If you use a piece of GPL software, you have some stake in it, if only that you probably don't want everyone else to lose interest in it while you want to keep using it. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but...
The real point is to make it easier to look up. Proving that Linus wrote the code which SCO claimed to own took a weekend of looking through history and it was only distinctive due to characteristic bugs. The goal with this is to be able to be able to report the entire history of the code back to the original authors of each line by the question and answer section. "But that code was donated by Christopher Hellwig and signed off on by Robert Love. Do you mean to claim that the CEO didn't have the authority to do so?" It's quite beneficial to have the real story worked out while the press is still there.
I actually mentioned that (paranthetically); what Linux doesn't support is running the same code as either a kernel module or in userspace with one of those. The thing that would be useful would be to be able to say, "I think ext3.ko is misbehaving on occasion. I'll stick it in userspace and see if I see a segfault." If you were running a different implementation in userspace than in kernel space, this wouldn't be informative.
From the point of view of the kernel binary, Linux is a monolithic kernel. But from the point of view of the source of a filesystem, there's no way to tell. It could, in principle, be in a different address space, with access only to the things it's supposed to have access to.
So I think that Linux is now a microkernel design, with a monolithic implementation. Of course, it doesn't use a generic message passing system, and does a lot of communication by shared memory, but that doesn't change the fact that, from the filesystem programmer's point of view, there are only certain APIs available, and the rest cannot be used directly with any hope of having it work.
Linus is an engineer, and is wants to make a system that works really well. Tanenbaum is an academic, and wants to make a system which is informative. Both have been wildly successful at their respective goals.
The microkernel argument was an academic argument, of the sort that which is not held for the purpose of winning it, but of coming to an agreement on the relative merits of different approaches. As for winners, Linux obviously continues to be a monolithic kernel. But it should not be ignored that you can now add filesystems to a running kernel as modules, and even build them outside of the kernel tree. At this point, Linux is essentially a microkernel design running as a monolithic kernel for performance reasons as an implementation detail. A future version could offer the option of running the filesystems in userspace if you want. (That is, running all of the filesystems in userspace with the kernel fs API; there's already support for having filesystems in userspace if you want.) I wouldn't be surprised if people having weird problems would be advised to try the "ext3.userspace" option, and if you could avoid tainting your kernel with "nvidia.userspace".
It sounds like they had been posting things under pseudonyms primarily to avoid giving the impression that what they were saying was an official JBoss position or giving their opinions unjustified clout due to the reputation of their software, in a misplaced attempt at tact or something. When people complained, he realized that everything they were accused of saying, they would be willing to take credit for.
I expect that they'll demonstrate their conformance to the new policy by mocking WebLogic's standards compliance under their real names. "And, in conclusion, values in a Map returned by getParameterMap are arrays of Strings, you idiot. Signed, Marc."
His point is that Linux isn't a Microsoft competitor, you are. You may call it slapping together a server, but you're really building out of raw materials a product which competes with their products. If you were an IBM employee, the same task would be "delivering a solution."
Plaintiff: give us everything. Subpoenee: we give you nothing. Plaintiff: okay, how bout half? Subpoenee: we'll give you everything RMS has said about software licensing. Plaintiff: uh... Subpoenee: and everything he's said to women at cons. Plaintiff: got a court date, talk to you later. Subpoenee: and a recording of the song. Subpoenee: Hello?
So Ken Brown is claiming that, because Linus didn't write Linux in a vacuum, but was exposed to Andy Tanenbaum's work on the subject, he doesn't really own it. In order to come to this view of history, Ken Brown exposed himself to Andy Tanenbaum's work on the subject. So is Linus isn't the originator of Linux, Ken Brown isn't the originator of his book.
The trick for dealing with Verizon is to call them and tell them that your phone service is out (even if the reason it's out is that they installed it in some other building). As far as I can tell, they're much better at "fixing" a non-existant line than they are at installing it in the first place. The guy who came to install our lines at work fiddled around in the closet for a while, didn't label anything, got a dial tone, and left. When it stopped working and we called them, a different guy showed up that afternoon, figured out were it was hooked up, and got everything worked out and labelled.
Caffeine is actually very similar to cocaine, but caffeine is significantly stronger. Coca leaf tea is a mild stimulant popular in the Andes, and reportedly is as effective as caffeinated beverages without causing nearly so much twichiness. If, on the other hand, caffeine were used like cocaine is usually used in the US, it would be generally fatal.
Interestingly, most cultures historically have used one of the mild stimulants widely while prohibiting others, with the "good" one chosen practically at random.
Caffeine withdrawal can definitely vary significantly in intensity. It does get pretty bad if you're unlucky. On the other hand, it's very rarely worse than a sinus infection. It's not something to belittle, but it's not something to worry too much about, either.
It's really hard for most people to stay off of caffeine, I think, primarily because a regular low dose of caffeine doesn't have particularly significant side effects, so there's very little motivation to quit for good.
Personally, I drink a cup of coffee each morning when I get to work. I find this a more effective, and, in New England, a more available, alternative to sunshine. I used to drink coffee in the evening and drink a lot of it at a time, but I quit that so that I could keep a more regular schedule.
You don't really mean public class interfaces (per se), you mean function prototypes, which are available in C (for example). The difference is really that you can specify arbitrary information about what the function is supposed to do, rather than just a few particular things. E.g., the usual API for mod is something like
int mod(int num, int den)
This lets you add
den != 0
(den = 0)
Then the compiler could automatically write the check for division by 0, and could optimize it out in cases when it can statically prove it is unnecessary.
Of course, it's easy to get excessive in writing the contracts, such that the contracts are no simpler or more informative than the implementation. The trick is to have your contracts specify inportant information about the behavior of the code without going into so much detail that the contract is unclear to the user or not what you intended.
At this point, it still has to go back for a "second reading" to the Parliament. Considering that, in addition to the original issues, this is now seen as a challenge to democracy and the role of the parliament in the EU, it seems likely that the parliament will soundly reject it.
On the other hand, some amendments were made at the last minute which convined a number of the representatives; since the parliament version was also this bill with amendments, they might have actually passed that version.
"Rodents Of Unusual Size? Frankly, I don't think they... " *boom*
Re:That's the idea, but not the truth.
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 1
You're missing the fact that this is a Dutch Auction. The way this works is that shares are allocated to bidders starting with the highest bid and going down in per-share price until the supply is exhausted (or the demand is exhausted). The lowest successful bid is then takes as the price, and everybody pays that per share, regardless of the prices that higher bidders bid.
Therefore, there are two possible situations: speculators get all of the stock, and pay a speculation price for it. They all lose, because the stock then drops to the market price, since nobody thinks the stock is actually worth that much, and Google gets a ton of cash from idiots who failed to read that Google wanted to discourage speculation. Or the lowest bidder is not speculating, in which case everybody pays a reasonable price for the stock (that is, a price that someone believes it's actually worth), and the stock is either at the market price (because people like the lowest successful bidder think the value is right) or below it (because not enough people bid the market price, and the lowest successful bidder was someone bidding less).
The only case in which the stock will go up after the auction is if Google is offerring too much of it, such that there is stock left over after everyone bidding market price or over has gotten their stock, which would mean that there are potential buyers who are not participating in the IPO.
Bidding higher than you believe the market value of the stock to be just means that you risk the first situation, where you look dumb (because you're buying at higher than you thought the market value was); by speculating, you earn the chance to win the auction and lose money.
The Dutch Auction is actually a pretty stable system for this sort of thing, because it provides no motivation to bid higher than your guess at the market price, and, if you expect the auction to be well-attended, there is no motivation to bid lower than your guess at the market price, either.
Of course, there's no reason that the market value of the stock is actually going to be what the stock is actually worth, but that is equally true before and after the IPO.
It's the "optimization" strategy for WalMart. You build desktop computer hardware, and sell it. If you put Linux on it, all of the software is free; if you charge a little less for Linux than for Windows, your margin is still higher for Linux. For Lindows, it's the subscription model.
The interesting thing would be to do a tax program where the code part and the data part were completely separate, and distribute each of them separately. The code part could be free software, and the data could be purchased in stores or online for the usual price of tax software. The free software project could even have paid developers funded by the makers of the tax law data packages, on the "give away the razors, sell the blades" model.
Re:Google = genius
on
Google IPO Swami
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The idea is that stock prices tend to start out unreasonably low (due to the price being set by people who agree with each other to get a good deal on the stock), shoot up towards the market valuation, and then go higher on momentum and speculation. Then they drop back towards the market valuation when the novelty subsides.
Google's idea is to arrange for the stock to start at the market valuation, such that it will probably stay flat after the IPO. Since the system is engineered to prevent a bubble, it discourages speculation.
The point is really to become public with the minimum of volitility. They have to follow most of the rules for a public company anyway, so they might as well actually be publically traded, if for no other reason than to let their major stockholders diversify.
The other flaws are differences between what is actually done and what a user is likely to expect to be done. In a social engineering attack, the attacker confuses the victem in some way; in this case, the victem is confused in advance by the software, and does something inappropriate because of that.
The mechanism fails to provide several expected properties: that all of the information in the file is hidden and that a file which decrypts without error with a given key was created by someone with the key (and does not have modified filenames or masked data).
The key generation attack only works against someone who generates 4 billion zip files with the same password; while a cryptographer might expect 16e18 zip files to be required, I doubt anyone is likely to actually create enough files to permit the attack. (If you create a zip file every second, you should change your password some time in the next 126 years, just to be sure).
As it is, WinZip needs two warnings: filenames and sizes are not encrypted; and, if you get something broken out of WinZip, it might still be sensitive. The latter turned out to be a flaw in PGP as well, and it was considered sufficiently important to fix.
I don't think they knew they needed people like that until Congress started investigating and asking why they didn't know anything. At the moment, they could really use the PR of hiring somebody clever, lest the investigation report that the administration can't be blamed for not stopping the 9/11 attacks, because the intelligence agencies were clueless, but the administration has also kept the intelligence agencies clueless by chasing off everyone clever.
I suspect there would be a 50/50 chance that the visit from the intelligence goons would be a job offer. US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines and actually come up with correct answers.
It is not necessarily the case that religions don't permit dissent. Mainstream Christianity is very authoritarian (going back to Nicea), and would not be a good foundation for a religious democracy (which is quite ironic, really, given Christ's teachings). Judaism, on the other hand, is all about arguing over scripture. Even if dissent isn't a core religious prinicple, you can disagree with a religious figure's interpretation of God's will without disagreeing with God, particularly if the clergy disagrees with each other. It is not really different from disagreeing with the Supreme Court without disagreeing with the Constitution.
There have to be multiple branches of government set against each other, with ways to oppose excesses, in order to maintain a democracy, but I don't think that a religious organization cannot be one of these, or that divergant religious organizations cannot be multiple of them. A church does not necessarily have particularly strong authority over the faithful, even on non-political matters (consider that the Catholic Church has been widely criticized by Catholics recently; and that's a religion with a dogma of infallibility).
I think that a society will cease to be a democracy if it believes in the infallibility of a leader who is permitted to have power in government. It doesn't matter if this belief is religious or not; it can be just as bad if the leader is simply vastly popular. That's why Washington had to turn down a third term, and how Germany democratically elected the Nazi government. But it is a property primarily of the sects of Christianity that survived the early days that the religion contains this sort of leader, not a fundamental property of religion in general.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use a piece of GPL software, you have some stake in it, if only that you probably don't want everyone else to lose interest in it while you want to keep using it. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but...
The real point is to make it easier to look up. Proving that Linus wrote the code which SCO claimed to own took a weekend of looking through history and it was only distinctive due to characteristic bugs. The goal with this is to be able to be able to report the entire history of the code back to the original authors of each line by the question and answer section. "But that code was donated by Christopher Hellwig and signed off on by Robert Love. Do you mean to claim that the CEO didn't have the authority to do so?" It's quite beneficial to have the real story worked out while the press is still there.
I actually mentioned that (paranthetically); what Linux doesn't support is running the same code as either a kernel module or in userspace with one of those. The thing that would be useful would be to be able to say, "I think ext3.ko is misbehaving on occasion. I'll stick it in userspace and see if I see a segfault." If you were running a different implementation in userspace than in kernel space, this wouldn't be informative.
From the point of view of the kernel binary, Linux is a monolithic kernel. But from the point of view of the source of a filesystem, there's no way to tell. It could, in principle, be in a different address space, with access only to the things it's supposed to have access to.
So I think that Linux is now a microkernel design, with a monolithic implementation. Of course, it doesn't use a generic message passing system, and does a lot of communication by shared memory, but that doesn't change the fact that, from the filesystem programmer's point of view, there are only certain APIs available, and the rest cannot be used directly with any hope of having it work.
Linus is an engineer, and is wants to make a system that works really well. Tanenbaum is an academic, and wants to make a system which is informative. Both have been wildly successful at their respective goals.
The microkernel argument was an academic argument, of the sort that which is not held for the purpose of winning it, but of coming to an agreement on the relative merits of different approaches. As for winners, Linux obviously continues to be a monolithic kernel. But it should not be ignored that you can now add filesystems to a running kernel as modules, and even build them outside of the kernel tree. At this point, Linux is essentially a microkernel design running as a monolithic kernel for performance reasons as an implementation detail. A future version could offer the option of running the filesystems in userspace if you want. (That is, running all of the filesystems in userspace with the kernel fs API; there's already support for having filesystems in userspace if you want.) I wouldn't be surprised if people having weird problems would be advised to try the "ext3.userspace" option, and if you could avoid tainting your kernel with "nvidia.userspace".
It sounds like they had been posting things under pseudonyms primarily to avoid giving the impression that what they were saying was an official JBoss position or giving their opinions unjustified clout due to the reputation of their software, in a misplaced attempt at tact or something. When people complained, he realized that everything they were accused of saying, they would be willing to take credit for.
I expect that they'll demonstrate their conformance to the new policy by mocking WebLogic's standards compliance under their real names. "And, in conclusion, values in a Map returned by getParameterMap are arrays of Strings, you idiot. Signed, Marc."
His point is that Linux isn't a Microsoft competitor, you are. You may call it slapping together a server, but you're really building out of raw materials a product which competes with their products. If you were an IBM employee, the same task would be "delivering a solution."
Plaintiff: give us everything.
Subpoenee: we give you nothing.
Plaintiff: okay, how bout half?
Subpoenee: we'll give you everything RMS has said about software licensing.
Plaintiff: uh...
Subpoenee: and everything he's said to women at cons.
Plaintiff: got a court date, talk to you later. Subpoenee: and a recording of the song.
Subpoenee: Hello?
So Ken Brown is claiming that, because Linus didn't write Linux in a vacuum, but was exposed to Andy Tanenbaum's work on the subject, he doesn't really own it. In order to come to this view of history, Ken Brown exposed himself to Andy Tanenbaum's work on the subject. So is Linus isn't the originator of Linux, Ken Brown isn't the originator of his book.
I hear they have to deal with coffee that's got a lot more caffeine than the stuff at the donut shop...
The trick for dealing with Verizon is to call them and tell them that your phone service is out (even if the reason it's out is that they installed it in some other building). As far as I can tell, they're much better at "fixing" a non-existant line than they are at installing it in the first place. The guy who came to install our lines at work fiddled around in the closet for a while, didn't label anything, got a dial tone, and left. When it stopped working and we called them, a different guy showed up that afternoon, figured out were it was hooked up, and got everything worked out and labelled.
Caffeine is actually very similar to cocaine, but caffeine is significantly stronger. Coca leaf tea is a mild stimulant popular in the Andes, and reportedly is as effective as caffeinated beverages without causing nearly so much twichiness. If, on the other hand, caffeine were used like cocaine is usually used in the US, it would be generally fatal.
Interestingly, most cultures historically have used one of the mild stimulants widely while prohibiting others, with the "good" one chosen practically at random.
Caffeine withdrawal can definitely vary significantly in intensity. It does get pretty bad if you're unlucky. On the other hand, it's very rarely worse than a sinus infection. It's not something to belittle, but it's not something to worry too much about, either.
It's really hard for most people to stay off of caffeine, I think, primarily because a regular low dose of caffeine doesn't have particularly significant side effects, so there's very little motivation to quit for good.
Personally, I drink a cup of coffee each morning when I get to work. I find this a more effective, and, in New England, a more available, alternative to sunshine. I used to drink coffee in the evening and drink a lot of it at a time, but I quit that so that I could keep a more regular schedule.
You don't really mean public class interfaces (per se), you mean function prototypes, which are available in C (for example). The difference is really that you can specify arbitrary information about what the function is supposed to do, rather than just a few particular things. E.g., the usual API for mod is something like
int mod(int num, int den)
This lets you add
den != 0
(den = 0)
Then the compiler could automatically write the check for division by 0, and could optimize it out in cases when it can statically prove it is unnecessary.
Of course, it's easy to get excessive in writing the contracts, such that the contracts are no simpler or more informative than the implementation. The trick is to have your contracts specify inportant information about the behavior of the code without going into so much detail that the contract is unclear to the user or not what you intended.
At this point, it still has to go back for a "second reading" to the Parliament. Considering that, in addition to the original issues, this is now seen as a challenge to democracy and the role of the parliament in the EU, it seems likely that the parliament will soundly reject it.
On the other hand, some amendments were made at the last minute which convined a number of the representatives; since the parliament version was also this bill with amendments, they might have actually passed that version.
"Rodents Of Unusual Size? Frankly, I don't think they... " *boom*
You're missing the fact that this is a Dutch Auction. The way this works is that shares are allocated to bidders starting with the highest bid and going down in per-share price until the supply is exhausted (or the demand is exhausted). The lowest successful bid is then takes as the price, and everybody pays that per share, regardless of the prices that higher bidders bid.
Therefore, there are two possible situations: speculators get all of the stock, and pay a speculation price for it. They all lose, because the stock then drops to the market price, since nobody thinks the stock is actually worth that much, and Google gets a ton of cash from idiots who failed to read that Google wanted to discourage speculation. Or the lowest bidder is not speculating, in which case everybody pays a reasonable price for the stock (that is, a price that someone believes it's actually worth), and the stock is either at the market price (because people like the lowest successful bidder think the value is right) or below it (because not enough people bid the market price, and the lowest successful bidder was someone bidding less).
The only case in which the stock will go up after the auction is if Google is offerring too much of it, such that there is stock left over after everyone bidding market price or over has gotten their stock, which would mean that there are potential buyers who are not participating in the IPO.
Bidding higher than you believe the market value of the stock to be just means that you risk the first situation, where you look dumb (because you're buying at higher than you thought the market value was); by speculating, you earn the chance to win the auction and lose money.
The Dutch Auction is actually a pretty stable system for this sort of thing, because it provides no motivation to bid higher than your guess at the market price, and, if you expect the auction to be well-attended, there is no motivation to bid lower than your guess at the market price, either.
Of course, there's no reason that the market value of the stock is actually going to be what the stock is actually worth, but that is equally true before and after the IPO.
It's the "optimization" strategy for WalMart. You build desktop computer hardware, and sell it. If you put Linux on it, all of the software is free; if you charge a little less for Linux than for Windows, your margin is still higher for Linux. For Lindows, it's the subscription model.
The interesting thing would be to do a tax program where the code part and the data part were completely separate, and distribute each of them separately. The code part could be free software, and the data could be purchased in stores or online for the usual price of tax software. The free software project could even have paid developers funded by the makers of the tax law data packages, on the "give away the razors, sell the blades" model.
The idea is that stock prices tend to start out unreasonably low (due to the price being set by people who agree with each other to get a good deal on the stock), shoot up towards the market valuation, and then go higher on momentum and speculation. Then they drop back towards the market valuation when the novelty subsides.
Google's idea is to arrange for the stock to start at the market valuation, such that it will probably stay flat after the IPO. Since the system is engineered to prevent a bubble, it discourages speculation.
The point is really to become public with the minimum of volitility. They have to follow most of the rules for a public company anyway, so they might as well actually be publically traded, if for no other reason than to let their major stockholders diversify.
The other flaws are differences between what is actually done and what a user is likely to expect to be done. In a social engineering attack, the attacker confuses the victem in some way; in this case, the victem is confused in advance by the software, and does something inappropriate because of that.
The mechanism fails to provide several expected properties: that all of the information in the file is hidden and that a file which decrypts without error with a given key was created by someone with the key (and does not have modified filenames or masked data).
The key generation attack only works against someone who generates 4 billion zip files with the same password; while a cryptographer might expect 16e18 zip files to be required, I doubt anyone is likely to actually create enough files to permit the attack. (If you create a zip file every second, you should change your password some time in the next 126 years, just to be sure).
As it is, WinZip needs two warnings: filenames and sizes are not encrypted; and, if you get something broken out of WinZip, it might still be sensitive. The latter turned out to be a flaw in PGP as well, and it was considered sufficiently important to fix.
I don't think they knew they needed people like that until Congress started investigating and asking why they didn't know anything. At the moment, they could really use the PR of hiring somebody clever, lest the investigation report that the administration can't be blamed for not stopping the 9/11 attacks, because the intelligence agencies were clueless, but the administration has also kept the intelligence agencies clueless by chasing off everyone clever.
I suspect there would be a 50/50 chance that the visit from the intelligence goons would be a job offer. US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines and actually come up with correct answers.
"Even in Arcadia, there am I." Perhaps they should look in Arcadia...
(The thing that is perfectly obvious is that it is a joke to make you all mad, of course)
It is not necessarily the case that religions don't permit dissent. Mainstream Christianity is very authoritarian (going back to Nicea), and would not be a good foundation for a religious democracy (which is quite ironic, really, given Christ's teachings). Judaism, on the other hand, is all about arguing over scripture. Even if dissent isn't a core religious prinicple, you can disagree with a religious figure's interpretation of God's will without disagreeing with God, particularly if the clergy disagrees with each other. It is not really different from disagreeing with the Supreme Court without disagreeing with the Constitution.
There have to be multiple branches of government set against each other, with ways to oppose excesses, in order to maintain a democracy, but I don't think that a religious organization cannot be one of these, or that divergant religious organizations cannot be multiple of them. A church does not necessarily have particularly strong authority over the faithful, even on non-political matters (consider that the Catholic Church has been widely criticized by Catholics recently; and that's a religion with a dogma of infallibility).
I think that a society will cease to be a democracy if it believes in the infallibility of a leader who is permitted to have power in government. It doesn't matter if this belief is religious or not; it can be just as bad if the leader is simply vastly popular. That's why Washington had to turn down a third term, and how Germany democratically elected the Nazi government. But it is a property primarily of the sects of Christianity that survived the early days that the religion contains this sort of leader, not a fundamental property of religion in general.