It seems pretty dubious to me. IBM run some rather decent security so I'd bet they are measuring IBM security service output. Ditto a lot of the other companies listed.
I don't think that it is misleading. There are disagreements at the very core of many fields. There are also deeply messy divides about basic objects between different sciences.
Take a look for example at Egyptology and at Geology on the subject of the Sphinx. It's a nice simple question "Who built the Sphinx and when", its a rather complex non-answer.
Actually the fact Wikipedia can encompass both wel l is nice - also that it is rapidly updated. My paper encyclopedia still says in learned style that the Titanic had a huge hole ripped in it by an Iceberg. Of course we now know thats wrong, but these books change so slowly they are still teaching rubbish nd will do so for many years.
I suspect everyone has ulterior motives. The notion that an encyclopedia can be unbiased is ridiculous when if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
Flaming Wikipedia for inaccuracy is missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has.
#1 You can reuse, reference and reprocess the content. If you want trusted articles then set up a scheme where experts in the field can GPG sign versions of the article that they believe to be correct.
#2 Unlike every other encyclopedia you can take Wikipedia content under license and "fix it", where fixing means adjusting to your own world view. If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can. Thats both powerful and dangerous as you can easily imagine groups with an agenda doing things like issuing 'evolution free' wikipedia variants to schools.
What matters for Wikipedia isn't IMHO whether Sanger has an axe to grind but who is going to build the tools to take this kind of distributed public knowledgebase further.
The EU is a single market which makes these kind of taxes very messy very rapidly. Many people order their blank media from different countries within the EU now in order to avoid levies so no doubt PC mail order will simply migrate over the border too.
That's a problem the EU still hasn't resolved sanely because so many countries have such different views on "fair use" and compensation. At the moment their are plans afoot to unify copyright-collection agency policies and the like across the EU but they are problematic and may get very problematic for things like Creative Commons because they are stuck in the oldthink of "free-cost" v "proprietary" not "non-commercial reuse" v "commercial reuse"
As an overall policy I'm not sure its quite as "assinine" as some posters think. This kind of approach is how radio and copyright was settled originally and people have talked about the same idea for internet and music.
America had been discovered at the point the French were fighting wars all the time. It was happily occupied by native Americans who weren't upsetting too many people except the odd passing viking.
It just happened to get invaded, and then various local terrorist forces (by the current definition) overthrew the "legitimate" goverment.
The supreme irony of course is that the only reason the revolution succeeded was assistance from the French whose new ideals were of a republic and not dissimilar to the US of the time.
And freedom.. Freedom to be persecuted by your own media industry ? Freedom to have your web site (ie your printing press) taken away without legal due process ?
"Freedom" in the USA and many other countries (the UK for example) is a marketing exercise used to control the people. Look beyond it, what matters is not being associated with a word but acting accordingly.
The geologists believe there would be a couple of weeks warning that it was likely to happen, not a couple of hours that it had. You'd have time to cancel deliveries, buy a tent on ebay and move a few miles to higher ground.
You need to push 500,000,000 tons of rock (thats real tons not US tons too). Not only would you need to sneak an awful lot of explosive onto the island you'd have to drill some huge huge holes in the right place in an active volcano (ie rather warm rock below the surface in places) and put all your bombs down it without anyone noticing. As an idea of scale you are talking about disloging an object not dissimilar in size to the Isle of Man. Swatting it with a missle or crashing a plane into it isn't going to have much effect.
It is a model that governments have looked at (that much I know from some stuff where I was involved in helping look at more mundane questions like computer super-viruses "chernobyl meets slammer" etc).
It looks more like a great Bond film than a realistic hazard although it is without a doubt a terrorists dream. Prime time tv coverage for several hours of the wave racing towards New York, unavoidable carnage, powerless governments and all the rest.
That appears to have been answered already. Anyone who talks about "their code" in GPL software made up from code by many contributors has a problem already.
The fork can certainly hide its code until releases, but then it's got all the disadvantages of a proprietary software product - it's hard to work on and has no community. Plus when it comes out a little bit of diff and reading will deal with anything of interest. And obfuscate the changelog - as a user would you trust software whose author has made changes unauditable ?
If the fundamental design goals are different then the chances are that the opportunities for sharing will go down over time anyway.
Well we do have to do something, although fortunately we have 795 years before we need to worry. In 2800 however the calenders diverge and we'll have different countries on different days unless they can agree on a revised leap year rule set.
Because thats how engineers think, especially when told that something is impossible. It's actually a pity they spoiled an excellent piece by needlessly publishing the scrambling codes.
Fair use in the US sense isn't something present in the EU. As to DVD region coding - there have been actions in the past but the movie world seems to have just given up. To start with players are so cheap the consumer fight is pointless. When a 2nd hand DVD drive is UKP5 on ebay, and a new DVD player is UKP 25 (or free with 5 full priced movies) anyone who cares can just buy two.
They do still harass companies selling non-EU region DVD's but they all moved out of the EU (and out of EU tax regimes) into countries with no tax duties into the UK but outside the more stupid bits of EU law.
This is correct, and in some other countries beyond even that. Eg in the UK all business web sites have to be accessible. Sadly it needs a bit of enforcement yet (and the government to get its own house in order)
The unfortunate rider is "except where it is illegal". Eg I can't use decss to make a DVD player for epileptics that filters out flashing video, or various other similar things. Apparently the right of the MPAA exceeds the rights of the epileptics.
I can't even get a java app for my phone to run portably. It totals the java vm on some friends phones (they have to quit all java stuff to get back to sanity). Works great on Nokia.
SiS made extensive use of it on cards like the 6326, although note that the 6326 also did this for PCI as well as AGP. Ironically this seems to work very well again with modern games as they use shaders and so need a lot less texture bandwidth anyway.
Actually more seriously I think the class has generated some interesting information. Almost no hole found was in commonly vendor shipped code (cups being a clear notable example).
If Sun are going open source then tell me why they've changed the MPL so they can include third party patented material without telling you (See the section 3 changes) and which you would have no rights to.
The MPL requires that anyone using third party patented material declares it so that you know if its contaminated and non-free as a contributed. The Sun license allows them to slip anything the like into the code then smile as a third party sues people for their contribution.
In general the changes are mundane (Software for Code etc) or in some cases quite sensible - legal jurisdiction, simplifying the definition of creator, but that one change is quite evil on first reading
The UK has some anti-spam law not that is has yet been put into any kind of use. It also has the computer misuse act which would make running that screensaver almost certainly an offence in itself.
There is a big difference between sorting material *about* a group of people or historical events than supporting them. Is a historical compilation of facts about world war II an endorsement of war ? Of course not, but you can be sure such a history would include material from the point of view of the "bad guys" because it is neccesary context.
Turkey does have some serious human rights problems, and terror problems, and many other problems. As it moves towards the EU we can only hope that it continues to improve on that (eg it abolished the death penalty)
Not that EU countries all have a great record either. The UK has foreigners imprisoned indefinitely without trial for example.
FC2 is basically straight 2.6 - the earlker 2.6 has had a few problems as you'd expect from new code. 2.6.9 is getting pretty solid now. It tends to depend what drivers you run more than on core load.
Another box thats better secured so hasn't had to have a kernel update recently - running FC2 but still the FC1 kernel since when it booted FC2 wasn't out.
That is you can choose to play it, but you've heard about the claim so you know and decided to continue using it without having your attorney and a qualified patent lawyer review the claim. Thats triple damages for intentional infringement. You could of course write to the law firm and ask for a patent license or go get some IP violation insurance for all this dangerous proprietary software.
Unfortunately it's probably only a matter of time before these kind of patent law companies adopt all the tricks that have been developed in a certain well known IBM case.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems pretty dubious to me. IBM run some rather decent security so I'd bet they are measuring IBM security service output. Ditto a lot of the other companies listed.
I don't think that it is misleading. There are disagreements at the very core of many fields. There are also deeply messy divides about basic objects between different sciences.
Take a look for example at Egyptology and at Geology on the subject of the Sphinx. It's a nice simple question "Who built the Sphinx and when", its a rather complex non-answer.
Actually the fact Wikipedia can encompass both wel l is nice - also that it is rapidly updated. My paper encyclopedia still says in learned style that the Titanic had a huge hole ripped in it by an Iceberg. Of course we now know thats wrong, but these books change so slowly they are still teaching rubbish nd will do so for many years.
I suspect everyone has ulterior motives. The notion that an encyclopedia can be unbiased is ridiculous when if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
Flaming Wikipedia for inaccuracy is missing the two most important single points about Wikipedia that no other encyclopedia has.
#1 You can reuse, reference and reprocess the content. If you want trusted articles then set up a scheme where experts in the field can GPG sign versions of the article that they believe to be correct.
#2 Unlike every other encyclopedia you can take Wikipedia content under license and "fix it", where fixing means adjusting to your own world view. If you happen to think the Encyclopedia Britannica has its head up its backside you can't fix it. Wikipedia you can. Thats both powerful and dangerous as you can easily imagine groups with an agenda doing things like issuing 'evolution free' wikipedia variants to schools.
What matters for Wikipedia isn't IMHO whether Sanger has an axe to grind but who is going to build the tools to take this kind of distributed public knowledgebase further.
The EU is a single market which makes these kind of taxes very messy very rapidly. Many people order their blank media from different countries within the EU now in order to avoid levies so no doubt PC mail order will simply migrate over the border too.
That's a problem the EU still hasn't resolved sanely because so many countries have such different views on "fair use" and compensation. At the moment their are plans afoot to unify copyright-collection agency policies and the like across the EU but they are problematic and may get very problematic for things like Creative Commons because they are stuck in the oldthink of "free-cost" v "proprietary" not "non-commercial reuse" v "commercial reuse"
As an overall policy I'm not sure its quite as "assinine" as some posters think. This kind of approach is how radio and copyright was settled originally and people have talked about the same idea for internet and music.
America had been discovered at the point the French were fighting wars all the time. It was happily occupied by native Americans who weren't upsetting too many people except the odd passing viking.
It just happened to get invaded, and then various local terrorist forces (by the current definition) overthrew the "legitimate" goverment.
The supreme irony of course is that the only reason the revolution succeeded was assistance from the French whose new ideals were of a republic and not dissimilar to the US of the time.
And freedom.. Freedom to be persecuted by your own media industry ? Freedom to have your web site (ie your printing press) taken away without legal due process ?
"Freedom" in the USA and many other countries (the UK for example) is a marketing exercise used to control the people. Look beyond it, what matters is not being associated with a word but acting accordingly.
Alan
Nope its the "Isle of Man"
o s/ im.html
At least the one I am talking about, that is part of the United Kingdom.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
The geologists believe there would be a couple of weeks warning that it was likely to happen, not a couple of hours that it had. You'd have time to cancel deliveries, buy a tent on ebay and move a few miles to higher ground.
Very low.
You need to push 500,000,000 tons of rock (thats real tons not US tons too). Not only would you need to sneak an awful lot of explosive onto the island you'd have to drill some huge huge holes in the right place in an active volcano (ie rather warm rock below the surface in places) and put all your bombs down it without anyone noticing. As an idea of scale you are talking about disloging an object not dissimilar in size to the Isle of Man. Swatting it with a missle or crashing a plane into it isn't going to have much effect.
It is a model that governments have looked at (that much I know from some stuff where I was involved in helping look at more mundane questions like computer super-viruses "chernobyl meets slammer" etc).
It looks more like a great Bond film than a realistic hazard although it is without a doubt a terrorists dream. Prime time tv coverage for several hours of the wave racing towards New York, unavoidable carnage, powerless governments and all the rest.
I think you are being grossly unfair to Al-Jazeera
That appears to have been answered already. Anyone who talks about "their code" in GPL software made up from code by many contributors has a problem already.
The fork can certainly hide its code until releases, but then it's got all the disadvantages of a proprietary software product - it's hard to work on and has no community. Plus when it comes out a little bit of diff and reading will deal with anything of interest. And obfuscate the changelog - as a user would you trust software whose author has made changes unauditable ?
If the fundamental design goals are different then the chances are that the opportunities for sharing will go down over time anyway.
Alan
Well we do have to do something, although fortunately we have 795 years before we need to worry. In 2800 however the calenders diverge and we'll have different countries on different days unless they can agree on a revised leap year rule set.
Because thats how engineers think, especially when told that something is impossible. It's actually a pity they spoiled an excellent piece by needlessly publishing the scrambling codes.
Fair use in the US sense isn't something present in the EU. As to DVD region coding - there have been actions in the past but the movie world seems to have just given up. To start with players are so cheap the consumer fight is pointless. When a 2nd hand DVD drive is UKP5 on ebay, and a new DVD player is UKP 25 (or free with 5 full priced movies) anyone who cares can just buy two.
They do still harass companies selling non-EU region DVD's but they all moved out of the EU (and out of EU tax regimes) into countries with no tax duties into the UK but outside the more stupid bits of EU law.
This is correct, and in some other countries beyond even that. Eg in the UK all business web sites have to be accessible. Sadly it needs a bit of enforcement yet (and the government to get its own house in order)
The unfortunate rider is "except where it is illegal". Eg I can't use decss to make a DVD player for epileptics that filters out flashing video, or various other similar things. Apparently the right of the MPAA exceeds the rights of the epileptics.
And then we have ebooks..
"Bitkeeper doesn't pirate movies - people do"
I can't even get a java app for my phone to run portably. It totals the java vm on some friends phones (they have to quit all java stuff to get back to sanity). Works great on Nokia.
"Write once - debug everywhere" is horribly true.
SiS made extensive use of it on cards like the 6326, although note that the 6326 also did this for PCI as well as AGP. Ironically this seems to work very well again with modern games as they use shaders and so need a lot less texture bandwidth anyway.
Actually more seriously I think the class has generated some interesting information. Almost no hole found was in commonly vendor shipped code (cups being a clear notable example).
Thanks. I appreciate that pointer. I'd missed the specific change to knowing about - yes that seems a very reasonable way to rework it.
If Sun are going open source then tell me why they've changed the MPL so they can include third party patented material without telling you (See the section 3 changes) and which you would have no rights to.
The MPL requires that anyone using third party patented material declares it so that you know if its contaminated and non-free as a contributed. The Sun license allows them to slip anything the like into the code then smile as a third party sues people for their contribution.
In general the changes are mundane (Software for Code etc) or in some cases quite sensible - legal jurisdiction, simplifying the definition of creator, but that one change is quite evil on first reading
The UK has some anti-spam law not that is has yet been put into any kind of use. It also has the computer misuse act which would make running that screensaver almost certainly an offence in itself.
There is a big difference between sorting material *about* a group of people or historical events than supporting them. Is a historical compilation of facts about world war II an endorsement of war ? Of course not, but you can be sure such a history would include material from the point of view of the "bad guys" because it is neccesary context.
Turkey does have some serious human rights problems, and terror problems, and many other problems. As it moves towards the EU we can only hope that it continues to improve on that (eg it abolished the death penalty)
Not that EU countries all have a great record either. The UK has foreigners imprisoned indefinitely without trial for example.
FC2 is basically straight 2.6 - the earlker 2.6 has had a few problems as you'd expect from new code. 2.6.9 is getting pretty solid now. It tends to depend what drivers you run more than on core load.
14:37:45 up 66 days, 5:47, 1 user, load average: 9.80, 10.33, 12.20
Thats FC2 on a big FTP server that's still being hammered by FC3 downloads.
14:34:34 up 447 days, 4:38, 2 users, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.00
Another box thats better secured so hasn't had to have a kernel update recently - running FC2 but still the FC1 kernel since when it booted FC2 wasn't out.
So it certainly can be pretty solid.
We couldnt fit the sources and binaries on one DVD either.
That is you can choose to play it, but you've heard about the claim so you know and decided to continue using it without having your attorney and a qualified patent lawyer review the claim. Thats triple damages for intentional infringement. You could of course write to the law firm and ask for a patent license or go get some IP violation insurance for all this dangerous proprietary software.
Unfortunately it's probably only a matter of time before these kind of patent law companies adopt all the tricks that have been developed in a certain well known IBM case.
Alan
Let me strongly second (b). I've made that mistake the painful way - two drives with serial numbers 5 apart did indeed die about the same time.
Be aware 2.6 LVM still seems to have some 2Tb limits.