I understood that. When I said "a modern OS", I was referring to something which is still under active development and use. Things like the debate over khttpd and the post-2.1 Linux VFS design would be great topics for modern OS students. I'm sure the *BSD world has equally interesting debates/re-implimentations going on (e.g. I've heard good things about what NetBSD is doing with VM).
My point was that there seems to be no large-scale effort to teach college kids about the things that are important, nay pivotal, topics in today's OS design world. Linux and other free UNIXen are being put into super computers and telephone switches. It makes sense for the topics of debate in that world to be the meat of modern OS courses.
UPN's Entertainment President Tom Noonan made the announcement during a meeting with advertisers. He promised a "surprising conclusion" and a "smashing finale" to the show, which is UPN's longest-running series.
Jenette: Yes, that was the press release from six months ago when it was first annonced that Star Trek: Voyager was comming to an end. Who could have predicted the fan reaction, and outpouring of support. As yet, Paramount has not changed its mind on ending the series, but here at Multi-Mega Theater in Burbank California, a public simulcast of the finale has just finished airing, and folks are just starting to get out. Let's go chat with a few.
[pause while she manuevers over to a teenager with reddish hair poking out from under his Klingon skull-cap]
Jenette: Well young man, what did you think of the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager?
[The boy looks a bit dazed as he slowly realizes that he's been asked a question]
Kid#1: Uh... woah. I really didn't expect the 328 product placements for modern products in a futuristic series.
Jenette: You counted?
Kid#1:[Starting to get his bearrings] Oh yeah, I got it all here on my padd [waves Palm VII] Some of the highlights were: Bill Gates making a personal appeal to the public to block the breakup of Microsoft (they snuck that in with Data's cameo when he's doing research on historical precidents for the Drakh Plague, er Borg Virus); 22 different sodas and 32 beers lined up in a long, slow pan during the holodeck sequence; 15...
Jenette: Thanks, son. And you, miss? What did you think?
[A late teens, college girl walks up, wiping away a tear]
Girl#1: I... I can't believe it. I always knew that the captain and Chakotay had a thing going on, but I didn't think you could hide being pregnant that well. And, wow, for the little guy to be accepted into Star Fleet as soon as they returned, that was just... like... wow.
Jenette:[Looking a bit perplexed] Ok... thanks. Um, you sir! What did... Oh! Mr Nimoy, I didn't even know you were here. What did you think of the final episode of the third Star Trek series?
Nimoy: Actually, it's either the fourth or the fifth, depending on whether or not you count the animated series, but either way, I just want to say that any remaining chance that I would be willing to reprise my, now famous role as Mr. Spock, was just jettisoned with Voyager's trash.
Jenette: You mean you didn't like it?
Nimoy: No, my contract as director of Star Trek IV: Whales in Space restricts me from saying that, but I can say that Vulcans, as I understand them, have never had a propensity for walking around noting how everything has this or that historical connection to a 21st century web-site. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Gene had never envisioned a Vulcan easing the tension of Pan-Far by visiting www.hot-nekkid-chicks.com
Jenette: Well, there you have it. Mixed reviews, but clearly a Star Trek episode that will be talked about for years to come. Back to you, Harve.
It wasn't 10%. I think B5 was costing around $800,000 per episode (which peaked out at about $1M toward the end of the series) and ST:TNG was around $1M-1.5M per episode. Everyone was aghast that Space: Above and Beyond was costing $2M, so there's no way TNG was costing $10M!
BTW: The B5 numbers are quoted from Straczynski (back when rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 was THE group) who was very up-front that these numbers were ballpark, and he was not allowed to go into detail.
I really enjoyed reading the Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate in the back of Open Sources. As much as many of A.T.'s arguments seem short-sighted in retrospect, he had several very good points about Linux (e.g. it was not portable, it could not deal with externally maintained extensions, and other things that had to be fixed in the 2.0 and later series). I think it will be well worth the community's time to re-read the Minix source and figure out if there's any more lessons to be learned, and/or incorporate the features that make sense.
Question, though: does Minix still have a future as a teaching tool, or do OSes like Linux and *BSD make it obsolete? I would certianly like to see a good textbook that teaches OS design, using the source to a modern OS as examples....
I've heard good things (even from Joe Straczynski) about the original movies, but the show is just dumb. It's the kind of Benny Hill SciFi (pronounced skiffy) that makes people think that there can't be any such thing as good writers who produce science fiction.
Now, the science fiction snobbery asside, it's not as arousing as it aims to be, it's not as action-packed as it aims to be, and it's very rarely funny. It's sort of like Dr Who with sex, but without the interesting stories and occasional quality actor (e.g. Tom Baker). In short, there's simply no basis on which to recommend the show. On the other hand, they passed up Crusade because Lexx was in production. Think about this: they passed up a show with quality actors, good stories, a 5-year plan and an established audience for an "assassin, an idiot and a sex slave" in space.
Here's the 10 top reasons that the sci-fi channel should resurect the currently-dead Crusade:
10.
Galen alone is a better character than any other sci-fi channel character. Not because technomages are cool, but because he is more than just an SF stereotype. Yes, he's Aragorn and Gandalf. Yes, he's got bits of a lot of archetypes, but he's a living breathing character. Plus, technomages are cool.
;-)
9.
The sci-fi channel has some people (at least indirectly) who are familiar with how to integrate good animatronics into a science fiction show, and it would be a cool thing to see some of Straczynski's odder ideas put into play (e.g. the praying-mantis-like character from B5).
8.
The bits of Crusade that TNT didn't f**k with were much more interesting than the bits that they did. This makes me think that a station willing to let Straczynski do his thing will reap the rewards.
7.
There's a ready-made fan-base, as I'm sure the B5 ratings will tell them.
6.
The sci-fi channel has good connections among teleplay-capable SF authors. This means that they can feed Straczynski with good authors and keep him down to those 8-12 per season where he does his best writing (e.g. see the first 2 seasons of B5 vs. the rest; still a lot of good writing, but not as many GOOD EPISODES).
5.
They need a good companion show for Farscape (once they start writing episodes as well as they did at the end of last season, and I'm hoping that they will...)
4.
A 4+ year show that's pretty much guaranteed to have interesting stories for the full run.
3.
Sci-fi could use some good will among fans right about now.
2.
If they don't Joe will go somewhere else, and do something that Sci-Fi will wish they had.
1.
Two words: Lexx must die.
:-|
Ever since I first saw Lexx, and every time I accidentally catch a little of it by way of the promo spots, I sigh and say "this is what Sci-Fi wanted in stead of Crusade." I can only hope that the move to pick up B5 is a trial before going whole-hog and developing Crusade. Fellow fans, let us hope....
This is a really great point, but you don't make it strongly enough. Here's a concrete example:
What is the prior art for an online discussion forum that uses user-moderation and moderation of moderation to determine scores for articles which can then be viewed in a threaded fashion, wieghted by a moderation threshold? We know it as Slash. Does the USPTO know of it? Doubtful, as the folks at Slashdot/Andover.net/VA-Linux have been too busy writing code and making their site work to publish papers. The source is out there, but I betcha you could sneak this sucker through the USPTO if you greased it with enough patent-lawyer-speak.
Prior art can only be identified usefully by individuals who work in the affected field. This is not being done.
My solution? Patents should undergo a probationary period where they are publicly displayed and the community at large can submit comments. That would have killed the 10 most aggregeous patents of the last decade easily.
The music industry had a decade or more in which they knew this was coming. Hell, in the 80's people started handing around hand-tooled MIDI files on BBSs. And, what did they do? The industry has spent millions of dollars on opposing any sort of on-line music, and the only overtures that they made treated every consumer like a suspect in the worlds largest petty theft.
If they had really pushed since the founding of the Internet, they could have molded online music into a massive profit center, but they stuck their fingers in their ears and tried real hard to believe that the Internet fad would pass.
Well, now they get to lie in that bed, and to quote far too many people, a little revolution can be a good thing. In 20 years, we will likely not recognize the music industry on planet earth. I suspect that the real product will be bandwidth, and songs will not be sold without video. "Pirating" is already the new radio, and as music companies realize this, they may seek to find ways to advertize through the distribution channels of "pirated" music. This will mean a consolidation and commercialization of those services and technologies.
Actually, it sounds like a damn good time to be getting into the online music industry. But, you have to choose your competitors carefully. Companies like MP3.com seem very avant garde to the music industry, but may not be radical enough to end up on top. Remember the early days of the net when first FTP software and then Netscape seemed poised to take the most advantage of software sales to consumer use of the Internet?
There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from artists because they are used to the status quo. Ignore the fact that the status quo has lead to one of the most abusive producer/distributor/consumer relationships in history. The artists feel that they have stability. So, as instability sets in, the ones that do this because they think they can make the system work for them will say that they are being hurt by the "pirates".
The artists and small publishers who push the envelope and take a risk will profit. It may come in the form of creating a new music format that includes graphical or textual information about tour dates. I just don't know what will happen, but I know that artistic creativity will always be a valuable commodity, and artists may not be able to profit as much from the music industry, but they will certainly have the public's ear and thus a door do their wallets for a long time to come.
I was amused by the line "Microsoft was keen to agree with this." I can just see it now:
"Mr Balmer, do you agree that Linux is insecure because of the source code being available."
"Well, from a marketing standpoint, I'd love to agree (as you know we hide our source as if it were actually valuable, so we have something to concede to the DoJ). However, the truth is that my technical analysts (yeah, we had to hire a couple last week) told me that Linux is actually very secure, and that most of the security problems that arise in any environment are either insiders exploiting the local security policy or months old problems that the administrators should have fixed. Now, I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that if I had the source code, then I could do my own security evaluations, and limit the extent of problem #2, but it still lies in my hands to create good security policy."
"Wow, Mr Balmer, that's just an amazingly cogent and forthright statement for you!"
"Mmmmrrfffll... Mrrrrmmm! Rugh.... Get this damn daemon out of my head!"
"Um, and as Mr. Balmer spews forth pea soup, we go back to you in Metropolis, Clark!"
I see I got side-tracked, there. Sorry.
Disclaimer: None of the people herin depicted ever acted this reasonably.
what points did you make? you testified to the defendant's character.
There is no defendant. This is a Slashdot discussion not a trial.
Ted Bundy had people testify to his character, also. I'm not trying to compare the defendant to a mass murderer
That's funny, you certainly did so. Why?
His intentions may have been altruistic, but as an experience worker he should have had the common sense to bring his superiors in on his little experiments.
Agreed. Good, glad we got that out of the way. Now, please feel free to contribute to the contest, or don't. But, if you have some problem with Randal being a judge on the contest, try bringing up a new, and pertinent point.
Anonymous Coward said, "I'll probably never be able to get another corporate job again." First sign that this guy is a little unstable (if replying to his own posts wasn't enough). The old, they're-out-to-get-me.
Then, "I was carrying a gun after being surrounded by a group of them brandishing baseball bats"
Wow. That's good, I like that part. What has this to do with Randal?
"don't you fucking tell me about duty and what anyone owes their employers."
Why not? I have strong feelings on the matter, and clearly so do you. I respect your right to say what you like on the topic, but please consider not ordering others around. It doesn't work very well as a debate tactic.
Randal felt he had a duty, and he executed that duty in a way that was questionable. That does not change the fact that he is qualified to judge the contest in question.
Ok, for starters, clearly you didn't read comp.lang.perl in the old days (when there was such a group). The JAPHs were Randal's way of demonstrating whatever feature he was explainging in the message. They were wonderful ways to see concrete examples of how Perl features worked. For those of us who learned perl at version 3, Randal and his JAPHs were a huge help.
Second, chat2.pl may seem like a mess, now, but I dare you to write something as efficient that does the same thing IN PERL VERSION 4! You couldn't just write C library, you didn't have references or anonymous anything, no objects, no lexical scope. Perl was primitive back then and chat2 was about as clean as a complex module like that could get. Once Perl version 5 came along chat2.pl was obsoleted by cleaner interfaces, not because there were better programmers, but because there were better LANGUAGE FEATURES.
As for his CPAN credits, Randal doesn't generally write modules. He's a trainer. I've participated in numerous conversations with him where he has fixed someone else code, or shown them how to do it themselves, and I can attest that he's not just good. He's worthy of being one of the Perl trinity.
You note that Larry Wall wrote Programming Perl. Go look at the 2nd edition. It's co-authored by Randal, Tom and Larry.
Now, Randal's technical credits asside, this thread was about how we should all boycott this contest purely because the person judging it has a conviction is his past. If you feel that strongly about people who have served their time, then perhaps you should stop ranting on Slashdot and go run for office. Your platform can be: "Never forgive the guilty: Life for 'em all!" I suspect there will even be a few takers. Not me, but then everyone's allowed an opinion. Just stop following up to your own Slashdot posts.
Replying to your own post.... getting desperate are we?
You're preaching the sins of wearing blue to the police, in this case. We've all done what Randal did in the line of what we were told was our duty. Intel flipped when they realized that a) he could circumvent security and b) he did so in order to fix it. In the end, if you haven't had to break into a box to fix something at work, I assume you're not much of a sysadmin.
How can you feel "dirty" for having learned Perl from someone who risks jail time over helping his employer?
This (bashing of Randal) is almost certainly a troll,...
why, because it differs from your opinions of the matter?
No, because a) it's off topic b) it's not supported by any real evidence that what he did was not standard business practice for those of us who were in his industry at the time and c) you don't cite any external material.
Randal is well known as one of the most selfless members of the Perl community. He spent years helping others on USENET for NO PAY. He's the author of one of the most respected introductory language texts in existance. I say this, not to appologize for his actions, but to demonstrate the truth of his central claim in the case: he did what he did because it was in his basic nature to try to help others, and it never occured to him that that help would be mis-interpreted. And what's more, his actions in the case in question were exactly how a lot of us were dealing with security probelms at work at the time.
I know that I did exactly what Randal did. He was "found out" before he could report his findings. I managed to get info to the admins in that department before that happened. Neither of us thought twice about it. We were just doing the right thing for the people who depended on technology that they didn't understand. I would have been stunned if anyone had been upset by what I did. When I heard about Randal, I almost threw up. It was just stupid, and it scared me. Today, I'm much less productive, because I don't take chances. Of course, I really don't have this problem NOW, because all of the company's production hardware is my domain. I don't have to answer to anyone about logging into/examining security on any of the systems.
Stay with the context, son. We're talking about a SunOS system circa mid 90's./etc/shadow was OPTIONAL./etc/passwd would have likely contained the passwords (DES hashed, of course).
What do you mean the poster did not know what grep does. He used the phrase "grepped the password file". Being an author of several versions of grep (including the only one that I'm aware of in Perl), I would use the same phrase (password, if I was being generic and passwd if I was refering to/etc/passwd).
Randal did what many of us did. He logged into a machine in a department that he used to work with in order to verify that his security recommendations were being followed. I've done it. He did it. He got "caught" by people without a clue. In the end, had he not been stopped, he would have alerted them to potentially serious security problems (which he had advised them about previously when he had been in that department).
Give it a rest, Randal is one of the most upstanding folks on the Net. He just fell afoul of some bad assumptions WRT corporate culture meets UNIX culture, and paid the price for it.
The thing that I took away from the Randal incident was that you can't trust your employer to trust you. You have to be every bit as paranoid about them as they *could* be of you and that has, of course, hurt my job performance since. Sigh.
Provisional patents solve the smaller of the two giant problems out there. That is, they solve for the laziness of the patent office in doing research.
However, it only solves for it spottily and does not solve the problem of people getting silly patents that they can then use to shut down open source efforts that might hurt their proprietary software sales.
The right way to deal with this would seem to be to establish (as has been discussed elsewhere) a non-profit "patent custodian" that people can donate their patents to. Then have that organization use licenses for its patents as a lever to extract open source licensing for other key patents. For example, if the GNOME folks had a few good patents, they might be able to get Adobe to release their color model handling for use in GNOME programs (and their derivatives). This really should not be an issue, since any GNOME derived program is subject to the GPL, and that means that most of Adobe's rivals won't touch it.
good examples for some of the projects out there are the way Perl does its advanced regular expression stuff and the way that Slash manages moderated discussion forums. If there were patents on all of these things, licensed to any open source effort that wanted to use them, the patent situation might be livable.
I don't think this will happen, though, until the open source world begins to truely believe that the USPTO will not be magically reformed and turned into an organization with a clue.
Remember that Kubrick intended for Spielberg to direct this film. This is why the film was held off, Spielberg was not available. Kubrick felt that Spielberg had a better angle on the FX and child-work that were needed, which is true on both counts.
ADOM was originally released with the caveat that version 1.0 would have source. We're now (after several years) at 0.99gamma16
Needless to say, the author of that software package felt that he had written himself a loophole, and could take advantage of the good will of the open source community. I don't know about these people, but if the mindset isn't release early, release often, then they don't get it to begin with.
Porn pushes bandwidth, but not much else. People generally don't go out and buy a new machine to support porn, when the old machine can display it just fine.
Games on the other hand keep pushing memory size, bus speed, processsor speed, bandwidth, CDROMs, rendering speed, video memory, etc, etc, etc.
Wish list: I'd like to get an incremental linker one of these days. I'd also like to see better assembly tools, better debugging tools, better C++ support, better code optimization, better compatibility across the various Window managers, better thread handling and free beer.
Reading this very nearly brings tears to my eyes. You can't know, unless you too have been there, how badly I've wanted all of these things under Linux since the early days of Slackware.
It's always the games. Do you think that XFree4.0 would have come as soon as it has without the push from the gaming market? Do you think that we would have Mesa as stable and accepted as it is? Gaming pushes the graphics industry harder than any other force.
But, it doesn't stop there. We'll be pushing for creative new networking libraries to support the kind of client-side massively multi-user gaming that will become popular. There will be a need for creative new ways to deal with sound, memory management, desktop integration and roaming sessions. All of this will be driven by other factors too, but gaming will be the only one pushing EVERYTHING.
I just can't wait, which is why I'll be doing my little bit....
Slashdot Mirror
I understood that. When I said "a modern OS", I was referring to something which is still under active development and use. Things like the debate over khttpd and the post-2.1 Linux VFS design would be great topics for modern OS students. I'm sure the *BSD world has equally interesting debates/re-implimentations going on (e.g. I've heard good things about what NetBSD is doing with VM).
My point was that there seems to be no large-scale effort to teach college kids about the things that are important, nay pivotal, topics in today's OS design world. Linux and other free UNIXen are being put into super computers and telephone switches. It makes sense for the topics of debate in that world to be the meat of modern OS courses.
Jenette: Yes, that was the press release from six months ago when it was first annonced that Star Trek: Voyager was comming to an end. Who could have predicted the fan reaction, and outpouring of support. As yet, Paramount has not changed its mind on ending the series, but here at Multi-Mega Theater in Burbank California, a public simulcast of the finale has just finished airing, and folks are just starting to get out. Let's go chat with a few.
[pause while she manuevers over to a teenager with reddish hair poking out from under his Klingon skull-cap]
Jenette: Well young man, what did you think of the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager?
[The boy looks a bit dazed as he slowly realizes that he's been asked a question]
Kid#1: Uh... woah. I really didn't expect the 328 product placements for modern products in a futuristic series.
Jenette: You counted?
Kid#1: [Starting to get his bearrings] Oh yeah, I got it all here on my padd [waves Palm VII] Some of the highlights were: Bill Gates making a personal appeal to the public to block the breakup of Microsoft (they snuck that in with Data's cameo when he's doing research on historical precidents for the Drakh Plague, er Borg Virus); 22 different sodas and 32 beers lined up in a long, slow pan during the holodeck sequence; 15
Jenette: Thanks, son. And you, miss? What did you think?
[A late teens, college girl walks up, wiping away a tear]
Girl#1: I... I can't believe it. I always knew that the captain and Chakotay had a thing going on, but I didn't think you could hide being pregnant that well. And, wow, for the little guy to be accepted into Star Fleet as soon as they returned, that was just... like... wow.
Jenette: [Looking a bit perplexed] Ok... thanks. Um, you sir! What did... Oh! Mr Nimoy, I didn't even know you were here. What did you think of the final episode of the third Star Trek series?
Nimoy: Actually, it's either the fourth or the fifth, depending on whether or not you count the animated series, but either way, I just want to say that any remaining chance that I would be willing to reprise my, now famous role as Mr. Spock, was just jettisoned with Voyager's trash.
Jenette: You mean you didn't like it?
Nimoy: No, my contract as director of Star Trek IV: Whales in Space restricts me from saying that, but I can say that Vulcans, as I understand them, have never had a propensity for walking around noting how everything has this or that historical connection to a 21st century web-site. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Gene had never envisioned a Vulcan easing the tension of Pan-Far by visiting www.hot-nekkid-chicks.com
Jenette: Well, there you have it. Mixed reviews, but clearly a Star Trek episode that will be talked about for years to come. Back to you, Harve.
It wasn't 10%. I think B5 was costing around $800,000 per episode (which peaked out at about $1M toward the end of the series) and ST:TNG was around $1M-1.5M per episode. Everyone was aghast that Space: Above and Beyond was costing $2M, so there's no way TNG was costing $10M!
BTW: The B5 numbers are quoted from Straczynski (back when rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 was THE group) who was very up-front that these numbers were ballpark, and he was not allowed to go into detail.
I really enjoyed reading the Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate in the back of Open Sources. As much as many of A.T.'s arguments seem short-sighted in retrospect, he had several very good points about Linux (e.g. it was not portable, it could not deal with externally maintained extensions, and other things that had to be fixed in the 2.0 and later series). I think it will be well worth the community's time to re-read the Minix source and figure out if there's any more lessons to be learned, and/or incorporate the features that make sense.
Question, though: does Minix still have a future as a teaching tool, or do OSes like Linux and *BSD make it obsolete? I would certianly like to see a good textbook that teaches OS design, using the source to a modern OS as examples....
I've heard good things (even from Joe Straczynski) about the original movies, but the show is just dumb. It's the kind of Benny Hill SciFi (pronounced skiffy) that makes people think that there can't be any such thing as good writers who produce science fiction.
Now, the science fiction snobbery asside, it's not as arousing as it aims to be, it's not as action-packed as it aims to be, and it's very rarely funny. It's sort of like Dr Who with sex, but without the interesting stories and occasional quality actor (e.g. Tom Baker). In short, there's simply no basis on which to recommend the show. On the other hand, they passed up Crusade because Lexx was in production. Think about this: they passed up a show with quality actors, good stories, a 5-year plan and an established audience for an "assassin, an idiot and a sex slave" in space.
- Galen alone is a better character than any other sci-fi channel character. Not because technomages are cool, but because he is more than just an SF stereotype. Yes, he's Aragorn and Gandalf. Yes, he's got bits of a lot of archetypes, but he's a living breathing character. Plus, technomages are cool.
- ;-)
9.- The sci-fi channel has some people (at least indirectly) who are familiar with how to integrate good animatronics into a science fiction show, and it would be a cool thing to see some of Straczynski's odder ideas put into play (e.g. the praying-mantis-like character from B5).
8.- The bits of Crusade that TNT didn't f**k with were much more interesting than the bits that they did. This makes me think that a station willing to let Straczynski do his thing will reap the rewards.
7.- There's a ready-made fan-base, as I'm sure the B5 ratings will tell them.
6.- The sci-fi channel has good connections among teleplay-capable SF authors. This means that they can feed Straczynski with good authors and keep him down to those 8-12 per season where he does his best writing (e.g. see the first 2 seasons of B5 vs. the rest; still a lot of good writing, but not as many GOOD EPISODES).
5.- They need a good companion show for Farscape (once they start writing episodes as well as they did at the end of last season, and I'm hoping that they will...)
4.- A 4+ year show that's pretty much guaranteed to have interesting stories for the full run.
3.- Sci-fi could use some good will among fans right about now.
2.- If they don't Joe will go somewhere else, and do something that Sci-Fi will wish they had.
1.Ever since I first saw Lexx, and every time I accidentally catch a little of it by way of the promo spots, I sigh and say "this is what Sci-Fi wanted in stead of Crusade." I can only hope that the move to pick up B5 is a trial before going whole-hog and developing Crusade. Fellow fans, let us hope....
That's "Hammer to Fall"
This is a really great point, but you don't make it strongly enough. Here's a concrete example:
What is the prior art for an online discussion forum that uses user-moderation and moderation of moderation to determine scores for articles which can then be viewed in a threaded fashion, wieghted by a moderation threshold? We know it as Slash. Does the USPTO know of it? Doubtful, as the folks at Slashdot/Andover.net/VA-Linux have been too busy writing code and making their site work to publish papers. The source is out there, but I betcha you could sneak this sucker through the USPTO if you greased it with enough patent-lawyer-speak.
Prior art can only be identified usefully by individuals who work in the affected field. This is not being done.
My solution? Patents should undergo a probationary period where they are publicly displayed and the community at large can submit comments. That would have killed the 10 most aggregeous patents of the last decade easily.
The music industry had a decade or more in which they knew this was coming. Hell, in the 80's people started handing around hand-tooled MIDI files on BBSs. And, what did they do? The industry has spent millions of dollars on opposing any sort of on-line music, and the only overtures that they made treated every consumer like a suspect in the worlds largest petty theft.
If they had really pushed since the founding of the Internet, they could have molded online music into a massive profit center, but they stuck their fingers in their ears and tried real hard to believe that the Internet fad would pass.
Well, now they get to lie in that bed, and to quote far too many people, a little revolution can be a good thing. In 20 years, we will likely not recognize the music industry on planet earth. I suspect that the real product will be bandwidth, and songs will not be sold without video. "Pirating" is already the new radio, and as music companies realize this, they may seek to find ways to advertize through the distribution channels of "pirated" music. This will mean a consolidation and commercialization of those services and technologies.
Actually, it sounds like a damn good time to be getting into the online music industry. But, you have to choose your competitors carefully. Companies like MP3.com seem very avant garde to the music industry, but may not be radical enough to end up on top. Remember the early days of the net when first FTP software and then Netscape seemed poised to take the most advantage of software sales to consumer use of the Internet?
There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from artists because they are used to the status quo. Ignore the fact that the status quo has lead to one of the most abusive producer/distributor/consumer relationships in history. The artists feel that they have stability. So, as instability sets in, the ones that do this because they think they can make the system work for them will say that they are being hurt by the "pirates".
The artists and small publishers who push the envelope and take a risk will profit. It may come in the form of creating a new music format that includes graphical or textual information about tour dates. I just don't know what will happen, but I know that artistic creativity will always be a valuable commodity, and artists may not be able to profit as much from the music industry, but they will certainly have the public's ear and thus a door do their wallets for a long time to come.
I was amused by the line "Microsoft was keen to agree with this." I can just see it now:
"Mr Balmer, do you agree that Linux is insecure because of the source code being available."
"Well, from a marketing standpoint, I'd love to agree (as you know we hide our source as if it were actually valuable, so we have something to concede to the DoJ). However, the truth is that my technical analysts (yeah, we had to hire a couple last week) told me that Linux is actually very secure, and that most of the security problems that arise in any environment are either insiders exploiting the local security policy or months old problems that the administrators should have fixed. Now, I'm no programmer, but it seems to me that if I had the source code, then I could do my own security evaluations, and limit the extent of problem #2, but it still lies in my hands to create good security policy."
"Wow, Mr Balmer, that's just an amazingly cogent and forthright statement for you!"
"Mmmmrrfffll... Mrrrrmmm! Rugh.... Get this damn daemon out of my head!"
"Um, and as Mr. Balmer spews forth pea soup, we go back to you in Metropolis, Clark!"
I see I got side-tracked, there. Sorry.
Disclaimer: None of the people herin depicted ever acted this reasonably.
Due to high volume (wonder why) they're taking 2 days or so to set up accounts....
what points did you make? you testified to the defendant's character.
There is no defendant. This is a Slashdot discussion not a trial.
Ted Bundy had people testify to his character, also. I'm not trying to compare the defendant to a mass murderer
That's funny, you certainly did so. Why?
His intentions may have been altruistic, but as an experience worker he should have had the common sense to bring his superiors in on his little experiments.
Agreed. Good, glad we got that out of the way. Now, please feel free to contribute to the contest, or don't. But, if you have some problem with Randal being a judge on the contest, try bringing up a new, and pertinent point.
Anonymous Coward said, "I'll probably never be able to get another corporate job again." First sign that this guy is a little unstable (if replying to his own posts wasn't enough). The old, they're-out-to-get-me.
Then, "I was carrying a gun after being surrounded by a group of them brandishing baseball bats"
Wow. That's good, I like that part. What has this to do with Randal?
"don't you fucking tell me about duty and what anyone owes their employers."
Why not? I have strong feelings on the matter, and clearly so do you. I respect your right to say what you like on the topic, but please consider not ordering others around. It doesn't work very well as a debate tactic.
Randal felt he had a duty, and he executed that duty in a way that was questionable. That does not change the fact that he is qualified to judge the contest in question.
Ok, for starters, clearly you didn't read comp.lang.perl in the old days (when there was such a group). The JAPHs were Randal's way of demonstrating whatever feature he was explainging in the message. They were wonderful ways to see concrete examples of how Perl features worked. For those of us who learned perl at version 3, Randal and his JAPHs were a huge help.
Second, chat2.pl may seem like a mess, now, but I dare you to write something as efficient that does the same thing IN PERL VERSION 4! You couldn't just write C library, you didn't have references or anonymous anything, no objects, no lexical scope. Perl was primitive back then and chat2 was about as clean as a complex module like that could get. Once Perl version 5 came along chat2.pl was obsoleted by cleaner interfaces, not because there were better programmers, but because there were better LANGUAGE FEATURES.
As for his CPAN credits, Randal doesn't generally write modules. He's a trainer. I've participated in numerous conversations with him where he has fixed someone else code, or shown them how to do it themselves, and I can attest that he's not just good. He's worthy of being one of the Perl trinity.
You note that Larry Wall wrote Programming Perl. Go look at the 2nd edition. It's co-authored by Randal, Tom and Larry.
Now, Randal's technical credits asside, this thread was about how we should all boycott this contest purely because the person judging it has a conviction is his past. If you feel that strongly about people who have served their time, then perhaps you should stop ranting on Slashdot and go run for office. Your platform can be: "Never forgive the guilty: Life for 'em all!" I suspect there will even be a few takers. Not me, but then everyone's allowed an opinion. Just stop following up to your own Slashdot posts.
Give up on this replying-to-yourself thing. It just makes you look bad.
Replying to your own post.... getting desperate are we?
You're preaching the sins of wearing blue to the police, in this case. We've all done what Randal did in the line of what we were told was our duty. Intel flipped when they realized that a) he could circumvent security and b) he did so in order to fix it. In the end, if you haven't had to break into a box to fix something at work, I assume you're not much of a sysadmin.
How can you feel "dirty" for having learned Perl from someone who risks jail time over helping his employer?
I note that you responded to none of the points that I made. Far from being objective....
Please troll someone else's reputation. Randal has too much history of being honorable and helpful to be harmed by your rants.
You're supposed to submit your entry as "a MIME attachment". So, it counts if I submit a 1280x1024 scanned JPEG of the source, right? ;-)
Actually, I am going to enter. I have a plan that will either get a quick chuckle or win the prize... we'll see.
Randal is well known as one of the most selfless members of the Perl community. He spent years helping others on USENET for NO PAY. He's the author of one of the most respected introductory language texts in existance. I say this, not to appologize for his actions, but to demonstrate the truth of his central claim in the case: he did what he did because it was in his basic nature to try to help others, and it never occured to him that that help would be mis-interpreted. And what's more, his actions in the case in question were exactly how a lot of us were dealing with security probelms at work at the time.
I know that I did exactly what Randal did. He was "found out" before he could report his findings. I managed to get info to the admins in that department before that happened. Neither of us thought twice about it. We were just doing the right thing for the people who depended on technology that they didn't understand. I would have been stunned if anyone had been upset by what I did. When I heard about Randal, I almost threw up. It was just stupid, and it scared me. Today, I'm much less productive, because I don't take chances. Of course, I really don't have this problem NOW, because all of the company's production hardware is my domain. I don't have to answer to anyone about logging into/examining security on any of the systems.
- Stay with the context, son. We're talking about a SunOS system circa mid 90's.
/etc/shadow was OPTIONAL. /etc/passwd would have likely contained the passwords (DES hashed, of course). - What do you mean the poster did not know what grep does. He used the phrase "grepped the password file". Being an author of several versions of grep (including the only one that I'm aware of in Perl), I would use the same phrase (password, if I was being generic and passwd if I was refering to
/etc/passwd). - Randal did what many of us did. He logged into a machine in a department that he used to work with in order to verify that his security recommendations were being followed. I've done it. He did it. He got "caught" by people without a clue. In the end, had he not been stopped, he would have alerted them to potentially serious security problems (which he had advised them about previously when he had been in that department).
Give it a rest, Randal is one of the most upstanding folks on the Net. He just fell afoul of some bad assumptions WRT corporate culture meets UNIX culture, and paid the price for it.The thing that I took away from the Randal incident was that you can't trust your employer to trust you. You have to be every bit as paranoid about them as they *could* be of you and that has, of course, hurt my job performance since. Sigh.
Provisional patents solve the smaller of the two giant problems out there. That is, they solve for the laziness of the patent office in doing research.
However, it only solves for it spottily and does not solve the problem of people getting silly patents that they can then use to shut down open source efforts that might hurt their proprietary software sales.
The right way to deal with this would seem to be to establish (as has been discussed elsewhere) a non-profit "patent custodian" that people can donate their patents to. Then have that organization use licenses for its patents as a lever to extract open source licensing for other key patents. For example, if the GNOME folks had a few good patents, they might be able to get Adobe to release their color model handling for use in GNOME programs (and their derivatives). This really should not be an issue, since any GNOME derived program is subject to the GPL, and that means that most of Adobe's rivals won't touch it.
good examples for some of the projects out there are the way Perl does its advanced regular expression stuff and the way that Slash manages moderated discussion forums. If there were patents on all of these things, licensed to any open source effort that wanted to use them, the patent situation might be livable.
I don't think this will happen, though, until the open source world begins to truely believe that the USPTO will not be magically reformed and turned into an organization with a clue.
Remember that Kubrick intended for Spielberg to direct this film. This is why the film was held off, Spielberg was not available. Kubrick felt that Spielberg had a better angle on the FX and child-work that were needed, which is true on both counts.
ADOM was originally released with the caveat that version 1.0 would have source. We're now (after several years) at 0.99gamma16
Needless to say, the author of that software package felt that he had written himself a loophole, and could take advantage of the good will of the open source community. I don't know about these people, but if the mindset isn't release early, release often, then they don't get it to begin with.
Porn pushes bandwidth, but not much else. People generally don't go out and buy a new machine to support porn, when the old machine can display it just fine.
Games on the other hand keep pushing memory size, bus speed, processsor speed, bandwidth, CDROMs, rendering speed, video memory, etc, etc, etc.
It's always the games. Do you think that XFree4.0 would have come as soon as it has without the push from the gaming market? Do you think that we would have Mesa as stable and accepted as it is? Gaming pushes the graphics industry harder than any other force.
But, it doesn't stop there. We'll be pushing for creative new networking libraries to support the kind of client-side massively multi-user gaming that will become popular. There will be a need for creative new ways to deal with sound, memory management, desktop integration and roaming sessions. All of this will be driven by other factors too, but gaming will be the only one pushing EVERYTHING.
I just can't wait, which is why I'll be doing my little bit....