I was always under the impression that "CamelCase" referred to the "humps" in the words that made it look like a camels back. As such it would have no particular relation to perl and its O'Reilly Camel book.
I may be entirely wrong here, so it someone knows the true origin it would be interesting to know.
At the time the metric system was designed, there were several different definitions of feet, inches, miles and all the other measures (e.g., Fuss, Zoll, Meile in German, which were different all over Germany, and similar in other nations). The fact that only the English system is surviving somehow now in the US could not have been a good guide line some 200 and odd years ago.
The meter was not chosen to be some arbitrary measure either. There are 10 million meters from the equator to the pole. While this doesn't seem very reasonable today it fits well with the plan to split a right angle into 100 new degrees. They could have converted the nautical miles to km that way. But then France wasn't the major sea fareing nation of the time. This meter was resonably close to typical measures in use (like the yard that survived) and thought to be just as practical as the old ones. And then it didn't favor one kingdoms measures over those of anybody else. At least they were far-sighted enough to realize that the rest of Europe would not follow the old French system even if it was otherwise converted to decimal. Your argument with 2.5 cm to the inch is just the same idea seen from an English (and now US) point of view.
While I understand your feeling about the odd fractions, it doesn't stand up in a historical perspective. You could have had smooth fractions only with one of the old measures at most. Since the metric system was supposed to replace the old measures, it may just as well start over from scratch. This worked out very well for everybody except the present-day US.
Gecko, as far as I know, is only responsible to render a page. Therefore, upon seeing an img tag it will request the contents of the src attribute from the browser itself. Fetching the image for Gecko is the job of another part of the browser. Gecko itself doesn't (and shouldn't) interpret that URL. It should only complain (normally by displaying the broken image symbol) if it doesn't get an image that can be displayed.
I bet these people live in houses without knowing how to build one.
Actually, people sort of know how to build houses when they live in one. If they see that the roof starts leaking they know to ask a professional to fix it. Same goes for cars. Responsible people know to get their cars repaired by trained technicians and to schedule regular tune ups (depending on the local legislation it is often usually required to get the driving permit).
If every computer had a competent system administrator, then we could compare computers to houses or cars. Unfortunately, Microsoft implies in their advertisment, that none such professional help is needed. And Linux security is better precisely because it was developed with the idea that a professional administrator needs to be able to control her/his systems.
So indeed, computers and houses/cars are still different. With computers most users do not have the slightest idea what goes on behind the scene. With houses/cars they are more familiar, even when they couldn't fix anything themselves.
WTO specifically regulates procurement in the public sector, i.e., any purchase by a government which would total more than $130'000. At least that was the sum when I had to go through the procedures in 1999. It might be higher today.
Private companies are free to buy whatever they want from whoever they want. The WTO rules prohibit governments from imposing unfair restrictions. This is specifically relevant to discrimination between domestic and foreign companies. I am pretty sure that the choice of words in the response letter is meant to address exactly the WTO regulations.
Free Software should be held responsible for defects just like other software - not more, nor less. Free Software would do rather well compared to many proprietary offerings. Liability does not mean that anybody can sue anyone about anything.
(1) if software is offered free of charge, a limited liability clause has good chance to protect the provider the software. This would cover most downloads. Essentially, the users accept their responsibily to check the software independently, which would give free software a definite advantage. The user could only sue over cases of gross negligence.
(2) if software is sold (from boxed set distributions to support contracts) the vendor takes on more responsibility. But even then there are limits to liability. If the vendor follows accepted standards in software engineering and reacts fast and appropriately when a flaw in a product is discovered, they may be resonably safe from lawsuits. Of course accepted standards can change over time, so tomorrow you may not get away with something that was common yesterday. However, it would prevent companies from keeping a flaw under cover like Microsoft does so often.
I am not a lawyer and standard disclaimers apply. Moreover details vary from one jurisdiction to the other. I am just inferring this from common practise in consumer laws. The well known cases (car manufacturers, etc.) all relate to the failure of the producer to alert their customers about grave defects they had known about for a while.
The offer of a free replacement of a defective application may be all that is required in some cases. In other cases the vendor might be expected to actively alert its customers with support contracts. This is something free software is good at and is standard practice already in many cases.
Now we finally know what a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) degree is good for. These people know how to determine whether a MineSweeper layout is consistent.
Is there an equivalent problem for the Solitaire Expert?;-)
Price isn't the issue, freedom is! Unfortunately, this mantra has been repeated so often, that people don't think about its meaning anymore. So let me try to rephrase it, even if imprefectly: commericalization isn't the issue, open standards are.
Having an MS Office port available for Linux improves the situation from what we have now. We would still have to fight for getting the MS Office file formats documented and adhered to but at least we would be free to choose Linux as the underlying OS.
It would be arrogant to force other people not to use MS Windows if they like it. Having commercial programs available and making people pay for them is OK! What's not OK is to be unable to come up with free (as in freedom / open source) alternative due to undocumented (pseudo-)standards that on top of it are changing too fast!
You may not be free to do what you want with Linux but Linux is free for anyone to take, use, and adjust as necessary.
When people mention "free speech" vs. "free beer" all they want to point out is that GNU GPL doesn't care about the money aspect but stresses the rights and resposibilities with respect to the code.
Rather than nitpicking about words I suggest to accept whatever license the author chooses. That includes refraining to use proprietary software if you don't want to pay the price.
So they sue Microsoft, because something went wrong and while Microsoft is defending itself they go out of business because they have no time and resources to fix the problem.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that buying software from a company (be that Microsoft or RedHat or anyone) will prevent any failure of their system deserves such failures. This is what support contracts are for. I wonder how many decision makers confuse buying software with buying support. Microsoft propaganda certainly aims at spreading such misinformation (dare I say FUD).
One argument against software patents is that they are very different from patents in traditional manufacturing. The number of patents possibly applying to a software project is orders of magnitudes bigger than those applying to, say, designing a car.
In addition there are many software patents considered void because the patented ideas are obvious (and thus violate patent law). The XOR patent is usually quoted in this context. There is hardly a chance a small software company can know all the relevant patents let alone fight the bad ones in court, which would be the constitutional/legally correct thing to do.
It all boils down to whether society profits from software patents. With industrial manufacturing the decision of most of todays industrial nations is to support the patent system. For other things like mathematics, law, and to a large extent basic research including medicine these same industrial nations won't grant the protection of patents. Software currently falls under the patent system but the discussion is far from over.
Microsoft has declared that BackOrifice 2000 (BO2K) is a virus and I guess most anti virus programs have updated their definitions accordingly.
The authors of BO2K on the other hand have clearly stated their intention to provide a system management tool. They even point out the potential danger when not properly handled and when combined with the security hole provided by the MS-Word macro language.
The question is who decides. Maybe now big companies like Microsoft have one more weapon to crush small competitors writing power tools.
Having two expressions (open source and free software) for essentially the same idea means that we are still left with one of them working while the other one is under market pressure. I don't remember that this was on the list of motivations when ESR started using the open source expression.
The word open has a track record of being misused in exactly the way Microsoft does now: i.e. pretending to be a nice neighbor while retaining as much control/power as possible. On the other hand free has an matching track record of always being in need of explaining.
Between the two the pendulum will swing back and forth while the idea keeps working just fine.
Therefore, no! I'm not getting nervous! Words will continue to get misused and we will continue to explain the idea.
The (relevant) critique can be considered a reality check for Microsoft and anyone else running a "cracking contest".
Break-in scripts/recipes are designed and security holes fixed by looking at the code and protocols/specifications. E.g., take buffer overruns. Functions like gets in the C library are infamous for the security problems they create. So you can specifically search for those holes. Or take the crashme tests. They work because of the specification that no user process shall be able to take down any system task, let alone the kernel.
crashme type testing is incidentially the most promising type of attack for a new OS like W2K and Microsoft specifically rules out DoS types of attacks. Granted, there are good reasons to rule out DoS, but this only means, that a black box test like this one is rather pointless. Asking the public to crack a setup with entirely open source components on the other hand is more promising.
If any problem is found, so much better for all of us. But it won't improve the system very much and should not be mistaken for improved security.
Preventing unauthorized access from the network is only part of securing a system. Moreover, since W2K is mostly new code it is indeed unlikely that a black box test will uncover a large fraction of the bugs that certainly exist. It is a good move of Microsoft and there will certainly be plenty of people trying to break into the machine. However, it may give a false sense of security, and given Microsoft's track record, they are planning to fall for it.
There is a clear difference in asking the public to do a free (gratis) beta test and opening up the code for public scrutiny. Those of us who have followed the Unix history for long enough know, that as system administrators we have been giving the Unix vendors as hard a time as Microsoft when they were withholding necessary information. That is why BSD and Linux are so highly regarded among the professionals. And that is why they are among the most secure operating systems around.
The world is not quite that simple. E.g., I happen to have chosen Latex over MS-Word for my personal document processing needs. But alas, collaborations with others demand that I read and edit MS-Word documents occasionally and this has become more of a problem since e-mail has become ubiquitous.
It doesn't matter what I like and don't like in Latex or MS-Word. What matters is that I have no choice but to use MS-Word in some cases. The document format isn't anywhere near being a standard, and so far no MS alternative has been compatible enough with MS-Word. Even different versions of MS-Word can't agree on the same layout for the same document to the extent of dropping information here and there. And the problem is, I don't have the choice!
I wish the situation were as simple as to be my choice only.
This whole issue of software patents and related issues with copyright is at the heart of the GNU/FSF movement. Currently, most everyone in the Open Source movement is still playing fair so that the Free Software advocates seem overly zealous. However, in the not-so-distant future we may well be glad that some people held the torch.
This is not as clear cut as you may think it is. "x times faster than modem" doesn't specify which services this applies to. If they are trying to limit speed on uploads and home web servers as it seems, this may indeed lead to faster access for the majority of their customers just browsing the web.
You may like this or not, but calling it fraud is a little too quick. Review your contract and take your money elsewhere if you don't like the terms. On the other hand you may find out that you'll be better off browsing the web.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be entirely wrong here, so it someone knows the true origin it would be interesting to know.
The meter was not chosen to be some arbitrary measure either. There are 10 million meters from the equator to the pole. While this doesn't seem very reasonable today it fits well with the plan to split a right angle into 100 new degrees. They could have converted the nautical miles to km that way. But then France wasn't the major sea fareing nation of the time. This meter was resonably close to typical measures in use (like the yard that survived) and thought to be just as practical as the old ones. And then it didn't favor one kingdoms measures over those of anybody else. At least they were far-sighted enough to realize that the rest of Europe would not follow the old French system even if it was otherwise converted to decimal. Your argument with 2.5 cm to the inch is just the same idea seen from an English (and now US) point of view.
While I understand your feeling about the odd fractions, it doesn't stand up in a historical perspective. You could have had smooth fractions only with one of the old measures at most. Since the metric system was supposed to replace the old measures, it may just as well start over from scratch. This worked out very well for everybody except the present-day US.
Gecko, as far as I know, is only responsible to render a page. Therefore, upon seeing an img tag it will request the contents of the src attribute from the browser itself. Fetching the image for Gecko is the job of another part of the browser. Gecko itself doesn't (and shouldn't) interpret that URL. It should only complain (normally by displaying the broken image symbol) if it doesn't get an image that can be displayed.
Actually, people sort of know how to build houses when they live in one. If they see that the roof starts leaking they know to ask a professional to fix it. Same goes for cars. Responsible people know to get their cars repaired by trained technicians and to schedule regular tune ups (depending on the local legislation it is often usually required to get the driving permit).
If every computer had a competent system administrator, then we could compare computers to houses or cars. Unfortunately, Microsoft implies in their advertisment, that none such professional help is needed. And Linux security is better precisely because it was developed with the idea that a professional administrator needs to be able to control her/his systems.
So indeed, computers and houses/cars are still different. With computers most users do not have the slightest idea what goes on behind the scene. With houses/cars they are more familiar, even when they couldn't fix anything themselves.
Private companies are free to buy whatever they want from whoever they want. The WTO rules prohibit governments from imposing unfair restrictions. This is specifically relevant to discrimination between domestic and foreign companies. I am pretty sure that the choice of words in the response letter is meant to address exactly the WTO regulations.
(1) if software is offered free of charge, a limited liability clause has good chance to protect the provider the software. This would cover most downloads. Essentially, the users accept their responsibily to check the software independently, which would give free software a definite advantage. The user could only sue over cases of gross negligence.
(2) if software is sold (from boxed set distributions to support contracts) the vendor takes on more responsibility. But even then there are limits to liability. If the vendor follows accepted standards in software engineering and reacts fast and appropriately when a flaw in a product is discovered, they may be resonably safe from lawsuits. Of course accepted standards can change over time, so tomorrow you may not get away with something that was common yesterday. However, it would prevent companies from keeping a flaw under cover like Microsoft does so often.
I am not a lawyer and standard disclaimers apply. Moreover details vary from one jurisdiction to the other. I am just inferring this from common practise in consumer laws. The well known cases (car manufacturers, etc.) all relate to the failure of the producer to alert their customers about grave defects they had known about for a while.
The offer of a free replacement of a defective application may be all that is required in some cases. In other cases the vendor might be expected to actively alert its customers with support contracts. This is something free software is good at and is standard practice already in many cases.
Now we finally know what a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) degree is good for. These people know how to determine whether a MineSweeper layout is consistent.
;-)
Is there an equivalent problem for the Solitaire Expert?
ISO/ANSI standards are at least published! That's orders of magnitudes better than undocumented (pseudo-) standards.
Price isn't the issue, freedom is! Unfortunately, this mantra has been repeated so often, that people don't think about its meaning anymore. So let me try to rephrase it, even if imprefectly: commericalization isn't the issue, open standards are.
Having an MS Office port available for Linux improves the situation from what we have now. We would still have to fight for getting the MS Office file formats documented and adhered to but at least we would be free to choose Linux as the underlying OS.
It would be arrogant to force other people not to use MS Windows if they like it. Having commercial programs available and making people pay for them is OK! What's not OK is to be unable to come up with free (as in freedom / open source) alternative due to undocumented (pseudo-)standards that on top of it are changing too fast!
When people mention "free speech" vs. "free beer" all they want to point out is that GNU GPL doesn't care about the money aspect but stresses the rights and resposibilities with respect to the code.
Rather than nitpicking about words I suggest to accept whatever license the author chooses. That includes refraining to use proprietary software if you don't want to pay the price.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that buying software from a company (be that Microsoft or RedHat or anyone) will prevent any failure of their system deserves such failures. This is what support contracts are for. I wonder how many decision makers confuse buying software with buying support. Microsoft propaganda certainly aims at spreading such misinformation (dare I say FUD).
In addition there are many software patents considered void because the patented ideas are obvious (and thus violate patent law). The XOR patent is usually quoted in this context. There is hardly a chance a small software company can know all the relevant patents let alone fight the bad ones in court, which would be the constitutional/legally correct thing to do.
It all boils down to whether society profits from software patents. With industrial manufacturing the decision of most of todays industrial nations is to support the patent system. For other things like mathematics, law, and to a large extent basic research including medicine these same industrial nations won't grant the protection of patents. Software currently falls under the patent system but the discussion is far from over.
This article or the League for Programming Freedom have a few arguments.
The authors of BO2K on the other hand have clearly stated their intention to provide a system management tool. They even point out the potential danger when not properly handled and when combined with the security hole provided by the MS-Word macro language.
The question is who decides. Maybe now big companies like Microsoft have one more weapon to crush small competitors writing power tools.
On their web page they say, they have discontinued support for VBIX but the provide something called Instant Converter
I have no experience with either of them and can't comment on how well they work.
The word open has a track record of being misused in exactly the way Microsoft does now: i.e. pretending to be a nice neighbor while retaining as much control/power as possible. On the other hand free has an matching track record of always being in need of explaining.
Between the two the pendulum will swing back and forth while the idea keeps working just fine.
Therefore, no! I'm not getting nervous! Words will continue to get misused and we will continue to explain the idea.
Break-in scripts/recipes are designed and security holes fixed by looking at the code and protocols/specifications. E.g., take buffer overruns. Functions like gets in the C library are infamous for the security problems they create. So you can specifically search for those holes. Or take the crashme tests. They work because of the specification that no user process shall be able to take down any system task, let alone the kernel.
crashme type testing is incidentially the most promising type of attack for a new OS like W2K and Microsoft specifically rules out DoS types of attacks. Granted, there are good reasons to rule out DoS, but this only means, that a black box test like this one is rather pointless. Asking the public to crack a setup with entirely open source components on the other hand is more promising.
If any problem is found, so much better for all of us. But it won't improve the system very much and should not be mistaken for improved security.
Preventing unauthorized access from the network is only part of securing a system. Moreover, since W2K is mostly new code it is indeed unlikely that a black box test will uncover a large fraction of the bugs that certainly exist. It is a good move of Microsoft and there will certainly be plenty of people trying to break into the machine. However, it may give a false sense of security, and given Microsoft's track record, they are planning to fall for it.
There is a clear difference in asking the public to do a free (gratis) beta test and opening up the code for public scrutiny. Those of us who have followed the Unix history for long enough know, that as system administrators we have been giving the Unix vendors as hard a time as Microsoft when they were withholding necessary information. That is why BSD and Linux are so highly regarded among the professionals. And that is why they are among the most secure operating systems around.
The world is not quite that simple. E.g., I happen to have chosen Latex over MS-Word for my personal document processing needs. But alas, collaborations with others demand that I read and edit MS-Word documents occasionally and this has become more of a problem since e-mail has become ubiquitous.
It doesn't matter what I like and don't like in Latex or MS-Word. What matters is that I have no choice but to use MS-Word in some cases. The document format isn't anywhere near being a standard, and so far no MS alternative has been compatible enough with MS-Word. Even different versions of MS-Word can't agree on the same layout for the same document to the extent of dropping information here and there. And the problem is, I don't have the choice!
I wish the situation were as simple as to be my choice only.
This whole issue of software patents and related issues with copyright is at the heart of the GNU/FSF movement. Currently, most everyone in the Open Source movement is still playing fair so that the Free Software advocates seem overly zealous. However, in the not-so-distant future we may well be glad that some people held the torch.
This is not as clear cut as you may think it is. "x times faster than modem" doesn't specify which services this applies to. If they are trying to limit speed on uploads and home web servers as it seems, this may indeed lead to faster access for the majority of their customers just browsing the web.
You may like this or not, but calling it fraud is a little too quick. Review your contract and take your money elsewhere if you don't like the terms. On the other hand you may find out that you'll be better off browsing the web.