You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win by making the other guy die for his country. (To paraphrase George Patton). Heros don't win wars.
If the US military leadership wasn't using whatever means was available to give their troops an edge, they would certainly would not be doing their jobs. Any criticism of military for using the tools available to it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the mission of a military organization.
Times in the past when the military pulled its punch led to Vietnam, and the second Gulf War (because George Herbert Walker Bush didn't finish the job the first time).
Anybody knows if FCC has some advisories about wireless devices touching your body for long periods of time?
This is the same sort of question as "Do cell-phones cause brain cancer". We have a lot of experimental data on this, with few answers.
The impact of RF on biological systems has been controversial for a very long time. Some studies have shown that there is an effect, however reproducability is very poor, and the issue is still under study with no clear-cut answer available. Surely any logical person may draw the conclusion that an unknown risk, even if it is small, of this sort should be avoided.
On the other and the essential purpose of these devices is to reduce the likelihood of being killed in battle by conventional weapons. The impact of bullets, explosive devices and so on on the human body in NOT controversial, and is very reproducable.
It seems to me that the tradeoff of some potential, unproven effect of dubious statistical significance vs. significant reduction of the likelihood of taking a rockect propelled grenade in your lap is pretty clear-cut.
What is with the US fascination with military hardware?
The US economy has benefited tremendously from money sunk into military R&D. Since WWII many if not most of the technological innovations (such as the Internet) that have propelled US economic growth have origins in military R&D programs. The migration of battlefield techonogies such as described by this article into commercial applications is something that has great precedence.
The world doesn't need more storm troopers.
US military power has come from information management and rapid movement. Not increased numbers of 'storm troopers'. In fact the current doctrine is that increased military power comes from improved knowledge of the battlefield and reducing the number of troops to a minimum to allow the most rapid movement possible.
SCO is to Slashdot as OJ Simpson is to Tabloid TV News.
Re:I doubt that Java will succeed.
on
Preview of Java 1.5
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Lack of operator overloading is a defect in a C-style language.
The fact of the matter is that operator overloading always leads to evil abuses. Some of which are evident in the C++ standard libraries as glaring examples of how irresistively seductive the temptation to abuse operator overloading is.
Java has several interactive interpreters. One such is DynamicJava.
Plus some very powerful debugging tools TOTALLY missing from Python that are very important for teaching programming.
As someone who has taught programming at a university level, and is also a practicing programmer I find the broken syntactical structure of Python completely disqualifies it as a teaching language. The use of non printing characters as syntax elements is ridiculous on the face of it.
Elimination of run-time casting errors tipped the balance in favor of inclusion of generics into Java. Syntactic sugar is one thing, but the increase in reliability that can be gained through the use of generics is a very powerful argument in its favor.
some of the most promising parts of C++ where thrown out - operator overloading and generic programming.
Did you even read the article? This version implements generics. As far as operator overloading, that is a VERY controversial feature.
As far as.Net providing a platform for a wide variety of languages, you have been reading too much Microsoft hype. The languages that people will use are C# (a Java clone) and VB.Net (a version of VB with some Java-like features grafted on to it). Attempts to move other languages like Eiffel to.Net have run into problems with limitations in the underlying CIL - written primarily to support Java-like languages, NOT other paradigms like those of Eiffel - so we end up with Eiffel#, a bastardized Eiffel that guess what works like another kind of Java.
Oh, Guess What? That wonderful CIL that supports all those other languages does not support generics yet.
Thanks for pointing this out. I particularly like the rant in the comments by Eric Green Lee:
"C++ is an atrocity, the bletcherous scab of the computing world, responsible for more buffer overflows, more security breaches, more blue screens of death, more mysterious failures than any other computer language in the history of the planet Earth. It is pathetic, pitiful, a bag of disparate bolts on the side of "C", a fancy preprocessor that attempts to make "C" look like an object-oriented language and ends up merely being pathetic. If there was any mercy in this world, we would all have adopted Objective "C" as our standard object-oriented "C" follow-on and left C++ to the garbage bin of history where it belongs. Instead, we have a language more bloated than PL/1 or Ada, whose runtime library has all the coherency of a madman cutting pieces of books out and pasting them together into the documentation for the inconsistent drivel that comprises the standard C++ library, we have binding and linkage conventions that are utterly ridiculous in a supposedly "object-oriented" language, and otherwise a pathetic, ridiculous, drooling moronic abortion of computer science that should have been given a decent burial long ago (and would have been, if Microsoft had not mysteriously decided to standardize upon C++ to write their operating systems).
As for what languages are better than C++, gosh, what languages are NOT better than C++? Basically, any language whose basic design eliminates the possibility of memory leaks, whose semantics are simple enough for mere mortals to not have to peruse the 12,000 pages of Stroustrup to understand, that has a coherent and consistent and well-documented runtime library and a well-thought-out syntax, that has "real" objects instead of a wrapper around "C" structs, that does not allow buffer overflows to crash or, worse, subvert your program. What language is that? Oh, pretty much anything, actually, other than C++. Python, Ruby, Java, Objective CAML (which, BTW, has a compiler that actually generates faster code than many "C" compilers!), and many, many other languages that actually have a design that makes sense, which nobody has accused C++ of doing. C++ is a kludge, a hack, a bag on the side of "C", and always will be, and nothing we say or do will ever make that different."
another run-time-environemnt, each of which is subtly incompatible with the rest.
End result was a switch back to C++
This is hilarious. No two C++ compilers handle the language the same way, and you are complaining about subtle differences in JVMs? Give me a break.
The fact of the matter is that C++ is THE abomination of all languages in wide use - tries to pretend that it's OOP, yet is almost but not quite compatable with legacy C. It is so badly designed that many people now believe that it is NOT POSSIBLE to write a compiler that is 100% compliant with the specification.
C++ ? Gag. Vomit.
C++ is the LAST language I would recommend to anyone. A nightmare of design. Compilers that just do not work. A standard that PROVES the maxim that a camel is what you get when you ask a committee to design a horse.
Mapping keys is a software issue. If you can't map keys some reason, PCKeyboard sells a model M type keyboard under the name Linux 101 that comes out of the box with the control key next to the a.
I did a grep last night on the source for SCO and came up with some interesting things in some of the drivers and other parts of the kernel.
That doesn't mean squat unless you know the lineage of the code. It is quite possible that SCO and Linux share a lot of source code without any of it starting in SCO and migrating to Linux.
Some of the possibilities are:
A hardware vendor writes driver tech notes with code samples. Both SCO and Linux use these samples.
SCO takes code from Linux and uses it in violation of the GPL. Face it, Linux code is a LOT easier to get a hold of than os source code from SCO, so the odds are better for Linux -> SCO than the other way.
Both Linux and SCO use BSD code, or code from a third open source project in their kernel. We already know that AT&T has some BSD in it's past, and it is no secret that Linux has BSD code in it as well.
If you turn over your keyboard and find that it does not say Model M on the bottom, you are not a true human being.
It's not hard to find your own. Ebay lists them all the time. I pulled 12 of them out of an insurance company dumpster last year.
Model M!
Re:Things that I like after 40 years of reading Sc
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
Her short stories are magnificent. And what is often missed is her Wizard of Earthsea stories - much better writing than Harry Potter for the same age group.
SOURCE CONTROL is the KEY to PROVING or DISPROVING the case...
Source control is probably useless in this case as Linus only started using it recently. More likely you will need to look at the individual kernel versions.
How does anyone know that the code in question was not first in Linux, then integrated into System V, thus violating the GPL?
My suspicion is that it is more likely that it is BSD code that has crept into both Linux and SCO. After all, it is well known that Linux and commercial OS vendors freely use BSD, and perfectly legally.
Furthermore, SCO would then need to prove that the code implemented in the linux kernel is 1) critical to the application and 2) actually covered by any patents as being both non-obvious and non-prior art.
You are getting a little mixed up here. A trade secret is something that is NOT patented for any of a variety of reasons. For example, a company could decide that a patent if granted would be unenforceable because it covered a process step that another company could practice in secret making it impossible for the patent holder to determine if infringement was occurring.
The kicker in all of this is the contract with IBM. We don't know what the terms are, and it may well be that it included terms protecting things beyond what is considered trade secret.
I have been involved in some of these things, and I will say that SCO's claims that developers who worked on the SCO project with IBM then later moved on to work on Linux will be dangerous in a court of law. It is very common to claim that knowledge obtained in the first case will inevetably leak into the second project, and courts can and do believe it.
In my case I was privy under NDA to a technology that my employer was considering purchasing from another company - after the decision was made not to go ahead with the purchase I was not allowed by my employer to ever do work in the technology area covered by the NDA for fear of exactly this problem. I also had to destroy all documents involved, and wasn't able to even tell my boss (the VP R&D) the technical reasons behind my decision to recommend against the purchase.
Let us for a second grant the fact that SCO has found some code in Linux that is actually in their UNIX product.
That in itself doesn't prove any sort of infringement because SCO also has to prove that THEY or the predecessors were the original author of this code, and the code is covered as some sort of IP - trade secret, copyright or patent that they own. The question of copyright and patent has already been put in doubt by Novell. Trade secrets are liable to be attacked from a variety of channels including assertion that the secret can easily be reverse-engineered, and that SCO did not adaquately protect their code.
The reality of the matter is that the code in SCO UNIX that duplicates what is in Linux could have come from a variety of sources - vendor examples, other open source projects - BSD, Linux - yes, SCO could have copied from Linux, which could be likely due to the relative availability of Linux vs. SCO source, and so on) and a variety of other closed source origins that SCO may have had access to.
We already know for a fact that there is a large amount of BSD code in Linux. Given the licensing of BSD, it would seem to me that the likelihood of much of what SCO is claiming interference on is in actuality BSD code in SCO is hard to ignore.
Re:Things that I like after 40 years of reading Sc
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Daneel was invented in The Caves of Steel.
Yes, I blew that one. I meant Caves of Steel, which is really much better than the Naked Sun.
Gibson perfected it and made it what we know it as today in Neuromancer.
Sure, but the original article already mentioned Neuromancer. I thought that having read Neuromancer, Shockwave Rider would be very interesting.
Things that I like after 40 years of reading SciFi
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Dune if you haven't already - the best. City by Clifford Simak - classic. Shockwave Rider - the first real computer/scifi cyberpunkish book. The term 'worm' comes from this book. Naked Sun - Asimov - genesis of R. Daneel Olivaw, the character that Commander Data was based on. Nine Princes in Amber - after Lord of the Rings my favorite fantasy book. Left Hand of Darkness - IMHO the 2nd best scifi novel ever written after only Dune. Ringworld by Larry Niven - extrodinary world building and imagination in hard scifi genre. Gateway by Frederick Pohl - ditto. Startide Rising, David Brin - wonderful novel set in world where man is lifting other species to intelligence. Terrific writing, and the sequels are excellent too.
That loads the kernel code, that doesn't autoconfig the interfaces.
I was able to get the IPv6 address off of ifconfig for my interfaces and ping6 them after running modprobe ipv6. They sure looks autoconfigured to me.
And, fwiw, I don't get that module out of the box with Debian Woody.
That's surprising. The link that I provided lists this module as being part of Debian Woody. Are you sure?
Can I do a net install over IPv6? (I don't use RedHat).
I don't see why not. You can always run expert mode and add whatever modules you want during installation.
It isn't required for FreeBSD, either.
Didn't you list 'reboot' as one of the requirements? That did seem a bit odd to me. I've never heard that FreeBSD required rebooting for configuration changes a la Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
but America's Army are cowards
You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win by making the other guy die for his country. (To paraphrase George Patton). Heros don't win wars.
If the US military leadership wasn't using whatever means was available to give their troops an edge, they would certainly would not be doing their jobs. Any criticism of military for using the tools available to it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the mission of a military organization.
Times in the past when the military pulled its punch led to Vietnam, and the second Gulf War (because George Herbert Walker Bush didn't finish the job the first time).
Anybody knows if FCC has some advisories about wireless devices touching your body for long periods of time?
This is the same sort of question as "Do cell-phones cause brain cancer". We have a lot of experimental data on this, with few answers.
The impact of RF on biological systems has been controversial for a very long time. Some studies have shown that there is an effect, however reproducability is very poor, and the issue is still under study with no clear-cut answer available. Surely any logical person may draw the conclusion that an unknown risk, even if it is small, of this sort should be avoided.
On the other and the essential purpose of these devices is to reduce the likelihood of being killed in battle by conventional weapons. The impact of bullets, explosive devices and so on on the human body in NOT controversial, and is very reproducable.
It seems to me that the tradeoff of some potential, unproven effect of dubious statistical significance vs. significant reduction of the likelihood of taking a rockect propelled grenade in your lap is pretty clear-cut.
What is with the US fascination with military hardware?
The US economy has benefited tremendously from money sunk into military R&D. Since WWII many if not most of the technological innovations (such as the Internet) that have propelled US economic growth have origins in military R&D programs. The migration of battlefield techonogies such as described by this article into commercial applications is something that has great precedence.
The world doesn't need more storm troopers.
US military power has come from information management and rapid movement. Not increased numbers of 'storm troopers'. In fact the current doctrine is that increased military power comes from improved knowledge of the battlefield and reducing the number of troops to a minimum to allow the most rapid movement possible.
Well, for one thing a lot of broadband service providers block port 139 because it is the target of so many hacking attacks.
SCO is to Slashdot as
OJ Simpson is to Tabloid TV News.
Lack of operator overloading is a defect in a C-style language.
The fact of the matter is that operator overloading always leads to evil abuses. Some of which are evident in the C++ standard libraries as glaring examples of how irresistively seductive the temptation to abuse operator overloading is.
cout "woo"
Are you joking?
Java has several interactive interpreters. One such is DynamicJava.
Plus some very powerful debugging tools TOTALLY missing from Python that are very important for teaching programming.
As someone who has taught programming at a university level, and is also a practicing programmer I find the broken syntactical structure of Python completely disqualifies it as a teaching language. The use of non printing characters as syntax elements is ridiculous on the face of it.
you also gain compile-time type checking
Elimination of run-time casting errors tipped the balance in favor of inclusion of generics into Java. Syntactic sugar is one thing, but the increase in reliability that can be gained through the use of generics is a very powerful argument in its favor.
Any language that uses whitespace syntactically is TOTALLY unsuited for teaching.
some of the most promising parts of C++ where thrown out - operator overloading and generic programming.
.Net providing a platform for a wide variety of languages, you have been reading too much Microsoft hype. The languages that people will use are C# (a Java clone) and VB.Net (a version of VB with some Java-like features grafted on to it). Attempts to move other languages like Eiffel to .Net have run into problems with limitations in the underlying CIL - written primarily to support Java-like languages, NOT other paradigms like those of Eiffel - so we end up with Eiffel#, a bastardized Eiffel that guess what works like another kind of Java.
Did you even read the article? This version implements generics. As far as operator overloading, that is a VERY controversial feature.
As far as
Oh, Guess What? That wonderful CIL that supports all those other languages does not support generics yet.
With none of the performance.
C++ is an abomination. 13 Years after the standard there STILL is not a single compiler that implements the language correctly.
Thanks for pointing this out. I particularly like the rant in the comments by Eric Green Lee:
"C++ is an atrocity, the bletcherous scab of the computing world, responsible for more buffer overflows, more security breaches, more blue screens of death, more mysterious failures than any other computer language in the history of the planet Earth. It is pathetic, pitiful, a bag of disparate bolts on the side of "C", a fancy preprocessor that attempts to make "C" look like an object-oriented language and ends up merely being pathetic. If there was any mercy in this world, we would all have adopted Objective "C" as our standard object-oriented "C" follow-on and left C++ to the garbage bin of history where it belongs. Instead, we have a language more bloated than PL/1 or Ada, whose runtime library has all the coherency of a madman cutting pieces of books out and pasting them together into the documentation for the inconsistent drivel that comprises the standard C++ library, we have binding and linkage conventions that are utterly ridiculous in a supposedly "object-oriented" language, and otherwise a pathetic, ridiculous, drooling moronic abortion of computer science that should have been given a decent burial long ago (and would have been, if Microsoft had not mysteriously decided to standardize upon C++ to write their operating systems).
As for what languages are better than C++, gosh, what languages are NOT better than C++? Basically, any language whose basic design eliminates the possibility of memory leaks, whose semantics are simple enough for mere mortals to not have to peruse the 12,000 pages of Stroustrup to understand, that has a coherent and consistent and well-documented runtime library and a well-thought-out syntax, that has "real" objects instead of a wrapper around "C" structs, that does not allow buffer overflows to crash or, worse, subvert your program. What language is that? Oh, pretty much anything, actually, other than C++. Python, Ruby, Java, Objective CAML (which, BTW, has a compiler that actually generates faster code than many "C" compilers!), and many, many other languages that actually have a design that makes sense, which nobody has accused C++ of doing. C++ is a kludge, a hack, a bag on the side of "C", and always will be, and nothing we say or do will ever make that different."
another run-time-environemnt, each of which is subtly incompatible with the rest.
End result was a switch back to C++
This is hilarious. No two C++ compilers handle the language the same way, and you are complaining about subtle differences in JVMs? Give me a break.
The fact of the matter is that C++ is THE abomination of all languages in wide use - tries to pretend that it's OOP, yet is almost but not quite compatable with legacy C. It is so badly designed that many people now believe that it is NOT POSSIBLE to write a compiler that is 100% compliant with the specification.
C++ ? Gag. Vomit.
C++ is the LAST language I would recommend to anyone. A nightmare of design. Compilers that just do not work. A standard that PROVES the maxim that a camel is what you get when you ask a committee to design a horse.
You can see it here
There are two layout variations - as to whether you buy or remap, that's your choice of course.
Mapping keys is a software issue. If you can't map keys some reason, PCKeyboard sells a model M type keyboard under the name Linux 101 that comes out of the box with the control key next to the a.
I did a grep last night on the source for SCO and came up with some interesting things in some of the drivers and other parts of the kernel.
That doesn't mean squat unless you know the lineage of the code. It is quite possible that SCO and Linux share a lot of source code without any of it starting in SCO and migrating to Linux.
Some of the possibilities are:
A hardware vendor writes driver tech notes with code samples. Both SCO and Linux use these samples.
SCO takes code from Linux and uses it in violation of the GPL. Face it, Linux code is a LOT easier to get a hold of than os source code from SCO, so the odds are better for Linux -> SCO than the other way.
Both Linux and SCO use BSD code, or code from a third open source project in their kernel. We already know that AT&T has some BSD in it's past, and it is no secret that Linux has BSD code in it as well.
There is only one keyboard, the Model M. All others are false pretenders.
Repeat after me: Model M - the one true keyboard. All hail Model M.
Model M
If you turn over your keyboard and find that it does not say Model M on the bottom, you are not a true human being.
It's not hard to find your own. Ebay lists them all the time. I pulled 12 of them out of an insurance company dumpster last year.
Model M!
Her short stories are magnificent. And what is often missed is her Wizard of Earthsea stories - much better writing than Harry Potter for the same age group.
SOURCE CONTROL is the KEY to PROVING or DISPROVING the case...
Source control is probably useless in this case as Linus only started using it recently. More likely you will need to look at the individual kernel versions.
How does anyone know that the code in question was not first in Linux, then integrated into System V, thus violating the GPL?
My suspicion is that it is more likely that it is BSD code that has crept into both Linux and SCO. After all, it is well known that Linux and commercial OS vendors freely use BSD, and perfectly legally.
Furthermore, SCO would then need to prove that the code implemented in the linux kernel is 1) critical to the application and 2) actually covered by any patents as being both non-obvious and non-prior art.
You are getting a little mixed up here. A trade secret is something that is NOT patented for any of a variety of reasons. For example, a company could decide that a patent if granted would be unenforceable because it covered a process step that another company could practice in secret making it impossible for the patent holder to determine if infringement was occurring.
The kicker in all of this is the contract with IBM. We don't know what the terms are, and it may well be that it included terms protecting things beyond what is considered trade secret.
I have been involved in some of these things, and I will say that SCO's claims that developers who worked on the SCO project with IBM then later moved on to work on Linux will be dangerous in a court of law. It is very common to claim that knowledge obtained in the first case will inevetably leak into the second project, and courts can and do believe it.
In my case I was privy under NDA to a technology that my employer was considering purchasing from another company - after the decision was made not to go ahead with the purchase I was not allowed by my employer to ever do work in the technology area covered by the NDA for fear of exactly this problem. I also had to destroy all documents involved, and wasn't able to even tell my boss (the VP R&D) the technical reasons behind my decision to recommend against the purchase.
Let us for a second grant the fact that SCO has found some code in Linux that is actually in their UNIX product.
That in itself doesn't prove any sort of infringement because SCO also has to prove that THEY or the predecessors were the original author of this code, and the code is covered as some sort of IP - trade secret, copyright or patent that they own. The question of copyright and patent has already been put in doubt by Novell. Trade secrets are liable to be attacked from a variety of channels including assertion that the secret can easily be reverse-engineered, and that SCO did not adaquately protect their code.
The reality of the matter is that the code in SCO UNIX that duplicates what is in Linux could have come from a variety of sources - vendor examples, other open source projects - BSD, Linux - yes, SCO could have copied from Linux, which could be likely due to the relative availability of Linux vs. SCO source, and so on) and a variety of other closed source origins that SCO may have had access to.
We already know for a fact that there is a large amount of BSD code in Linux. Given the licensing of BSD, it would seem to me that the likelihood of much of what SCO is claiming interference on is in actuality BSD code in SCO is hard to ignore.
Actually, Daneel was invented in The Caves of Steel.
Yes, I blew that one. I meant Caves of Steel, which is really much better than the Naked Sun.
Gibson perfected it and made it what we know it as today in Neuromancer.
Sure, but the original article already mentioned Neuromancer. I thought that having read Neuromancer, Shockwave Rider would be very interesting.
Dune if you haven't already - the best.
City by Clifford Simak - classic.
Shockwave Rider - the first real computer/scifi cyberpunkish book. The term 'worm' comes from this book.
Naked Sun - Asimov - genesis of R. Daneel Olivaw, the character that Commander Data was based on.
Nine Princes in Amber - after Lord of the Rings my favorite fantasy book.
Left Hand of Darkness - IMHO the 2nd best scifi novel ever written after only Dune.
Ringworld by Larry Niven - extrodinary world building and imagination in hard scifi genre.
Gateway by Frederick Pohl - ditto.
Startide Rising, David Brin - wonderful novel set in world where man is lifting other species to intelligence. Terrific writing, and the sequels are excellent too.
That loads the kernel code, that doesn't autoconfig the interfaces.
I was able to get the IPv6 address off of ifconfig for my interfaces and ping6 them after running modprobe ipv6. They sure looks autoconfigured to me.
And, fwiw, I don't get that module out of the box with Debian Woody.
That's surprising. The link that I provided lists this module as being part of Debian Woody. Are you sure?
Can I do a net install over IPv6? (I don't use RedHat).
I don't see why not. You can always run expert mode and add whatever modules you want during installation.
It isn't required for FreeBSD, either.
Didn't you list 'reboot' as one of the requirements? That did seem a bit odd to me. I've never heard that FreeBSD required rebooting for configuration changes a la Windows.