No, I tried it (the demo) here (Konquerer 2.2.1) and nothing happened.
It may be a bug that nothing happens (I could not figure out what the link was trying to do and I would expect to find some way to get it to prompt me to save either an.html or.pdf file, and I tried save-as and save-link-as).
I think the solution would be if they let a specific tree of Linux or a specific Distro go under a BSD license and let someone do to Linux what Apple did to BSD.
Actually what Apple did could have been done with a GPL system. They released all their changes to the code. Both BSD and Linux allow you to run closed-source systems atop them.
Though your quote is obviously flamebait, I think what you state is going to happen, though not exactly as you say. The Linux kernel will always be GPL. However there is no requirement at all that programs running on Linux be GPL, and more and more commercial applications will appear (they already exist but are mostly 3D and graphics, and database stuff). I also expect support for user-mode device drivers and user-mode filesystems are going to be in 2.7, and these can also be closed-source commercial programs, and this will eliminate the need for closed-source kernel modules and thus eliminate one of the big GPL questions about Linux.
The end result is going to be quite commercial, and is not going to make RMS happy. But it will be better than the situation we have now, at least a lot more of the lower-level system is open. If current corporate thinking was prevalent 20 years ago, we would probably have CPU's in our machines where the machine language is a closely-guarded corporate secret. But despite the open nature of CPU's it does not stop closed-source commercial software from running on it. Same thing with an open-source operating system.
Or he wants to release his code under a less restrictive open source license.
Actually this is a good question. It seems you can do this already! The code just calls Qt. If you release just your code the reciever of the code can compile it and link with their copy of Qt. If the receiver happens to have a developers license, then they can sell it as closed-source (assumming you released the code as public domain).
Of course this gets into the realm of sending a non-GPL "patch" to a GPL source and saying you are not violating the GPL. But the reason that is not allowed is because the patch is not the "common form that is used to develop the code". But a program that just calls Qt without changing it can easily be considered to be the "common form used by developers", especially if you assumme all receivers already have Qt installed. Is this then not a derived work?
Qt requires a preprocesser to turn human-readable code into those signal/slot macros. So to use the GNU definition of "the form normally used to write code" the language used to program Qt is not C++.
As far as I know, Microsoft's mangling of the C++ language was not done to support MFC. MFC works around the lack of many things in the earlier versions of VC++, but it does so using legal C++ code.
1.1 Part of the problem with IE is that it already treats a class of URL's specially and displays them with the text after the '@' deleted. If it showed then entire text it would be better (though as a lot of people pointed out it won't be that much better). But anyway the test is there already.
1.2 Detecting and somehow dealing with such URL's must be done to "disable" it as well. The parsing is done by the server that IE talks to, not IE. So whatever is done (either not sending it, or popping up a dialog) requires the same amount of work to get started.
1.3 I agree that any dialog would have to be tested. This could be the main reason they decided to do something with no dialog. Although a yes/no question box should have been easy. My more complex suggestion probably is hard, and I think needs lots of testing to make sure people are not tempted to hit "ok".
2. "Disabling the feature" in this case means really adding a feature to detect and not send these URL's.
Yes, but this is apparently because it is *better written*, not "because it can do primitives" which the Slashdot writeup suggests. In theory it could be slightly faster if it *didn't* do primitives due to some slight simplification of the generics code (though if intelligently written it would just be the same speed as now).
Let me reiterate: adding primitives should not slow it down, but I can think of no concievable explanation for it making it faster, so the slashdot writeup is wrong.
The possibility that C# is written by smart people and Java is written by idiots may mean that the C# is faster. But that does not mean the reason it is faster is because of the treatement of primitives.
What I'm saying is it *doesn't* make the C# implementation faster. If C# is written intelligently, the best it can do is make it the *same* speed.
Now C# could in general be written better and do the *same* job faster. And I agree that this ability makes the language *better*. But saying this better feature of the languages is the *reason* it does something faster is bogus. I am pretty certain the artificial differentiation between primitives and objects in both languages is in order to make them more efficient, and removing that restriction by defninition will slow them down, or at least not make them faster.
After reading all the comments here, I agree that MS's "solution" is bogus. A far better one would be:
1. Fix the status preview. But instead of showing the full path, show the actual URL with the usernae and password stripped, or show it with a leading '@'. This will hide the username/password from casual viewing, something a reply to this same comment said is a problem to his actual use of this scheme in browsers other than IE.
2. If the user clicks on such a link, pop up a box asking if the user really wants to do this. However a relative link (ie from one location with the same name&password to another) does not pop up the box.
3. To be really clever the box can also let the user choose a different name or password, prefilled with the URL values. Be careful to design it so a novice user is absolutely certain to cancel the box rather than hit ok.
Not having to "box primitives" is certainly an advantage in that it makes the language cleaner. So I think C# is better because of this. But I find it hard to believe that this "improves performance". I would think the whole reason for treating primitives differently is to improve performance, as they can go through optimized code rather than the path taken by normal user-defined objects. So a collection of boxed primitives in Java may be slower than non-boxed primitives in C#, but this was done so that a collection of normal objects is faster.
Though really, I want to know why these languages have to be written so "primitives" are special at all. I would really like to be able to subclass an int or other built-in, and having "methods" on an int would be nice (even if you can't define new ones). The main reason is so you don't have to rewrite if you change your mind about whether type A is a primitive or something you define. Can't the byte compiler do a bit of work so any fast-path for the primitive can be used, without building in such restrictions to the syntax?
Although this is a user problem, Outlook definately has a bug. There is no way that the code that decides how to display the icon for the attachement should be seperated from the code that decides how to "execute" it and thus will display different things. That is a definate bug.
Not a bug, but a nice feature, would be to have any executable attachment pop up a dialog that says "Do you really want to run this thing, it is probably a destructive virus. Do not run unless you are really certain that you trust the sender and that you know the sender had a good reason to send it to you."
This virus is obviously written by an expert and is designed to install back doors. The writer knew exactly what the result would be of a publicized attack against SCO, though they probably did not expect it to be discovered until the attack started.
If this is really the "Linux community" then by your logic all those nasty hackers have learned from this bad publicity and we won't see another virus like this. However I don't expect this, in fact I expect *every* spam backdoor virus from now on to do a DDOS of sco because the spam writers know this is extremely damaging to their enemies.
Bullshit. It is obvious that the author intended to hurt the "linux community". Though not likely SCO itself, it certainly was written by a symphasizer or somebody who dislikes Linux, such as a Spam house.
More importantly, the number 13 is "15 or so". And 2/13 is.1538... which when rounded to the nearest 10% is 20%. So I think they mean they talked to 13 companies and 2 of them (Microsoft and Sun) bought licenses.
As has been pointed out about a million times already, if there really is a copyright violation they have to indicate exactly where it is, so that the violation can be remedied.
Of course the code will be replaced. But that would be proof that there was a copyright violation, which would help their case. SCO can then work on figuring out who actually violated their copyright and go sue them.
SCO is not acting like anybody who thinks they actually have a copyright case. The fact that they are not saying where the code is damages their case, because you have to demonstrate an interest in mitigating the damages. They are acting exactly like somebody who is being paid to spread FUD about Linux. This either means they are being paid by Microsoft, or (more likely to me) they are trying to make investors think they are being paid by Microsoft.
The complaint is not about their closed-source software. The complaint is that the XML DTD actually has a older BSD style license which requires attribution.
1. Remove any test for "what browser the user has". A lot of sites would improve considerably if they would just send their IE-specific stuff to any browser. Often the alternative code is broken because they never test it, or worse it is some crap that says "You need IE". This also forces users to change the browser id to IE, which is throwing off surveys as to browser popularity.
2. Just do all your work with IE if that is what most people have. Try the site now and then in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari, which will get most of the alternative engines. Just make sure it is readable and somewhat usable. It really should not be all that hard.
Why doesn't OSDL or somebody with enough machines to handle this DDOS offer to host the SCO site for free? Offer to put it on some machines so that if the DDOS is big enough to take them down it will also take down some OSS sites like SlashDot. If SCO turns them down it is proof that SCO wants this DDOS to happen, and a press release to this effect can be done.
I agree that some spam house wrote this and the intention is to install a backdoor. And the virus writer likely has a vendetta against the "Linux community" and wants it to get bad publicity. They probably don't care one bit about SCO.
I also think SCO mistakenly took down their own site in anticipation of this virus, which really does not happen until Feb 1st. Watch for it to reappear later today after they read some slashdot comments pointing this out, and then promptly disappear on Feburary 1st Utah time (rather than gradually being DDos'd over a 24-hour period). The number of Windows machines set exactly 3 to 15 days ahead is a trivial number that could not DDOS anybody. Though SCO probably did not write the virus, they are certainly interested in making it look like it hurts them.
What are you talking about. It is far more "obvious" that this was written by SCO itself to discredit the "Linux community". This one is obviously timed to match when SCO is going to get in trouble with the courts, so they can make press releases saying they are being attacked by all those mean old Linux people, and bury any bad press releases from the court actions.
Why don't they just include nothing with the machine? It would seem it would save them some money. Is there some requirement that a machine has to have an OS?
Not sure if maybe you are just responding to the wrong letter, but I agree that patents somehow held by open-source would be a good idea.
The poster I was responding to said something about the patent application going into the public domain when the patent expires, apparently he felt this would damage the GPL. What I was trying (perhaps badly) to explain was that GPL code also goes into the public domain when the copyright expires, so this aspect of the patent really does not hurt any.
If the copyright expires then even GPL software becomes public domain. Lots of people (like myself) think copyright should be for a very limited time, like 15 years (with the ability to pay for extensions so Disney can keep copyrighting their characters as long as they are in business).
After the copyright expires (or the patent protection expires) then the code becomes public domain. But by there there will be a much newer version with lots of fixes and improvements, copyrighted at a later date. Unless you want to abandon all the changes made in 15 years you the now public-domain version is useless.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a different bug than the this one, stupid.
No, I tried it (the demo) here (Konquerer 2.2.1) and nothing happened.
.html or .pdf file, and I tried save-as and save-link-as).
It may be a bug that nothing happens (I could not figure out what the link was trying to do and I would expect to find some way to get it to prompt me to save either an
But it certainly caused no harm to my machine.
I think the solution would be if they let a specific tree of Linux or a specific Distro go under a BSD license and let someone do to Linux what Apple did to BSD.
Actually what Apple did could have been done with a GPL system. They released all their changes to the code. Both BSD and Linux allow you to run closed-source systems atop them.
Though your quote is obviously flamebait, I think what you state is going to happen, though not exactly as you say. The Linux kernel will always be GPL. However there is no requirement at all that programs running on Linux be GPL, and more and more commercial applications will appear (they already exist but are mostly 3D and graphics, and database stuff). I also expect support for user-mode device drivers and user-mode filesystems are going to be in 2.7, and these can also be closed-source commercial programs, and this will eliminate the need for closed-source kernel modules and thus eliminate one of the big GPL questions about Linux.
The end result is going to be quite commercial, and is not going to make RMS happy. But it will be better than the situation we have now, at least a lot more of the lower-level system is open. If current corporate thinking was prevalent 20 years ago, we would probably have CPU's in our machines where the machine language is a closely-guarded corporate secret. But despite the open nature of CPU's it does not stop closed-source commercial software from running on it. Same thing with an open-source operating system.
Actually this is a good question. It seems you can do this already! The code just calls Qt. If you release just your code the reciever of the code can compile it and link with their copy of Qt. If the receiver happens to have a developers license, then they can sell it as closed-source (assumming you released the code as public domain).
Of course this gets into the realm of sending a non-GPL "patch" to a GPL source and saying you are not violating the GPL. But the reason that is not allowed is because the patch is not the "common form that is used to develop the code". But a program that just calls Qt without changing it can easily be considered to be the "common form used by developers", especially if you assumme all receivers already have Qt installed. Is this then not a derived work?
Qt requires a preprocesser to turn human-readable code into those signal/slot macros. So to use the GNU definition of "the form normally used to write code" the language used to program Qt is not C++.
As far as I know, Microsoft's mangling of the C++ language was not done to support MFC. MFC works around the lack of many things in the earlier versions of VC++, but it does so using legal C++ code.
1.1 Part of the problem with IE is that it already treats a class of URL's specially and displays them with the text after the '@' deleted. If it showed then entire text it would be better (though as a lot of people pointed out it won't be that much better). But anyway the test is there already.
1.2 Detecting and somehow dealing with such URL's must be done to "disable" it as well. The parsing is done by the server that IE talks to, not IE. So whatever is done (either not sending it, or popping up a dialog) requires the same amount of work to get started.
1.3 I agree that any dialog would have to be tested. This could be the main reason they decided to do something with no dialog. Although a yes/no question box should have been easy. My more complex suggestion probably is hard, and I think needs lots of testing to make sure people are not tempted to hit "ok".
2. "Disabling the feature" in this case means really adding a feature to detect and not send these URL's.
Yes, but this is apparently because it is *better written*, not "because it can do primitives" which the Slashdot writeup suggests. In theory it could be slightly faster if it *didn't* do primitives due to some slight simplification of the generics code (though if intelligently written it would just be the same speed as now).
Let me reiterate: adding primitives should not slow it down, but I can think of no concievable explanation for it making it faster, so the slashdot writeup is wrong.
The possibility that C# is written by smart people and Java is written by idiots may mean that the C# is faster. But that does not mean the reason it is faster is because of the treatement of primitives.
What I'm saying is it *doesn't* make the C# implementation faster. If C# is written intelligently, the best it can do is make it the *same* speed.
Now C# could in general be written better and do the *same* job faster. And I agree that this ability makes the language *better*. But saying this better feature of the languages is the *reason* it does something faster is bogus. I am pretty certain the artificial differentiation between primitives and objects in both languages is in order to make them more efficient, and removing that restriction by defninition will slow them down, or at least not make them faster.
After reading all the comments here, I agree that MS's "solution" is bogus. A far better one would be:
1. Fix the status preview. But instead of showing the full path, show the actual URL with the usernae and password stripped, or show it with a leading '@'. This will hide the username/password from casual viewing, something a reply to this same comment said is a problem to his actual use of this scheme in browsers other than IE.
2. If the user clicks on such a link, pop up a box asking if the user really wants to do this. However a relative link (ie from one location with the same name&password to another) does not pop up the box.
3. To be really clever the box can also let the user choose a different name or password, prefilled with the URL values. Be careful to design it so a novice user is absolutely certain to cancel the box rather than hit ok.
Not having to "box primitives" is certainly an advantage in that it makes the language cleaner. So I think C# is better because of this. But I find it hard to believe that this "improves performance". I would think the whole reason for treating primitives differently is to improve performance, as they can go through optimized code rather than the path taken by normal user-defined objects. So a collection of boxed primitives in Java may be slower than non-boxed primitives in C#, but this was done so that a collection of normal objects is faster.
Though really, I want to know why these languages have to be written so "primitives" are special at all. I would really like to be able to subclass an int or other built-in, and having "methods" on an int would be nice (even if you can't define new ones). The main reason is so you don't have to rewrite if you change your mind about whether type A is a primitive or something you define. Can't the byte compiler do a bit of work so any fast-path for the primitive can be used, without building in such restrictions to the syntax?
Although this is a user problem, Outlook definately has a bug. There is no way that the code that decides how to display the icon for the attachement should be seperated from the code that decides how to "execute" it and thus will display different things. That is a definate bug.
Not a bug, but a nice feature, would be to have any executable attachment pop up a dialog that says "Do you really want to run this thing, it is probably a destructive virus. Do not run unless you are really certain that you trust the sender and that you know the sender had a good reason to send it to you."
This virus is obviously written by an expert and is designed to install back doors. The writer knew exactly what the result would be of a publicized attack against SCO, though they probably did not expect it to be discovered until the attack started.
If this is really the "Linux community" then by your logic all those nasty hackers have learned from this bad publicity and we won't see another virus like this. However I don't expect this, in fact I expect *every* spam backdoor virus from now on to do a DDOS of sco because the spam writers know this is extremely damaging to their enemies.
Bullshit. It is obvious that the author intended to hurt the "linux community". Though not likely SCO itself, it certainly was written by a symphasizer or somebody who dislikes Linux, such as a Spam house.
More importantly, the number 13 is "15 or so". And 2/13 is .1538... which when rounded to the nearest 10% is 20%. So I think they mean they talked to 13 companies and 2 of them (Microsoft and Sun) bought licenses.
As has been pointed out about a million times already, if there really is a copyright violation they have to indicate exactly where it is, so that the violation can be remedied.
Of course the code will be replaced. But that would be proof that there was a copyright violation, which would help their case. SCO can then work on figuring out who actually violated their copyright and go sue them.
SCO is not acting like anybody who thinks they actually have a copyright case. The fact that they are not saying where the code is damages their case, because you have to demonstrate an interest in mitigating the damages. They are acting exactly like somebody who is being paid to spread FUD about Linux. This either means they are being paid by Microsoft, or (more likely to me) they are trying to make investors think they are being paid by Microsoft.
The complaint is not about their closed-source software. The complaint is that the XML DTD actually has a older BSD style license which requires attribution.
1. Remove any test for "what browser the user has". A lot of sites would improve considerably if they would just send their IE-specific stuff to any browser. Often the alternative code is broken because they never test it, or worse it is some crap that says "You need IE". This also forces users to change the browser id to IE, which is throwing off surveys as to browser popularity.
2. Just do all your work with IE if that is what most people have. Try the site now and then in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari, which will get most of the alternative engines. Just make sure it is readable and somewhat usable. It really should not be all that hard.
Why doesn't OSDL or somebody with enough machines to handle this DDOS offer to host the SCO site for free? Offer to put it on some machines so that if the DDOS is big enough to take them down it will also take down some OSS sites like SlashDot. If SCO turns them down it is proof that SCO wants this DDOS to happen, and a press release to this effect can be done.
I agree that some spam house wrote this and the intention is to install a backdoor. And the virus writer likely has a vendetta against the "Linux community" and wants it to get bad publicity. They probably don't care one bit about SCO.
I also think SCO mistakenly took down their own site in anticipation of this virus, which really does not happen until Feb 1st. Watch for it to reappear later today after they read some slashdot comments pointing this out, and then promptly disappear on Feburary 1st Utah time (rather than gradually being DDos'd over a 24-hour period). The number of Windows machines set exactly 3 to 15 days ahead is a trivial number that could not DDOS anybody. Though SCO probably did not write the virus, they are certainly interested in making it look like it hurts them.
What are you talking about. It is far more "obvious" that this was written by SCO itself to discredit the "Linux community". This one is obviously timed to match when SCO is going to get in trouble with the courts, so they can make press releases saying they are being attacked by all those mean old Linux people, and bury any bad press releases from the court actions.
Why don't they just include nothing with the machine? It would seem it would save them some money. Is there some requirement that a machine has to have an OS?
Not sure if maybe you are just responding to the wrong letter, but I agree that patents somehow held by open-source would be a good idea.
The poster I was responding to said something about the patent application going into the public domain when the patent expires, apparently he felt this would damage the GPL. What I was trying (perhaps badly) to explain was that GPL code also goes into the public domain when the copyright expires, so this aspect of the patent really does not hurt any.
Who really cares what happens in 20 years?
If the copyright expires then even GPL software becomes public domain. Lots of people (like myself) think copyright should be for a very limited time, like 15 years (with the ability to pay for extensions so Disney can keep copyrighting their characters as long as they are in business).
After the copyright expires (or the patent protection expires) then the code becomes public domain. But by there there will be a much newer version with lots of fixes and improvements, copyrighted at a later date. Unless you want to abandon all the changes made in 15 years you the now public-domain version is useless.
En1argee yurz Axlles n0w! Addz up2 .86 mm! Ordr t0day!
What I meant was that this could not possibly be a copyright violation. It might be a EULA or some other violation.
What the hell are you talking about? "Back in the day" a computer came with complete hardware schematics and the assembler code for everything in ROM.