while true, this is just another example of the sorry state of modern society. people have it so easy, they forget to be sensible. Its the same argument against being able to defend yourself against a mugger - you open yourself up to an arrest for assault if you do. (or being sued).
The white worms usage of bandwidth is, IMHO, acceptable - its not as if they'll DDoS some site, and downloading the patches is something the users should do themselves anyway (if they could find the right button to click), and the total bandwidth usage will drop for every black worm the white ones take out.
The anti-virus companies could do something with this though, sell a product that doesn't just download an av-update, but allows you to be visited by a cleanup-worm. If said worm only 'attacks' av customers (ie people with some software on their box), no-one could complain.
"you can't do these things because we said so" - doesn't the GPL say that I must make any derivative work GPL (or at least 'freely distributable'). How come that restriction on what I could legally do with my code is ignored in discussions about the GPL?
The GPL is flawed - if you want code to be free, you should release it under a licence that says 'this is free. do what you want with it', and leave whoever uses it to make their choices with their code. Nice, simple, easy. Adds to the world of free software without making any restrictions whatsoever.
With MS code, even if I had some, I do not have a licence to use it. SO if I used it I would be breaking the law.
With GPL code, I *do* have a licence to use it. Everything released as GPL code comes with a licence for me to use it.
That's the point. If I use legitimately-licenced GPL code (which it all is) then I'm not breaking any law. I am breaking the licence if then I do not release my product under the terms of that licenc however.
I find it interesting that they claim to survive a slashdotting when both times the links were posted on a sunday. Just looking at the number of comments posts get on sundays show that maybe 1/10 of the normal/. crowd gather - so really they should try a monday-morning post to see if they can stand up.
anyway.. your analogy isn't so hot WRT MS code - if you stole their code, you didn't have a licence in the first place to use it. Whereas the GPL encourages you to use code released under it, ie. you do have a licence to use it.
The problem comes when you use it - you're breaking the licence agreement if you don't then GPL your product.
not necessarily - if the GPL wins, and the court conclusion is that anything with GPL code in it is GPL, then business will be very scared indeed. I may be able to open-source all my employers products by slipping in a few lines of some-GPLed routine. yikes!
Alternatively, if the conclusion is that mixing GPL code into proprietary code doesn't affect the proprietary licence, then the GPL is effective useless. (or more likely, finally usable in the real world)
whatever makes you think it was a hacker - the employee had accss to the data, copied it off and took it away. No doubt he tried to sell it and was caught doing so.
Hacker? If I walk away with the sourcecode I'm writing for my current company, does that make me a hacker? of course not. If this guy (who could be the data protection officer for all we know) took away the data in his keeping, that doesn't make him a hacker either.
Similarly - all the posts about 'if you can't keep it secure you shouldn't have it' are stupid - with that argument, absolutely no-one should be able to keep the data... and therefore no-one should have a credit card.. and we should all go live in wigwams like nature intended, man.
you're quite right about contacting the package owner and letting them handle things - after all, it's *their* copyright that is being violated, and has little to do with any do-gooder geek screaming about his rights to the GPL source code.
In many cases software released under GPL is also released under commercial licences too - so what if the 'violating' company is using that? You can scream all you want at the company, bring its reputation into disrepute with the community and turn out you're attacking something that actually supports the OSS creators!
(see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73095&cid=6580 222) for a perfect example.
Re:What I always wondered
on
OpenGL 1.5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know about 'extensions' but there are plenty of game libraries.
SDL could be considered one, it handles OpenGL windows.
PLIB (.sf.net) is a game library, it contains some feaures that assist games developers (a GUI, fonts, scene graph, utility fns).
OpenSceneGraph is rather good.
and a host more - use google to find them, or search through SourceForge, or even the OpenGL page has a set of links.
As for the licence - most of these are LGPL, which I think is the most appropriate licence for a library.
One of the things that ships with Windows is the magnifier accessibility applet - for people with poor vision. it turns the top of the screen into a magnified area of the screen under the mouse, so you can have the screen estate nicely laid out, and be still able to read any part of it you want to. (BTW I'm using XP, but I think its available on the other OS versions)
You can change its settings, make it follow text editing cursor, and keyboard focus, (its quite cool actually, I may bump my resolution down to 1600x1200 on my 17" monitor and use it:-)
Not only that, when you first start it up, you get a dialog box offering to take you to see more poor-vision tools on the web.
10/10 for Microsoft on the accesibility features? na, this is/. after all.
absolutely right - whenever I read Gartner reports in the past, they've always been anti-microsoft. I used to think they were biased that way, but perhaps they just hate everything:-)
It doesn't have to be that way. Because the portability barriers between GNU/Linux and Solaris are low, customers can migrate easily, yes -- but so can good code. For instance, Apache is often thought of as "Linux software" by people who don't know very much, but it also ships with Solaris.
Apache also runs on Windows, as does PHP and SSH etc etc. Sure you have to install it, but that hardly counts against the concept.
The big difference is that Linux is technically free, and you can build a large server farm from it. Something web server providers have built a business on. In their case, they have a very good reason to use Linux. Now, if Windows Server was given to them for free.. would they use it? Maybe not so much nowadays, but you'd definitely see windows-based web servers popping up all over, each provider trying to outdo their competition with ASP.NET hosting, MS Office hosting, etc etc.
So my point is that you can't just assume that OSS will take over everywhere - it has to have a solid benefit or business niche to be widely used.
why get rid of the preprocessor? every C++ programmer finds it useful, and if the argument is that you can create obscure and unmaintainable code with it - well, you don't need the preprocessor to do that!
Yeah, we need a java-like syntax so you too can create lots of debug info in programs with 'if (global_debug==1) ' rather than the infinitely more efficient #ifdef DEBUG.
I think some people have problems with practical features of the language - sure, we can make it 'elegant' (like they read somewhere that java was), ignoring the fact that people use the language to get the job done. If you want to make C++ easier - stop using it! Go get yourself a copy of Visual Basic if you don't want the features C++ offers. You *do* want those features, then learn it, just like all the other C++ programmers have done before you. Too bad that the newbies have to, *gasp* understand what they have to do to make the code work, that they can't just knock up a program in a half-hour without any thought involved. Possibly this is one of the best features of C++ - you can't have any old monkey programming it, not without being found out straight away.
Re:Good, but...secure?
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 1
Next thing you know, they'll lock the staff out of the buildings. Studies show that 100% of security violations are caused by people.
Sounds like your company hasn't done its risk analysis properly, instead someone is just making security practices up as they go along.
good luck, but please bear in mind that the reason no-one has come up with an effective distributed DB is not through lack of customers, or trying, or research.
You should remind yourself what problems you're trying to overcome - is it large database, faster processing, or faster networking? Each of those 3 requires a different solution.
You could say the internet is a distributed database though, and Google is its index.
Its quite simple really. consider the 2 db scenario (as more nodes are just more-of-the-same).
You hold the entire db on each server, all writes are performed to both servers, reads take place on either of them. That doesn't really reduce the network traffic as you still are spending as much as you would with a 1-db system, but now you have reundancy and faster processing (ie reads).
You hold the entire database spread over the 2 nodes, in which case you have problems if 1 node fails. In this case you really would like to make reads occur on the db where the data is kept, however, you can only do this if the data is partitioned (ie records A-N on one, M-Z on the other), as otherwise a read transaction won't know if the other server holds the required data or if there is no data. (ie. get all records beginning with 'Z', maybe there are no Z records, maybe they're all on the other server).
If you hold 'pointers' to the records on the other server, you have the problem of updating both servers - once with the data, and then another network hit with a 'the data is stored here' transaction. Those additional transactions can add up to more traffic, especailly as the number of nodes increases.
IMHO, the only way to reduce network traffic is to hold local caches. This is a problem for write transactions, but each read transaction can hit the server for a 'is my local copy still correct', in which case you may get greatly reduced network traffic, but only if each transaction is for a significantly large amount of data (ie larger than the results of the cache-correct transaction).
Incidentally, if you bundle transactions to send over the network to maintain data integrity on the servers, you are incraesing latency - the first transaction's data will take a lot longer to travel to its destination if it has to wait for other transactions to complete first. (waiting for a full bus), so unless the amount of data in a transaction is significantly larger than the cache-control transactions, you might as well send it directly.
Your best bet is to compress the data on the fly, or to connect your network as a 'tree', so data sent to 2 servers can be sent as 1 hit, and is then split closer to those servers. (ie. client A sends to switch/proxy B which sends to servers C and D)
In the end, its a big trade-off between data size, latency, and data integrity. In other words - depends on what exactly you're trying to do:-)
I would have thought its a service for the previous owners... Dear ex-cyberangels, we've received a fair amount of email for you, but as we don't have a forwarding address we've uploaded it to a web site so you can access it at your convenience.
I wouldn't want my email read by others, but then, I'd arrange with my contacts to forward my mail elsewhere, or at least inform them I've moved address.
I second that. I bought a 4029 Laser about.. 8 years ago and it's stll going perfectly well. Never broke on me, even when I left it in storage for 2 years, it was right as rain when I brought it out.
However, if you buy the cheapest of cheap inkjet printers.. what do you expect!?
well, IANAP nor a Physics Professor at that, but I think what he's saying here is that a perfect mirror will reflect all the photons away from it, so that none of their energy is absorbed by the sail. eg. if you fired a laser at a perfect> mirror, it wouldn't get hot.
If the sail was painted black, then it'd be a different matter as the energy would 'stick' and push the sail, but then of course, the energy would heat the sail up too.
totally right. However it also applies to big businesses.
For a developer - knowing MS Word or Wordpenguinstaroffice makes no difference whatsoever. All the developer will do is write simple reports and maybe put a few tables and section headings in there. But then, no-one is going to ask a developer if they know how to use a word processor.
If the job description *does* ask for Office skills, then that's what they expect you to have, and you'd better know it as it's no good trying to find the menu to highlight the 2nd row of each table if you have a stack of documents to type up. People using such packages are trained in how to use them, and I don't mean just how to click 'file open either'.
So flexibility matters, but specific skills matter far, far more if that's what the recruiter wants. (for developers: imagine you went to an interview, said I know C++, and the recruiter said 'brilliant, that shows you're flexible 'cos we only do java here':-)
Slashdot Mirror
while true, this is just another example of the sorry state of modern society. people have it so easy, they forget to be sensible. Its the same argument against being able to defend yourself against a mugger - you open yourself up to an arrest for assault if you do. (or being sued).
The white worms usage of bandwidth is, IMHO, acceptable - its not as if they'll DDoS some site, and downloading the patches is something the users should do themselves anyway (if they could find the right button to click), and the total bandwidth usage will drop for every black worm the white ones take out.
The anti-virus companies could do something with this though, sell a product that doesn't just download an av-update, but allows you to be visited by a cleanup-worm. If said worm only 'attacks' av customers (ie people with some software on their box), no-one could complain.
except that they probably would.
"you can't do these things because we said so" - doesn't the GPL say that I must make any derivative work GPL (or at least 'freely distributable'). How come that restriction on what I could legally do with my code is ignored in discussions about the GPL?
The GPL is flawed - if you want code to be free, you should release it under a licence that says 'this is free. do what you want with it', and leave whoever uses it to make their choices with their code. Nice, simple, easy. Adds to the world of free software without making any restrictions whatsoever.
you're missing the point (or skirting it).
With MS code, even if I had some, I do not have a licence to use it. SO if I used it I would be breaking the law.
With GPL code, I *do* have a licence to use it. Everything released as GPL code comes with a licence for me to use it.
That's the point. If I use legitimately-licenced GPL code (which it all is) then I'm not breaking any law. I am breaking the licence if then I do not release my product under the terms of that licenc however.
I find it interesting that they claim to survive a slashdotting when both times the links were posted on a sunday. Just looking at the number of comments posts get on sundays show that maybe 1/10 of the normal /. crowd gather - so really they should try a monday-morning post to see if they can stand up.
well I was mainly curious.. and trolling :)
anyway.. your analogy isn't so hot WRT MS code - if you stole their code, you didn't have a licence in the first place to use it. Whereas the GPL encourages you to use code released under it, ie. you do have a licence to use it.
The problem comes when you use it - you're breaking the licence agreement if you don't then GPL your product.
not necessarily - if the GPL wins, and the court conclusion is that anything with GPL code in it is GPL, then business will be very scared indeed. I may be able to open-source all my employers products by slipping in a few lines of some-GPLed routine. yikes!
Alternatively, if the conclusion is that mixing GPL code into proprietary code doesn't affect the proprietary licence, then the GPL is effective useless. (or more likely, finally usable in the real world)
whatever makes you think it was a hacker - the employee had accss to the data, copied it off and took it away. No doubt he tried to sell it and was caught doing so.
Hacker? If I walk away with the sourcecode I'm writing for my current company, does that make me a hacker? of course not. If this guy (who could be the data protection officer for all we know) took away the data in his keeping, that doesn't make him a hacker either.
Similarly - all the posts about 'if you can't keep it secure you shouldn't have it' are stupid - with that argument, absolutely no-one should be able to keep the data... and therefore no-one should have a credit card.. and we should all go live in wigwams like nature intended, man.
you're quite right about contacting the package owner and letting them handle things - after all, it's *their* copyright that is being violated, and has little to do with any do-gooder geek screaming about his rights to the GPL source code.
0 222) for a perfect example.
In many cases software released under GPL is also released under commercial licences too - so what if the 'violating' company is using that? You can scream all you want at the company, bring its reputation into disrepute with the community and turn out you're attacking something that actually supports the OSS creators!
(see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=73095&cid=658
I don't know about 'extensions' but there are plenty of game libraries.
SDL could be considered one, it handles OpenGL windows.
PLIB (.sf.net) is a game library, it contains some feaures that assist games developers (a GUI, fonts, scene graph, utility fns).
OpenSceneGraph is rather good.
and a host more - use google to find them, or search through SourceForge, or even the OpenGL page has a set of links.
As for the licence - most of these are LGPL, which I think is the most appropriate licence for a library.
yeah, its a bit like the breaking research that sticking a pencil up your nose *may* cause brain damage...
Completely offtopic, and I am sorry for that, but Ultraviolet is a series that *needs* to be brought back. Joe Aherne - make it happen, please!!!
If anyone hasn;t seen this series, go get the DVD (or download them off Kazaa..) You will be glad you did.
One of the things that ships with Windows is the magnifier accessibility applet - for people with poor vision. it turns the top of the screen into a magnified area of the screen under the mouse, so you can have the screen estate nicely laid out, and be still able to read any part of it you want to. (BTW I'm using XP, but I think its available on the other OS versions)
:-)
/. after all.
You can change its settings, make it follow text editing cursor, and keyboard focus, (its quite cool actually, I may bump my resolution down to 1600x1200 on my 17" monitor and use it
Not only that, when you first start it up, you get a dialog box offering to take you to see more poor-vision tools on the web.
10/10 for Microsoft on the accesibility features? na, this is
absolutely right - whenever I read Gartner reports in the past, they've always been anti-microsoft. I used to think they were biased that way, but perhaps they just hate everything :-)
I think IPv6 is backwards compatible with IPv4 - an IPv4 address will still be recognised as a valid IPv6 address, just one with lots of 0s in it.
Apache also runs on Windows, as does PHP and SSH etc etc. Sure you have to install it, but that hardly counts against the concept.
The big difference is that Linux is technically free, and you can build a large server farm from it. Something web server providers have built a business on. In their case, they have a very good reason to use Linux. Now, if Windows Server was given to them for free.. would they use it? Maybe not so much nowadays, but you'd definitely see windows-based web servers popping up all over, each provider trying to outdo their competition with ASP.NET hosting, MS Office hosting, etc etc.
So my point is that you can't just assume that OSS will take over everywhere - it has to have a solid benefit or business niche to be widely used.
why get rid of the preprocessor? every C++ programmer finds it useful, and if the argument is that you can create obscure and unmaintainable code with it - well, you don't need the preprocessor to do that!
Yeah, we need a java-like syntax so you too can create lots of debug info in programs with 'if (global_debug==1) ' rather than the infinitely more efficient #ifdef DEBUG.
I think some people have problems with practical features of the language - sure, we can make it 'elegant' (like they read somewhere that java was), ignoring the fact that people use the language to get the job done. If you want to make C++ easier - stop using it! Go get yourself a copy of Visual Basic if you don't want the features C++ offers. You *do* want those features, then learn it, just like all the other C++ programmers have done before you. Too bad that the newbies have to, *gasp* understand what they have to do to make the code work, that they can't just knock up a program in a half-hour without any thought involved. Possibly this is one of the best features of C++ - you can't have any old monkey programming it, not without being found out straight away.
Next thing you know, they'll lock the staff out of the buildings. Studies show that 100% of security violations are caused by people.
Sounds like your company hasn't done its risk analysis properly, instead someone is just making security practices up as they go along.
good luck, but please bear in mind that the reason no-one has come up with an effective distributed DB is not through lack of customers, or trying, or research.
You should remind yourself what problems you're trying to overcome - is it large database, faster processing, or faster networking? Each of those 3 requires a different solution.
You could say the internet is a distributed database though, and Google is its index.
Its quite simple really. consider the 2 db scenario (as more nodes are just more-of-the-same).
:-)
You hold the entire db on each server, all writes are performed to both servers, reads take place on either of them. That doesn't really reduce the network traffic as you still are spending as much as you would with a 1-db system, but now you have reundancy and faster processing (ie reads).
You hold the entire database spread over the 2 nodes, in which case you have problems if 1 node fails. In this case you really would like to make reads occur on the db where the data is kept, however, you can only do this if the data is partitioned (ie records A-N on one, M-Z on the other), as otherwise a read transaction won't know if the other server holds the required data or if there is no data. (ie. get all records beginning with 'Z', maybe there are no Z records, maybe they're all on the other server).
If you hold 'pointers' to the records on the other server, you have the problem of updating both servers - once with the data, and then another network hit with a 'the data is stored here' transaction. Those additional transactions can add up to more traffic, especailly as the number of nodes increases.
IMHO, the only way to reduce network traffic is to hold local caches. This is a problem for write transactions, but each read transaction can hit the server for a 'is my local copy still correct', in which case you may get greatly reduced network traffic, but only if each transaction is for a significantly large amount of data (ie larger than the results of the cache-correct transaction).
Incidentally, if you bundle transactions to send over the network to maintain data integrity on the servers, you are incraesing latency - the first transaction's data will take a lot longer to travel to its destination if it has to wait for other transactions to complete first. (waiting for a full bus), so unless the amount of data in a transaction is significantly larger than the cache-control transactions, you might as well send it directly.
Your best bet is to compress the data on the fly, or to connect your network as a 'tree', so data sent to 2 servers can be sent as 1 hit, and is then split closer to those servers. (ie. client A sends to switch/proxy B which sends to servers C and D)
In the end, its a big trade-off between data size, latency, and data integrity. In other words - depends on what exactly you're trying to do
I would have thought its a service for the previous owners...
Dear ex-cyberangels, we've received a fair amount of email for you, but as we don't have a forwarding address we've uploaded it to a web site so you can access it at your convenience.
I wouldn't want my email read by others, but then, I'd arrange with my contacts to forward my mail elsewhere, or at least inform them I've moved address.
get some noise cancelling headphones then. It may not be as convenient as putting something in a PC case, but they are remarkably effective.
I second that. I bought a 4029 Laser about.. 8 years ago and it's stll going perfectly well. Never broke on me, even when I left it in storage for 2 years, it was right as rain when I brought it out.
However, if you buy the cheapest of cheap inkjet printers.. what do you expect!?
well, IANAP nor a Physics Professor at that, but I think what he's saying here is that a perfect mirror will reflect all the photons away from it, so that none of their energy is absorbed by the sail. eg. if you fired a laser at a perfect> mirror, it wouldn't get hot.
If the sail was painted black, then it'd be a different matter as the energy would 'stick' and push the sail, but then of course, the energy would heat the sail up too.
lol. what we really need is a law that says, *all* employees that are made redundant are paid 3 months salary to help them find a new job.
;-) (I mean, it'd help you - 3 months salary for 1 weeks work)
That would help recruiting problems like you describe
totally right. However it also applies to big businesses.
:-)
For a developer - knowing MS Word or Wordpenguinstaroffice makes no difference whatsoever. All the developer will do is write simple reports and maybe put a few tables and section headings in there. But then, no-one is going to ask a developer if they know how to use a word processor.
If the job description *does* ask for Office skills, then that's what they expect you to have, and you'd better know it as it's no good trying to find the menu to highlight the 2nd row of each table if you have a stack of documents to type up. People using such packages are trained in how to use them, and I don't mean just how to click 'file open either'.
So flexibility matters, but specific skills matter far, far more if that's what the recruiter wants. (for developers: imagine you went to an interview, said I know C++, and the recruiter said 'brilliant, that shows you're flexible 'cos we only do java here'