if FreeBSD is so great, why don't they still use it?
Well, running FreeBSD was sort of an embarassment to Microsoft after they acquired HotMail, what with "eating your own dogfood" and all of that.
It took them at least two cuts at it, as I recall. The first time went rather badly, with delays and even brief outages. The second time they made it.
There was an interesting white paper, originally meant for internal consumption but later leaked (I have a vague recollection that it ended up in a public ftp directory by mistake) that described some of the issues involved. I read it back then and found it a pretty balanced work (perhaps why it had to be leaked.) Their offical public paper is also available.
It's worth noting that Hotmail worked just fine with a FreeBSD front end (the back end was a combination of NT SQL boxes and various Sun systems providing files services and handling incoming mail.) I'm not entirely clear just how much of the site is Windows even now -- they explicitily describe switching over the web servers, but don't really get into the back-end machines -- but I'm sure they're working on it if it isn't. It's a good showcase for them, after all.
A perfect example is the Windows NT/XP TCP/IP stack -- stolen straight from BSD
Smile when you say that, pardner!
"Stolen?" No, used legitimately. In fact, as I recall, you used to be able to look at the WinNT ftp client and read the credits to UC Berkely, which aren't even required any more.
"Stolen" just undermines your point that the BSD license allows -- hell, encourages -- this sort of use.
Of course, I think you misread the post to which you were replying, because that poster agreed with you that the GPL includes restrictions absent from BSD.
I'd also check again with regard to XP. I think the Redmond boys may have rewritten that stack by now.
Part 2: Patent Clarification Notice: Reading and Writing PDF Files (exact quote of [3])
Adobe has a number of patents covering technology that is disclosed
in the Portable Document Format (PDF) Specification, version 1.3
and later, as documented in PDF Reference and associated Technical
Notes (the "Specification"). Adobe desires to promote the use of PDF
for information interchange among diverse products and
applications.
Accordingly, the following patents are licensed on a royalty-free,
non-exclusive basis for the term of each patent and for the sole
purpose of developing software that produces, consumes, and
interprets PDF files that are compliant with the Specification:
In addition, the following patent is licensed on a royalty-free,
non-exclusive basis for its term and for the sole purpose of
developing software that produces PDF files that are compliant with
the Specification (specifically excluding, however, software that
consumes and/or interprets PDF files):
U.S. Patent Numbers:
* 5,860,074
Life of the patent seems long enough for me.
I note also that the GNU folks felt comfortable enough about this to work on GhostScript. Would they have done so if they felt the terms encumbered? I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but some of the FSF people are, and they seem pretty careful to me.
Adobe has made their money the old-fashioned way, by making tools that work well, rather than by locking people into a format. GhostScript, among others, will read those PDF's with or without Adobe.
Wrong. The current legal climate may not agree, but the rights recognized in the constitution are inalienable. They are not "granted" to us by the constitution, they are just voiced in it. That means that you simply have those rights, irrelivent who it is that is trying to infringe upon them.
So you honestly believe that your right to life means that you should live forever, that nothing and nobody can infringe upon that right? Tell me, has anybody told the smallpox virus that you have this inalienable right to life, liberty, etc? Is cancer illegal?
That aside, sometimes rights conflict. I have a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that I have a right to stand in front of your house and use a bull-horn to annoy your neighbors while I tell them that you raped my brother and his dog. Your neighbors have a right to some peace and quiet, and you have a right to face me in open, neutral court and ask that I show some evidence of the charge (especially considering that I don't have a brother.) Slander doesn't cover your opinions -- you have every right to say that you think I'm an asshole, for instance -- and it doesn't cover truth that you can back up -- "George Bush was busted for driving drunk!".
Properly applied (and of course any law can be misapplied, but "driving while black" issues are not a reason to drop all laws regulating conduct on the road) the only thing slander and libel laws restrain is lies, and even those only after the fact, after you've gotten the word out and damaged my reputation with your lies. Do you honestly have a problem with that? Was Carol Burnett an oppressor pig when she sued the National Enquirer? Should she have had no recourse at all, no matter what they said?
Free speech is an aspect of government, not civil relations. It's perfectly legal for me to claim that you have sex with goats -- the government has no concern about that one way or the other -- but I'd be a fool to expect you only to nod and smile, and one possible response would be a civil lawsuit (other possibilities include an ass-kicking and a drive-by shooting.)
Free speech does not mean that your words have no consequence. Sometimes those consequences are desirable, and the peasants rise and overthrow their oppressors. Sometimes the consequences are less desirable, and you lie on the floor in a pool of your own fluids wondering why you ever said that to the biggest biker in the bar.
I found out that the SiS 315 was the basis for all of SiS/XGI's new chipsets and included all kinds of new IP, register informtion/locations, and therefor datasheets could not be released to create an open driver. Ok, that is reasonable.
I guess I'm just dumb, but while I agree that the data can be held closely (it's theirs, after all), I don't understand what the company loses by releasing it. It's not like their competitors can scan the data-sheets and walk down to the chip fab with the design, any more than I can build a Pentium (or even a 6502) in my basement because I know the registers and instruction set. Don't the data sheets simply describe the interface to their product?
It's not like they make their money selling drivers, so what's the point? They didn't make any money when they told you the Big Secret, so why shouldn't they tell me, Cookie Monster, and anybody else who asks? What are we gonna do -- support their hardware in new applications, possibly increasing sales? Anything but that...!
Like I say, maybe I'm just dumb, but what's the problem with people writing software so that the company doesn't have to? The worst consequence I can see is that bad drivers would make them look bad, but they have that now ("What, I pay all this money for a high-end graphics card and all I get is 640 X 480 X 16!?") when good drivers are unavailable because they block their development.
Yes, but registering something as your trademark is not the same as naming your company -- "Crest" is a registered trademark, even though the name of the manufacturer is "Proctor & Gamble", not "Crest." This is, BTW, why a single company can hold many trademarks, without having to have different letterhead for each one.
Well, again, getting the information for any specific location isn't equatable to having it for everywhere all the time.
Surely you call Miss Utility (God, what a job title!) and verify your information anyway, right? I sure wouldn't trust some ten year old city plan to be kept up to date by all the relevant operations, not enough to light a cigarette near a broken pipe, anyway ("Nah, it'll be OK -- says right here this pipe's reserved for future..." WHOOSHBANG!)
It's one thing to ask about your backyard, it's another thing entirely to ask about everybody's backyards.
I move into a house with a burglar alarm. I might well call the police and ask if the alarm is connected to their systems. Reasonable question, especially if I could show that I in fact live at that address.
Now I call them back and ask, "Say, who else has alarms connected to your system?"
Not really the same question, is it? The first is a Harry Homeowner request, the second is J. Random Burglar.
Similarly restricting knowledge of gas pipelines and such isn't entirely unreasonable.
A good friend of mine, who should have damned well known better, once handed me code to maintain that included three procedures named Abc, aBc, and abC. I could have killed him.
In an earlier case, I once worked in a facility with honest-to-God 132-column green-bar line printers, and one of them, for higher speed, was upper-case only. Luckily our in-house proprietary languages were all case-insensitive.
Frankly I always figured that case-sensitivity was primarily a product of system programmers who didn't feel like writing upper filters, and later made it seem like a virtue. In the same vein, clearly nobody at Bell Labs could type very well.
As for point 1, having spoken to a cop about this after I was a victim, it's not terribly hard. Vacant apartment, big screwdriver. You know, thug skills -- the brazen effrontery to stand there and sign for it with a fake name. Part of the reason the thief was able to use my card this way is that BlueLight.com didn't concern itself with address verification (even after I called the dumb bastards within two hours of the transaction) -- they just blithely shipped it off.
Yeah, I know that Bad Guys can max out cards in rotation, and I don't doubt that it goes on. I'm just betting that actual losses, as distinct from "I bagged 10,000 credit card numbers last night", are more from low-skill, ballsy punks who have the nerve (and stupidity) to do shit we'd never seriously consider. We're geeks -- we'd busy ourselvers drawing up "Mission Impossible"-style schemes with 900 steps involving precise timing and filing our fingertips and whatnot, while old-school professional criminals have boosted 16 liquor stores with pistols and baseball bats and are already smoking the proceeds. Sure, they get caught, which is why we don't do it (well, that and morals), but before they get caught they commit huge amounts of crime, and after they get caught their friends and relations are still committing huge amounts of crime.
I just think we grossly underestimate the cumulative effect of stupid, violent people. It hurts us to think that they're scarier than we are even after high school.
Watch yourself the next time you eat at a sit-down restaurant. End of the meal, smiling waitress brings you the check and what do you do? Hand her the card, that's what, and wait for her to come back.
Skills for her to steal your number (including the magic little number on the back)? Nothing more technical than pencil and paper.
Not that I'm suggesting that waitresses, per se, are the major source of stolen CC numbers, just that I'd wager that more numbers are stolen and used through such simple means than more elaborate Internet schemes. Sure, I know that "millions of card numbers stolen by teenager in Yonkers" is the scary headline, but how many of those numbers are ever actually used? I suspect that, as technical people, we'd like to think that we're the danger, but I'd bet that ignorant thugs stealing wallets put all the actual high-tech crime to shame.
No, I can certainly see such circumstances, but why a camera / phone combo in particular? Why not, for instance, a pen / phone?
I just don't see any particular commonality of form or function. It's not like the combination makes thrifty use of the lens, or the microphone, or the speaker. If my phone had a flash, then perhaps I'd wish to make better use of it, but it doesn't. If my camera needed a numeric keypad, then it might avoid duplication, but it doesn't. In fact, about the only thing I can think of that the two devices share is the battery.
Obviously if the pairing suits you, then it suits you and no more need be said, but I wonder what inspired the jamming together of two essentially different devices, and why that combination and not the phone / bottle opener or camera / PDA?
No, we've maybe established that both phones and cameras are good things to have with you. That doesn't mean that they should be combined.
I always carry a pocket knife, but I haven't seen any need to have a blade built into my phone. My guess is that the phone manufacturer would pick some cheap and nasty sort of knife that I wouldn't find very useful, so I'd end up carrying my Wenger and my Leatherman anyway, only now my phone would be bigger as well.
Well, yeah, but if I combine a phone with a bathtub then I'll always have a bathtub with me. It won't be a very good bathtub, since it will have to fit into my pocket so I'll only be able to wash one finger at a time, but I'll always have a tub.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot "all your fish are belong to Natalie Portman"
Well, running FreeBSD was sort of an embarassment to Microsoft after they acquired HotMail, what with "eating your own dogfood" and all of that.
It took them at least two cuts at it, as I recall. The first time went rather badly, with delays and even brief outages. The second time they made it.
There was an interesting white paper, originally meant for internal consumption but later leaked (I have a vague recollection that it ended up in a public ftp directory by mistake) that described some of the issues involved. I read it back then and found it a pretty balanced work (perhaps why it had to be leaked.) Their offical public paper is also available.
It's worth noting that Hotmail worked just fine with a FreeBSD front end (the back end was a combination of NT SQL boxes and various Sun systems providing files services and handling incoming mail.) I'm not entirely clear just how much of the site is Windows even now -- they explicitily describe switching over the web servers, but don't really get into the back-end machines -- but I'm sure they're working on it if it isn't. It's a good showcase for them, after all.
You could be right. I once ran strings on the ftp.exe, but isolating the protocol stack and scanning it surpassed both my skill and interest level.
Since you're unfamiliar with the term, you must be unfamiliar with The Register. The BOFH alone is worth the price of admission.
Smile when you say that, pardner!
"Stolen?" No, used legitimately. In fact, as I recall, you used to be able to look at the WinNT ftp client and read the credits to UC Berkely, which aren't even required any more.
"Stolen" just undermines your point that the BSD license allows -- hell, encourages -- this sort of use.
Of course, I think you misread the post to which you were replying, because that poster agreed with you that the GPL includes restrictions absent from BSD.
I'd also check again with regard to XP. I think the Redmond boys may have rewritten that stack by now.
Life of the patent seems long enough for me.
I note also that the GNU folks felt comfortable enough about this to work on GhostScript. Would they have done so if they felt the terms encumbered? I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but some of the FSF people are, and they seem pretty careful to me.
The fact that it's an open, documented format?
Adobe has made their money the old-fashioned way, by making tools that work well, rather than by locking people into a format. GhostScript, among others, will read those PDF's with or without Adobe.
Cool! There's my arcane word for the day.
And when you look it up, I'd suggest you look up "municipal" -- I think you'll have better luck.
Jeez, I was hoping for something vaguely Kevin Mitnick, and instead I get Sam Spade. This may not be Intarweb 101, but it's maybe 102.
So you honestly believe that your right to life means that you should live forever, that nothing and nobody can infringe upon that right? Tell me, has anybody told the smallpox virus that you have this inalienable right to life, liberty, etc? Is cancer illegal?
That aside, sometimes rights conflict. I have a right to free speech, but that doesn't mean that I have a right to stand in front of your house and use a bull-horn to annoy your neighbors while I tell them that you raped my brother and his dog. Your neighbors have a right to some peace and quiet, and you have a right to face me in open, neutral court and ask that I show some evidence of the charge (especially considering that I don't have a brother.) Slander doesn't cover your opinions -- you have every right to say that you think I'm an asshole, for instance -- and it doesn't cover truth that you can back up -- "George Bush was busted for driving drunk!".
Properly applied (and of course any law can be misapplied, but "driving while black" issues are not a reason to drop all laws regulating conduct on the road) the only thing slander and libel laws restrain is lies, and even those only after the fact, after you've gotten the word out and damaged my reputation with your lies. Do you honestly have a problem with that? Was Carol Burnett an oppressor pig when she sued the National Enquirer? Should she have had no recourse at all, no matter what they said?
Free speech does not mean that your words have no consequence. Sometimes those consequences are desirable, and the peasants rise and overthrow their oppressors. Sometimes the consequences are less desirable, and you lie on the floor in a pool of your own fluids wondering why you ever said that to the biggest biker in the bar.
Yeah, I miss the old days, when you'd just go beat the hell out of somebody. All this litigation is barbarous.
Are you one of those people who get the 500-page report each morning, flip to page 3, highlight line 2, and then toss the rest into the recycling bin?
I guess I'm just dumb, but while I agree that the data can be held closely (it's theirs, after all), I don't understand what the company loses by releasing it. It's not like their competitors can scan the data-sheets and walk down to the chip fab with the design, any more than I can build a Pentium (or even a 6502) in my basement because I know the registers and instruction set. Don't the data sheets simply describe the interface to their product?
It's not like they make their money selling drivers, so what's the point? They didn't make any money when they told you the Big Secret, so why shouldn't they tell me, Cookie Monster, and anybody else who asks? What are we gonna do -- support their hardware in new applications, possibly increasing sales? Anything but that...!
Like I say, maybe I'm just dumb, but what's the problem with people writing software so that the company doesn't have to? The worst consequence I can see is that bad drivers would make them look bad, but they have that now ("What, I pay all this money for a high-end graphics card and all I get is 640 X 480 X 16!?") when good drivers are unavailable because they block their development.
Yeah, that is a nice bit of software, and I'm surprised it doesn't get more use outside of BSD.
Yes, but registering something as your trademark is not the same as naming your company -- "Crest" is a registered trademark, even though the name of the manufacturer is "Proctor & Gamble", not "Crest." This is, BTW, why a single company can hold many trademarks, without having to have different letterhead for each one.
Surely you call Miss Utility (God, what a job title!) and verify your information anyway, right? I sure wouldn't trust some ten year old city plan to be kept up to date by all the relevant operations, not enough to light a cigarette near a broken pipe, anyway ("Nah, it'll be OK -- says right here this pipe's reserved for future..." WHOOSHBANG!)
It's one thing to ask about your backyard, it's another thing entirely to ask about everybody's backyards.
I move into a house with a burglar alarm. I might well call the police and ask if the alarm is connected to their systems. Reasonable question, especially if I could show that I in fact live at that address.
Now I call them back and ask, "Say, who else has alarms connected to your system?"
Not really the same question, is it? The first is a Harry Homeowner request, the second is J. Random Burglar.
Similarly restricting knowledge of gas pipelines and such isn't entirely unreasonable.
In an earlier case, I once worked in a facility with honest-to-God 132-column green-bar line printers, and one of them, for higher speed, was upper-case only. Luckily our in-house proprietary languages were all case-insensitive.
Frankly I always figured that case-sensitivity was primarily a product of system programmers who didn't feel like writing upper filters, and later made it seem like a virtue. In the same vein, clearly nobody at Bell Labs could type very well.
Yeah, I know that Bad Guys can max out cards in rotation, and I don't doubt that it goes on. I'm just betting that actual losses, as distinct from "I bagged 10,000 credit card numbers last night", are more from low-skill, ballsy punks who have the nerve (and stupidity) to do shit we'd never seriously consider. We're geeks -- we'd busy ourselvers drawing up "Mission Impossible"-style schemes with 900 steps involving precise timing and filing our fingertips and whatnot, while old-school professional criminals have boosted 16 liquor stores with pistols and baseball bats and are already smoking the proceeds. Sure, they get caught, which is why we don't do it (well, that and morals), but before they get caught they commit huge amounts of crime, and after they get caught their friends and relations are still committing huge amounts of crime.
I just think we grossly underestimate the cumulative effect of stupid, violent people. It hurts us to think that they're scarier than we are even after high school.
Watch yourself the next time you eat at a sit-down restaurant. End of the meal, smiling waitress brings you the check and what do you do? Hand her the card, that's what, and wait for her to come back.
Skills for her to steal your number (including the magic little number on the back)? Nothing more technical than pencil and paper.
Not that I'm suggesting that waitresses, per se, are the major source of stolen CC numbers, just that I'd wager that more numbers are stolen and used through such simple means than more elaborate Internet schemes. Sure, I know that "millions of card numbers stolen by teenager in Yonkers" is the scary headline, but how many of those numbers are ever actually used? I suspect that, as technical people, we'd like to think that we're the danger, but I'd bet that ignorant thugs stealing wallets put all the actual high-tech crime to shame.
I just don't see any particular commonality of form or function. It's not like the combination makes thrifty use of the lens, or the microphone, or the speaker. If my phone had a flash, then perhaps I'd wish to make better use of it, but it doesn't. If my camera needed a numeric keypad, then it might avoid duplication, but it doesn't. In fact, about the only thing I can think of that the two devices share is the battery.
Obviously if the pairing suits you, then it suits you and no more need be said, but I wonder what inspired the jamming together of two essentially different devices, and why that combination and not the phone / bottle opener or camera / PDA?
I always carry a pocket knife, but I haven't seen any need to have a blade built into my phone. My guess is that the phone manufacturer would pick some cheap and nasty sort of knife that I wouldn't find very useful, so I'd end up carrying my Wenger and my Leatherman anyway, only now my phone would be bigger as well.
Well, yeah, but if I combine a phone with a bathtub then I'll always have a bathtub with me. It won't be a very good bathtub, since it will have to fit into my pocket so I'll only be able to wash one finger at a time, but I'll always have a tub.