Sure, in a saturated market a large drop in price is usually an anti-competetive move, or a drop in quality. Sometimes it's because of some great innovation that truly dropped costs.
But, when a company has its monopoly rights taken away, a big pricing drop is only natural and often comes with an increase in quality of service.
I highly doubt it honestly costs anywhere near $50 a year to run the service. I think that it could probably be done around $5-$10 a year without a drop in service.
The way DNS requests are cached pretty well assures that the bandwidth requirements don't kill you. If it's a busy domain it'll simply be more likely to be in a cache when a user requests it.
But, I don't think domain names are here to stay.
Something like "Real Names (tm?)" will probably take over. Then web lookups would be more like a yellow pages phone book. With some sort of caching... The first time you look for Slashdot it would suggest all the alternatives, the next time it'd remember your choice unless you asked for the list again.
Seems silly to limit ourselves to this silly naming scheme. It's already hitting limits similar to phone numbers. Not only are a lot of the obvious and good names going, but the.com/.org/etc thing is just making people register any and all applicable suffixes, like with the 1-800/888 thing. And to avoid things like microsfot.com, companies are registering all the likely typos... Sheesh. Am I the only one who thinks the system is close to finished?
Like all performance hacks, though, this one has a cost: the non-paged pool is kept as small as it possibly can be. After all, every locked page is a page that ordinary applications can't use (or, at least, shouldn't use.) Moreover, the NPP doesn't grow, and can't make use of virtual memory. (If you grow the NPP, then you risk taking a page to which another process was paging. As to why it can't use virtual memory...well, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. Remember, though, that it is the non-paged pool.)
I'm betting that this is what is happening to W2K. Kepp in mind that it's been taking many thousands of bogus hits per second, and every one of those hits requires it to grab a tiny bit of non-paged memory. It becomes an elementary exercise in queueing theory to recognize that there exists a critical rate beyond which the queue of owned blocks will inevitably grow without bound. Since this implies that for any W2K machine, there exists a driving speed beyond which the machine will eventually run out of NPP, and halt hard.
Ouch.
"An elementary exercise in queueing"... Is it just me, or is it also elementary to keep track of the relative value of each item being cache (or not paged out) and when the list is getting full, start throwing out the items at the bottom of the list, even if they'd normally be kept in a non-overworked machine?
It might take a bit more work, but it sounds like one of those fairly obvious tweaks.
Isn't this (talking about how not paging anything consumes all available ram) sort of like talking about nicing all processes to the same level and wondering why realtime apps like MP3s are skipping?
But, I don't understand why you take it for granted that both OSes leaked memory. I mean, if I program of mine leaks memory under any conditions, I don't release it.
It's simple. Provide ways for people to support themselves, or they'll make one. If you don't let people work to survive, they'll *take* what they need.
And I for one wouldn't blame them one bit.
There's a difference between not wanting to work and not being able to.
If you had children you had to take care of and didn't have any way of legally raising money would you sit there and watch them starve or get a baseball bat and go mug some rich fucker as he was getting out of his Jag?
And if those children barely manage to survive, what choice are they going to have except to do the same thing?
There are a lot more 'poor' people than rich people, so either treat them with a little respect, like the humans they are, or don't be suprised when they decide to take what the system has taken away from them.
I know it's the Quake symbol, I was there while the drawing was made and we were all talking about it, not to mention that I am a rabid Quake fan and all.
I just want to know what if Illiad was looking for the tatoo or not..:)
How to properly allocate string space? Well, malloc() works..
You mean though, how to allocate enough space that you don't get overflows.
Can't be done. Any buffer you can allocate can be overflowed if someone tries hard enough.
What you need to do is allocate a certain buffer, n bytes for instance, and read only n-1 bytes from the input. Use an fgets() call to read a certain number of bytes, or if you're reading one byte at a time, simply keep track of how many you've read and when it gets to n-1, write a zero to terminate it and exit.
Being that ram is 'cheap', I usually allocate 4k buffers at a minimum, even for command lines and other 'small' strings. Then I use a strncpy or fgets to read data into the string. Both of these functions have the benefit of reading a certain maximum number of bytes and then terminating, regardless of hitting the end of the string.
I can't see many reasons to make strings dynamic for the most part. Simply allocate as much space as you're going to need in the worst case. (Unless that worse case is a megabyte-long string...)
Probably because except for the celebrities (ESR, Gates, etc) everyone in UF is based on local people and there were no minorities in the office. (Not suprising, Vancouver has a moderately large Asian population, but other than that, is mainly European.)
It's easy to imagine someone taking an existing project, forks it, and with the benefit of more developers, makes it looks nicer. Then they release a functionally identicaly, but spifier version, except that they don't do it with open source. And then, they make minor tweaks, breaking compatibility so that their version works with both, but your version won't work with theirs. And, if they have the ability to force preinstall of their version, many users will stick with it because they can't change.
In such a way a company like MS could fork an open source OS and supporting apps, and deny most users the benefits of open source.
If any of the code I write is in something you write, then your work isn't completely original, and still benefits from what I wrote. If you can't handle the fact that modifying code doesn't make it your own, then you're no better than MS. Go pick on your baby brother.
Perhaps Linux does hold back the development a bit, but that's also a good thing. Having everyone add in their own favorite performance tweak, or little fix, will eventually bloat the codebase. If Linux makes a serious mistake, all the other big names will corner him and let him know, but if his only mistake is being a little timid with the stability of the OS...
Besides, he's not going to veto something if it proves to work consistently in test releases. At worse it'll just take a year or so for something to be proven to the point where it gets folded in.
Atually, probably the only thing that would be restricted would be saying that you wrote it, if you stood to benefit from having people believe that.
Lies aren't illegal unless you have intent to defraud (or are in court, etc).
If Microsoft took a public-domain program and then claimed that they wrote it, they'd (imho) be attempting to defraud people because if they claim to have written it, you should be able to expect them to understand it well enough to fix it, etc.
You probably wouldn't win against MS, but considering that anything short of full disclosure can be seen as fraud in some instances, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of this.
But, all said, this wouldn't be copyright protection. Similar to there being a law against you hitting someone with a book, even if the book was free and the information in the public domain.
The point of the GPL is not to enforce any rules upon USERS of the software. The license only dictates what you may do with the source code! And that's different. It's a copyrighted work that you modify. And because copyrights are universal on all 'creative' works unless specifically renounced, you can't claim ignorance. You had to know that the source code was copyrighted so not looking for the license is no excuse. (The GPL is actually less restrictive than the copyright laws would default to. The GPL lets you use all of the code, with only a few restrictions. Fair use of non-GPLed (or BSDLed, etc) code would be much smaller.
So, you go to edit the code, find the license agreement, and agree to the terms of the license implicitly when you use the copyrighted material.
And, this thing about being under the legal age... Try commiting a crime in front of a police officer if you're under age. I guarantee you'll be hauled in. The charges may be lighter or nonexistant, but you will be arrested. And, what does it matter? Assume someone in a non-signing country (to the copyright treaties) does the license-violating work on the source code and distributes it. Is this any different than someone in those countries setting up a warez or mp3 site? They may not be breaking their laws, but by downloading the copyrighted materials, or in the case of the source code, material which has been modified in a way the license doesn't allow for, will be illegal in your area.
The defense against EULAs is that you bought the product and there was no contract then, and then when you go to use what you own, they try to get you to agree to a contract, but because you already own the product, they aren't offering you anything, so the contract isn't valid. That doesn't apply to the license agreements because you haven't paid anything for the source code, but are assumed to be getting value out of it if you use it (if it had no value, you wouldn't use it.)
I know they do, but they do it by promoting my software and other software that I support, and by giving it away for free.
Redhat isn't trying to convince people not to use one application or distribution to make theirs more popular. I don't see how you could ever compare Redhat with companies like MS.
Redhat makes money by helping Linux. Other companies make money by hurting the competition.
Re:Bean was cool, but what about Alai?
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 1
Sure, other characters may have been more personable, but what made the story accessible to most everyone on/. and all of our peers is that Ender was so fucked up.
I dunno about others here, but I really indentified with Ender. I don't think I ever learned anything from school that they were trying to teach me. I aced all of the tests that I took with no marks lower than 98%, yet talked to very few people at school. Math contests and stuff were trivial, multiplayer games were easy because I could see patterns in other people behaviour and act upon these.
Not that I'm *the* most brilliant kid in the world, or even was at the time, but given that my world wasn't (until I discovered the net) much bigger than my neighborhood and school, I was.
I think we've all felt the loneliness of Ender's situation.
If he was better adjusted, well. It'd be an interesting story, but it wouldn't be the same. He'd be more like a young Lazarus Long.
There's a pretty easy solution. Online voting. A description of the issue along with opinion pieces by anyone who wants to comment, moderated up if it's a popular piece (so you can get the gist of the issue, and opinions about it from both sides). Then you vote on it, or proxy your vote to someone else you think can do a better job of it.
And if you don't like how they're doing, or feel strongly enough about an issue to vote yourself, you take back your vote and control it yourself. It'd be like instant recall legislation. All 'elected' representative would face instant recall if they pissed people off enough to make those people want to cast their own votes.
Terms in office could be decided every six months based on the two-hundred people with the most votes proxied to them.
The only real problem I see would be in getting the current system out of power. A lot of people would NOT do well in a system where they were actually accountable to the people they supposedly represent, and would fight a system like this.
Remember, we live in a 'representative democracy' not a democracy. In a democracy we'd all vote on all the issues. In a representative democracy, we vote on who will best (least badly?) represent us and then trust them to vote as we'd want.
This system could even be designed to prevent 'bread and circuses'. Simply require a higher majority to vote in changes to existing law.
And, if it all comes down around our ears and a dictator takes power, we'd have proven that we (collectively) deserve that.
If you don't want someone to do something, you can ask, but they can ignore you. Or, you can write a licensing agreement and they can ignore you and write their own software, or do as you ask and use yours. That's perfectly free.
If you think the GPL restricts freedom, consider the use of a non-propogating license... If someone uses your (modified) code and don't release it at all, the users aren't getting any benefits of what you wrote. So, one clause intended to control the robber-barons of the world, or monopolistic practices. Your choice.
I'm with Bruce. I'm not going to be an unpaid employee of a company I wouldn't work for if they paid me!
They DID try to communicate directly with S@H, but they were brushed off and ignored.
I personally think it is VERY news-worthy that this project is double-processing everything (and not for verification purposes) and using an inefficient client.
If I'm going to donate my time/money/resources to someone/thing, I want to make sure that they use my resources in an efficient way.
If I wanted to waste the CPU cycles, I'd run a screensaver. Or I'd shut off the computer and save a little electricity.
The best thing about the SETI@HOME client vs the RC5 client is that you can substitute planted positives. In RC5 you'd need to have the key already to send a known positive to a client to check them. When SETI@HOME where there are MANY potential positive results and they could easily manufacture a block of data that would generate a positive result if the client properly processes it, so they can use CRC checks to make sure people don't return false negatives, and known-positives to make sure people are returning the proper results in all cases.
One suggestion though would be to drop the size of the blocks if possible. They'd get more casual users (who is sounds like they want) by making it so that 5-10 hours would process a block instead of 40-50 (on a low-end P2) so that someone could have a feeling of accomplishment overnight instead of over a week.
Well, it doesn't even matter if it's released with a license that allows any derivative work to be made for non-private (testing, etc) uses.
Ideally it would be open source to help people run future projects like this, etc.
But, the current task is only to waste as few cycles as possible while cranking out SETI blocks. To do this they don't need to allow derivative forked projects or anything. All they need to do is let people read the code (or even parts of it ala d.net's RC5) so that we can suggest improvements.
A GPL or BSDL-ish license would only be icing on the cake.
Nobody is saying the GPL is more popular. I didn't see anyone saying that n% of unixes were open source...
The reason GPL is better is because it keeps people from closing the source again. If I write open source software to benefit my fellow computer users, I don't want someone turning around and closing that source later.
You would say that the GPL handles this by restricting freedom. But, I'd say that the freedom to plagarize code isn't one that I particularly care if I withhold from somebody whose only use of it would be to deny any benefits of open source to future users.
ie: BSD helps microsoft. Evidence: Win95(etc) TCP/IP based on BSD code, almost a direct ripoff. This is known because the attacks that work on BSD derivatives also worked identically on MS products.
GPL hurts companies like Microsoft. Not only can they not (legally) take a complete application like Apache, steal all the good innovations, close the source, and stick an MS label on it, but they have to compete with a project that they can't kill by forking to death.
If you can give me an example of how the GPL hurts users, the people who will run potential code that I may write, by guaranteeing that it will stay open source, well... I'd like to hear it.
You accept an implicit contract when agreeing to purchase. This basically means that you have entered into a contract to do what seems reasonable by offering to buy merchandise that a merchant makes available for purchase.
If the merchant wishes to make any ammendmants to this contract, they must be stated before the offer. This means, for instance, posting an "As Is - All sales final" sign over the merchandise, altering you to the deal. Otherwise, you'd be entitled to a refund if the merchandise didn't perform as expected (ie, you were sold a broken unit.)
Any contract requires consideration for both parties. In other words, you and they both have to get something out of it. You also can't be held to a contract that you are unaware of (with some very limited exceptions). The EULA, if in the box, or otherwise difficult to read, is invalid for at least two reasons. 1) You didn't know what it said, even if you knew it was there, thus you can't be expected to have agreed to it. 2) You don't receive anything for agreeing to it because you already paid for the package, so unless they offer it with an incentive ("Sign this and we'll send you a rebate for the product") it's not valid.
I'm sure people would like you to think that EULAs are binding, and would really love to change enough laws to make them binding, but at this point, they're completely worthless.
Re:Can't wait for those exploits
on
UCITA is passed
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Back Orifice and other trojans don't require holes in your operating system.
Think about it. Back Orifice basically gives you the power that telnetting into a unix box with root would give you. If telnet isn't a security hole, then back orifice isn't.
The whole security problem comes when someone runs code that someone else sends them. If you install software on your computer and are taken advantage of with that software, then it's the fault of that software, not the OS.
If offering to hide processes from casual browsing, providing net connections, etc, are holes, well then the most secure OS would be DOS 3.3 on my apple//+ because it didn't do any of that. Of course, it wouldn't use anything except 5.25 inch floppies, but 140k is enough for anyone...
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto. It's great.
And you'd be suprised how fast stuff loads.
Sure, in a saturated market a large drop in price is usually an anti-competetive move, or a drop in quality. Sometimes it's because of some great innovation that truly dropped costs.
.com/.org/etc thing is just making people register any and all applicable suffixes, like with the 1-800/888 thing. And to avoid things like microsfot.com, companies are registering all the likely typos... Sheesh. Am I the only one who thinks the system is close to finished?
But, when a company has its monopoly rights taken away, a big pricing drop is only natural and often comes with an increase in quality of service.
I highly doubt it honestly costs anywhere near $50 a year to run the service. I think that it could probably be done around $5-$10 a year without a drop in service.
The way DNS requests are cached pretty well assures that the bandwidth requirements don't kill you. If it's a busy domain it'll simply be more likely to be in a cache when a user requests it.
But, I don't think domain names are here to stay.
Something like "Real Names (tm?)" will probably take over. Then web lookups would be more like a yellow pages phone book. With some sort of caching... The first time you look for Slashdot it would suggest all the alternatives, the next time it'd remember your choice unless you asked for the list again.
Seems silly to limit ourselves to this silly naming scheme. It's already hitting limits similar to phone numbers. Not only are a lot of the obvious and good names going, but the
I'm betting that this is what is happening to W2K. Kepp in mind that it's been taking many thousands of bogus hits per second, and every one of those hits requires it to grab a tiny bit of non-paged memory. It becomes an elementary exercise in queueing theory to recognize that there exists a critical rate beyond which the queue of owned blocks will inevitably grow without bound. Since this implies that for any W2K machine, there exists a driving speed beyond which the machine will eventually run out of NPP, and halt hard.
Ouch.
"An elementary exercise in queueing"... Is it just me, or is it also elementary to keep track of the relative value of each item being cache (or not paged out) and when the list is getting full, start throwing out the items at the bottom of the list, even if they'd normally be kept in a non-overworked machine?
It might take a bit more work, but it sounds like one of those fairly obvious tweaks.
Isn't this (talking about how not paging anything consumes all available ram) sort of like talking about nicing all processes to the same level and wondering why realtime apps like MP3s are skipping?
But, I don't understand why you take it for granted that both OSes leaked memory. I mean, if I program of mine leaks memory under any conditions, I don't release it.
It's simple. Provide ways for people to support themselves, or they'll make one. If you don't let people work to survive, they'll *take* what they need.
And I for one wouldn't blame them one bit.
There's a difference between not wanting to work and not being able to.
If you had children you had to take care of and didn't have any way of legally raising money would you sit there and watch them starve or get a baseball bat and go mug some rich fucker as he was getting out of his Jag?
And if those children barely manage to survive, what choice are they going to have except to do the same thing?
There are a lot more 'poor' people than rich people, so either treat them with a little respect, like the humans they are, or don't be suprised when they decide to take what the system has taken away from them.
And honestly, people like you will deserve it.
I know it's the Quake symbol, I was there while the drawing was made and we were all talking about it, not to mention that I am a rabid Quake fan and all.
:)
I just want to know what if Illiad was looking for the tatoo or not..
How to properly allocate string space? Well, malloc() works..
You mean though, how to allocate enough space that you don't get overflows.
Can't be done. Any buffer you can allocate can be overflowed if someone tries hard enough.
What you need to do is allocate a certain buffer, n bytes for instance, and read only n-1 bytes from the input. Use an fgets() call to read a certain number of bytes, or if you're reading one byte at a time, simply keep track of how many you've read and when it gets to n-1, write a zero to terminate it and exit.
Being that ram is 'cheap', I usually allocate 4k buffers at a minimum, even for command lines and other 'small' strings. Then I use a strncpy or fgets to read data into the string. Both of these functions have the benefit of reading a certain maximum number of bytes and then terminating, regardless of hitting the end of the string.
I can't see many reasons to make strings dynamic for the most part. Simply allocate as much space as you're going to need in the worst case. (Unless that worse case is a megabyte-long string...)
Adobe Illustrator and a Wacom tablet I believe.
(You can tell the Wacom tablets from the texture of the lines.)
Probably because except for the celebrities (ESR, Gates, etc) everyone in UF is based on local people and there were no minorities in the office. (Not suprising, Vancouver has a moderately large Asian population, but other than that, is mainly European.)
I wouldn't imagine it's at all deliberate.
From what you saw there, does Iambe have a 'Q' tatoo as seen in This Picture?
Does Arcterex really look like his picture on the UFie page? If so, did his family get a good settlement from the malpractice suit? :)
Not true.
It's easy to imagine someone taking an existing project, forks it, and with the benefit of more developers, makes it looks nicer. Then they release a functionally identicaly, but spifier version, except that they don't do it with open source. And then, they make minor tweaks, breaking compatibility so that their version works with both, but your version won't work with theirs. And, if they have the ability to force preinstall of their version, many users will stick with it because they can't change.
In such a way a company like MS could fork an open source OS and supporting apps, and deny most users the benefits of open source.
If any of the code I write is in something you write, then your work isn't completely original, and still benefits from what I wrote. If you can't handle the fact that modifying code doesn't make it your own, then you're no better than MS. Go pick on your baby brother.
Perhaps Linux does hold back the development a bit, but that's also a good thing. Having everyone add in their own favorite performance tweak, or little fix, will eventually bloat the codebase. If Linux makes a serious mistake, all the other big names will corner him and let him know, but if his only mistake is being a little timid with the stability of the OS...
Besides, he's not going to veto something if it proves to work consistently in test releases. At worse it'll just take a year or so for something to be proven to the point where it gets folded in.
Atually, probably the only thing that would be restricted would be saying that you wrote it, if you stood to benefit from having people believe that.
Lies aren't illegal unless you have intent to defraud (or are in court, etc).
If Microsoft took a public-domain program and then claimed that they wrote it, they'd (imho) be attempting to defraud people because if they claim to have written it, you should be able to expect them to understand it well enough to fix it, etc.
You probably wouldn't win against MS, but considering that anything short of full disclosure can be seen as fraud in some instances, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of this.
But, all said, this wouldn't be copyright protection. Similar to there being a law against you hitting someone with a book, even if the book was free and the information in the public domain.
The point of the GPL is not to enforce any rules upon USERS of the software. The license only dictates what you may do with the source code! And that's different. It's a copyrighted work that you modify. And because copyrights are universal on all 'creative' works unless specifically renounced, you can't claim ignorance. You had to know that the source code was copyrighted so not looking for the license is no excuse. (The GPL is actually less restrictive than the copyright laws would default to. The GPL lets you use all of the code, with only a few restrictions. Fair use of non-GPLed (or BSDLed, etc) code would be much smaller.
So, you go to edit the code, find the license agreement, and agree to the terms of the license implicitly when you use the copyrighted material.
And, this thing about being under the legal age... Try commiting a crime in front of a police officer if you're under age. I guarantee you'll be hauled in. The charges may be lighter or nonexistant, but you will be arrested. And, what does it matter? Assume someone in a non-signing country (to the copyright treaties) does the license-violating work on the source code and distributes it. Is this any different than someone in those countries setting up a warez or mp3 site? They may not be breaking their laws, but by downloading the copyrighted materials, or in the case of the source code, material which has been modified in a way the license doesn't allow for, will be illegal in your area.
The defense against EULAs is that you bought the product and there was no contract then, and then when you go to use what you own, they try to get you to agree to a contract, but because you already own the product, they aren't offering you anything, so the contract isn't valid. That doesn't apply to the license agreements because you haven't paid anything for the source code, but are assumed to be getting value out of it if you use it (if it had no value, you wouldn't use it.)
I know they do, but they do it by promoting my software and other software that I support, and by giving it away for free.
Redhat isn't trying to convince people not to use one application or distribution to make theirs more popular. I don't see how you could ever compare Redhat with companies like MS.
Redhat makes money by helping Linux. Other companies make money by hurting the competition.
Sure, other characters may have been more personable, but what made the story accessible to most everyone on /. and all of our peers is that Ender was so fucked up.
I dunno about others here, but I really indentified with Ender. I don't think I ever learned anything from school that they were trying to teach me. I aced all of the tests that I took with no marks lower than 98%, yet talked to very few people at school. Math contests and stuff were trivial, multiplayer games were easy because I could see patterns in other people behaviour and act upon these.
Not that I'm *the* most brilliant kid in the world, or even was at the time, but given that my world wasn't (until I discovered the net) much bigger than my neighborhood and school, I was.
I think we've all felt the loneliness of Ender's situation.
If he was better adjusted, well. It'd be an interesting story, but it wouldn't be the same. He'd be more like a young Lazarus Long.
Not really.
There's a pretty easy solution. Online voting. A description of the issue along with opinion pieces by anyone who wants to comment, moderated up if it's a popular piece (so you can get the gist of the issue, and opinions about it from both sides). Then you vote on it, or proxy your vote to someone else you think can do a better job of it.
And if you don't like how they're doing, or feel strongly enough about an issue to vote yourself, you take back your vote and control it yourself. It'd be like instant recall legislation. All 'elected' representative would face instant recall if they pissed people off enough to make those people want to cast their own votes.
Terms in office could be decided every six months based on the two-hundred people with the most votes proxied to them.
The only real problem I see would be in getting the current system out of power. A lot of people would NOT do well in a system where they were actually accountable to the people they supposedly represent, and would fight a system like this.
Remember, we live in a 'representative democracy' not a democracy. In a democracy we'd all vote on all the issues. In a representative democracy, we vote on who will best (least badly?) represent us and then trust them to vote as we'd want.
This system could even be designed to prevent 'bread and circuses'. Simply require a higher majority to vote in changes to existing law.
And, if it all comes down around our ears and a dictator takes power, we'd have proven that we (collectively) deserve that.
It all comes down to protecting your rights.
If you don't want someone to do something, you can ask, but they can ignore you. Or, you can write a licensing agreement and they can ignore you and write their own software, or do as you ask and use yours. That's perfectly free.
If you think the GPL restricts freedom, consider the use of a non-propogating license... If someone uses your (modified) code and don't release it at all, the users aren't getting any benefits of what you wrote. So, one clause intended to control the robber-barons of the world, or monopolistic practices. Your choice.
I'm with Bruce. I'm not going to be an unpaid employee of a company I wouldn't work for if they paid me!
They DID try to communicate directly with S@H, but they were brushed off and ignored.
I personally think it is VERY news-worthy that this project is double-processing everything (and not for verification purposes) and using an inefficient client.
If I'm going to donate my time/money/resources to someone/thing, I want to make sure that they use my resources in an efficient way.
If I wanted to waste the CPU cycles, I'd run a screensaver. Or I'd shut off the computer and save a little electricity.
The best thing about the SETI@HOME client vs the RC5 client is that you can substitute planted positives. In RC5 you'd need to have the key already to send a known positive to a client to check them. When SETI@HOME where there are MANY potential positive results and they could easily manufacture a block of data that would generate a positive result if the client properly processes it, so they can use CRC checks to make sure people don't return false negatives, and known-positives to make sure people are returning the proper results in all cases.
One suggestion though would be to drop the size of the blocks if possible. They'd get more casual users (who is sounds like they want) by making it so that 5-10 hours would process a block instead of 40-50 (on a low-end P2) so that someone could have a feeling of accomplishment overnight instead of over a week.
Well, it doesn't even matter if it's released with a license that allows any derivative work to be made for non-private (testing, etc) uses.
Ideally it would be open source to help people run future projects like this, etc.
But, the current task is only to waste as few cycles as possible while cranking out SETI blocks. To do this they don't need to allow derivative forked projects or anything. All they need to do is let people read the code (or even parts of it ala d.net's RC5) so that we can suggest improvements.
A GPL or BSDL-ish license would only be icing on the cake.
Nobody is saying the GPL is more popular. I didn't see anyone saying that n% of unixes were open source...
The reason GPL is better is because it keeps people from closing the source again. If I write open source software to benefit my fellow computer users, I don't want someone turning around and closing that source later.
You would say that the GPL handles this by restricting freedom. But, I'd say that the freedom to plagarize code isn't one that I particularly care if I withhold from somebody whose only use of it would be to deny any benefits of open source to future users.
ie: BSD helps microsoft. Evidence: Win95(etc) TCP/IP based on BSD code, almost a direct ripoff. This is known because the attacks that work on BSD derivatives also worked identically on MS products.
GPL hurts companies like Microsoft. Not only can they not (legally) take a complete application like Apache, steal all the good innovations, close the source, and stick an MS label on it, but they have to compete with a project that they can't kill by forking to death.
If you can give me an example of how the GPL hurts users, the people who will run potential code that I may write, by guaranteeing that it will stay open source, well... I'd like to hear it.
You accept an implicit contract when agreeing to purchase. This basically means that you have entered into a contract to do what seems reasonable by offering to buy merchandise that a merchant makes available for purchase.
If the merchant wishes to make any ammendmants to this contract, they must be stated before the offer. This means, for instance, posting an "As Is - All sales final" sign over the merchandise, altering you to the deal. Otherwise, you'd be entitled to a refund if the merchandise didn't perform as expected (ie, you were sold a broken unit.)
Any contract requires consideration for both parties. In other words, you and they both have to get something out of it. You also can't be held to a contract that you are unaware of (with some very limited exceptions). The EULA, if in the box, or otherwise difficult to read, is invalid for at least two reasons. 1) You didn't know what it said, even if you knew it was there, thus you can't be expected to have agreed to it. 2) You don't receive anything for agreeing to it because you already paid for the package, so unless they offer it with an incentive ("Sign this and we'll send you a rebate for the product") it's not valid.
I'm sure people would like you to think that EULAs are binding, and would really love to change enough laws to make them binding, but at this point, they're completely worthless.
Actually, Back Orifice and other trojans don't require holes in your operating system.
//+ because it didn't do any of that. Of course, it wouldn't use anything except 5.25 inch floppies, but 140k is enough for anyone...
Think about it. Back Orifice basically gives you the power that telnetting into a unix box with root would give you. If telnet isn't a security hole, then back orifice isn't.
The whole security problem comes when someone runs code that someone else sends them. If you install software on your computer and are taken advantage of with that software, then it's the fault of that software, not the OS.
If offering to hide processes from casual browsing, providing net connections, etc, are holes, well then the most secure OS would be DOS 3.3 on my apple
Gibson's books aren't science-fiction. They're so-so adventure books set in a badly explained, pseudo-science nightmare.
Someone once said "Write what you know." It's obvious that Gibson does NOT follow that advice.
His books would be much better if he hadn't tried to build up a world he didn't understand.
In almost all cases, whichever came first is better.