don't seem to be big enough to actually use it on a commercial chip. Granted Sutherland is optimistic, but he's been optimistic 7 years ago, too - when I first heard of his mircopipeline approach. (And it is a great idea, don't get me wrong.)
Well, come on, a linux server may stay up for months and months, but a linux desktop system is easy to crash.
Just use netscape open a handful of browser windows and visit a few javascript sites or something like that - sooner or later your desktop will lock up and your rlogin will time out. Ok, maybe it would come
back after an hour of spinning the harddrive, but who cares? If it's faster to reboot, than it's not much different from a crash.
There is quite some room to improve on the stability of Linux, I don't think pretending that there is no problem helps.
Slashdot Mirror
I like that idea, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a fund which would negotiate a purchase price for certain software and then release it under GPL? I'd pledge the first $100 to it. :)
I think with a greater market share, the incentive for developers to target Linux would also increase. Realistically you always have a benefit from writing a native version, e.g. speed or integration with other apps. If the market is big enough you might consider providing that benefit to your users.
Also some developers particularly enjoy developing for (and in) Linux. Their commercial efforts become more viable with an increased market share, and this could then also lead to more software being written for Linux.
(1) Of course the reverse is also true.
Also we have to keep in mind that evolution does not necessarily work to improve the species(1), it's not a planned process in any way. For it to advance the appearance of certain features, people who have those features need to have more descendants than those who do not.
I don't think this is happening at all, at least not in western societies. Since pretty much everybody has access to sufficient food and shelter the likelihood of propagating one's genes seems to be almost entirely tied to inclination and maybe (somewhat) to attractiveness.
Today it's so much easier for us to change our environment than to adapt to it, I don't think evolution will have much of a role to play anymore.
(1) Think of the many species with ridiculous and impractical horns or tail feathers etc.
This is quite different from a petition, or a form letter, where the involvement is out in the open.
It is basically the difference between two people saying they waited for a green light when one of them drove through. The statements are very similar, sure, but one of them is a lie.
So me suggesting "DMCA Sucks" letters and some MS marketing person suggesting "DMCA is great" letters are similar actions, but his certainly is not grass root. If he claims it is, then he's lying.
Yes there is one, it's in the "astroturf" link - just move your cursor over it and you can read it. :)
I'm not suggesting that you click on it for verification purposes...
On the other hand, developing a new drug costs extraordinary amounts of money, the companies who are in the business of making them deserve their reward, too. Someone needs to pay the bill, it's not entirely fair to stick these companies with it. After all, the work they do there is very valuable. There is also the danger, that that loss of profits would decrease the effort which goes into AIDS research.
It would be nice if some developed countries would be prepared to finance part of the drug costs - obviously the pharmaceutical companies would have to be expected to be reasonable in their demands, too.
It's a spell checker, which (among other things) allows you to select a specific dictonary - useful if you write in a language other than English.
While Unix supports to switch Workstations much better, it has problems too: neither CDE (SUN) nor KDE (Linux) handle different screen sizes very well - the panel can be all over the place, sometimes well off the screen.
That's true, but commercial development has the same problems - programmers don't stick around for ever, and it can be tough to maintain someone else's code. (1)
Similar problems apply to companies as a whole, you don't really know how long they will be around either, or whether they'll continue to support their product (at least not for the 10 year timeframe).
That's a good argument to chose the market leader, I suppose, but on the other hand open source has an advantage there too, since at least you can hire someone to fix the problems you're experiencing. Having the source is an insurance in a way.
(1) Everyone is suffering from the documentation problem: either because you're forced to write it, or because the other guy didn't write any. :)
So assuming Ötzi's age determination was even remotely correct, his murderer is off the hook. :)
That is because some people have "hide extensions" enabled - that's the default setting. :)
I agree with you about the origins of the problem: monoculture of mail clients and scripting. However most engineers when adding scripting to an email tool would give security a thought. Why not implement a sandbox? Why not write sensible warning messages which *only* apply to executables?
You could put the effort in to implement scripting in a mail client while maintaining security. Just compare Sun's approach when they introduced java. They realized when you execute code coming from the web you need a security system - and it had one right from start.
Sure, just having such a system is not enough, it's implementation might be flawed, there could be holes which can be exploited. However Microsoft put no effort in at all. I think it's fair to put the blame on them, too. Outlook is sub-standard engineering, MS should take responsibility for the damage they cause to customers.
How does the ICQ exploit work, do you have a link?
I know it won't effect me with kXicq, but I'm curious.
Wipe the software from the face of the earth.
Absolutely impossible. Under the GPL license, people can create derivative works from versions already existing, unless I have misunderstood the GPL.
I wonder whether that's true. I think for the GPL to take effect the person releasing a piece of software under it, would need to have the right to do so. E.g. if I were to somehow obtain the source for Adobe Illustrator and "release" it under GPL, nobody would actually gain the right to modify the code, as it was never legal for me to grant that right.
So while the demands of these lawyers seem ludicrous they'd probably argue that it was never lawful to release the software in the first place.
The other thing to keep in mind is that working in some other country doesn't necessarily have anything to do with emigrating there. Enjoy it for a year or two and then decide where you want to go next. :)
Besides, data formats are nothing, historians have decoded long forgotten scripts and languages which no-one speaks anymore. I think it will be comparatively easy to get at the files on a CDROM, 500 years from now.
They'll just put the thing into some sort of a 3-D scanner and work on the computer copy... "Oh lock these dents are 1's, and those are 0's and they write them in a spiral." Sure it may be tough work (file system, data formats), but they'll also have very sophisticated technology to analyze these things. They might just have to click on the "unknown media wizzard" and get all the files. ;)
Another problem is deteriorating media, but on a historic level I don't think it matters much. Current data recovery companies can do amazing things already: restoring hard drives from totally burned-out PCs, or restoring data which has been overwritten multiple times.
It's one problem to keep your data so you can readily access it in 50 years, but I think on the scale interesting for historians we have no problem at all.
One of the reasons this might well take of in Germany is also mentioned in the article: Deutsche Telecom sells a lot of DSL lines, but it installs less than 50% of them. :)
Well, it's the basic premise of capitalism: you get the best product at the best price through competition. If you have monopolies the system fails.
My biggest beef with it is:
Just a comment on platform compatibility - X11 is pretty damn good, but in some cases it will still break there. I think one of the problems is the font handling. E.g. if I try to run SUN's "admintool" setting the DISPLAY to my Linux machine with XFree 4.02 it will just crash - where is does just fine dsiplaying to XFree 3.xx. In this case I could fix it by using the old XFree fonts, but I got an editor (Esprimo, an older customized version of Vslick) which will
still crash after a little while - no idea what could be causing this one.
<P>
Sorry for the length of this, basically what I want to say is: yes X11 is pretty great, but there are limits to the compatibility...
I disagree, the article's headline refers exclusively to the Bundeswehr, the article's content does not. The text just below states "wollen das Auswärtige Amt und die Bundeswehr Sicherheitslücken schließen" - so that refers to the Bundeswehr and the foreign ministry, both. It also states "In Computern, die in sensiblen Bereichen eingesetzt werden" - which means "computers which are used in sensitive areas" - that's a very long way from a general "ban". The headline is pretty confusing in that respect...
Obviously if the other country learns of these instructions he'll not negotiate A and B... They'd know exactly how hard they can press him.
I remember there was a news story a while back: the Irish government had used an encryption system from an American company. As it turned out while negotiating over Northern Ireland with the UK their communications with their ambassadors were known to the UK government. The system contained a backdoor for the US secret service and they were passing the data to the UK.
I can't say I blame them, this is what intelligence work is about. On the other hand, this is the danger you face when you have insufficient control over your security systems.
The interesting part is that copyright law was given priority over the Teledienstgesetz which is supposed to limit responsibility of ISPs for the activities of their users.
One interesting result of the AMULET group's The main proreasearch was in power consumption: the likelyhood that all elements of the circuit switch at the same time is basically zero, however, the likelyhood that 90% of all elements switch at the same time is quite high. This puts a limit on the power-dissipation advantage that was thought to be a benefit of asynchronous logic. However asynchronous design is still usefull if you want to save energy rather than power, which would be the case, e.g. in portable devices. I think Phillips has some chips for CD players which are asynchronous.
Another problem for traditional synchronous design was clock skew, and the resulting need for large clock buffers - however there are some interesting approaches to handling this, too. There is a company which actually uses the clock skew to aid timing between interfacing blocks - sort of turning the problem on it's head and treating it as a benefit. :)
(That's as much research as Sutherland's work, though.)
The main problem with asynchronous design is the lack of tools: you can't design multi-million gate ASICs by hand, and there is no support from the tool vendors.
Right now the possible advantages of asynchronous design don't seem to be big enough to actually use it on a commercial chip. Granted Sutherland is optimistic, but he's been optimistic 7 years ago, too - when I first heard of his mircopipeline approach. (And it is a great idea, don't get me wrong.)
Just use netscape open a handful of browser windows and visit a few javascript sites or something like that - sooner or later your desktop will lock up and your rlogin will time out. Ok, maybe it would come back after an hour of spinning the harddrive, but who cares? If it's faster to reboot, than it's not much different from a crash.
There is quite some room to improve on the stability of Linux, I don't think pretending that there is no problem helps.