(If I recall correctly) When the AdBlock Plus guy started out, he started out by sealing the Adblock name and then spaming negative reviews (etc) at the original AdBlock until he got the original AdBlock guy to just quit out of disinterest having to mess with the scammer-like behavior. I am not at all surprised that now AdBlock Plus is titting-for-tat with someone else. It is Ego Ware after all. If it weren't he would never have tried to undermine the (simpler and better) AdBlock by gaming the reviews.
Of course that's just how I remember the whole thing. I never visit the AdBlock Plus page and I am deliberately blind to most ads anyway. Why would anybody ever need to go to the page anyway? I click the close-tab icon on add-in update pages the way I click buttions that say "Accept", qickly and with deliberate intent not to allow any of the content into my awareness. Both are after the fact, both add nothing to the software in question, and as a matter of policy I refuse to "come to a meeting of the mind" with anybody who attempts to compel or curtail my behavior.
Actaully it isn't "reverse engineer" its "circumvent an 'effective copy protection'" now to my mind the word "effective" should infer a measure of, well, effectiveness. Unfortunately that phrase is usually taken to mean "a measure intended to have the same role as copy protection" which is a perversion of the language.
Under the DMCA it is illegal to own a felt-tip marker because there was a mechanism that "effectively" copy protected a disk by adding a track to the disk that confused computers, and that could be "circumvented" by coloring over the visually-distinct and operationally distinct and bogus "data" track with a Sharpie.
So even though you are just running their code, they didn't intent for you to run their code _that_ _way_ so a ha! (and so forth).
Remember, there are many technologies in many areas that would allow a provider of a material to violate the law. Anybody who sells you bananas _could_ sell you poison bananas so that you could only eat their bananas "effectively" if you also by their "antidote enriched tooth-liners". But in computers the "content providers" claim there is nothing wrong will selling you a CD that makes you computer sick unless you have a connection to their validation servers (etc).
Capability isn't legality or morality. It never has been. But big money is making a cultural land-grab on the grounds that the technology _lets_ _them_...
After that, the fact that none of it makes sense shouldn't surprise anybody. DRM is illegal prior restraint and sabotage and several other things and just because the businesses are pretending its all fine and legal doesn't make it so. Ask the residents of Bhopal whether Union Carbide's ability is the same as being legally or morally correct...
Love to see the deep research being done. If you pursue the links and the topic in general you will discover that there is an _uncertianty_ (q.v. FUD) that has been raised.
You clearly haven't taken the time to read or analyze the indemnification program. It seems to protect you by giving you Microsoft's blessing, but under those blessed terms your indemnification is limited in duration and enjoins you from relicense and commercial or for-profit redistribution and some other interesting, delicious, or vague "bad acts" where people other than you get final say on whether you were "bad". Its a steaming tar-pit full spikes with no benefit to you,the end user, and all rights reserved to other people. You essentially pre-agree to adhere to rules you are not allowed to know.
I use lots of linux systems and many distributions thereof, but nothing from SUSE any more because having a case you _ought_ to win easily, is not the same as wining a case.
The entire purpose of the Microsoft patent license seems to be _inject_ uncertainty by a side door.
Philosophically, I strongly recommend stepping around the potential mess by avoiding all the offerings of the now-tainted company.
We have seen, in the SCO debacle, that weaker legal threads have been followed into various places by ill-meaning individuals and corporate entities.
And besides, when talking about _untested_ areas of law, you can, by definition, only talk about it speculatively.
And since you cannot tell speculation from philosophy, you are as doomed eyes-shut instead of eyes-opened.
Th license "you get" lets you "off the hook" by restricting your ability to use the technology for _anything_ except personal use.
That is, if you promise never to get paid working on open source for any reason, and to never use open source for anything but (effectively) artistic reasons; and if you promise only to use the SUSE parts for that artistic purpose, then they promise not to sue you FOR A FEW YEARS. That's right, the promise not to sue is a weak promise and has an expiration date.
The problem comes that, for instance, if you use the same "protected" work via any other channel or for any material purpose, you are now not just a normal bloke, you are a guy who _promised_ not to.
Its a legal thin-wedge.
Of course I am not a lawyer, and that is a very boroad and vague summary, but there are good summaries at GrokLaw, and they all pretty much say that you get _noting_ but greater legal exposure to Microsoft's whim.
It's like becomming an SCO customer, you are creating a legal connection between you an Microsoft via Novel that you don't need, and that makes you subject to new and fascinatingly untested areas of law.
What a bargain!
The only safe move is to shun the whole mess. And I am not being a troll by saying so. Get a real legal opinion.
In science-speak a law is an equation, or something formulaic and bounded, while a theory is a collection of thought on a hopefully coherent topic. Typically a theory contains many laws, along with questions, conditionals, and known uncertainties.
Laws more or less represent simple machines, eventualities if you will, based on initial or persistent conditions.
For instance, in lay speech, "what goes up must come down" is essentially a law of gravity, and for non-exceptional definitions of "what" (e.g. not something "lighter than air") and for expected definitions of "up" and normative values of "goes", the law is true, and for millennium it was all as true as it needed to be.
We have always understood that conditions were part of the law, like we always understood that if we are under water and the "what" is a cork, then the law will not hold as the cork will go up and stay there for as long as we are likely to willingly observe.
It wasn't until the advancement of particular understandings came (though science I might add) to lead us to discover that the magnitude of "goes" was so important. Outside the original floaty exceptions "what goes up must come down" was a universal known. Then we discovered escape velocity and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, and now we know that what goes up may well never come down, or it may even come down in a context that invalidates our old definitions of "down". After all, in the old context, did the mars rover come down in the 12th century sense when it landed on mars? It matches our expectation of down, but surely not theirs. And we knew about escape velocity and orbital mechanics long before we could fabricate rockets of the type and strength necessary to prove or disprove that new understanding.
So that law of gravity, that what goes up must come down, is true but the domain over which it is true has been strongly circumscribed.
So in science, "a law" is a spesific expression of a "what" and sometimes it has a good dose of "how" stuck to it by necessity of expression.
But the only expression of "why", the only parts of science that purport to explain anything, are the theories.
And just like scientific pursuits, this description, this distinction, is a good starting place, but when you look deeper, when you understand what I have said for the analogy that it is, you will find that this explanation is only true in a limited and somewhat allegorical way... it can be picked apart and tested and disproved bit by bit until its all but gone... but now you are doing science.
Novel doesn't have to "love microsoft" in order for Microsoft to pee in my pool if I use SUSE and they think that means I have a licence with them (Microsoft).
Even if it was an obviously friviolous action, I don't have the reserves to fight off even a casual suit from M$.
So I stay away from products they have tainted, particularly those that are tainted with untried legal practices...
Until I see, in writing, that the Novel & Microsoft deal is vacated, I have to presume it isn't safe to use any Suse release. I have no interest in colaterally losing any of my Linux rights by being co-opted by some legal shenanigans from Microsoft.
Users Beware, Suse is no longer safe to use, and Suse news is, therefore, not to be considered of interest.
I am waiting for the stories blaming the scare for the disease to come out. It has to happen eventually. The media just needs to make sure that they don't make the dumbass parents look like dumbasses for being dumbasses about not vaccinating their kids.
Sort of a "i know we sold you on not doing this thing, but now that you aren't doing this thing and your kids are dying, we decided to tell you that the people who made up how bad this thing was were dumb and we were just following the press coverage heard, so get mad at them."
Okay, all the digs asside, the windows paging file isn't actually "real" virtual memory in the Unix/SunOS/FreeBSD/Linux/Real-Operating-System.
Let me explain...
In most "real operating systems" (e.g. modern, shared, multiprocessing, virtual memory supporting, etc) the virtual memory system has "nothing" to do with paging or swapping memory out to disk per-se. In these systems each process in the system lives in its own (usually identical) separate memory space. In this space an particular address, say five (5) is typically private to the process and may be at any physical address in electrical memory.
The fact that it may be anywhere includes the fact that it may be nowhere in electrical memory at all. That's where paging and swapping come in, the pages that haven't been used lately, and which may not be used at all can be copied out to slower storage.
Even more important, a virtual address that has never been used (yet) then they memory may never exist. So even if you never page/swap a single lick of memory, they could have allocate huge memory regions they intend to fill later. The total amount of memory allocated but not used in all the process could even exceed the total physical and available paging/swapping memory. This is called "over-committing memory".
Its important and cool and vital, but this _isn't_ what really happens in windows.
In windows the processes don't (necessarily) live in their own separate spaces. More importantly every element of the process is a "relocatable" image element. EXE, DLL, FOT, CPL and all those other "file types" are actually variants of the EXE format. And in all these formats there are a whole bunch of places in each file where, when it is loaded into the "virtual memory" the executable text and data references have to be "fixed up". This is so that a compiler can make all the DLLs (etc) the same way, but they can be loaded into the process memory "wherever the code will fit." (That's oversimplified but true enough for this explanation.)
So anyway, in a "real" os, the process definition (e.g. the theoretical model of how the process will exist in memory) makes it possible for the image of the program elements in the process (executable) text files to be "final". That is, the process elements dont need fixing up.
The benefit of this in a real environment is that pages of the program that aren't being used can be "forgotten" for free. If the process needs that piece of the program file it can just read it back in. (This is also why you cannot replace a running program without getting "text file busy" etc.)
But windows cannot "forget" a page of text for free because if it needs it again, it will have to rerun the fixup step, which may involve re-fixing up the entire process image.
So what happens in Windows is that After the fixups, the fixed up image is written to the pagefile immediately. This is why you will _always_ see windows using the pagefile. This is also why windows will tell you that the "maximum page file size" is slightly less than half the physical memory. Any one cell/page in the pagefile exactly maps to one location of physical memory. Then, after that, windows can afford to replace one (and only one) physical memory page with alternate contents.
So why must you _always_ use it?
Because if you _don't_ use the windows page file, the kernel cannot overcommit memory for processes.
See most windows programmers, by default, don't know how to tell the compier and library how _not_ to ask for huge virtual memory layouts. So without the assurance of overcommit windows will kneecap itself and prevent you from running programs that you could otherwise run because most of that overcommitted memory will never be used.
This is because there isn't an operating system on the planet that can create memory or swap space out of thin air. In linux process can be killed and process text can be dropped and overcommit can be marshaled. In windows there are none of these last-resort options (practical
The funniest thing about all these VPN policies is the no-pr0n part. (1) Everyone knows that The Internet is fo Pr0n and (2) Everyone knows that the pr0n is faster when surfed directly, the VPN isn't going to make things faster, its going to make things slower.
If you have an employee who uses the VPN so fetch pr0n you should fire them for being _stupid_ not for surfing pr0n per say.
Unless, of course, it's kiddie pr0n, in which case you should probably keep them on for knowing how to use a VPN for anonymizing their activities... uh... wait... that _can't_ be right...
Actually, you plant the plants (paid labor) then you uproot them and bury them to "sequester the carbon" (more paid labor).
Thousands of years later those plants have been compressed into a hard black rocky substance that can be burned.
See... coal is a renewable resource!
(not to step on the joke, but burying plants deep under ground is just as good an idea as all those other sequesterizing ideas. Bulk plant material would be easier to handle then trying to inject liquid CO2 deep into the earth or ocean. Think about it...)
By definition, the person buying the license is paying less than their expected return on the investment. That expected return for the seller is _after_ all the overhead you cite.
Unless you are desperate for immediate liquidity, you are, by definition, sacrificing return on the alter of expediency.
Unless, of course, in your heart of hearts, you expect the effective return to be non-trivially less than the sale price. That is, unless you know you are selling junk at a premium price.
Now it is reasonable to sell because you don't want to be in the business (e.g. cashing out etc) which is the core of open source software (e.g. the guy who writes an OSS database is typically in the business of needing a database, not the business of selling database software etc).
The government and all its bodies is already in the business of collecting money and fees (see the IRS and the USPTO), why not have a profit center agency that licenses government held patents to business to offset the value the taxpayer (n.e. the government) invested in creating the technology? That minimizes the cash entropy cost of realizing the return on the investment.
then _NASN_ should be licensing these patents to businesses directly instead of selling them to a third party for the (presumably lower) short term return. Said license fees then used to forward NASA's goals at a reduced ongoing tax burden.
That way the money we invested in NASA is paid back into NASA in an approach towards a self sustaining NASA.
Like how it goes in life insurance. You pay in until the fund is full, and then the fund starts paying you back.
Selling for the short term and (at least as far as the buyer is concerned) sucker-price is for, well, suckers.
No, obviously it was a breakpoint set in the unused section of the heap, set with the intention of finding out why the "universe" process was expanding to fill all available storage even though it was designed as a densely packed array with sparse representation.
That or some cracker was trying to see if the DRM key was there in that wastefully "unused" region so he could copy this whole production onto the media of his own choice.
I sure hope I am not down-sampled into the noise floor in the resulting low-quality torrent.
I cannot say that I was "taught" any such technique. But I did play around with flash-recognition on my own once I heard what was being taught as speed reading.
I too can use the page-down key to rapidly scan through documents and a befuddling-to-others rate looking for the section of code, or indeed documentation, that "feels about right" to be the correct section. And it is the correct section, or a relevant passage, a good 98 percent of the time.
I have found, also, that the other people who have developed this skill all have claimed to be, to some degree, dyslexic.
I have never before heard someone claim to have been taught a contributing skill (besides reading etc 8-) that lead to that behavior.
ASIDE: sometimes it is very frustrating for me to help people with their coding problems because they take _forever_ to decide that the page they are looking at is _not_ the page they mean to be looking at. I also have to slow down when I'm driving the keyboard and someone else is trying to follow.
I was vindictively fired by a total idiot. I made sure that everyone I knew at the company knew the hows and whys of my dispute (including where I _was_ at fault). I also always start grooming my replacement the first day I take a job or can identify the best guy to replace me, because who wants to be stuck in the same job forever.
In the days following my firing I took several opportunities to talk the guy who replaced me (my friend Dan) how to lock me out of various machines and such.
For almost eighteen months people at that job were forced to say "is a good thing (my name) made sure we had extra capacity laid in while the trench down the block was opened", or thing-x was purchased, or policy-y was in place.
By the end of that eighteen months, the guy who had fired me had been shown to be the kind of person who he was, and he was invited to leave the company. (I was long gone and made no attempt to return.)
If you have to "do something" to your company to make them feel the pain of your absence when you are gone, you weren't previously doing your job.
Competence, and never looking back except to laugh, is the best revenge ever.
Maybe he was using CVS instance-time substitution tags, which are formatted $WORD$ (like $ID$ to insert the current id string).
Moral: don't presume to correct someone till you know the language they are speaking, and know the difference between Moral and Morale before your cohort fails an important dice check...
Actually, "a single point of exit" is the whole of the law for being a "structured program" in the classical sense.
From the practical sense, it makes debugging happier since you have one place to put a breakpoint.
What most people call "refactoring" I usually call "code origami" because it is a useful moment to apply both science and art. 8-)
Consider the average function returning bool. Fro the most part, if you can determine that a function is either "normally true" or "normally false" and then all of your structure analysis can be in terms of "varies from true" or "varies from false" (e.g. you start with "bool f() { bool retval = true; return retval;" as a normally true function and find the false cases as necessary.
When you find that "normally true" and "normally false" logic is intermingled, you instantly know that the function should be split.
When you add other rules like "a function either does or decides" (e.g. decision structure is different than computation etc) and so on, you get lots of natural divisions for your decompositions.
Oddly, this is exactly orthogonal to the functional programming model where iterative collateral definitions of a function bodies with guards, reduces the code body to declaratives.
So anyway, the prohibition doesn't come from misunderstanding of early program proving technology. It comes from the root theoretical work relating to state isolation and "demonstrable correctness". That turned into some of the early provability tools. But there is a difference.
I _only_ write code where the control delimiters (e.g. "{" and "}" or ";") are on the same line as the conditional (e.g. "if" "else" "do" "while" "switch" etc.
That rule comes from the fact that I have used systems where line splitting and dropping is rife. (It's perhaps part of the old-unix-guy mentality.)
Consider what happens if you drop the line containing "do" in a do-while construct. If you have the conditional and delimiter on the same line the code suddenly fails to compile.
Since an anonymous block brace-statements-brace is a completely legal C/C++ construct without any conditionals etc, there is a chance for confusion when you separate the braces onto their own lines.
Consider what happens if someone accidentally pastes/adds line after the else and before the opening brace. That's just plain induced and subsequently invisible error. It can always happen, but it isn't anywhere as likely when the braces are bound to their verbs.
Insertion just before the else, if the else is on its own line, is just as dangerous. A line-paste of a random if conditional will become invisible inclusion. Not as common as the spurious delete, but possible.
As a second issue, Writing "if-paren-space" as opposed to "if-space-paren-optional_space" is "wrong" for me because you make the "if" construct look like a function call, when it is instead a language construct.
I have done coding in all sorts of standards and circumstances. The code you have above is "correct" to my eye except for the lack of a space after the if.
You may not be able to "stand" seeing it, but it is superior (imho) to splitting it.
The problem is that you have yet to internalize the continuity of the conditional and the grouping operator. you might as well complain that "b * -a;" should have a new-line before the -a because the two operators look wrong together. That is, putting new-lines in the middle of structurally bound elements is just wrong (unless it cannot be avoided of course, nothing is absolute... 8-)
They seem to have thought that the MAFIAA were their "customers" instead of the people who would be paying them money.
Had they blown off all the encrypted cascading cruft, even with the laze-faire, if the entire world hadn't had to release half-made over-engineered recreations of their drivers for everything, then there would still have been an acceptable use case for a _few_ people at the least.
So yea, not marketing but _pandering_ in the hope of capturing the MAFIAA like they were one of the countless prior "partners" that microsoft screwed in the past.
What exactly is "Stalin"ist about Stallman's attitude?
This is a Goodwin-lite violation...
Stallman proposes an ideal, but demands no exclusion, has no progrom, and uses the absolute of capitalist methodology in the form of producing a better product at a better price to cause the market to adopt his policies along with his products.
He _is_ an ass personally, but calling Stallman a stalinist is like saying every adamant geek is a secret nazi.
Slashdot Mirror
(If I recall correctly) When the AdBlock Plus guy started out, he started out by sealing the Adblock name and then spaming negative reviews (etc) at the original AdBlock until he got the original AdBlock guy to just quit out of disinterest having to mess with the scammer-like behavior. I am not at all surprised that now AdBlock Plus is titting-for-tat with someone else. It is Ego Ware after all. If it weren't he would never have tried to undermine the (simpler and better) AdBlock by gaming the reviews.
Of course that's just how I remember the whole thing. I never visit the AdBlock Plus page and I am deliberately blind to most ads anyway. Why would anybody ever need to go to the page anyway? I click the close-tab icon on add-in update pages the way I click buttions that say "Accept", qickly and with deliberate intent not to allow any of the content into my awareness. Both are after the fact, both add nothing to the software in question, and as a matter of policy I refuse to "come to a meeting of the mind" with anybody who attempts to compel or curtail my behavior.
Actaully it isn't "reverse engineer" its "circumvent an 'effective copy protection'" now to my mind the word "effective" should infer a measure of, well, effectiveness. Unfortunately that phrase is usually taken to mean "a measure intended to have the same role as copy protection" which is a perversion of the language.
Under the DMCA it is illegal to own a felt-tip marker because there was a mechanism that "effectively" copy protected a disk by adding a track to the disk that confused computers, and that could be "circumvented" by coloring over the visually-distinct and operationally distinct and bogus "data" track with a Sharpie.
So even though you are just running their code, they didn't intent for you to run their code _that_ _way_ so a ha! (and so forth).
Remember, there are many technologies in many areas that would allow a provider of a material to violate the law. Anybody who sells you bananas _could_ sell you poison bananas so that you could only eat their bananas "effectively" if you also by their "antidote enriched tooth-liners". But in computers the "content providers" claim there is nothing wrong will selling you a CD that makes you computer sick unless you have a connection to their validation servers (etc).
Capability isn't legality or morality. It never has been. But big money is making a cultural land-grab on the grounds that the technology _lets_ _them_...
After that, the fact that none of it makes sense shouldn't surprise anybody. DRM is illegal prior restraint and sabotage and several other things and just because the businesses are pretending its all fine and legal doesn't make it so. Ask the residents of Bhopal whether Union Carbide's ability is the same as being legally or morally correct...
Actually you got it more right than you think. There is a lot of research about how people don't generally want $0 things the way they should.
People _want_ the $14 music more than the $0 music, they just want it to be _worth_ the $14.
People don't want the $0.50 at $14, so they fall back to $0.
Love to see the deep research being done. If you pursue the links and the topic in general you will discover that there is an _uncertianty_ (q.v. FUD) that has been raised.
You clearly haven't taken the time to read or analyze the indemnification program. It seems to protect you by giving you Microsoft's blessing, but under those blessed terms your indemnification is limited in duration and enjoins you from relicense and commercial or for-profit redistribution and some other interesting, delicious, or vague "bad acts" where people other than you get final say on whether you were "bad". Its a steaming tar-pit full spikes with no benefit to you,the end user, and all rights reserved to other people. You essentially pre-agree to adhere to rules you are not allowed to know.
I use lots of linux systems and many distributions thereof, but nothing from SUSE any more because having a case you _ought_ to win easily, is not the same as wining a case.
The entire purpose of the Microsoft patent license seems to be _inject_ uncertainty by a side door.
Philosophically, I strongly recommend stepping around the potential mess by avoiding all the offerings of the now-tainted company.
We have seen, in the SCO debacle, that weaker legal threads have been followed into various places by ill-meaning individuals and corporate entities.
And besides, when talking about _untested_ areas of law, you can, by definition, only talk about it speculatively.
And since you cannot tell speculation from philosophy, you are as doomed eyes-shut instead of eyes-opened.
You cleary ha
Caveat Emptor. Sic transit gloria mundi. Amen.
Not quite...
Th license "you get" lets you "off the hook" by restricting your ability to use the technology for _anything_ except personal use.
That is, if you promise never to get paid working on open source for any reason, and to never use open source for anything but (effectively) artistic reasons; and if you promise only to use the SUSE parts for that artistic purpose, then they promise not to sue you FOR A FEW YEARS. That's right, the promise not to sue is a weak promise and has an expiration date.
The problem comes that, for instance, if you use the same "protected" work via any other channel or for any material purpose, you are now not just a normal bloke, you are a guy who _promised_ not to.
Its a legal thin-wedge.
Of course I am not a lawyer, and that is a very boroad and vague summary, but there are good summaries at GrokLaw, and they all pretty much say that you get _noting_ but greater legal exposure to Microsoft's whim.
It's like becomming an SCO customer, you are creating a legal connection between you an Microsoft via Novel that you don't need, and that makes you subject to new and fascinatingly untested areas of law.
What a bargain!
The only safe move is to shun the whole mess. And I am not being a troll by saying so. Get a real legal opinion.
You have been warned.
I like to pose it to people thusly:
In science-speak a law is an equation, or something formulaic and bounded, while a theory is a collection of thought on a hopefully coherent topic. Typically a theory contains many laws, along with questions, conditionals, and known uncertainties.
Laws more or less represent simple machines, eventualities if you will, based on initial or persistent conditions.
For instance, in lay speech, "what goes up must come down" is essentially a law of gravity, and for non-exceptional definitions of "what" (e.g. not something "lighter than air") and for expected definitions of "up" and normative values of "goes", the law is true, and for millennium it was all as true as it needed to be.
We have always understood that conditions were part of the law, like we always understood that if we are under water and the "what" is a cork, then the law will not hold as the cork will go up and stay there for as long as we are likely to willingly observe.
It wasn't until the advancement of particular understandings came (though science I might add) to lead us to discover that the magnitude of "goes" was so important. Outside the original floaty exceptions "what goes up must come down" was a universal known. Then we discovered escape velocity and orbital mechanics and all that stuff, and now we know that what goes up may well never come down, or it may even come down in a context that invalidates our old definitions of "down". After all, in the old context, did the mars rover come down in the 12th century sense when it landed on mars? It matches our expectation of down, but surely not theirs. And we knew about escape velocity and orbital mechanics long before we could fabricate rockets of the type and strength necessary to prove or disprove that new understanding.
So that law of gravity, that what goes up must come down, is true but the domain over which it is true has been strongly circumscribed.
So in science, "a law" is a spesific expression of a "what" and sometimes it has a good dose of "how" stuck to it by necessity of expression.
But the only expression of "why", the only parts of science that purport to explain anything, are the theories.
And just like scientific pursuits, this description, this distinction, is a good starting place, but when you look deeper, when you understand what I have said for the analogy that it is, you will find that this explanation is only true in a limited and somewhat allegorical way... it can be picked apart and tested and disproved bit by bit until its all but gone... but now you are doing science.
The number of times this message has bounced between "troll" and "informative" is kind-of funny.
There really should be a way see not just the current rating, but the entire rating log of a message.
Novel doesn't have to "love microsoft" in order for Microsoft to pee in my pool if I use SUSE and they think that means I have a licence with them (Microsoft).
Even if it was an obviously friviolous action, I don't have the reserves to fight off even a casual suit from M$.
So I stay away from products they have tainted, particularly those that are tainted with untried legal practices...
I don't have the money to be a test case.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080904043402537&query=Novel+Microsoft+deal+patent
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070930081040440&query=Novel+Microsoft+deal+patent
And so forth...
Now there was some question as to whether Open SUSE was equally damned as SUSE Enterprise.
I don't want to bet that Microsoft _won't_ sue.
Until I see, in writing, that the Novel & Microsoft deal is vacated, I have to presume it isn't safe to use any Suse release. I have no interest in colaterally losing any of my Linux rights by being co-opted by some legal shenanigans from Microsoft.
Users Beware, Suse is no longer safe to use, and Suse news is, therefore, not to be considered of interest.
I am waiting for the stories blaming the scare for the disease to come out. It has to happen eventually. The media just needs to make sure that they don't make the dumbass parents look like dumbasses for being dumbasses about not vaccinating their kids.
Sort of a "i know we sold you on not doing this thing, but now that you aren't doing this thing and your kids are dying, we decided to tell you that the people who made up how bad this thing was were dumb and we were just following the press coverage heard, so get mad at them."
It'll happen. You heard it here first.
Okay, all the digs asside, the windows paging file isn't actually "real" virtual memory in the Unix/SunOS/FreeBSD/Linux/Real-Operating-System.
Let me explain...
In most "real operating systems" (e.g. modern, shared, multiprocessing, virtual memory supporting, etc) the virtual memory system has "nothing" to do with paging or swapping memory out to disk per-se. In these systems each process in the system lives in its own (usually identical) separate memory space. In this space an particular address, say five (5) is typically private to the process and may be at any physical address in electrical memory.
The fact that it may be anywhere includes the fact that it may be nowhere in electrical memory at all. That's where paging and swapping come in, the pages that haven't been used lately, and which may not be used at all can be copied out to slower storage.
Even more important, a virtual address that has never been used (yet) then they memory may never exist. So even if you never page/swap a single lick of memory, they could have allocate huge memory regions they intend to fill later. The total amount of memory allocated but not used in all the process could even exceed the total physical and available paging/swapping memory. This is called "over-committing memory".
Its important and cool and vital, but this _isn't_ what really happens in windows.
In windows the processes don't (necessarily) live in their own separate spaces. More importantly every element of the process is a "relocatable" image element. EXE, DLL, FOT, CPL and all those other "file types" are actually variants of the EXE format. And in all these formats there are a whole bunch of places in each file where, when it is loaded into the "virtual memory" the executable text and data references have to be "fixed up". This is so that a compiler can make all the DLLs (etc) the same way, but they can be loaded into the process memory "wherever the code will fit." (That's oversimplified but true enough for this explanation.)
So anyway, in a "real" os, the process definition (e.g. the theoretical model of how the process will exist in memory) makes it possible for the image of the program elements in the process (executable) text files to be "final". That is, the process elements dont need fixing up.
The benefit of this in a real environment is that pages of the program that aren't being used can be "forgotten" for free. If the process needs that piece of the program file it can just read it back in. (This is also why you cannot replace a running program without getting "text file busy" etc.)
But windows cannot "forget" a page of text for free because if it needs it again, it will have to rerun the fixup step, which may involve re-fixing up the entire process image.
So what happens in Windows is that After the fixups, the fixed up image is written to the pagefile immediately. This is why you will _always_ see windows using the pagefile. This is also why windows will tell you that the "maximum page file size" is slightly less than half the physical memory. Any one cell/page in the pagefile exactly maps to one location of physical memory. Then, after that, windows can afford to replace one (and only one) physical memory page with alternate contents.
So why must you _always_ use it?
Because if you _don't_ use the windows page file, the kernel cannot overcommit memory for processes.
See most windows programmers, by default, don't know how to tell the compier and library how _not_ to ask for huge virtual memory layouts. So without the assurance of overcommit windows will kneecap itself and prevent you from running programs that you could otherwise run because most of that overcommitted memory will never be used.
This is because there isn't an operating system on the planet that can create memory or swap space out of thin air. In linux process can be killed and process text can be dropped and overcommit can be marshaled. In windows there are none of these last-resort options (practical
The funniest thing about all these VPN policies is the no-pr0n part. (1) Everyone knows that The Internet is fo Pr0n and (2) Everyone knows that the pr0n is faster when surfed directly, the VPN isn't going to make things faster, its going to make things slower.
If you have an employee who uses the VPN so fetch pr0n you should fire them for being _stupid_ not for surfing pr0n per say.
Unless, of course, it's kiddie pr0n, in which case you should probably keep them on for knowing how to use a VPN for anonymizing their activities... uh... wait... that _can't_ be right...
You can bankrupt the country over the internet in theory...
but it doesn't really count until you print out the statement and mail it.
Actually, you plant the plants (paid labor) then you uproot them and bury them to "sequester the carbon" (more paid labor).
Thousands of years later those plants have been compressed into a hard black rocky substance that can be burned.
See... coal is a renewable resource!
(not to step on the joke, but burying plants deep under ground is just as good an idea as all those other sequesterizing ideas. Bulk plant material would be easier to handle then trying to inject liquid CO2 deep into the earth or ocean. Think about it...)
By definition, the person buying the license is paying less than their expected return on the investment. That expected return for the seller is _after_ all the overhead you cite.
Unless you are desperate for immediate liquidity, you are, by definition, sacrificing return on the alter of expediency.
Unless, of course, in your heart of hearts, you expect the effective return to be non-trivially less than the sale price. That is, unless you know you are selling junk at a premium price.
Now it is reasonable to sell because you don't want to be in the business (e.g. cashing out etc) which is the core of open source software (e.g. the guy who writes an OSS database is typically in the business of needing a database, not the business of selling database software etc).
The government and all its bodies is already in the business of collecting money and fees (see the IRS and the USPTO), why not have a profit center agency that licenses government held patents to business to offset the value the taxpayer (n.e. the government) invested in creating the technology? That minimizes the cash entropy cost of realizing the return on the investment.
then _NASN_ should be licensing these patents to businesses directly instead of selling them to a third party for the (presumably lower) short term return. Said license fees then used to forward NASA's goals at a reduced ongoing tax burden.
That way the money we invested in NASA is paid back into NASA in an approach towards a self sustaining NASA.
Like how it goes in life insurance. You pay in until the fund is full, and then the fund starts paying you back.
Selling for the short term and (at least as far as the buyer is concerned) sucker-price is for, well, suckers.
No, obviously it was a breakpoint set in the unused section of the heap, set with the intention of finding out why the "universe" process was expanding to fill all available storage even though it was designed as a densely packed array with sparse representation.
That or some cracker was trying to see if the DRM key was there in that wastefully "unused" region so he could copy this whole production onto the media of his own choice.
I sure hope I am not down-sampled into the noise floor in the resulting low-quality torrent.
I cannot say that I was "taught" any such technique. But I did play around with flash-recognition on my own once I heard what was being taught as speed reading.
I too can use the page-down key to rapidly scan through documents and a befuddling-to-others rate looking for the section of code, or indeed documentation, that "feels about right" to be the correct section. And it is the correct section, or a relevant passage, a good 98 percent of the time.
I have found, also, that the other people who have developed this skill all have claimed to be, to some degree, dyslexic.
I have never before heard someone claim to have been taught a contributing skill (besides reading etc 8-) that lead to that behavior.
ASIDE: sometimes it is very frustrating for me to help people with their coding problems because they take _forever_ to decide that the page they are looking at is _not_ the page they mean to be looking at. I also have to slow down when I'm driving the keyboard and someone else is trying to follow.
It's just life I guess.
... Is being missed.
I was vindictively fired by a total idiot. I made sure that everyone I knew at the company knew the hows and whys of my dispute (including where I _was_ at fault). I also always start grooming my replacement the first day I take a job or can identify the best guy to replace me, because who wants to be stuck in the same job forever.
In the days following my firing I took several opportunities to talk the guy who replaced me (my friend Dan) how to lock me out of various machines and such.
For almost eighteen months people at that job were forced to say "is a good thing (my name) made sure we had extra capacity laid in while the trench down the block was opened", or thing-x was purchased, or policy-y was in place.
By the end of that eighteen months, the guy who had fired me had been shown to be the kind of person who he was, and he was invited to leave the company. (I was long gone and made no attempt to return.)
If you have to "do something" to your company to make them feel the pain of your absence when you are gone, you weren't previously doing your job.
Competence, and never looking back except to laugh, is the best revenge ever.
Maybe he was using CVS instance-time substitution tags, which are formatted $WORD$ (like $ID$ to insert the current id string).
Moral: don't presume to correct someone till you know the language they are speaking, and know the difference between Moral and Morale before your cohort fails an important dice check...
Actually, "a single point of exit" is the whole of the law for being a "structured program" in the classical sense.
From the practical sense, it makes debugging happier since you have one place to put a breakpoint.
What most people call "refactoring" I usually call "code origami" because it is a useful moment to apply both science and art. 8-)
Consider the average function returning bool. Fro the most part, if you can determine that a function is either "normally true" or "normally false" and then all of your structure analysis can be in terms of "varies from true" or "varies from false" (e.g. you start with "bool f() { bool retval = true; return retval;" as a normally true function and find the false cases as necessary.
When you find that "normally true" and "normally false" logic is intermingled, you instantly know that the function should be split.
When you add other rules like "a function either does or decides" (e.g. decision structure is different than computation etc) and so on, you get lots of natural divisions for your decompositions.
Oddly, this is exactly orthogonal to the functional programming model where iterative collateral definitions of a function bodies with guards, reduces the code body to declaratives.
So anyway, the prohibition doesn't come from misunderstanding of early program proving technology. It comes from the root theoretical work relating to state isolation and "demonstrable correctness". That turned into some of the early provability tools. But there is a difference.
I _only_ write code where the control delimiters (e.g. "{" and "}" or ";") are on the same line as the conditional (e.g. "if" "else" "do" "while" "switch" etc.
That rule comes from the fact that I have used systems where line splitting and dropping is rife. (It's perhaps part of the old-unix-guy mentality.)
Consider what happens if you drop the line containing "do" in a do-while construct. If you have the conditional and delimiter on the same line the code suddenly fails to compile.
Since an anonymous block brace-statements-brace is a completely legal C/C++ construct without any conditionals etc, there is a chance for confusion when you separate the braces onto their own lines.
Consider what happens if someone accidentally pastes/adds line after the else and before the opening brace. That's just plain induced and subsequently invisible error. It can always happen, but it isn't anywhere as likely when the braces are bound to their verbs.
Insertion just before the else, if the else is on its own line, is just as dangerous. A line-paste of a random if conditional will become invisible inclusion. Not as common as the spurious delete, but possible.
As a second issue, Writing "if-paren-space" as opposed to "if-space-paren-optional_space" is "wrong" for me because you make the "if" construct look like a function call, when it is instead a language construct.
I have done coding in all sorts of standards and circumstances. The code you have above is "correct" to my eye except for the lack of a space after the if.
You may not be able to "stand" seeing it, but it is superior (imho) to splitting it.
The problem is that you have yet to internalize the continuity of the conditional and the grouping operator. you might as well complain that "b * -a;" should have a new-line before the -a because the two operators look wrong together. That is, putting new-lines in the middle of structurally bound elements is just wrong (unless it cannot be avoided of course, nothing is absolute... 8-)
They seem to have thought that the MAFIAA were their "customers" instead of the people who would be paying them money.
Had they blown off all the encrypted cascading cruft, even with the laze-faire, if the entire world hadn't had to release half-made over-engineered recreations of their drivers for everything, then there would still have been an acceptable use case for a _few_ people at the least.
So yea, not marketing but _pandering_ in the hope of capturing the MAFIAA like they were one of the countless prior "partners" that microsoft screwed in the past.
What exactly is "Stalin"ist about Stallman's attitude?
This is a Goodwin-lite violation...
Stallman proposes an ideal, but demands no exclusion, has no progrom, and uses the absolute of capitalist methodology in the form of producing a better product at a better price to cause the market to adopt his policies along with his products.
He _is_ an ass personally, but calling Stallman a stalinist is like saying every adamant geek is a secret nazi.