On the other hand, DannyB is an intellectual property lawyer, and you aren't.
Furthermore, "the ffmpeg folks" would include "any contributor to ffmpeg", so your point is moot.
Most non-GL fullscreen games (yes, they do exists) could benefit from resolution and color depth changing.
Come to think of it, image editors could also benefit, by virtue of the fact that 16-bit color space and 24-bit colorspace don't actually overlap, iirc. Allowing artists to switch between color depths on-the-fly to check that their images still look good could probably be useful. (How's that for a purely hypothetical example?)
If they really wanted to sell more PCs, Intel would pay EA to include Macs as well. They'd cost twice as much as the P4 PCs, and they would generate less happiness points (or whatever the hell they're called...).
I've seen lots of comments about how Microsoft is evil and is trying to eliminate all their competitors in the personal firewal market and how they are going to spy on what the users have installed and how they will block web sites a programs too, along with the drivers, but nobody seems to have realized the true implications of this modification to Windows, instead of all the paranoid stupidity.
First of all, this provides another revenue stream for Microsoft. In order to get their the drivers marked as Windows XP Compatible (and the digital signature that goes along with this), hardware vendors will undoubtedly have to pay Microsoft some fee, whether it be for the signature itself or perhaps something slightly more useful (and less greedy), like paying Microsoft to do some testing on the drivers and then providing the certification.
This isn't particularly bad (although, Microsoft is once again abusing its monopoly power to gain money, who else are the hardware companies going to make hardware for?).
What does worry me is the fact that this provides an easy way for Microsoft to infulence hardware manufacturers. If they don'y follow Microsoft's "suggestions", the testing and certification could be "accidently" delayed, while all the hardware company's competitors deliver their products to market before them.
What will those suggestions be?
Probably something like "Hey, you know those weird communist hippy freaks who work on that evil anti-American OS called Linux? We want you to stop providing them with technical specifications and hardware drivers. Thanks, and have a nice day!"
Linux isn't experiencing anything remotely similar to DLL Hell.
DLL Hell is when Foo DLL 1.0 and Foo DLL 6.0 both stored in the file foo.dll (unlike libfoo.so.1.0 and libfoo.so.6.0) and brain damaged installer programs blindly replace foo.dll version 6.0 with foo.dll version 1.0, thus breaking every single program that depends on the newer version of foo.dll
Because so many of these crappy programs exist, Microsoft has made an attempt at fixing the problem by introducing the Critical Files Protection mechanism, in which the operating system itself monitors file creations and modifications, looking for these stupid installers as they attempt to replace the new versions with the old versions of the libraries. Attempts at change silently fail, and the installer runs along its merry course without breaking things too badly.
Re:Intresting, but impractical for general web use
on
You Are What You Click
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· Score: 2
Does the phrase "Microsoft Windows XP" mean anything to you ?
Hiding any kind of marketing spyware in a product is bad PR when it is discovered. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
Although, the whole "charging people once wasn't enough, let's charge them as many times as possible" thing does make me wonder about the collective intelligence over there at MSFT...
This is an interesting offshoot of general biometrics research.
Fortunately, in order for it to work, the user needs to be running the tracking software on their computer. Most users will be leary of programs which spy on their input, so the probability of them installing the spyware is very small.
However, there is the possibility that this could be snuck into programs that have other uses and spy on users without their knowledge. (Didn't Comet Cursor do this?) Of course someone will discover it eventually, publicize it, and then be sued by the company for violation of the DMCA. So we're all screwed.
I don't know, existence in nature seems to be a pretty good example of prior art to me.
Honestly, I think that patenting random discoveries (genes and the like) is idiotic.
Think about this scenario: Random company discovers a gene somewhere that does something interesting and patents. Sometime later, a baby is born with this gene due to a natural mutation (assuming a mutation can ever be considered natural). Now what? The baby, which has the gene, is in violation of the random companies patent. Does this mean the parents have to pay license fees? If they can't afford to pay, what happens? Should they go to prison because their child happens to have this gene? The possible rammifications are staggering.
Anyway, the thought that a company can stumble over something and then claim that they actually did something important in finding it and deserve compensation for their efforts is absurd. Anyone can find something by accident, being first to find something that already exists in nature does not give you the right to own it.
Oracle is more of a Unix DB, the Windows support is an after thought. That's probably why Oracle is prevelent in the larger database categories on bigger systems.
Besides, Microsoft has an unfair advantage against anyone who wants to write software for Windows -- they wrote the thing, so they know exactly how to make it go fast. (And if that doesn't work, they can always make everbody elses code go slower. Whether or not they are still doing this is debatable. Its fun to say, though.:-)
Another interesting thing to note is the price per hour metric -- Linux has the highest cost for its category, which implies that if you spend more on hardware for your Win2k server, it will outperform Linux. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen -- I'm sure some poor slob at Microsoft is paid to look for things like this and then send helpful e-mails to various third parties suggesting that they run new DB benchmarks soon.
Still, this is cool. Even if somebody comes out with a new benchmark tomorrow that puts Windows back on top, it still shows that Linux is a contender, not just some weirdo anti-American commie pinko hippie anti-Capitalistic intellectual property destroying OS that doesn't work very well.
Just a note: Although the database was IBM's DB2, the benchmark was done by SGI on 16-way Pentium III Xeon cluster. Also of note is the fact that the nearest competitors were 8-way Pentium III Xeon systems, not clusters, running SQL Server 2000 on Win2k.
My parents had one of their credit cards temporarily disabled due to unusual spending activity.
The reason? Someone was using the credit card number in Europe to buy stuff.
Later, when my parents got home from their trip to Europe (Switzerland, Germany, Italy and briefly England, in case you wondered), they found a nice, helpful message on their answering machine from the credit card company letting them know that there had been some unusual purchases lately and asking if they had perhaps lost a credit card and not noticed it...
The reader-writer semaphore implementation is broken, resulting in processes getting stuck in the D state in down_semaphore. Heavily threaded programs (like Mozilla) are most likely to hit this bug, resulting in lots of stuck threads and an unusable program.
(Nothing actually used the rw-sems until fairly recently, which is why this bug went undetected for so long.)
Also fixed: the iptables FTP connection tracking security hole, some potential filesystem corrupting bugs and a bunch of other bugs that weren't likely to affect anybody.
And Dave Miller's zerocopy networking changes were merged in, which is pretty cool.
Slightly longer answer: Adding ACL support to the kernel would require large-scale changes to the entire VFS, as well as the individual filesystems. This isn't going to happen in a stable kernel series. IIRC, this is one of the major goals for the 2.5 development cycle (along with generic extended atributes and maybe named streams), so the ACL support introduced in 2.5 may be backported to 2.4 (but that would be up to Alan Cox).
Although patches currently exist to add extended attributes and ACL support to the current VFS, I don't think that the kernel gods are entirely happy with its architecture. (This has been a frequent topic on the linux-fsdevel list.)
The
Mozilla ActiveX Project has been around for quite awhile. As to when exactly, I don't know.
Unfortunately, you can't just replace the IE DLLs with a compatible Mozilla implementation. Mozilla is just a web browser/email client/etc. while IE is the whole OS shell, and its DLLs do more than provide web browsing services.
Also, I think the plan is to replace gtkhtml with gtkhtml2. Mozilla is too damn huge!
Mozilla the comprehensive internet client is huge (24 MB on Linux, last time I checked. Which is tiny compared to IE.). However, if you get rid of the mail/news client, HTML editor and themes, it shrinks in size.
Besides, I would prefer a rendering engine capable of doing all of the relevant standards (HTML4, CSS, CSS2, DOM2, XML, MathML, XSL, etc.) mostly correctly and pretty quickly at that. However, I have no idea how well gtkhtml2 supports the standards or displays content.
Mozilla implements (most, all the relevant bits anyway) of the IWebBrowser2 interface, making it a drop in replacement for IE.
However, in order to use Mozilla instead of IE, you have to do a binary patch to every single program that uses the IE control in order to make it use Mozilla instead. (All you need to do is change 16 bytes.)
If Microsoft had created a standard method of defining which CLSID (class ID) to use to create an object that supports the IWebBrowser2 IID (interface ID) (for instance, by storing browser name and CLSID key pairs in the registry and providing a control panel to change which one is the default), it would be trivially easy for the user to choose which web browser they wanted to use and for a program to use that web browser to display content.
I find it odd that people are bashing MS because so many programs are using IE to render HTML.
Think about it. There is a standard way for any program to render HTML in a window. Instead of everyone reinventing the wheel, all a programmer has to do is create a COM object and display it in a window.
Of course, the average Slashdotter is using this as evidence that Microsoft is the tool of Satan and their buildings shall be razed and their children and their children's children unto the fifth generation shall be cursed and despised, etc.
Modularity is good. Standard ways of doing things is good. Code reuse is good.
Now, the fact that there is absolutely no way to replace IE with your web browser of choice is evil (despite the fact that email clients, HTML editors, conferencing software and whatever else can be easily replaced) and the fact that Microsoft is terminally unable to write a program that doesn't serve as a speedy means of either crashing the OS or inviting in unwanted network guests is also evil. So they are the tool of Satan and their buildings shall be razed and their children and their children's children unto the fifth generation shall be cursed and despised, etc.
On a side note, GNOME is doing the same thing. Any program can use gtkhtml to render HTML in a window. Evolution is using it to display email messages (sound familiar?), Red Carpet uses it for UI, and GNOME Help uses it to render content. IIRC, the plan is to eventually replace gtkhtml with Mozilla (which does a much better job of complying to standards and rendering documents than gtkhtml.
Special note of warning, the website has been more messed up than usual over the past few days
Yeah, I just installed the latest IE security updates on my parents computer. One of them (the so-called "VeriSign fix") was dated April 2. Which is a bit odd, considering today is March 29.
This won't work. Audio data is encoded differently than (say) a filesystem. The commands sent to the drive when reading audio data are different than when reading normal data, and the audio commands are unreliable. The CD drive is not physically able to read audio data with any real precision or quality, making programs like cdparanoia necessary. ("Almost" is good enough when Joe User is fast-forwarding through the track.)
$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=512 count=128
dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
My feeling is that it isn't a general release document - for one thing it's actually a PDF, instead of the usual Word document in a self-extracting EXE.
You are of course correct, posting it to a publicly available web site does call into question its trade secret status. However, it can also be viewed as an automated way for them to share their proprietary secrets with other worthy entities, despite the fact that there is no constraint on who can look at it.
Although anyone is free to view the document (providing they promise not to share its contents with anyone outside of their organization), they are not free to use any of the contained information. It has been provided for the purposes of security analysis only, any other use is strictly prohibited.
The end result? Just one more piece of evidence that Microsoft is nothing more than a group of lawyers, marketers, and managers, with the occasional code monkey to do some actual work and no quality-control people in sight.
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.
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On the other hand, DannyB is an intellectual property lawyer, and you aren't. Furthermore, "the ffmpeg folks" would include "any contributor to ffmpeg", so your point is moot.
Linux kernel hacker Pavel Machek claims to have received a job offer from Apple to hack on things ACPI and BIOS related.
Most non-GL fullscreen games (yes, they do exists) could benefit from resolution and color depth changing.
Come to think of it, image editors could also benefit, by virtue of the fact that 16-bit color space and 24-bit colorspace don't actually overlap, iirc. Allowing artists to switch between color depths on-the-fly to check that their images still look good could probably be useful. (How's that for a purely hypothetical example?)
If they really wanted to sell more PCs, Intel would pay EA to include Macs as well. They'd cost twice as much as the P4 PCs, and they would generate less happiness points (or whatever the hell they're called...).
Well, the first season will be released in March and additional season will be released every other month.
That means that there won't be anything worth buying until September or so...
I've seen lots of comments about how Microsoft is evil and is trying to eliminate all their competitors in the personal firewal market and how they are going to spy on what the users have installed and how they will block web sites a programs too, along with the drivers, but nobody seems to have realized the true implications of this modification to Windows, instead of all the paranoid stupidity.
First of all, this provides another revenue stream for Microsoft. In order to get their the drivers marked as Windows XP Compatible (and the digital signature that goes along with this), hardware vendors will undoubtedly have to pay Microsoft some fee, whether it be for the signature itself or perhaps something slightly more useful (and less greedy), like paying Microsoft to do some testing on the drivers and then providing the certification.
This isn't particularly bad (although, Microsoft is once again abusing its monopoly power to gain money, who else are the hardware companies going to make hardware for?).
What does worry me is the fact that this provides an easy way for Microsoft to infulence hardware manufacturers. If they don'y follow Microsoft's "suggestions", the testing and certification could be "accidently" delayed, while all the hardware company's competitors deliver their products to market before them.
What will those suggestions be?
Probably something like "Hey, you know those weird communist hippy freaks who work on that evil anti-American OS called Linux? We want you to stop providing them with technical specifications and hardware drivers. Thanks, and have a nice day!"
Linux isn't experiencing anything remotely similar to DLL Hell.
DLL Hell is when Foo DLL 1.0 and Foo DLL 6.0 both stored in the file foo.dll (unlike libfoo.so.1.0 and libfoo.so.6.0) and brain damaged installer programs blindly replace foo.dll version 6.0 with foo.dll version 1.0, thus breaking every single program that depends on the newer version of foo.dll
Because so many of these crappy programs exist, Microsoft has made an attempt at fixing the problem by introducing the Critical Files Protection mechanism, in which the operating system itself monitors file creations and modifications, looking for these stupid installers as they attempt to replace the new versions with the old versions of the libraries. Attempts at change silently fail, and the installer runs along its merry course without breaking things too badly.
Hiding any kind of marketing spyware in a product is bad PR when it is discovered. Microsoft isn't that stupid.
Although, the whole "charging people once wasn't enough, let's charge them as many times as possible" thing does make me wonder about the collective intelligence over there at MSFT...
This is an interesting offshoot of general biometrics research.
Fortunately, in order for it to work, the user needs to be running the tracking software on their computer. Most users will be leary of programs which spy on their input, so the probability of them installing the spyware is very small.
However, there is the possibility that this could be snuck into programs that have other uses and spy on users without their knowledge. (Didn't Comet Cursor do this?) Of course someone will discover it eventually, publicize it, and then be sued by the company for violation of the DMCA. So we're all screwed.
Welcome to the new dark ages. Have a nice day.
Imagine it: your plane's pilot suddenly has to sneeze, or he develops a nervous tic, or he has a muscle spasm.
"Folk's, I apologize for the rough flying back there, the pilot had to scratch an itch..."
What fun!
I don't know, existence in nature seems to be a pretty good example of prior art to me.
Honestly, I think that patenting random discoveries (genes and the like) is idiotic.
Think about this scenario: Random company discovers a gene somewhere that does something interesting and patents. Sometime later, a baby is born with this gene due to a natural mutation (assuming a mutation can ever be considered natural). Now what? The baby, which has the gene, is in violation of the random companies patent. Does this mean the parents have to pay license fees? If they can't afford to pay, what happens? Should they go to prison because their child happens to have this gene? The possible rammifications are staggering.
Anyway, the thought that a company can stumble over something and then claim that they actually did something important in finding it and deserve compensation for their efforts is absurd. Anyone can find something by accident, being first to find something that already exists in nature does not give you the right to own it.
Oracle is more of a Unix DB, the Windows support is an after thought. That's probably why Oracle is prevelent in the larger database categories on bigger systems.
Besides, Microsoft has an unfair advantage against anyone who wants to write software for Windows -- they wrote the thing, so they know exactly how to make it go fast. (And if that doesn't work, they can always make everbody elses code go slower. Whether or not they are still doing this is debatable. Its fun to say, though. :-)
Another interesting thing to note is the price per hour metric -- Linux has the highest cost for its category, which implies that if you spend more on hardware for your Win2k server, it will outperform Linux. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen -- I'm sure some poor slob at Microsoft is paid to look for things like this and then send helpful e-mails to various third parties suggesting that they run new DB benchmarks soon.
Still, this is cool. Even if somebody comes out with a new benchmark tomorrow that puts Windows back on top, it still shows that Linux is a contender, not just some weirdo anti-American commie pinko hippie anti-Capitalistic intellectual property destroying OS that doesn't work very well.
Just a note: Although the database was IBM's DB2, the benchmark was done by SGI on 16-way Pentium III Xeon cluster. Also of note is the fact that the nearest competitors were 8-way Pentium III Xeon systems, not clusters, running SQL Server 2000 on Win2k.
So reasonable that they've already done it. See www.uspto.gov for a searchable index.
My parents had one of their credit cards temporarily disabled due to unusual spending activity.
The reason? Someone was using the credit card number in Europe to buy stuff.
Later, when my parents got home from their trip to Europe (Switzerland, Germany, Italy and briefly England, in case you wondered), they found a nice, helpful message on their answering machine from the credit card company letting them know that there had been some unusual purchases lately and asking if they had perhaps lost a credit card and not noticed it...
2.4.3 does have serious issues.
The reader-writer semaphore implementation is broken, resulting in processes getting stuck in the D state in down_semaphore. Heavily threaded programs (like Mozilla) are most likely to hit this bug, resulting in lots of stuck threads and an unusable program.
(Nothing actually used the rw-sems until fairly recently, which is why this bug went undetected for so long.)
Also fixed: the iptables FTP connection tracking security hole, some potential filesystem corrupting bugs and a bunch of other bugs that weren't likely to affect anybody.
And Dave Miller's zerocopy networking changes were merged in, which is pretty cool.
Short answer: No
Slightly longer answer:
Adding ACL support to the kernel would require large-scale changes to the entire VFS, as well as the individual filesystems. This isn't going to happen in a stable kernel series. IIRC, this is one of the major goals for the 2.5 development cycle (along with generic extended atributes and maybe named streams), so the ACL support introduced in 2.5 may be backported to 2.4 (but that would be up to Alan Cox).
Although patches currently exist to add extended attributes and ACL support to the current VFS, I don't think that the kernel gods are entirely happy with its architecture. (This has been a frequent topic on the linux-fsdevel list.)
Think p2p2p2p2p2p2p.
The Mozilla ActiveX Project has been around for quite awhile. As to when exactly, I don't know.
Unfortunately, you can't just replace the IE DLLs with a compatible Mozilla implementation. Mozilla is just a web browser/email client/etc. while IE is the whole OS shell, and its DLLs do more than provide web browsing services.
Mozilla the comprehensive internet client is huge (24 MB on Linux, last time I checked. Which is tiny compared to IE.). However, if you get rid of the mail/news client, HTML editor and themes, it shrinks in size.
Besides, I would prefer a rendering engine capable of doing all of the relevant standards (HTML4, CSS, CSS2, DOM2, XML, MathML, XSL, etc.) mostly correctly and pretty quickly at that. However, I have no idea how well gtkhtml2 supports the standards or displays content.
Mozilla implements (most, all the relevant bits anyway) of the IWebBrowser2 interface, making it a drop in replacement for IE.
However, in order to use Mozilla instead of IE, you have to do a binary patch to every single program that uses the IE control in order to make it use Mozilla instead. (All you need to do is change 16 bytes.)
If Microsoft had created a standard method of defining which CLSID (class ID) to use to create an object that supports the IWebBrowser2 IID (interface ID) (for instance, by storing browser name and CLSID key pairs in the registry and providing a control panel to change which one is the default), it would be trivially easy for the user to choose which web browser they wanted to use and for a program to use that web browser to display content.
I find it odd that people are bashing MS because so many programs are using IE to render HTML.
Think about it. There is a standard way for any program to render HTML in a window. Instead of everyone reinventing the wheel, all a programmer has to do is create a COM object and display it in a window.
Of course, the average Slashdotter is using this as evidence that Microsoft is the tool of Satan and their buildings shall be razed and their children and their children's children unto the fifth generation shall be cursed and despised, etc.
Modularity is good. Standard ways of doing things is good. Code reuse is good.
Now, the fact that there is absolutely no way to replace IE with your web browser of choice is evil (despite the fact that email clients, HTML editors, conferencing software and whatever else can be easily replaced) and the fact that Microsoft is terminally unable to write a program that doesn't serve as a speedy means of either crashing the OS or inviting in unwanted network guests is also evil. So they are the tool of Satan and their buildings shall be razed and their children and their children's children unto the fifth generation shall be cursed and despised, etc.
On a side note, GNOME is doing the same thing. Any program can use gtkhtml to render HTML in a window. Evolution is using it to display email messages (sound familiar?), Red Carpet uses it for UI, and GNOME Help uses it to render content. IIRC, the plan is to eventually replace gtkhtml with Mozilla (which does a much better job of complying to standards and rendering documents than gtkhtml.
Yeah, I just installed the latest IE security updates on my parents computer. One of them (the so-called "VeriSign fix") was dated April 2. Which is a bit odd, considering today is March 29.
New math?
This won't work. Audio data is encoded differently than (say) a filesystem. The commands sent to the drive when reading audio data are different than when reading normal data, and the audio commands are unreliable. The CD drive is not physically able to read audio data with any real precision or quality, making programs like cdparanoia necessary. ("Almost" is good enough when Joe User is fast-forwarding through the track.)
$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=512 count=128dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
My feeling is that it isn't a general release document - for one thing it's actually a PDF, instead of the usual Word document in a self-extracting EXE.
You are of course correct, posting it to a publicly available web site does call into question its trade secret status. However, it can also be viewed as an automated way for them to share their proprietary secrets with other worthy entities, despite the fact that there is no constraint on who can look at it.
Although anyone is free to view the document (providing they promise not to share its contents with anyone outside of their organization), they are not free to use any of the contained information. It has been provided for the purposes of security analysis only, any other use is strictly prohibited.
The end result? Just one more piece of evidence that Microsoft is nothing more than a group of lawyers, marketers, and managers, with the occasional code monkey to do some actual work and no quality-control people in sight.
---
The Hotmail addres is my decoy account. I read it approximately once per year.