The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive. It also creates interest groups; crushes incipient competition in order to protect its prestige; and develops power to influence the government, the behaviour of whole industries, and eventually the perceptions of the whole population
Jeez, does every/. article have to devolve into Microsoft bashing?;-)
Some years back, I worked on a contract at Mitre for about a year. We were repeatedly reminded of the legal situation: Mitre was created by an act of Congress as a *consulting* firm, and is not permitted to engage in any commercial operations.
Mitre's sole purpose is to do studies and write reports for its contractor, the US government. (Well, actually the Air Force is their prime contractor, but they do like to drag in any government agencies that they can.;-)
Some of those reports are secret. Most are not, and are handed out to anyone who will read them. For all the usual reasons, Mitre's management treats publication and publicity as a Good Thing. They especially like to approach discussions with the comment "We did a study of that 5 years ago; would you like a copy of our report?"
I wrote a fair amount of code on the project, and it was all put into the public domain. Unfortunately, most of the project was developing OSI protocols.
ciAm should also promote more ethical gifts, such as adopting endangered animals
Actually, in a few cases, you can do this quite literally. A newcomer to our household is a blue-crowned conure whose previous owner was doing so much travelling that it was a growing stress on the bird, who was constantly being put up with strangers for a week at a time. We have two cockatiels (nowhere near endangered), so she asked if we could give the conure a good home.
Now, blue-crowned conures aren't yet officially endangered, but they are fairly rare in the wild, and their numbers are decreasing. A few years ago, we had a Goffin's cockatoo for a few years, until we sold her to a breeder. This species is rapidly going extinct in the wild. Their native islands in Indonesia are being converted to farmland. They are fruit eaters. They also chew on wood to shape their beaks. So a flock of them can not only destroy your fruit crop, but also do serious damage to the tree. Farmers shoot them on sight
Estimates are that Goffin's cockatoos will be extinct in the wild in a decade or so. But when raised with humans, they are very good pets. They will probably be saved from extinction only as pets, since the Indonesian government seems to show no interest in saving them.
This approach isn't generally useful for saving most endangered species. You don't really want a pet American crocodile, for instance. Or a pet condor, for that matter. But a few species can be saved this way, and maybe returned to the wild in the future if the appropriate governments decide that they've lost something important.
My reaction exactly. Some years ago (20 of them to be fairly precise) I worked in a place with a big IBM mainframe, and the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's UTS (a version of unix) to run on top of VM. When I asked the Amdahl people about source, their answer was "Oh, that's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." The install tapes in fact included the source to everything.
A couple of weeks later I diagnosed some problems due to some incorrect configuring that our VM guy was doing, which UTS couldn't handle. A day later I had a fix, and I emailed it to the folks at Amdahl. They sent back a nice message of thanks, my patch was added to their source, and my name was added to their list of contributors.
This was exactly why they sent out the source to all their customers. True, not many could use it, but they really liked customers that had people on staff who could read the source and help them fix problems.
I worked on it a couple of years, during which time the question occasionally came up of whether they had any theft of the code. Their answer was "Not that we know of". They also added that they really wouldn't mind if a few of their improvements were to find their way into the general body of shared unix code. They thought that it was to everyone's advantage to have good code, and having pieces of code identified as coming from Amdahl could only be good advertising.
I have no idea whether they still have this policy. Considering how management attitudes have changed, they probably aren't doing this any more.
It might also interest some to hear that at that time, IBM also supplied a lot of source with their systems. I know the VM support guy had full source. I saw some of the CMS and MVS source, though I don't know if we had all of it. But there was a lot of IBM source available from IBM in the 70's and early 80's, and they seemed to do pretty well commercially.
It could be useful to point out once again that multiple interconnections and multiple routes was an important part of the original Arpanet that led to the Internet. It was (as the commercial people keep forgetting) a project funded 100% by the US Defense Department, and they wanted a network that would survive in battle conditions. Fact is, this is also a good design principle for design in a world where many of the components have a MTBF of days or weeks.
Problem is, commercial folks invariably see reduncancy as a needless expense. Their natural tendency is to reduce everything to the bare minimum (while selling the maximum, of course). Then when anything breaks, big chunks of the system are down.
The World Trade Center attack is an excellent example that woke up a lot of people. There was far too much infrastructure passing under those buildings, and as a result, a lot of the communication systems in Manhattan collapsed along with the buildings. This stupidity was pointed out by people before the attacks, but the commercial interests in charge of the comm lines saw no profit in decentralizing. Even now, they're resisting the idea and merely rebuilding a lot of the destroyed capacity, because a better system would be more expensive.
Governments have stepped in and forced things like the phone, electricity and highway systems to have alternate routes that can be used in disasters and emergencies. The Net is becoming an important part of the world's infrastructure, and eventually those evil old governments are going to step in and force the commercial crowd to supply redundancy in the same way.
If you write the simplest code you can that meet the requirements then more than likely its secure.
Obvious counterexample:
sprintf(buffer,"",lots of data);
This is a simple elegant way to encode a lot of output text. But how big should the buffer be?
Obviously you need to calculate the largest possible size for every % chunk. How big should these be? There is in fact no upper bounds.
You can make reasonable assumptions. But then, 10 years from now when your code is compiled for the new FuBar 19 processor, which supports 4096-bit integers, your buffer isn't nearly big enough. And there have already been compilers written that support bignums as native int and float types. Granted, Microsoft doesn't supply them, but that doesn't mean they don't (and won't ever) exist.
The POSIX standard sprintf() doesn't have an arg that gives the buffer size. This was an oversight, true, but it's a fact of life. And it's not too hard to find examples that are conceptually similar in all common programming languages.
Remember back when IE first came out, and there were reports from with MS to the effect that billg had declared that they were going to control the browser "market", even if it took a billion dollars?
They did bankrupt Netscape, and nobody would be so foolish now as to try to market a browser that runs on Windows. So they won. And those profits on Windows are pretty much what allowed them to win.
Now that that battle's over, they are using their profits to guarantee that there can't be a market for various other kinds of software.
"Say, that's a great app you've got there, and it runs on Windows. Hand it over.... What? You think you can market it yourself? Well, I guess we'll just have to show you how a real businessman operates..."
I want Americans to have the capability to go whereever the hell we want in the Solar System.:)
I think the US government's priorities are currently a bit different than that. First we gotta go to Iraq. Then there are all those other countries that just won't follow orders.
Once we get them all in line, maybe we'll think about conquering the rest of the Solar System.
OTOH, maybe if we could convince Dubya that we were threatened by Mars or Callistans or Titanians or whatever, he'd have troops on the way as soon as Congress rubber-stamped his request for conquest.
By publishing the fact that CD protection is worthless, they are in blatant violation of the DMCA. So if they visit the USA, they are in danger of being treated like Dmitry Sklyarov was.
Note that he wasn't arrested for breaking an encoding scheme; his crime was publicising the fact that the scheme was weak. The New Scientist has done the same sort of thing.
Publicising the fact that a company's product is shoddy and breaks easily is a crime in the USA.
Now if I could get ogg tunes to work on my linux boxen...
I have downloaded, compiled, and (maybe) installed several purported ogg packages. I've also fetched a small collection of tunes off the net. But so far, I haven't discovered the trick of getting sound waves from them.
F'rinstance, I have a directory full of libao-0.8.3, libogg-1.0, libvorbis-1.0, and vorbis-tools-1.0, all of which compiled without any obvious problems. But there don't seem to be any clues as to how I make the latest mozilla fire them up with it gets an ogg file.
I think I'm missing something somewhere. Or maybe ogg is just not for dummies like me.
I think I'd rather see Sun focus on improving their products (Sparc and Java) than go after MS.
In the case of java, going after MS is a significant part of improving Sun's product. The main value of java is as a "network" language. It is only useful if all versions of java can be kept compatible. Sun's lawsuit against MS's java was based on the fact that Microsoft has long supplied a version of java that is full of incompatibilities with Sun's. This is almost certainly intentional, and has the purpose of making java less useful than it would be if MS's java were compatible.
There's a tendency of users to judge a product by the behavior of the one instance that they have available. Microsoft users judge java by MS's java, and they find it buggy and incompatible. So they conclude that java is buggy and incompatible.
But Sun owns java. If they can get judges that haven't been bought by Microsoft, they can stop MS's campaign to damage java. In fact, they might even be able to get a court order to replace MS's java with Sun's version on Windows machines. Then all those java applets out there might actually work the same everywhere.
Of course, now that it's clear that the US DoJ and at least some courts are in Microsoft's pocket, it's not obvious that Sun can prevail in the courts.
Hmmm... So you're telling me that if I install, e.g., AOL's IM tool on my linux box, it will be able to determine whether I'm sitting in the chair in front of the screen? I'm not sure I believe that.
I suspect that all this "presence" does is say whether the app is alive on my machine. If you sent me an IM and I've just walked out of the room, I sorta doubt the app can tell you that I'm not there to read your message. And even if I am, and choose to ignore it and not reply, you can you distinguish that from me not being there at all?
As for talk lacking such a capability, I point out the existence of the finger command. True, this is a different program than talk. But claiming that "talk doesn't have that capability" when it's merely split off into another command is a bit, well, I think it's called "FUD" in some circles.
So what's new here? Back in the early 80's, I used the talk(1) command a lot, and it worked between all the systems that were then capable of using the Internet.
Of course, those systems were limited to a hundred or so unix clones, plus VMS. But it would have worked just find on Windoze and the Mac, too, if they had bothered to pay attention to what was already developed and available for free.
It's really just another case of the commercial world laboriously reinventing the wheel, and loudly proclaiming that their shape wheel (square, hexagonal, etc.) are the best, while carefully ignoring the long existence of a round wheel.
At least you can sue after they beat you in the USA.
Well, maybe, if you can prove they did it.
I recall an incident when I was in college, back in the 70's, when a demonstration led to the arrest and overnight "holding" of several hundred students. They were held incommunicado, and in the morning, they were released. When they tried to sue the city, the response was "What are you talking about? We didn't arrest you. We've never seen you before. Those bruises must have come from a fight with a boy/girlfriend."
There was, in fact, no way to prove that they had ever been anywhere near a jail. It was obviously a large conspiracy to slander the police department.
This taught a good lesson to at least a few hundred students about how the real world works. Some haven't forgotten it.
Back in the mid 80's, NPR had a couple of fun articles about the non-celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the US going metric.
This needed a bit of explaining, of course. It turns out that the US, like most countries, actually has no legally-required system of measurements. There are laws (or more often, regulations) that specific items must be measured with specific units. But there is no overall requirement that all measurements be in the same "system".
However, the US government has always had an official standards body. It has had various names and acronyms, such as NBS (National Bureau of Standards) or NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It basically manages the regulations that say "If you use unit U, you must use the official definition of U, which is...."
So how did the US "go metric" in the 1880's? Well, what the national standards bureau did then was to revise the official definition of all terms of measurement. They've done this many times. At that time, they decided that the best system in use by scientists and engineers was the "metric" system centered in Paris. There were already copies of the metric units in the US, and they were used for calibration. What was done was to make this official, and publish definitions of all the common units as multiples of the metric units.
These definitions have mostly continued. Thus, the legal definition of an inch is 0.0254 meters. This is not an approximation. It is exact, because it's the official definition of "inch".
It occurred to me while listening to the NPR articles that what the US has is what we in the computer field would call an "extended metric system". We have all the metric terms, but we also have a whole lot more. This obviously makes the American system more versatile, right?
So it's really an example of "embrace and extend."
... link to the burn all gifs website, keep your politics to yourself...
Politics? The issue with GIF is the legal threat from the owner of the format. This hardly qualifies as a political issue. Well, I suppose one could argue that since the copyright and patent laws were set up by politicians, it qualifies a political. But that reduces the term to meaninglessness.
At least in the US, you don't have the legal right to create GIFs without the explicit written permission of the owner of the format. The owner has made legal threats against some users. So migrating away to a similar (but unencumbered) format is only prudent.
This is a very shortsighted attitude. I'm working on a project for a small consulting firm that is developing software for a couple of big commercial conglomerates. We're doing almost all of our work on linux, with Windows and a few Macs around for testing from the user viewpoint. The free and open nature of linux means that we can get quick answers to questions (or read the source and figure it out ourselves). As a result, we can deliver much faster results than people working on proprietary systems, where they often can't get straight answers to critical questions.
With a closed, proprietary system, our clients are at the mercy of a single vendor. With linux (or the BSD clones), GNU, and other open source software, they aren't at the mercy of anyone.
But, of course, the DP departments in the big conglomerates are your typical bumbling bureaucracy who can't program their way out of a wet paper bag. So they hire a small team of hotshot linux hackers to do the job.
Computers will always need programming, for far longer than any of us will be alive. Most people will never be programmers, just like most people will never be mechanics or accountants or surgeons. There will be a lot of work for a long time, unless the economy goes totally flatline.
Having a quality OS and libraries that are open to study and modification is nothing but an advantage for everyone, both the programmers and the people who pay them to program.
Microsoft makes shoddy software, and hides the details from users and programmers so they can't fix problems. They survive solely because they still have a humongous marketing budget (and the power to bribe politicians and top management). They deserve to fail.
Recently someone on NPR remarked that he had a simple rule for safe travel: He listens to NPR news, notices where Sylvia Poggioli is reporting from, and stays away from there.
This used to work with Daniel Pearl, too, but no more. I suppose there's gotta be one or two other reporters that could be as useful.
Does this mean that when MS decides to release a "security patch" for one of its releases, and explains why this patch is necessary and how it might be exploited, that they are in breach of the DMCA?
Probably not, but if YOU were to do this, you would be in violation of the DMCA. The main point of the DMCA is to protect companies from you and me revealing that security-related products are shoddy.
I recently got involved in a specific discussion where this might apply. Some people discovered that they could get the text out of most MS Word docs using the unix "strings" command. The format isn't pretty, but the text is there. The problem is that you also get "deleted" text that Word has just marked deleted but hasn't erased. This text can be from other docs that the sender's copy of Word has processed. This could be a very serious security leak in some cases.
This could be fixed in a unix mail reader, if the programmers could get enough info about the Word format to identify the deleted text and skip over it. This would presumably be legal. But if you were to describe the security issue when releasing the patch, you would be guilty of publicising a security flaw in MS software, and would thus be in violation of the DMCA.
So far, the decision seems to be to keep quiet about this, and just treat it as Someone Else's Problem.
There is the outstanding question of whether we unix/linux geeks are committing a serious crime if we warn Word users about this security issue. In particular, what sort of danger am I in by mentioning it here?
Maybe I should submit this as an Anonymous Coward? Nah...
Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results...
Well, yes, but as a programmer, I can tell you that I'd be able to do a much better job if I could look at the code. Verifying the correct functioning of something like Mathematica is a huge task. A set of expert eyes looking at the code can often find things quickly that would take years of testing.
This isn't to say that such testing isn't valid. It is, of course. But hiding the code removes one very fast and effective metchod of validating the results.
I'd have a lot more trust in software that had been tested thoroughly, AND whose code was open for inspection.
Also, a nice thing about having the source available is that you can compile it yourself, and make sure that your binaries correspond to that code. You can never be too paranoid about such things when the subject is politics.
The only way drm would be included in embedded systems is by law.
Even then, it's doubtful if it will matter with many embedded real-time systems. And it ain't gonna matter with consumer equipment, either. There will simply be massive "civil disobedience" and it will be roundly ignored.
There is an obvious precedent for this: In the early 1900's, laws were passed all over the US to prevent the use of automobiles. Speed limits of 5 mph were passed. Several states had laws saying that an auto had to be preceded by a rider on horseback. Others passed laws requiring that if a horse was nearby, an auto's engine had to be turned off to avoid frightening the horse, and left off until the horse was gone.
Such laws were simply ignored. Few if any policemen were silly enough to try to enforce them. They could be used occasionally for harassment purposes, but for all practical purposes, they were just the last gasp of a dying technology.
One of the fun legal things is that such laws are still on the books in many places. Almost all citizens are criminals. Nobody worries about this, for some strange reason.
Similarly, the recording and entertainment industries will come to terms with the Net. We will have the right to record things and play them later, or in our car or at a friend's house. We will have the right to back up our disks. We will have the right to upgrade our hardware and play our old purchased recordings on the new equipment. Attempts to stop this will simply be ignored, as the anti-auto laws were ignored.
And we will all end up criminals. But that's ok; if you're driving any sort of motor vehicle, you are probably a criminal already.
Slashdot Mirror
The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive. It also creates interest groups; crushes incipient competition in order to protect its prestige; and develops power to influence the government, the behaviour of whole industries, and eventually the perceptions of the whole population
/. article have to devolve into Microsoft bashing? ;-)
Jeez, does every
Some years back, I worked on a contract at Mitre for about a year. We were repeatedly reminded of the legal situation: Mitre was created by an act of Congress as a *consulting* firm, and is not permitted to engage in any commercial operations.
;-)
Mitre's sole purpose is to do studies and write reports for its contractor, the US government. (Well, actually the Air Force is their prime contractor, but they do like to drag in any government agencies that they can.
Some of those reports are secret. Most are not, and are handed out to anyone who will read them. For all the usual reasons, Mitre's management treats publication and publicity as a Good Thing. They especially like to approach discussions with the comment "We did a study of that 5 years ago; would you like a copy of our report?"
I wrote a fair amount of code on the project, and it was all put into the public domain. Unfortunately, most of the project was developing OSI protocols.
ciAm should also promote more ethical gifts, such as adopting endangered animals
Actually, in a few cases, you can do this quite literally. A newcomer to our household is a blue-crowned conure whose previous owner was doing so much travelling that it was a growing stress on the bird, who was constantly being put up with strangers for a week at a time. We have two cockatiels (nowhere near endangered), so she asked if we could give the conure a good home.
Now, blue-crowned conures aren't yet officially endangered, but they are fairly rare in the wild, and their numbers are decreasing. A few years ago, we had a Goffin's cockatoo for a few years, until we sold her to a breeder. This species is rapidly going extinct in the wild. Their native islands in Indonesia are being converted to farmland. They are fruit eaters. They also chew on wood to shape their beaks. So a flock of them can not only destroy your fruit crop, but also do serious damage to the tree. Farmers shoot them on sight
Estimates are that Goffin's cockatoos will be extinct in the wild in a decade or so. But when raised with humans, they are very good pets. They will probably be saved from extinction only as pets, since the Indonesian government seems to show no interest in saving them.
This approach isn't generally useful for saving most endangered species. You don't really want a pet American crocodile, for instance. Or a pet condor, for that matter. But a few species can be saved this way, and maybe returned to the wild in the future if the appropriate governments decide that they've lost something important.
Bug handling would be a nightmare
Er, wot?
My reaction exactly. Some years ago (20 of them to be fairly precise) I worked in a place with a big IBM mainframe, and the engineering staff brought in Amdahl's UTS (a version of unix) to run on top of VM. When I asked the Amdahl people about source, their answer was "Oh, that's not an option; you get it whether you want it or not." The install tapes in fact included the source to everything.
A couple of weeks later I diagnosed some problems due to some incorrect configuring that our VM guy was doing, which UTS couldn't handle. A day later I had a fix, and I emailed it to the folks at Amdahl. They sent back a nice message of thanks, my patch was added to their source, and my name was added to their list of contributors.
This was exactly why they sent out the source to all their customers. True, not many could use it, but they really liked customers that had people on staff who could read the source and help them fix problems.
I worked on it a couple of years, during which time the question occasionally came up of whether they had any theft of the code. Their answer was "Not that we know of". They also added that they really wouldn't mind if a few of their improvements were to find their way into the general body of shared unix code. They thought that it was to everyone's advantage to have good code, and having pieces of code identified as coming from Amdahl could only be good advertising.
I have no idea whether they still have this policy. Considering how management attitudes have changed, they probably aren't doing this any more.
It might also interest some to hear that at that time, IBM also supplied a lot of source with their systems. I know the VM support guy had full source. I saw some of the CMS and MVS source, though I don't know if we had all of it. But there was a lot of IBM source available from IBM in the 70's and early 80's, and they seemed to do pretty well commercially.
It could be useful to point out once again that multiple interconnections and multiple routes was an important part of the original Arpanet that led to the Internet. It was (as the commercial people keep forgetting) a project funded 100% by the US Defense Department, and they wanted a network that would survive in battle conditions. Fact is, this is also a good design principle for design in a world where many of the components have a MTBF of days or weeks.
Problem is, commercial folks invariably see reduncancy as a needless expense. Their natural tendency is to reduce everything to the bare minimum (while selling the maximum, of course). Then when anything breaks, big chunks of the system are down.
The World Trade Center attack is an excellent example that woke up a lot of people. There was far too much infrastructure passing under those buildings, and as a result, a lot of the communication systems in Manhattan collapsed along with the buildings. This stupidity was pointed out by people before the attacks, but the commercial interests in charge of the comm lines saw no profit in decentralizing. Even now, they're resisting the idea and merely rebuilding a lot of the destroyed capacity, because a better system would be more expensive.
Governments have stepped in and forced things like the phone, electricity and highway systems to have alternate routes that can be used in disasters and emergencies. The Net is becoming an important part of the world's infrastructure, and eventually those evil old governments are going to step in and force the commercial crowd to supply redundancy in the same way.
--
If you write the simplest code you can that meet the requirements then more than likely its secure.
Obvious counterexample:
sprintf(buffer,"",lots of data);
This is a simple elegant way to encode a lot of output text. But how big should the buffer be?
Obviously you need to calculate the largest possible size for every % chunk. How big should these be? There is in fact no upper bounds.
You can make reasonable assumptions. But then, 10 years from now when your code is compiled for the new FuBar 19 processor, which supports 4096-bit integers, your buffer isn't nearly big enough. And
there have already been compilers written that support bignums as native int and float types. Granted, Microsoft doesn't supply them, but that doesn't mean they don't (and won't ever) exist.
The POSIX standard sprintf() doesn't have an arg that gives the buffer size. This was an oversight, true, but it's a fact of life. And it's not too hard to find examples that are conceptually similar in all common programming languages.
If this becomes widespread, where are we going to get cheap discarded pcs to upgrade our beowulf clusters?
The other $255 pays for IE and WMP
... What? You think you can market it yourself? Well, I guess we'll just have to show you how a real businessman operates ..."
Funny, yes, but also accurate.
Remember back when IE first came out, and there were reports from with MS to the effect that billg had declared that they were going to control the browser "market", even if it took a billion dollars?
They did bankrupt Netscape, and nobody would be so foolish now as to try to market a browser that runs on Windows. So they won. And those profits on Windows are pretty much what allowed them to win.
Now that that battle's over, they are using their profits to guarantee that there can't be a market for various other kinds of software.
"Say, that's a great app you've got there, and it runs on Windows. Hand it over.
I want Americans to have the capability to go whereever the hell we want in the Solar System. :)
I think the US government's priorities are currently a bit different than that. First we gotta go to Iraq. Then there are all those other countries that just won't follow orders.
Once we get them all in line, maybe we'll think about conquering the rest of the Solar System.
OTOH, maybe if we could convince Dubya that we were threatened by Mars or Callistans or Titanians or whatever, he'd have troops on the way as soon as Congress rubber-stamped his request for conquest.
By publishing the fact that CD protection is worthless, they are in blatant violation of the DMCA. So if they visit the USA, they are in danger of being treated like Dmitry Sklyarov was.
Note that he wasn't arrested for breaking an encoding scheme; his crime was publicising the fact that the scheme was weak. The New Scientist has done the same sort of thing.
Publicising the fact that a company's product is shoddy and breaks easily is a crime in the USA.
Now if I could get ogg tunes to work on my linux boxen ...
I have downloaded, compiled, and (maybe) installed several purported ogg packages. I've also fetched a small collection of tunes off the net. But so far, I haven't discovered the trick of getting sound waves from them.
F'rinstance, I have a directory full of libao-0.8.3, libogg-1.0, libvorbis-1.0, and vorbis-tools-1.0, all of which compiled without any obvious problems. But there don't seem to be any clues as to how I make the latest mozilla fire them up with it gets an ogg file.
I think I'm missing something somewhere. Or maybe ogg is just not for dummies like me.
I think I'd rather see Sun focus on improving their products (Sparc and Java) than go after MS.
In the case of java, going after MS is a significant part of improving Sun's product. The main value of java is as a "network" language. It is only useful if all versions of java can be kept compatible. Sun's lawsuit against MS's java was based on the fact that Microsoft has long supplied a version of java that is full of incompatibilities with Sun's. This is almost certainly intentional, and has the purpose of making java less useful than it would be if MS's java were compatible.
There's a tendency of users to judge a product by the behavior of the one instance that they have available. Microsoft users judge java by MS's java, and they find it buggy and incompatible. So they conclude that java is buggy and incompatible.
But Sun owns java. If they can get judges that haven't been bought by Microsoft, they can stop MS's campaign to damage java. In fact, they might even be able to get a court order to replace MS's java with Sun's version on Windows machines. Then all those java applets out there might actually work the same everywhere.
Of course, now that it's clear that the US DoJ and at least some courts are in Microsoft's pocket, it's not obvious that Sun can prevail in the courts.
Hmmm ... So you're telling me that if I install, e.g., AOL's IM tool on my linux box, it will be able to determine whether I'm sitting in the chair in front of the screen? I'm not sure I believe that.
I suspect that all this "presence" does is say whether the app is alive on my machine. If you sent me an IM and I've just walked out of the room, I sorta doubt the app can tell you that I'm not there to read your message. And even if I am, and choose to ignore it and not reply, you can you distinguish that from me not being there at all?
As for talk lacking such a capability, I point out the existence of the finger command. True, this is a different program than talk. But claiming that "talk doesn't have that capability" when it's merely split off into another command is a bit, well, I think it's called "FUD" in some circles.
So what's new here? Back in the early 80's, I used the talk(1) command a lot, and it worked between all the systems that were then capable of using the Internet.
Of course, those systems were limited to a hundred or so unix clones, plus VMS. But it would have worked just find on Windoze and the Mac, too, if they had bothered to pay attention to what was already developed and available for free.
It's really just another case of the commercial world laboriously reinventing the wheel, and loudly proclaiming that their shape wheel (square, hexagonal, etc.) are the best, while carefully ignoring the long existence of a round wheel.
(1) See any unix manual from the early 80's.
At least you can sue after they beat you in the USA.
Well, maybe, if you can prove they did it.
I recall an incident when I was in college, back in the 70's, when a demonstration led to the arrest and overnight "holding" of several hundred students. They were held incommunicado, and in the morning, they were released. When they tried to sue the city, the response was "What are you talking about? We didn't arrest you. We've never seen you before. Those bruises must have come from a fight with a boy/girlfriend."
There was, in fact, no way to prove that they had ever been anywhere near a jail. It was obviously a large conspiracy to slander the police department.
This taught a good lesson to at least a few hundred students about how the real world works. Some haven't forgotten it.
Back in the mid 80's, NPR had a couple of fun articles about the non-celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the US going metric.
...."
This needed a bit of explaining, of course. It turns out that the US, like most countries, actually has no legally-required system of measurements. There are laws (or more often, regulations) that specific items must be measured with specific units. But there is no overall requirement that all measurements be in the same "system".
However, the US government has always had an official standards body. It has had various names and acronyms, such as NBS (National Bureau of Standards) or NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It basically manages the regulations that say "If you use unit U, you must use the official definition of U, which is
So how did the US "go metric" in the 1880's? Well, what the national standards bureau did then was to revise the official definition of all terms of measurement. They've done this many times. At that time, they decided that the best system in use by scientists and engineers was the "metric" system centered in Paris. There were already copies of the metric units in the US, and they were used for calibration. What was done was to make this official, and publish definitions of all the common units as multiples of the metric units.
These definitions have mostly continued. Thus, the legal definition of an inch is 0.0254 meters. This is not an approximation. It is exact, because it's the official definition of "inch".
It occurred to me while listening to the NPR articles that what the US has is what we in the computer field would call an "extended metric system". We have all the metric terms, but we also have a whole lot more. This obviously makes the American system more versatile, right?
So it's really an example of "embrace and extend."
Was that Don Marti or Don Martin?
... link to the burn all gifs website, keep your politics to yourself ...
Politics? The issue with GIF is the legal threat from the owner of the format. This hardly qualifies as a political issue. Well, I suppose one could argue that since the copyright and patent laws were set up by politicians, it qualifies a political. But that reduces the term to meaninglessness.
At least in the US, you don't have the legal right to create GIFs without the explicit written permission of the owner of the format. The owner has made legal threats against some users. So migrating away to a similar (but unencumbered) format is only prudent.
This is a very shortsighted attitude. I'm working on a project for a small consulting firm that is developing software for a couple of big commercial conglomerates. We're doing almost all of our work on linux, with Windows and a few Macs around for testing from the user viewpoint. The free and open nature of linux means that we can get quick answers to questions (or read the source and figure it out ourselves). As a result, we can deliver much faster results than people working on proprietary systems, where they often can't get straight answers to critical questions.
With a closed, proprietary system, our clients are at the mercy of a single vendor. With linux (or the BSD clones), GNU, and other open source software, they aren't at the mercy of anyone.
But, of course, the DP departments in the big conglomerates are your typical bumbling bureaucracy who can't program their way out of a wet paper bag. So they hire a small team of hotshot linux hackers to do the job.
Computers will always need programming, for far longer than any of us will be alive. Most people will never be programmers, just like most people will never be mechanics or accountants or surgeons. There will be a lot of work for a long time, unless the economy goes totally flatline.
Having a quality OS and libraries that are open to study and modification is nothing but an advantage for everyone, both the programmers and the people who pay them to program.
Microsoft makes shoddy software, and hides the details from users and programmers so they can't fix problems. They survive solely because they still have a humongous marketing budget (and the power to bribe politicians and top management). They deserve to fail.
Recently someone on NPR remarked that he had a simple rule for safe travel: He listens to NPR news, notices where Sylvia Poggioli is reporting from, and stays away from there.
This used to work with Daniel Pearl, too, but no more. I suppose there's gotta be one or two other reporters that could be as useful.
Interesting? Informative? Man was that bad moderation. It should have been moderated Funny.
;-)
(At least, I hope it's funny.
Does this mean that when MS decides to release a "security patch" for one of its releases, and explains why this patch is necessary and how it might be exploited, that they are in breach of the DMCA?
...
Probably not, but if YOU were to do this, you would be in violation of the DMCA. The main point of the DMCA is to protect companies from you and me revealing that security-related products are shoddy.
I recently got involved in a specific discussion where this might apply. Some people discovered that they could get the text out of most MS Word docs using the unix "strings" command. The format isn't pretty, but the text is there. The problem is that you also get "deleted" text that Word has just marked deleted but hasn't erased. This text can be from other docs that the sender's copy of Word has processed. This could be a very serious security leak in some cases.
This could be fixed in a unix mail reader, if the programmers could get enough info about the Word format to identify the deleted text and skip over it. This would presumably be legal. But if you were to describe the security issue when releasing the patch, you would be guilty of publicising a security flaw in MS software, and would thus be in violation of the DMCA.
So far, the decision seems to be to keep quiet about this, and just treat it as Someone Else's Problem.
There is the outstanding question of whether we unix/linux geeks are committing a serious crime if we warn Word users about this security issue. In particular, what sort of danger am I in by mentioning it here?
Maybe I should submit this as an Anonymous Coward? Nah
Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results ...
Well, yes, but as a programmer, I can tell you that I'd be able to do a much better job if I could look at the code. Verifying the correct functioning of something like Mathematica is a huge task. A set of expert eyes looking at the code can often find things quickly that would take years of testing.
This isn't to say that such testing isn't valid. It is, of course. But hiding the code removes one very fast and effective metchod of validating the results.
I'd have a lot more trust in software that had been tested thoroughly, AND whose code was open for inspection.
Also, a nice thing about having the source available is that you can compile it yourself, and make sure that your binaries correspond to that code. You can never be too paranoid about such things when the subject is politics.
The only way drm would be included in embedded systems is by law.
Even then, it's doubtful if it will matter with many embedded real-time systems. And it ain't
gonna matter with consumer equipment, either. There will simply be massive "civil disobedience" and it will be roundly ignored.
There is an obvious precedent for this: In the early 1900's, laws were passed all over the US to prevent the use of automobiles. Speed limits of 5 mph were passed. Several states had laws saying that an auto had to be preceded by a rider on horseback. Others passed laws requiring that if a horse was nearby, an auto's engine had to be turned off to avoid frightening the horse, and left off until the horse was gone.
Such laws were simply ignored. Few if any policemen were silly enough to try to enforce them. They could be used occasionally for harassment purposes, but for all practical purposes, they were just the last gasp of a dying technology.
One of the fun legal things is that such laws are still on the books in many places. Almost all citizens are criminals. Nobody worries about this, for some strange reason.
Similarly, the recording and entertainment industries will come to terms with the Net. We will have the right to record things and play them later, or in our car or at a friend's house. We will have the right to back up our disks. We will have the right to upgrade our hardware and play our old purchased recordings on the new equipment. Attempts to stop this will simply be ignored, as the anti-auto laws were ignored.
And we will all end up criminals. But that's ok; if you're driving any sort of motor vehicle, you are probably a criminal already.
I thought you were joking.
...
As usual, when I joke, people respond as if I were serious, and when I'm serious, people think it's a joke.
But at least someone took the time to Look It Up