If you remember, the incident in question involved someone loose for weeks or months on Microsoft's internal networks before they were discovered. It's wouldn't have been impossible for them to modify the code before it got signed. Microsoft had to spend a great deal of effort to try to verify that such a thing didn't actually happen.
Right. If I'm buying this license, I feel I should be entitled to my purchase for the duration of my life. I had my car broken into twice in 6 months, losing tons of CDs. I should be able, as a licensee, to receive a replacement copy of all those CDs.
Your analogy is inaccurate. This is more like the publisher rigging your CDs to self destruct if your car is broken into, even if the CDs were actually kept in your house at all times. If they were to implement this scheme, they would be going out of their way to break the media that you bought. That's a lot different than the media just wearing out or or getting lost; it would be intentionally destroying perfectly good media that you still own just because one player broke down.
I *do* feel entitled to purchase goods that aren't booby trapped. You may not, but I guess you're entitled to be a sucker if you want.
Actually, I would bet that the tip would be destroyed even before it hit a tomato. Probably within seconds of removing the blade from a vacuum, exposure to the air would corrode that single atom off of the tip. If nothing else, it probably wouldn't survive its first encounter with a stray ozone molecule.
Even if it somehow survived and made it into the tomato, that thing is full of thousands of acids, enzymes and other chemicals that are good at breaking down chemical bonds.
If you ever get involved in applying for a patent, you'll find that patent attorneys always apply a standard set of text filters to your documentation to transform it into a patent application (followed by conversion to Courier font). One of these filters is the regular expression: s/(\w+s\b)/a plurality of \1/.
The US government might actually be entitled to many internet patents
I think you mean would have been entitled, back in the 1970s. Since we're well past the 1-year deadline for filing patents on technology that's been revealed to the public, nobody is entitled to patents on that stuff anymore. (Of course, today the USPTO would probably gladly hand out patents on the Internet's fundamentals anyway, but that's another matter.)
Well, we could always overload words the way a C programmer would:
way -> way weigh -> way1 whey -> way2
Although introducing namespaces would be more clear to the reader:
way -> Directions::way weigh -> Measurements::way whey -> Foodstuffs::way
But since we're talking about text documents in general, maybe we should base a new simplified spelling scheme on XML:
way -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="directions"> way </spelling:overloaded_word> weigh -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="measurements"> way </spelling:overloaded_word> whey -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="foodstuffs"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
Let's stop all the regulations, taxes, tariffs, fees and restrictions on media companies and let them compete openly.
I've got a deal for you: First we achieve *all* of those goals, then we can oppose net neutrality legislation.
Given the current reality (a free market in low-latency broadband Internet access simply does not exist), opposing net neutrality legislation with the usual libertarian arguments is putting the cart before the horse.
It does, but then money comes along and closes the argument right there, right now.
Not really. Countless companies have been destroyed as a consequence of the egos of the people running them, regardless of how much money they stood to gain or lose.
How can anyone continue to attract the investment they use to hire and pay software developers in a not-yet-making-money startup
It seemed to work just fine for the first 40 years of the history of the software industry, when any software patents were still an anomaly. You know, the golden years when plenty of startups ended up making $Billions.
Where would the industry be today if things like hashtables and basic sorting routines had been encumbered well into the 1980s? What if Visicalc were the only legal spreadsheet until just a couple of years ago? Advancements in computer technology might have been delayed by a decade or more. We could just now be enjoying Win95 levels of computing Experience.
Yeah, it's great when little guys like the University of California are able to stand up against big companies that steal their totally non-obvious concepts that nobody else had previously implemented.
He's already replied to this but yes if you don't have a working network.
Then that's his problem, not Ubuntu's. They satisfied the legal requirement under section 3a of the GPL by making the source available on the same website that they distribute the object code from (with an easy automatic command, no less). If he can't connect with a particular machine, Ubuntu has no obligation to fix his problem for him.
And if he happened to get the distro on a CD, the Ubuntu FAQ has this to say:
We do not normally distribute source CDs and you cannot order them through shipit. That said, in order to comply with the GPL, we are happy to distribute source code on CD to anybody we give a binary CD. More information is written in fine print on the back of each CD. Source for everything on the CD is always available at http://archive.ubuntu.com/ or can be ordered from Canonical for them cost of the media plus shipping.
So you lost a lot of money due to this whole WinFS thing?
Certainly some of their competitors have been impacted financially. Microsoft's decade of promises, vaporware and FUD surrounding Cairo/OFS/Storage+/RFS/WinFS has been used to help persuade their customers to not migrate to other platforms. "Stay with us and you'll benefit from this wonderful new filesystem we're developing that will solve all your problems!"
Well, it turns out that most of those statements were false. Nevertheless, Microsoft retained those customers who were tempted by the promises, and other vendors lost out on the corresponding revenues.
The only reason that I am a little worried is I'm pretty sure yum will update me to core 6 automatically
I don't think that it will automatically upgrade your version number. However, over time you do largely end up with most of the software for the next version because of the huge volume of updates that happen in the current FC version. For example, the update to KDE 3.5.3 was recently posted for FC5.
This has actually been bothering me lately. Right now yum tells me that I've got more than 500 megabytes of updates to download, only a few weeks after the last time I did a full update. I haven't seen a simple way to tell it to *only* install security updates without me manually choosing the packages marked with [SECURITY] in the announcement list. As someone who goes by the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle, I'd rather not churn all of these versions through my system unless there's a really good reason. Maybe there is an automatic way to do only security updates, but it sure doesn't seem like they make it obvious how to do it.
Leptons are actually much lighter than quarks (in general). In the quantum world that smears them out so that they're effectively much bigger than quarks in physical extent.
Clearly, these information leaks are a major security threat that is aided and abetted by these renegade PDF viewers. I'm encouraging my representatives in Congress to introduce a "Digital Millennium Redaction Act" that will prohibit the manufacture, sale, discussion or hyperlinks to any PDF viewers which enable the illicit extraction of redacted data from PDF documents. Such viewers are little more than the preferred tools for information thieves, hiding in the guise of "productivity applications". It's despicable.
This law would instruct the FCC to create a program to certify approved PDF viewers; such viewers must make it impossible for users to steal the redacted data in a file, along with technical measures to prevent tampering with the viewers by hackers. Certified viewers will be made available to the public by software companies on a list of government-approved PDF vendors. After it becomes illegal to own a non-certified pirate PDF viewer, these dangerous information leaks will thankfully become a thing of the past.
rotary engine is about the only thing I've seen that comes close to an "improvement" on internal combustion engines in the last 100+ years
That's hardly an improvement. Wankel engines have even worse thermodynamic characteristics than piston engines. They typically are less efficient, more polluting and harder to make reliable. Their only claim to fame is more power output in a smaller lighter package than a 4-cycle engine, but then again the stinky 2-cycle engine in my weed whacker can make that same claim.
Fatality per mile, the shuttle is no doubt kicking cars' ass.
I don't know about that. Most shuttle trips are pretty short: They start at one of the Kennedy Space Center's launch pads, and they disembark just a couple of miles away at the shuttle's runway.
Some materials simply aren't available anymore or can't be made to the necessary impurity/strength/resiliance tolerances.
That's bunk. If they could be made then, they can be made now. If they're "not available", they can be made available by simply manufacturing them out of the same raw materials that they did a few decades ago.
Basically, those are the kinds of excuses people tell their bosses when they have a case of NIH and want to do "fun" design work instead of "boring" maintenance work.
No we don't. All we need to do is build a batch of fresh replacements to the exact same specs as the current ones. When those wear out in 30 years, do it again. There's no need to go creating and deploying new designs, especially since we can't actually test them anymore.
In most cases, unless you're using specialized vector processing units, there's probably not a massive difference in performance between C code written by someone who really knows what he's doing and assembly code. (A good C coder will have a good understanding of how each line of code will get translated into machine code, and will avoid creating performance problems.) I've been coding in both for more than 20 years now, and whenever I disassemble a modern optimized compiler produces, it's almost always very good code.
The main thing is that the optimized compiler can tirelessly work on millions of lines of code, doing a good job of fully utilizing the hardware at each point, whereas the human assembly language coder will peter out juggling registers after few hundred lines of code. Past that point, the human coder will start creating manual layers of abstraction (subroutine calls, assembler macros, etc.) that just don't get optimized at all.
After you've written your graphics masterpiece and gotten it fully debugged, then you can profile it. If you can then identify some inner loops that you can't fix up by tweaking the C code, then maybe you should write a few dozen lines of inline assembler code. Anything beyond that is likely to be an unportable, counterproductive waste of effort.
I program about 80% C code, 15% C++ (helper apps), and 5% Assembly Code. The cost involved in certifying any sort or interpreter or JIT compiler is not worth it to anyone doing saftey critical RTOS work.
Now that doesn't make much sense to me. Someone somewhere has to do the hard work to certify the high-level language, but that's largely a one-time effort. It seems to me that it would then be much easier to certify each new project that gets written in the safer high-level language than to prove that a bunch of random new C an assembler code is bug-free for every distinct project. It probably wouldn't require a heavyweight VM to achieve this either; a safety-oriented compiled language along the lines of D would probably allow for more streamlined development on low-powered hardware.
[Dr. Evil voice:] If your firm is able to deliver this massive software project by the end of this calendar year, I am prepared to offer a financial incentive package of Five Hundred Thousand dollars. Think it over.
Slashdot Mirror
If you remember, the incident in question involved someone loose for weeks or months on Microsoft's internal networks before they were discovered. It's wouldn't have been impossible for them to modify the code before it got signed. Microsoft had to spend a great deal of effort to try to verify that such a thing didn't actually happen.
Your analogy is inaccurate. This is more like the publisher rigging your CDs to self destruct if your car is broken into, even if the CDs were actually kept in your house at all times. If they were to implement this scheme, they would be going out of their way to break the media that you bought. That's a lot different than the media just wearing out or or getting lost; it would be intentionally destroying perfectly good media that you still own just because one player broke down.
I *do* feel entitled to purchase goods that aren't booby trapped. You may not, but I guess you're entitled to be a sucker if you want.
Even if it somehow survived and made it into the tomato, that thing is full of thousands of acids, enzymes and other chemicals that are good at breaking down chemical bonds.
If you ever get involved in applying for a patent, you'll find that patent attorneys always apply a standard set of text filters to your documentation to transform it into a patent application (followed by conversion to Courier font). One of these filters is the regular expression: s/(\w+s\b)/a plurality of \1/.
I think you mean would have been entitled, back in the 1970s. Since we're well past the 1-year deadline for filing patents on technology that's been revealed to the public, nobody is entitled to patents on that stuff anymore. (Of course, today the USPTO would probably gladly hand out patents on the Internet's fundamentals anyway, but that's another matter.)
Well, we could always overload words the way a C programmer would:
way -> way
weigh -> way1
whey -> way2
Although introducing namespaces would be more clear to the reader:
way -> Directions::way
weigh -> Measurements::way
whey -> Foodstuffs::way
But since we're talking about text documents in general, maybe we should base a new simplified spelling scheme on XML:
way -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="directions"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
weigh -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="measurements"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
whey -> <spelling:overloaded_word category="foodstuffs"> way </spelling:overloaded_word>
I've got a deal for you: First we achieve *all* of those goals, then we can oppose net neutrality legislation.
Given the current reality (a free market in low-latency broadband Internet access simply does not exist), opposing net neutrality legislation with the usual libertarian arguments is putting the cart before the horse.
It seemed to work just fine for the first 40 years of the history of the software industry, when any software patents were still an anomaly. You know, the golden years when plenty of startups ended up making $Billions.
Where would the industry be today if things like hashtables and basic sorting routines had been encumbered well into the 1980s? What if Visicalc were the only legal spreadsheet until just a couple of years ago? Advancements in computer technology might have been delayed by a decade or more. We could just now be enjoying Win95 levels of computing Experience.
Yeah, it's great when little guys like the University of California are able to stand up against big companies that steal their totally non-obvious concepts that nobody else had previously implemented.
What a bunch of bloatware. Here's word processing the way it's meant to be done:
Then that's his problem, not Ubuntu's. They satisfied the legal requirement under section 3a of the GPL by making the source available on the same website that they distribute the object code from (with an easy automatic command, no less). If he can't connect with a particular machine, Ubuntu has no obligation to fix his problem for him.
And if he happened to get the distro on a CD, the Ubuntu FAQ has this to say:
Certainly some of their competitors have been impacted financially. Microsoft's decade of promises, vaporware and FUD surrounding Cairo/OFS/Storage+/RFS/WinFS has been used to help persuade their customers to not migrate to other platforms. "Stay with us and you'll benefit from this wonderful new filesystem we're developing that will solve all your problems!"
Well, it turns out that most of those statements were false. Nevertheless, Microsoft retained those customers who were tempted by the promises, and other vendors lost out on the corresponding revenues.
I don't think that it will automatically upgrade your version number. However, over time you do largely end up with most of the software for the next version because of the huge volume of updates that happen in the current FC version. For example, the update to KDE 3.5.3 was recently posted for FC5.
This has actually been bothering me lately. Right now yum tells me that I've got more than 500 megabytes of updates to download, only a few weeks after the last time I did a full update. I haven't seen a simple way to tell it to *only* install security updates without me manually choosing the packages marked with [SECURITY] in the announcement list. As someone who goes by the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle, I'd rather not churn all of these versions through my system unless there's a really good reason. Maybe there is an automatic way to do only security updates, but it sure doesn't seem like they make it obvious how to do it.
Leptons are actually much lighter than quarks (in general). In the quantum world that smears them out so that they're effectively much bigger than quarks in physical extent.
This law would instruct the FCC to create a program to certify approved PDF viewers; such viewers must make it impossible for users to steal the redacted data in a file, along with technical measures to prevent tampering with the viewers by hackers. Certified viewers will be made available to the public by software companies on a list of government-approved PDF vendors. After it becomes illegal to own a non-certified pirate PDF viewer, these dangerous information leaks will thankfully become a thing of the past.
Query: printf
1. Windows CE toaster edition v1.0: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()
2. Windows CE toaster edition v1.1: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()
3. Windows CE.NET beta cellphone edition: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()
4. Windows CE.NET beta microwave oven edition: ActiveDataSourceExchangeObject.printf()
87. Visual C/C++ Library Reference: printf()
That's hardly an improvement. Wankel engines have even worse thermodynamic characteristics than piston engines. They typically are less efficient, more polluting and harder to make reliable. Their only claim to fame is more power output in a smaller lighter package than a 4-cycle engine, but then again the stinky 2-cycle engine in my weed whacker can make that same claim.
I don't know about that. Most shuttle trips are pretty short: They start at one of the Kennedy Space Center's launch pads, and they disembark just a couple of miles away at the shuttle's runway.
That's bunk. If they could be made then, they can be made now. If they're "not available", they can be made available by simply manufacturing them out of the same raw materials that they did a few decades ago.
Basically, those are the kinds of excuses people tell their bosses when they have a case of NIH and want to do "fun" design work instead of "boring" maintenance work.
No we don't. All we need to do is build a batch of fresh replacements to the exact same specs as the current ones. When those wear out in 30 years, do it again. There's no need to go creating and deploying new designs, especially since we can't actually test them anymore.
The main thing is that the optimized compiler can tirelessly work on millions of lines of code, doing a good job of fully utilizing the hardware at each point, whereas the human assembly language coder will peter out juggling registers after few hundred lines of code. Past that point, the human coder will start creating manual layers of abstraction (subroutine calls, assembler macros, etc.) that just don't get optimized at all.
After you've written your graphics masterpiece and gotten it fully debugged, then you can profile it. If you can then identify some inner loops that you can't fix up by tweaking the C code, then maybe you should write a few dozen lines of inline assembler code. Anything beyond that is likely to be an unportable, counterproductive waste of effort.
Now that doesn't make much sense to me. Someone somewhere has to do the hard work to certify the high-level language, but that's largely a one-time effort. It seems to me that it would then be much easier to certify each new project that gets written in the safer high-level language than to prove that a bunch of random new C an assembler code is bug-free for every distinct project. It probably wouldn't require a heavyweight VM to achieve this either; a safety-oriented compiled language along the lines of D would probably allow for more streamlined development on low-powered hardware.
[Dr. Evil voice:] If your firm is able to deliver this massive software project by the end of this calendar year, I am prepared to offer a financial incentive package of Five Hundred Thousand dollars. Think it over.