The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) has been doing this for the last year or so: the project is called Gallica and the collection of texts is now beginning to look respectable.
Unfortunately, most documents are simply scanned and not OCR'ed, so it is nice if you wish to print the book, but not if you want to use it for, e.g. statistical or analytical purposes, or simply to grep text in it.
Since we're on the topic, I'd like to as the following: do you think there's room for an ``Intermediate'' GPL, between the (Greater) GPL and the Lesser GPL?
More precisely: the.*GPL says that all derivatives of the work must remain free. The Lesser GPL allows linking of any programs / libraries (even proprietary programs / libraries) in the program / library under discussion. Whereas the (Greater) GPL allows linking only with programs / libraries that can be redistributed under the terms of the GPL.
For example, an LGPL'ed library can be used by a proprietary program. A GPL'ed library cannot, but it cannot even be used by a free program such as Mozilla (yet it can be used by a program covered by the BSD license for example), since Mozilla cannot be redistrubted under the terms of the GPL (whereas a BSD-licensed program can).
Now isn't there room for an intermediate license which would forbid linking with proprietary programs just like the GPL does, but allow linking with free software even if they are covered by licenses, such as the MPL or the QPL, which do not permit redistribution under the GPL's terms? I think this would achieve the goals which Stallman wants when he insists that some libraries should be covered by the GPL, and at the same time it would avoid excessive restrictions (consider how the expat library is released under the alternative between the GPL and the MPL: evidently jclark would have used such an Intermediate GPL).
The idea seems so obvious I can't understand why it hasn't been applied yet? Is there some basic legal fact I'm missing here?
Heard of OpenBSD? They hash their passwords with four blowfish rounds (eight for root). I do not think you can crack that in a week or less. I do not think even MD5 password encryption (now available on Linux), admittedly much weaker than blowfish, can be cracked in that time. (Not with reasonable means, of course.)
As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.
The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)
It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)
You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.
The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.
A mess: that's what I think the whole DNS system has become. It is being used for something which is completely unrelated to what it was designed for: it was designed as a way to associate IP addresses to computer names, and it is being used as a way to find data on the information web.
The three-letter domains are not at all being used as they should. Essentially, any name of importance gets registered under.com,.organd.net (except, of course, just the name I happen to be looking for, which is registered in just the one I don't think it is).
Now even two-letter domains are being used stupidly. We already have the.jump.to and.go.to silliness (.to is the country of Togo), now for the.tv silliness.
The solution lies, I think, in developping a new distributed database (one that is truly distributed and not centralized-distributed as the DNS is) and to replace Uniform Resource Locators by the Uniform Resource Names defined in RFC 2141 (not implemented) subset of Uniform Resource Identifiers.
It is certainly worthwhile to pursue research in this direction, if only to gain insight on how distributed databases can work. Unfortunately, it will be many years before a solution can be practically implemented, even if one is found. I am afraid that organizations such as the IETF are gradually being contaminated by commercial near-sightedness. But then, IPv6 development has been possible, even though it was a long-term project, so maybe a DNS replacement is not all that hopeless.
If we are allowed to link to the DeCSS source code, are we allowed to link to it using the data: URL scheme that is defined in RFC 2397? That would, of course, be exactly the same as mirroring it; but there's no limit to the amount of hair-splitting that legal nonsense can lead us to.
If your browser supports the data: URL scheme (pretty damn unlikely, really), then you should be able to read this document.
Granted, if you choose to define ``God'' as the laws of physics (resp. the Universe as a whole, resp. pure luck, resp. something of the kind), then I believe in the existence of God. But we already have words for those, so I do not think adding ``God'' as a new one is appropriate or wise.
It probably offends religious people even more if I say ``God is merely a term for the laws of physics'' than if I say ``I do not believe in God''. And I have no desire to anger people, it is a pointless activity.
But perhaps a more important and useful alternate definition of God would be, not whatever created us, but whatever we should use as the basis of our ethics. It is an error to think that the basis for ethics should be sought in science. Nor do I wish to appeal to a Higher Consciousness to do so. One of my favorite lines is from Molière's Dom Juan, when Dom Juan gives the pauper a coin and says ``I give it to you for the love of humanity'': maybe now this seems flat and unremarkable, but at the time it was written, that Molière should have dared write something else than ``for the love of God'' is wholly remarkable.
Yes there is, later on in the book (at the point where the Babel fish is mentioned): ``Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.''
...don't try to pass a few books being written on the frontiers of science (pardon the euphemism) as a new trend of any kind. The hayday of the epistemological enquiries on the meaning of physical reality and the mind of God and all that, came with quantum mechanics (a subject which, need I remind, Einstein never believed in, and some will say, probably with some justice, never understood; you know, the ``der gute Gott würfelt nicht'' (``God does not play dice'') story). These glorious days are gone. The day you see Ed Witten (the current ``pope'' of fundamental physics) or some such person writing something about Life, the Universe, God and Everything, maybe that will mean something. But I don't think that will come.
Sorry to disappoint you but, no, there isn't any hidden spirituality in physics. Spirituality is an attribute of the human mind, not one of the world around us. I don't call a book crackpot when I haven't read it, but I would simply like to remind how Sokal made a point by publishing a paper on the hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Spirituality, hermeneutics, whatever, just do not apply to physics, any more than the color ``green'' does.
I am an atheist myself. I do not think science and religion are incompatible, however. In the same way that art is not incompatible with science. But trying to write a book about both seems to me very much like trying to explain Michelangelo's paintings in terms of quantum physics, or vice versa.
-- ...more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? (Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Where's the rush? Couldn't they wait just a little more for a usable XFree 4.0 and perhaps even a 2.4 kernel and a 2.2 glibc? Or will that all be in 6.3 or whatever the next release is?
Oh well, I guess there's always something just around the corner.
-- I have the dream that some day all networking programs will fully support IPv6; that I won't have to masquerade my IP address any more; that the DNS will work intelligently; that my browser will be Mozilla, and will be stable; that it will fully support CSS2, MathML and Unicode, and that I'll have all the appropriate fonts for that; that my kernel will be the Hurd; that I can program my TV recording in Scheme...
So it's simple: don't type things any more, use the mouse to cut'n'paste instead. People don't know how to type nowadays any more, in any case. To make spies think you're typing anyway, put the focus on the root window so the keys don't have any effect, and type bogus commands there like ssh root@bigcomputer.nsa.gov or echo 'NathaliePortmanNakedAndPetrified' | gpg --passphrase-fd 0' and so on.
Or, if you prefer, use a ``random shuffle keyboard driver'': each time you strike the keyboard, the driver randomly reshuffles every key in the keyboard (so that even if someone is recording the keystrokes, he can't deduce anything from them, not knowing what each key corresponded to at the time when it was pressed). This makes typing a bit difficult, but who cares for a little comfort when the security gain is so huge. (If you really want it, you can perhaps have a little graphic showing the current key layout.)
The first step any Goldbach-conjecture-prover-wannabee should take is to read the book ``Additive Number Theory: the Classical Bases'' by Melvyn B. Nathanson, in Springer's Graduate Texts in Mathematics (number 164). It contains a description of the sieve methods and the Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan circle methods used to prove that sort of results in additive number theory. It gives a proof of the closes results known to Goldbach's conjecture: Vinogradov's theorem that every sufficiently large odd integer is the sum of three primes, and Chen's theorem that every even integer is the sum of a prime and a number which is at most product of two primes.
If you think it must be interesting reading, you're dead wrong. I have read many boring proofs in my life, but none of them came even close to the total lack of interest, the absolute and utter dullness of the analytic estimations of additive number theory, as found in the book in question. Even the (much easier) proof of Waring's problem (every integer is the sum of a bounded number of k-th powers, where the bound depends only on k) is unconceivably dull, and it is nothing compared to the more subtle results in the second part of the book.
Now why couldn't they offer a million dollars for proving the Riemann hypothesis. At least that's a worthwile result (nobody cares in the least about Goldbach's conjecture, but the Riemann hypothesis has many fascinating consequences).
``Uncle'' McCarthy (the inventor of Lisp and co-founder of the MIT AI Lab, foster uncle to all hackers in the world) has written this document about sustainability of human progress. Many who play Cassandra should do well to read it. (Note: I am not taking position myself one way or another, but it is certainly worth reading.)
Those who are nostalgic after the olden days of the first Uni*es should have a look at Digital's FTP site where a PDP-11 simulator can be found, together with disk images for Unix versions 5, 6 and 7.
Ah, the glorious times when Small was Beautiful: the V5 kernel was 25802 bytes — nowadays you can hardly find a web page for this size.
The GNU C library (version 2) only supports Linux and Hurd as kernels, as far as I know. Some README file somewhere says that porting it to other OSes should be an easy task, but it looks like it hasn't been done.
Writing a libc is a horribly fastidious job. Perhaps not as technically hard as writing a C compiler like gcc, but probably far more tedious. Making everything reentrant, maintaining nitty-gritty compatibility with the standards, trying hard not to break everything with each release, this is a very hard job. Remember, for one thing that the headers must compile with gcc -O6 -Wall -ansi -pedantic -W -Wstrict-prototypes -Wcast-qual -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings and this isn't really obvious. Also consider the important aspect of namespace pollution which must be avoided at all costs.
The GNU libc is a fantastic thing. It beats the hell out of the old libc5, which I found mostly worthless. It does a wonderful job of respecting the standards (just look at the features.h header file for an idea) while at the same time providing its own features when they seem useful. And it is very efficient. The documentation is very good, also (very complete, while at the same time very readable; and lots of examples too), even though I detest this texinfo format.
Also remember that a good part of the GNU Hurd is actually in the libc, since it takes care of communicating with the daemons of the Hurd and providing the interfaces (representing depth) that simulate Unix behavior.
ELF symbol versioning is another great thing that was introduced with version 2.1 of the libc. Not to mention things like IPv6 support and so on. In fact, I find that the libc is definitely ahead of the kernel (consider the case of the getcontext() function, which the libc has support for, but tthe kernel is still lacking.
The GNU libc plays an essential role in making our OS what it is. It gets far less attention than the kernel (because of its “cathedral” development model), but it is just as important (remember: a well-written program never sees the kernel, it only sees the libc; the libc is what keeps Unix united, and it can even achieve binary compatibility), and the GNU libc programmers certainly deserve praise for what they are writing.
So, congratulations to Andreas Jaeger, Ulrich Drepper and all the others.
"Trial tampering"??? Such a thing exists? That legal system is even more badly deranged than I imagined. I think I'll stick to more civilized countries, like... Iran?
Uh, if precedent is all that important, then anyone who wants to defeat the GPL, and who has enough money, can do this: write a stupid program, place it under the GPL, arrange for a friend to redistribute it under binary form only, bring him to court, arrange for his lawyers to be the best you can affort, and for yours to be the lousiest possible, and you lose the case, and you set a precedent for distributing binary only programs.
In fact, you can do this with any kind of precedent, including defending the GPL. This argument “aha, now we have a perfect precedent” is ridiculous: if you wanted such a precedent, you could have manifactured it ex nihilo at any time.
Maybe that's exactly what JC is doing now that's a thought
Of course, you must excuse me: I come from a country where (as in fact, in most countries in the world) precedent does not nearly have the importance it has in the US. I find the notion rather alien.
Re:"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!
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Men Playing as Women
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Nice imitation, but I wonder how much of it is cliché and how much is true.
I'm gay but I've never played female characters in computer games. Never dreamed of doing so, in fact.
By the way, there's no such thing as hyperbolic topology, only hyperbolic geometry. But I suppose you knew that.
Hello??? Where do you see this? It's not because my question has ``garbage collection'' in it as well as another question in the FAQ that they are identical — or, in fact, any more than remotely similar.
One of the the features that C++ can be said to lack, as a high-level language, is a garbage collector. Or rather, it's not so much that no collector exists (the Hans Boehm conservative C/C++ garbage collector is one, after all) but the fact that it isn't well integrated in the C/C++ API.
Do you regret this? Do you think someday we'll have a decent programming language with a garbage collector (i.e. one which is well integrated in the language and not just an add-on)? Java might have been just that only its eficiency (notably that of the GC) was terrible: do you think that was a necessity or just a consequence of the wrong decisions being made?
Yet Another Suggestion
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· Score: 2
I'm not sure I'm all enthusiastic about the idea of coming up with uncountably many new ways of distributing the DeCSS source (rather than, say, concentrating on proving that it is legal). But if you are looking for yet another way to do it, and if possible one which will get the legal system into a not of paradoxes, I have a suggestion for such a method which might be a novel way of supporting free speech on the Internet if enough people apply it.
I entirely agree with this comment. The same goes for typography: an em-dash is — for example (that's: —), double quotes are “ and ” (like “this”) and so on. My pages are full of things like that: if you see them as funny — strings and so on, your browser is broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you explain what stars more than 6004 light years distant have to do with the age of the Earth?
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) has been doing this for the last year or so: the project is called Gallica and the collection of texts is now beginning to look respectable.
Unfortunately, most documents are simply scanned and not OCR'ed, so it is nice if you wish to print the book, but not if you want to use it for, e.g. statistical or analytical purposes, or simply to grep text in it.
Since we're on the topic, I'd like to as the following: do you think there's room for an ``Intermediate'' GPL, between the (Greater) GPL and the Lesser GPL?
More precisely: the .*GPL says that all derivatives of the work must remain free. The Lesser GPL allows linking of any programs / libraries (even proprietary programs / libraries) in the program / library under discussion. Whereas the (Greater) GPL allows linking only with programs / libraries that can be redistributed under the terms of the GPL.
For example, an LGPL'ed library can be used by a proprietary program. A GPL'ed library cannot, but it cannot even be used by a free program such as Mozilla (yet it can be used by a program covered by the BSD license for example), since Mozilla cannot be redistrubted under the terms of the GPL (whereas a BSD-licensed program can).
Now isn't there room for an intermediate license which would forbid linking with proprietary programs just like the GPL does, but allow linking with free software even if they are covered by licenses, such as the MPL or the QPL, which do not permit redistribution under the GPL's terms? I think this would achieve the goals which Stallman wants when he insists that some libraries should be covered by the GPL, and at the same time it would avoid excessive restrictions (consider how the expat library is released under the alternative between the GPL and the MPL: evidently jclark would have used such an Intermediate GPL).
The idea seems so obvious I can't understand why it hasn't been applied yet? Is there some basic legal fact I'm missing here?
Heard of OpenBSD? They hash their passwords with four blowfish rounds (eight for root). I do not think you can crack that in a week or less. I do not think even MD5 password encryption (now available on Linux), admittedly much weaker than blowfish, can be cracked in that time. (Not with reasonable means, of course.)
(As usual, because I have the bad luck of reading Slashdot in my time zone, my comment is hardly going to get read, let alone moderated. Oh well.)
I'm surprised nobody seems to remember Ken Thompson's ACM A. M. Turing Award reception speech, “Reflections on Trusting Trust”. If you haven't read that classic essay, you definitely should.
As mentioned in the Jargon File (which ESR surely knows about because he's the current editor of the Jargon File), Ken Thompson planted a Back Door in the login program of the first versions of Unix by planting another back door in the compiler itself. The back door was visible nowhere, neither in the sources of the compiler nor in those of the login program, and yet it was there all the same.
The moral of this is not that it might happen, but that it is possible. You've got to start trusting someone, somewhere. How do you know, after all, that Intel has not planted back doors in your microchip's microcode? Even if you could see the chip's complete source code (and you certainly cannot), the back door may be in the software that compiles the source code to the actual plans. (And even if you can see the complete plans and have a mammoth brain that can understand them, you can never be sure that there is no back door in the laws of physics.:-)
It would be quite possible, in Ken Thompson style, for a Linux distribution, say, RedHat, to put a back door in the version of gcc they use so that, even though they redistribute all the source, and pristine source at that, and even though the compiler bootstraps correctly, yet various binary programs are compiled with back doors in them. (Note that I'm not suggesting they could tamper with the binaries: that would be noticed sooner or later. Ken Thompson's trick is far more devious.)
You cannot bootstrap everything down to the hardware level, not even to the assembler level. And even if you do bootstrap everything, detecting the presence of a back door in the source is equivalent to the halting problem. Consequently, there is plenty of room for back doors even in an Open Source world.
The last thing I want to do is defend Microsoft. I don't use their products, so I frankly don't care how many back doors they might have planted. Nor do I want to advocate security through obfuscation, because that is the one thing that has never wored and never will. But I just want to say that security will never work if you don't start trusting at some point. Microsoft may have failed this trust, now or in other numerous occasions. But for ESR to say that there is no such need in the case of Open Source software is simply wrong.
A mess: that's what I think the whole DNS system has become. It is being used for something which is completely unrelated to what it was designed for: it was designed as a way to associate IP addresses to computer names, and it is being used as a way to find data on the information web.
The three-letter domains are not at all being used as they should. Essentially, any name of importance gets registered under .com, .org and .net (except, of course, just the name I happen to be looking for, which is registered in just the one I don't think it is).
Now even two-letter domains are being used stupidly. We already have the .jump.to and .go.to silliness (.to is the country of Togo), now for the .tv silliness.
The solution lies, I think, in developping a new distributed database (one that is truly distributed and not centralized-distributed as the DNS is) and to replace Uniform Resource Locators by the Uniform Resource Names defined in RFC 2141 (not implemented) subset of Uniform Resource Identifiers.
It is certainly worthwhile to pursue research in this direction, if only to gain insight on how distributed databases can work. Unfortunately, it will be many years before a solution can be practically implemented, even if one is found. I am afraid that organizations such as the IETF are gradually being contaminated by commercial near-sightedness. But then, IPv6 development has been possible, even though it was a long-term project, so maybe a DNS replacement is not all that hopeless.
If we are allowed to link to the DeCSS source code, are we allowed to link to it using the data: URL scheme that is defined in RFC 2397? That would, of course, be exactly the same as mirroring it; but there's no limit to the amount of hair-splitting that legal nonsense can lead us to.
If your browser supports the data: URL scheme (pretty damn unlikely, really), then you should be able to read this document.
Granted, if you choose to define ``God'' as the laws of physics (resp. the Universe as a whole, resp. pure luck, resp. something of the kind), then I believe in the existence of God. But we already have words for those, so I do not think adding ``God'' as a new one is appropriate or wise.
It probably offends religious people even more if I say ``God is merely a term for the laws of physics'' than if I say ``I do not believe in God''. And I have no desire to anger people, it is a pointless activity.
But perhaps a more important and useful alternate definition of God would be, not whatever created us, but whatever we should use as the basis of our ethics. It is an error to think that the basis for ethics should be sought in science. Nor do I wish to appeal to a Higher Consciousness to do so. One of my favorite lines is from Molière's Dom Juan, when Dom Juan gives the pauper a coin and says ``I give it to you for the love of humanity'': maybe now this seems flat and unremarkable, but at the time it was written, that Molière should have dared write something else than ``for the love of God'' is wholly remarkable.
Yes there is, later on in the book (at the point where the Babel fish is mentioned): ``Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.''
...don't try to pass a few books being written on the frontiers of science (pardon the euphemism) as a new trend of any kind. The hayday of the epistemological enquiries on the meaning of physical reality and the mind of God and all that, came with quantum mechanics (a subject which, need I remind, Einstein never believed in, and some will say, probably with some justice, never understood; you know, the ``der gute Gott würfelt nicht'' (``God does not play dice'') story). These glorious days are gone. The day you see Ed Witten (the current ``pope'' of fundamental physics) or some such person writing something about Life, the Universe, God and Everything, maybe that will mean something. But I don't think that will come.
Sorry to disappoint you but, no, there isn't any hidden spirituality in physics. Spirituality is an attribute of the human mind, not one of the world around us. I don't call a book crackpot when I haven't read it, but I would simply like to remind how Sokal made a point by publishing a paper on the hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Spirituality, hermeneutics, whatever, just do not apply to physics, any more than the color ``green'' does.
I am an atheist myself. I do not think science and religion are incompatible, however. In the same way that art is not incompatible with science. But trying to write a book about both seems to me very much like trying to explain Michelangelo's paintings in terms of quantum physics, or vice versa.
--
...more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? (Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Where's the rush? Couldn't they wait just a little more for a usable XFree 4.0 and perhaps even a 2.4 kernel and a 2.2 glibc? Or will that all be in 6.3 or whatever the next release is?
Oh well, I guess there's always something just around the corner.
--
I have the dream that some day all networking programs will fully support IPv6; that I won't have to masquerade my IP address any more; that the DNS will work intelligently; that my browser will be Mozilla, and will be stable; that it will fully support CSS2, MathML and Unicode, and that I'll have all the appropriate fonts for that; that my kernel will be the Hurd; that I can program my TV recording in Scheme...
So it's simple: don't type things any more, use the mouse to cut'n'paste instead. People don't know how to type nowadays any more, in any case. To make spies think you're typing anyway, put the focus on the root window so the keys don't have any effect, and type bogus commands there like ssh root@bigcomputer.nsa.gov or echo 'NathaliePortmanNakedAndPetrified' | gpg --passphrase-fd 0' and so on.
Or, if you prefer, use a ``random shuffle keyboard driver'': each time you strike the keyboard, the driver randomly reshuffles every key in the keyboard (so that even if someone is recording the keystrokes, he can't deduce anything from them, not knowing what each key corresponded to at the time when it was pressed). This makes typing a bit difficult, but who cares for a little comfort when the security gain is so huge. (If you really want it, you can perhaps have a little graphic showing the current key layout.)
If R.S=0 then R=0 or S=0. Now which one is it?
Oh, really? You mean the product does not work this way?
The first step any Goldbach-conjecture-prover-wannabee should take is to read the book ``Additive Number Theory: the Classical Bases'' by Melvyn B. Nathanson, in Springer's Graduate Texts in Mathematics (number 164). It contains a description of the sieve methods and the Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan circle methods used to prove that sort of results in additive number theory. It gives a proof of the closes results known to Goldbach's conjecture: Vinogradov's theorem that every sufficiently large odd integer is the sum of three primes, and Chen's theorem that every even integer is the sum of a prime and a number which is at most product of two primes.
If you think it must be interesting reading, you're dead wrong. I have read many boring proofs in my life, but none of them came even close to the total lack of interest, the absolute and utter dullness of the analytic estimations of additive number theory, as found in the book in question. Even the (much easier) proof of Waring's problem (every integer is the sum of a bounded number of k-th powers, where the bound depends only on k) is unconceivably dull, and it is nothing compared to the more subtle results in the second part of the book.
Now why couldn't they offer a million dollars for proving the Riemann hypothesis. At least that's a worthwile result (nobody cares in the least about Goldbach's conjecture, but the Riemann hypothesis has many fascinating consequences).
``Uncle'' McCarthy (the inventor of Lisp and co-founder of the MIT AI Lab, foster uncle to all hackers in the world) has written this document about sustainability of human progress. Many who play Cassandra should do well to read it. (Note: I am not taking position myself one way or another, but it is certainly worth reading.)
So young and already nostalgic. :-|
Those who are nostalgic after the olden days of the first Uni*es should have a look at Digital's FTP site where a PDP-11 simulator can be found, together with disk images for Unix versions 5, 6 and 7.
Ah, the glorious times when Small was Beautiful: the V5 kernel was 25802 bytes — nowadays you can hardly find a web page for this size.
The GNU C library (version 2) only supports Linux and Hurd as kernels, as far as I know. Some README file somewhere says that porting it to other OSes should be an easy task, but it looks like it hasn't been done.
to the GNU libc team.
Writing a libc is a horribly fastidious job. Perhaps not as technically hard as writing a C compiler like gcc, but probably far more tedious. Making everything reentrant, maintaining nitty-gritty compatibility with the standards, trying hard not to break everything with each release, this is a very hard job. Remember, for one thing that the headers must compile with gcc -O6 -Wall -ansi -pedantic -W -Wstrict-prototypes -Wcast-qual -Wpointer-arith -Wwrite-strings and this isn't really obvious. Also consider the important aspect of namespace pollution which must be avoided at all costs.
The GNU libc is a fantastic thing. It beats the hell out of the old libc5, which I found mostly worthless. It does a wonderful job of respecting the standards (just look at the features.h header file for an idea) while at the same time providing its own features when they seem useful. And it is very efficient. The documentation is very good, also (very complete, while at the same time very readable; and lots of examples too), even though I detest this texinfo format.
Also remember that a good part of the GNU Hurd is actually in the libc, since it takes care of communicating with the daemons of the Hurd and providing the interfaces (representing depth) that simulate Unix behavior.
ELF symbol versioning is another great thing that was introduced with version 2.1 of the libc. Not to mention things like IPv6 support and so on. In fact, I find that the libc is definitely ahead of the kernel (consider the case of the getcontext() function, which the libc has support for, but tthe kernel is still lacking.
The GNU libc plays an essential role in making our OS what it is. It gets far less attention than the kernel (because of its “cathedral” development model), but it is just as important (remember: a well-written program never sees the kernel, it only sees the libc; the libc is what keeps Unix united, and it can even achieve binary compatibility), and the GNU libc programmers certainly deserve praise for what they are writing.
So, congratulations to Andreas Jaeger, Ulrich Drepper and all the others.
"Trial tampering"??? Such a thing exists? That legal system is even more badly deranged than I imagined. I think I'll stick to more civilized countries, like... Iran?
Uh, if precedent is all that important, then anyone who wants to defeat the GPL, and who has enough money, can do this: write a stupid program, place it under the GPL, arrange for a friend to redistribute it under binary form only, bring him to court, arrange for his lawyers to be the best you can affort, and for yours to be the lousiest possible, and you lose the case, and you set a precedent for distributing binary only programs.
In fact, you can do this with any kind of precedent, including defending the GPL. This argument “aha, now we have a perfect precedent” is ridiculous: if you wanted such a precedent, you could have manifactured it ex nihilo at any time.
Maybe that's exactly what JC is doing now that's a thought
Of course, you must excuse me: I come from a country where (as in fact, in most countries in the world) precedent does not nearly have the importance it has in the US. I find the notion rather alien.
Nice imitation, but I wonder how much of it is cliché and how much is true.
I'm gay but I've never played female characters in computer games. Never dreamed of doing so, in fact.
By the way, there's no such thing as hyperbolic topology, only hyperbolic geometry. But I suppose you knew that.
Hello??? Where do you see this? It's not because my question has ``garbage collection'' in it as well as another question in the FAQ that they are identical — or, in fact, any more than remotely similar.
One of the the features that C++ can be said to lack, as a high-level language, is a garbage collector. Or rather, it's not so much that no collector exists (the Hans Boehm conservative C/C++ garbage collector is one, after all) but the fact that it isn't well integrated in the C/C++ API.
Do you regret this? Do you think someday we'll have a decent programming language with a garbage collector (i.e. one which is well integrated in the language and not just an add-on)? Java might have been just that only its eficiency (notably that of the GC) was terrible: do you think that was a necessity or just a consequence of the wrong decisions being made?
I'm not sure I'm all enthusiastic about the idea of coming up with uncountably many new ways of distributing the DeCSS source (rather than, say, concentrating on proving that it is legal). But if you are looking for yet another way to do it, and if possible one which will get the legal system into a not of paradoxes, I have a suggestion for such a method which might be a novel way of supporting free speech on the Internet if enough people apply it.
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Posted using the Lizard.
I entirely agree with this comment. The same goes for typography: an em-dash is — for example (that's: —), double quotes are “ and ” (like “this”) and so on. My pages are full of things like that: if you see them as funny — strings and so on, your browser is broken.