Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
You can easily code your SQL to be database specific if you need it that way, but that shouldn't in any way stop developers from using a generic DB access API
I have yet to find one that actually fulfils the promise of database independence without getting in the way of being able to write useful queries. The problem is that every different database server out there has a different way of doing something.
Take automatically assigned row ids, for instance. I know at least 3 different syntaxes for specifying these in the CREATE TABLE statement. Sometimes your INSERT statement has to include the column but set it to NULL, sometimes it has to be not specified at all (i.e. you must give a list of columns to insert that excludes the automatic one). How about adding an interval to a date? Or specify dates at all (MSSQL seems to require dates to be specified in the format defined by the server's internationalisation settings -- fucked up, but that was the only way I could make it work last time I developed for it).
The only way to solve these problems is just to abandon SQL and build queries from a higher level specification. There are systems that do this (e.g. MS's "ADO"), but I've never found one I actually like using -- it's much more convenient to code DB specific SQL and then port if you need to work with a different DB server.
Re:Success of PHP easy to understand
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
The inital design isn't flawed. "==" does exactly what it's supposed to: test objects for equality (according to the definition of equality in force for that particular object), in the same way as calling ".equals ()" in Java or similar languages. "===" is used for checking for identity (equivalent to checking for pointer equality in other languages). It's a notational difference based around the fact that for 99% of purposes, what you want is "==".
The fact that "==" doesn't perform equality checking frequently confuses new Java programmers, BTW. This is clear evidence that neither approach is really better than the other, I think.
Sure, a lot of people will look at this and say "nerds... they'll have no experience" and stop there.
But I think the important thing to note is that most nerds are in my experience, a lot less selfish than the average person in their community. And selfishness in bed is _bad_.
The same lack of selfishness also explains open source software, free SF fanzines, and a whole wide range of nerdy behaviour.
When I stress-tested my MTA I managed to get twenty messages per second throughput; that's nearly 2 million per day. Of course, that was sending over a local network, but none of those messages were rejected and the hardware involved was not as up-to-date as the hardware described on the guy's site. I believe his server can handle that load easily.
True -- one domain I operate gets about 500 junk mails per day; nearly half of those mails are to @thedomain, for values of that have never been used by an actual user of the domain.
Owning your own domain and accepting messages at any address on it is a great way of getting a lot of junk, whether it be viruses or unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Having an e-mail address linked on web sites is one good way to get on a lot of spam lists. Using your address on Usenet postings will get it on even more.
As an author of free software that is commonly used on Windows, I can tell you that having your address sitting in a text file on Windows users' PCs is by far a worse way. It started out being just viruses, but now I get ~300 unsolicited commercial e-mails per day to that address. And a roughly equal number of "mail delivery failed" message for e-mails I never sent.
T worst it doubles the cost. If the cost of sending e-mails was that close to making spam unworkable I think thty'd have stopped sending span for US only products (e.g. mortgages) to my.co.uk address, no?
They aren't singling out Firefox. Read the text on the page you linked to -- they discovered it in IE on 2004-06-30 (i.e. nearly a year ago) and in Firefox on 2005-06-06 (i.e. yesterday), which is why it's news that it's happening in Firefox, but not news that it happens in IE.
wherever legal cases are involved, transparency of the design is essential.
Indeed. And I'm amazed that it's taken this long to come to public attention.
Over here in the UK, devices such as breathalyzers, speed cameras, and so on which are used to gather evidence for prosecutions are subject to very strict requirements on information disclosure that allow the government to determine whether or not they work correctly; courts may choose to ignore evidence provided by equipment that does not have correct government approval.
You can know that it works if its reproducable and calibrated.
No, you can't. You only know that it works in the conditions of the test. Real conditions in the field may be substantially different. It may produce incorrect results for a very narrow range of sample concentrations. It may not work properly if it is held in a particular way. There could be all kinds of faults with such a device -- the only way to be sure justice is being done is if the blueprints of the physical hardware and the source code to the software that runs on it are available for inspection by independent experts who could point out any such problems.
What really matters is that the algorithm/process is reliable, rather than the actual source code. If that algorithm/process has been properly reviewed and approved, whinging about lack of source code sounds more likely to let people off on a technicality than something actually in the interests of justice
Unless the source code has been reviewed by an independent person who is qualified to make such a review, how do you know that it correctly implements the process? What if there's a bug that causes every person whose result should be 0.012 to come out 0.210 instead?
Over here in the UK, any machine used for providing evidence like this has to be analysed by the Home Office for correctness. They demand complete source code and schematics of all parts of the system, and if you want to make the slightest change to the way the system is put together you need to get new approval for it. Prevents problems like this from arising.
Actually, you are entitled to see the photo. You say "I don't think I was driving the car at the time, and need to see the photographic evidence to determine who was driving it." At this point, they'll either have to show you the photo or drop the case.
I concede that point, but as the quote above makes clear, that doesn't give a valid license for something where the download is illegal to begin with.
You're right -- for the entire thing to be legal, the copy you were sharing would have to be a legitimate one (e.g. a file you downloaded from a correctly authorised digital music download store).
But the problem they face is this: they can't easily prove that it wasn't a legal file. Them downloading it from you does not cause an illegal action to take place. It's only if you downloaded it from somebody unauthorised (which they can't prove) or somebody else downloaded it from you (which they can't prove) that there's an issue.
The copyright owner clearly did not allow and would not have allowed it to be freely downloaded
True. But they can't prove that; they can only prove that they were able to download it themselves. And their computer sending a request to yours to make a copy and upload it could very easily be seen as a context which causes an implicit license to exist.
By law remove the "soft" standby switches on appliances that have no earthly reason to spend most of their lives consuming power while doing nothing. E.g. TV sets, washing machines, DVD players.
1. There is a reason for TV sets and DVD players to consume power when they aren't being used: if they didn't, you couldn't switch them on with a remote controller. OK, it isn't brilliant, but it exists.
2. I happened to research this a few days ago. TVs typically consume about 2 to 3 W in standby mode, these days. That's hardly a killer, you know? You could save a lot more power in one day by switching a standard tungsten filament lightbulb to a compact flourescent than you'd save in a week by not having your TV use standby. You are using compact flourescent lighting, aren't you?
In conjunction with that slap a heavy tax on offices for night time use of power to force them to force their employees to turn off all non-essential equipment like desktop computers, monitors, lights etc. when no one is there to use them.
What about businesses that operate overnight? Are they exempt?
I wonder how much power MS could save the world if the next version of Windoze shipped with a default setting to make PCs hibernate if they aren't used for half an hour?
I read the same article and almost identical comments 7 years ago when someone realized you could change NT 4 Workstation to NT 4 Server by changing a registry entry and rebooting...
No you can't. It looks like you should be able to, but the kernel switches it back if you try to modify it. You need to hack the kernel too.
But not many more. Problem is, though, the calling process performs a checksum operation that needs to be cancelled also, bringing the total to at least 4 bytes, and probably more like 10.
I'm not sure about the situation in the USA, but over here in the UK it is not necessarily the case that all the terms of MS's EULAs are legally binding. Specifically, no license or contract can take away your "fair use" rights.
Whether or not this kind of modification is fair use is another matter. I suspect it is, but wouldn't want to stake money on it. Besides, I already have XP Pro.:)
Anyway, the ruling will have little effect elsewhere, particularly as all countries in the EU and many other countries already have laws that would make this ruling impossible that state that merely offering to make a copy is an offence.
Would Fox now have to prove that someone actually came away from the swarm with a full Simpsons episode and that all of the bits came from me?
No; they'd have to prove that they came up with a greater proportion of a Simpsons episode than would be permissible under fair use exceptions, and that enough of the bits came from you that it was unlikely you were able to produce them yourself independently. IANAL, etc.
I don't see that. The person hosting the file has no way of knowing the person DL'ing it is the copyright holder unless the holder identifies himself as such (who obviously would not for the purpose of this DL).
Why should the fact that the person believes what they're doing is illegal make an otherwise legal action illegal? That makes no sense.
An even stronger argument, for the DL to be legal, regardless of who DL's it, the host needs WRITTEN permission from the copyright holder, who obviously did not give it.
AFAIK, you do not need written permission from the copyright holder to have a valid license.
Licenses can be granted implicitly, and I think them requesting you to make a copy is a great way of getting a license for that copy.
Quote: [...] you have an implied licence where all the circumstances suggest that the copyright owner expected you to use his or her copyright material in the way you are going to use it, even though this was never discussed and has not been written down anywhere (source)
I think this is a very important development for P2P file sharing. It will make the threshhold of proof much higher for sharers to be sued.
Give it 6 months and you'll see a new law to close up this "loophole". Over here in Europe, we already have the EUCD (and national implementations thereof) that specifies that "storage [of a work] in an information retrieval system" is a protected activity, and by the definition of information retrieval system, any P2P client will necessarily fit.
The copyright holder has the right to determine distribution.
Are you sure? That sounds like an unfair right to me. Over here in the EU, copyright holders can prevent copying, importation and public display of their works, but once a copy has been made that can be moved around however you want, and if you have a license for that copy there is nothing they can do to prevent it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can easily code your SQL to be database specific if you need it that way, but that shouldn't in any way stop developers from using a generic DB access API
I have yet to find one that actually fulfils the promise of database independence without getting in the way of being able to write useful queries. The problem is that every different database server out there has a different way of doing something.
Take automatically assigned row ids, for instance. I know at least 3 different syntaxes for specifying these in the CREATE TABLE statement. Sometimes your INSERT statement has to include the column but set it to NULL, sometimes it has to be not specified at all (i.e. you must give a list of columns to insert that excludes the automatic one). How about adding an interval to a date? Or specify dates at all (MSSQL seems to require dates to be specified in the format defined by the server's internationalisation settings -- fucked up, but that was the only way I could make it work last time I developed for it).
The only way to solve these problems is just to abandon SQL and build queries from a higher level specification. There are systems that do this (e.g. MS's "ADO"), but I've never found one I actually like using -- it's much more convenient to code DB specific SQL and then port if you need to work with a different DB server.
The inital design isn't flawed. "==" does exactly what it's supposed to: test objects for equality (according to the definition of equality in force for that particular object), in the same way as calling ".equals ()" in Java or similar languages. "===" is used for checking for identity (equivalent to checking for pointer equality in other languages). It's a notational difference based around the fact that for 99% of purposes, what you want is "==".
The fact that "==" doesn't perform equality checking frequently confuses new Java programmers, BTW. This is clear evidence that neither approach is really better than the other, I think.
Sure, a lot of people will look at this and say "nerds... they'll have no experience" and stop there.
But I think the important thing to note is that most nerds are in my experience, a lot less selfish than the average person in their community. And selfishness in bed is _bad_.
The same lack of selfishness also explains open source software, free SF fanzines, and a whole wide range of nerdy behaviour.
- we have *excellent* finger dexterity :-D
:)
Particularly those of us who also play guitar.
When I stress-tested my MTA I managed to get twenty messages per second throughput; that's nearly 2 million per day. Of course, that was sending over a local network, but none of those messages were rejected and the hardware involved was not as up-to-date as the hardware described on the guy's site. I believe his server can handle that load easily.
What's wrong with offering pipelining to untrusted hosts? It causes the sending dialogue to happen faster which reduces resource requirements.
True -- one domain I operate gets about 500 junk mails per day; nearly half of those mails are to @thedomain, for values of that have never been used by an actual user of the domain.
Owning your own domain and accepting messages at any address on it is a great way of getting a lot of junk, whether it be viruses or unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Having an e-mail address linked on web sites is one good way to get on a lot of spam lists. Using your address on Usenet postings will get it on even more.
As an author of free software that is commonly used on Windows, I can tell you that having your address sitting in a text file on Windows users' PCs is by far a worse way. It started out being just viruses, but now I get ~300 unsolicited commercial e-mails per day to that address. And a roughly equal number of "mail delivery failed" message for e-mails I never sent.
T worst it doubles the cost. If the cost of sending e-mails was that close to making spam unworkable I think thty'd have stopped sending span for US only products (e.g. mortgages) to my .co.uk address, no?
They aren't singling out Firefox. Read the text on the page you linked to -- they discovered it in IE on 2004-06-30 (i.e. nearly a year ago) and in Firefox on 2005-06-06 (i.e. yesterday), which is why it's news that it's happening in Firefox, but not news that it happens in IE.
But there _were_ error bars. That third one, where I had the triple vodka and coke was definitely a mistake. And the fourth...!
wherever legal cases are involved, transparency of the design is essential.
Indeed. And I'm amazed that it's taken this long to come to public attention.
Over here in the UK, devices such as breathalyzers, speed cameras, and so on which are used to gather evidence for prosecutions are subject to very strict requirements on information disclosure that allow the government to determine whether or not they work correctly; courts may choose to ignore evidence provided by equipment that does not have correct government approval.
You can know that it works if its reproducable and calibrated.
No, you can't. You only know that it works in the conditions of the test. Real conditions in the field may be substantially different. It may produce incorrect results for a very narrow range of sample concentrations. It may not work properly if it is held in a particular way. There could be all kinds of faults with such a device -- the only way to be sure justice is being done is if the blueprints of the physical hardware and the source code to the software that runs on it are available for inspection by independent experts who could point out any such problems.
What really matters is that the algorithm/process is reliable, rather than the actual source code. If that algorithm/process has been properly reviewed and approved, whinging about lack of source code sounds more likely to let people off on a technicality than something actually in the interests of justice
Unless the source code has been reviewed by an independent person who is qualified to make such a review, how do you know that it correctly implements the process? What if there's a bug that causes every person whose result should be 0.012 to come out 0.210 instead?
Over here in the UK, any machine used for providing evidence like this has to be analysed by the Home Office for correctness. They demand complete source code and schematics of all parts of the system, and if you want to make the slightest change to the way the system is put together you need to get new approval for it. Prevents problems like this from arising.
Actually, you are entitled to see the photo. You say "I don't think I was driving the car at the time, and need to see the photographic evidence to determine who was driving it." At this point, they'll either have to show you the photo or drop the case.
I concede that point, but as the quote above makes clear, that doesn't give a valid license for something where the download is illegal to begin with.
You're right -- for the entire thing to be legal, the copy you were sharing would have to be a legitimate one (e.g. a file you downloaded from a correctly authorised digital music download store).
But the problem they face is this: they can't easily prove that it wasn't a legal file. Them downloading it from you does not cause an illegal action to take place. It's only if you downloaded it from somebody unauthorised (which they can't prove) or somebody else downloaded it from you (which they can't prove) that there's an issue.
The copyright owner clearly did not allow and would not have allowed it to be freely downloaded
True. But they can't prove that; they can only prove that they were able to download it themselves. And their computer sending a request to yours to make a copy and upload it could very easily be seen as a context which causes an implicit license to exist.
By law remove the "soft" standby switches on appliances that have no earthly reason to spend most of their lives consuming power while doing nothing. E.g. TV sets, washing machines, DVD players.
1. There is a reason for TV sets and DVD players to consume power when they aren't being used: if they didn't, you couldn't switch them on with a remote controller. OK, it isn't brilliant, but it exists.
2. I happened to research this a few days ago. TVs typically consume about 2 to 3 W in standby mode, these days. That's hardly a killer, you know? You could save a lot more power in one day by switching a standard tungsten filament lightbulb to a compact flourescent than you'd save in a week by not having your TV use standby. You are using compact flourescent lighting, aren't you?
In conjunction with that slap a heavy tax on offices for night time use of power to force them to force their employees to turn off all non-essential equipment like desktop computers, monitors, lights etc. when no one is there to use them.
What about businesses that operate overnight? Are they exempt?
I wonder how much power MS could save the world if the next version of Windoze shipped with a default setting to make PCs hibernate if they aren't used for half an hour?
I read the same article and almost identical comments 7 years ago when someone realized you could change NT 4 Workstation to NT 4 Server by changing a registry entry and rebooting...
No you can't. It looks like you should be able to, but the kernel switches it back if you try to modify it. You need to hack the kernel too.
But not many more. Problem is, though, the calling process performs a checksum operation that needs to be cancelled also, bringing the total to at least 4 bytes, and probably more like 10.
I'm not sure about the situation in the USA, but over here in the UK it is not necessarily the case that all the terms of MS's EULAs are legally binding. Specifically, no license or contract can take away your "fair use" rights.
:)
Whether or not this kind of modification is fair use is another matter. I suspect it is, but wouldn't want to stake money on it. Besides, I already have XP Pro.
Becoming? Slashdot has always been US-centric.
Anyway, the ruling will have little effect elsewhere, particularly as all countries in the EU and many other countries already have laws that would make this ruling impossible that state that merely offering to make a copy is an offence.
Would Fox now have to prove that someone actually came away from the swarm with a full Simpsons episode and that all of the bits came from me?
No; they'd have to prove that they came up with a greater proportion of a Simpsons episode than would be permissible under fair use exceptions, and that enough of the bits came from you that it was unlikely you were able to produce them yourself independently. IANAL, etc.
I don't see that. The person hosting the file has no way of knowing the person DL'ing it is the copyright holder unless the holder identifies himself as such (who obviously would not for the purpose of this DL).
Why should the fact that the person believes what they're doing is illegal make an otherwise legal action illegal? That makes no sense.
An even stronger argument, for the DL to be legal, regardless of who DL's it, the host needs WRITTEN permission from the copyright holder, who obviously did not give it.
AFAIK, you do not need written permission from the copyright holder to have a valid license.
Licenses can be granted implicitly, and I think them requesting you to make a copy is a great way of getting a license for that copy.
Quote: [...] you have an implied licence where all the circumstances suggest that the copyright owner expected you to use his or her copyright material in the way you are going to use it, even though this was never discussed and has not been written down anywhere (source)
I think this is a very important development for P2P file sharing. It will make the threshhold of proof much higher for sharers to be sued.
Give it 6 months and you'll see a new law to close up this "loophole". Over here in Europe, we already have the EUCD (and national implementations thereof) that specifies that "storage [of a work] in an information retrieval system" is a protected activity, and by the definition of information retrieval system, any P2P client will necessarily fit.
The copyright holder has the right to determine distribution.
Are you sure? That sounds like an unfair right to me. Over here in the EU, copyright holders can prevent copying, importation and public display of their works, but once a copy has been made that can be moved around however you want, and if you have a license for that copy there is nothing they can do to prevent it.