Referencing Samba's AD support is actually a big point. The point is that Samba can replace an AD system, just like you could use a box running Samba to be a PDC before.
SourcePuller can do no such thing. SourcePuller's one and only function is to pull stuff out of BitKeeper. There's no interoperability. What SCM software can SourcePuller put that data into? I know, let's write a CVS plug-in for it. Oh wait, BitMover already provided that!
Unlike Samba, SourcePuller is completely useless without the proprietary product. So, you need to violate a commercial license in order to use it at all.
Samba provides both client and server capability (and PDC and AD functionality now too) for non-Windows OS's.
There really is no BK core and BK client like there is in the CIFS world. In order to replace the "BK core" someone will have to write from the ground-up a complete distributed SCM system. If that effort is undertaken then I really see no benefit whatsoever to having a client that speaks BK's client commands and writes files in their format? (Aside from potential IP violations in duplicating their format.)
So, honestly, what does something like SourcePuller get you aside from losing use of a tool?
I just waded through a whole pile of "the ads are annoying/suck/induce epilepsy" comments as justification and they're all missing the point.
The "social contract" is not between the reader and the advertiser. The "contract" is between the reader and the content producer. Now in the case of some blogs and websites the revenue from advertising and clicks is used to defray the hosting costs. Using an ad blocker defeats that potential revenue source. So, in a way, it could be considered breaking an informal contract.
Now, I for one absolutely love Adblock and have enjoyed the less cluttered look of pages that I view as a result. I especially do like that it purges those obnoxious animated ads that make reading a page so difficult. I guess the right thing to do would be to push back to the content producers and tell them that the ads they're showing make it very difficult to consume their content and try to get them to change instead of simply blocking the ads.
Tridge had a good explanation of how they did work on Samba that he likened to a French Cafe link
The thing is that in order for it to work you needed to know at least one side of the conversation and to observe the behavior of the other side.
You might decide to learn by flying to France and sitting in a French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you. You take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what food arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for "bread", "coffee" etc.
This is of course a good way to reverse engineer a protocol but you have to at least be able to compare what is requested with what is received. If the requests aren't documented and the received isn't documented either then how do you even start? In that case you'd probably have to know what is requested.
This is conjecture on my part but it certainly is on the telling side and so far Tridge's explanation is definitely light.
From Tridge's comments in the NewsForge article: - In late February I wrote a tool that is interoperable with BitKeeper. The aim was to provide export to other source code management tools and provide a useful tool to the community.
- I did not use BitKeeper at all in writing this tool and thus was never subject to the BitKeeper license. I developed the tool in a completely ethical and legal manner.
I really just don't see what he was hoping to accomplish here. You can already export the code out of any CVS system. Was he trying to get the commit information and versions out too?
At the very least he would have had to monitor client-server communications to learn how to talk with the server in the first place. (This was how they did a lot of the SAMBA work.)
Additionally if you read that interview it would appear according to McVoy that Tridge wasn't living up to an agreement either: We did get a verbal promise from OSDL that Tridge had discontinued his work and would not begin again as long as we were trying to work things out. We believed we had an uneasy truce, but it ends up Tridge was still working.
Now in the grand scheme of things after a lot of court rangling Tridge could maybe successfully claim that he was performing legal "clean room" reverse engineering but that's not something that he can decide and declare himself.
More detail on what he actually did would help to evaluate those claims. I find it difficult to think that he just simply started throwing random communications at the BitKeeper server and was able to check-in a file.
Did the files magically appear for him to work on? I find a little difficult to think that a CVS-type program could magically drop files onto someone's computer.
The thing is if you read the Samba talk about the French waiter you see that the type of reverse engineering work that they do requires actually conversing with the server. Obviously to make sense of the BitKeeper files you would have to take a snapshot of a file, make a change, and take another snapshot. By knowing what and where was changed you could then analyze the two files and start your reverse engineering process.
The thing is that you can't create those files without using a BitKeeper client.
The access to the product in question was based on a license agreement that said (in essence) in exchange for getting this for free to use for specific types of work I won't reverse engineer it.
Now if they wanted to pony up the cost of the licenses and then go to work on it then they might have had a case.
The argument about is "free as in beer" worse than "free as in speech" is unrelated to this. If they wanted a "free as in speech" code management system then they could have started with the concepts as they've absorbed them from working with BitKeeper and started coding.
The "sneak-n-peek" warrants are in-fact issued by a judge. I belive this would cover your "judicial oversight" requirement. Additionally, the conditions for a "sneak-n-peek" include provisions that the search warrant must eventually be disclosed (the time delay is set based on the sensitivity of the investigation and the time required to act on the information).
I remain amused how people post on a public forum and complain about how our police forces are like the gestapo. The beauty is that the people doing the complaining are not in the least bit worried about the possibility of being dragged out of their house in the middle of the night and shot.
The "shield laws" that apply in certain cases for protecting anonymous sources don't protect journalists in all cases.
In this particular case the issue is that information that was protected under NDA was disclosed. The information in question wasn't related to a felony or government abuse but rather a corporate trade secret. The company in question has every right to pursue the people who violated the terms of their NDA. In this case, the evidence of the violation is the posting of the information to a web site. Had the information been printed up in PC Week Apple would still have the right to sue the publisher for that information.
Is this good PR? Definitely not. Is it legal? Definitely.
How can you be in any way confident in this opinion? Do you know anything about the methodology used? What simulations were run? How were they run? What was the time frame for his temperature comparisons? What was this time frame chosen?
The fact that it hasn't even been peer-reviewed yet means that it is way too early to be saying "case closed".
"The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people," said Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. "The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable."
How much peer review have these models been subjected to? What assumptions are built into these models? How exactly do we control solely for sea temperature changes?
There's definitely way too much "we're right so shut up" attitude in this one.
There are excise and duties levied on items like cigarettes and liquor. I believe you'll see a little state seal on packs of cigarettes and what-not. Remember that taxes on cigarettes
So, I think we're mixing up two very different ideas and legal issues when we call it a sales tax.
You mean patents and patent applictions like this?
>
Application program interface for network software platform
Abstract
An application program interface (API) provides a set of functions for application developers who build Web applications on Microsoft Corporation's.NET.TM. platform.
Granted this is only an application but it attempts to lay claim to a rather wide field. If this is approved what affect would it have for similar functionality in Mono? We're talking about XML and remote procedure calls which would hurt things a lot worse than having to use something besides System.Windows.Forms.
The main thing is that we've already seen MS try to use patents to stop FOSS implementations (check SAMBA and CIFS patents) so this is not like it would require a huge change in corporate philosophy.
You can claim that Mono is FOSS but there are huge patent questions regarding implementing certain portions of.NET. Now Miguel and company have talked about "routing around" or simply not implementing portions that they can't do because of patents but if it's not compatible then there are going to be problems. Additionally, those patent problems could keep entire portions of Mono from being implemented because of similarities to.NET functions.
Meanwhile, Sun has legally committed themselves to allowing FOSS implementations of the Java spec. This includes licensing agreements for any relevant patents that would hinder a standard FOSS implementation.
Now you might bring up the "but Sun controls the spec" controversy. To answer that I'd ask: "Who controls.NET?"
Microsoft released portions of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and C# for standardization. The real nuts-and-bolts of.NET are decidedly NOT an open standard. This is what concers many people.
Additionally, since.NET is a wholly controlled "standard" by MS then Mono will be on the same treadmill that WINE and other groups chasing MS implementations have been on.
I hope you feel better. I hope that the persecuation complex doesn't interfere with your life.
The point was that Iraq delcared that they had certain items. Thus it was their responsibility to reconcile the discrepencies. Maybe it was a book keeping error, maybe they actually had the stuff in question. The onus was on them to resolve the issue.
The way they "prove a negative" is to do exactly what South America did when it disarmed. Full, active cooperation with inspectors. You take them to the sites that they ask to see and direct them to some sites that they didn't even think to look at. You certainly don't bury parts and plans under rose bushes, keep biological samples in home refridgerators, or have a whole collection of labs hidden in jails.
Go read the reports from the Iraq Survey Group they're quite informative.
You're welcome to state your opinion as much as you want and I'm welcome to state mine too.
Another matter, and one of great significance, is that many proscribed weapons and items are not accounted for.
To take an example, a document which Iraq provided suggested to us that some 1,000 tons of chemical agent were unaccounted for. I must not jump to the conclusion that they exist; however, that possibility is also not excluded. If they exist they must be presented for destruction. If they do not exist, credible evidence to that effect should be presented.
This is perhaps the most important problem we are facing. Although I can understand that it may not be easy for Iraq in all cases to provide the evidence needed, it is not the task of the inspectors to find it. Iraq itself must squarely tackle this task and avoid belittling the questions.
(Emphasis added)
I'm not sure how you categorize that as a paraphrase. link
I remember Hans Blix being quoted as saying that Iraq had failed to account for a large quantity of declared WMD stock piles.
Many people seem to have gotten the whole burden of proof thing ass-end-to. It was Iraq's responsibility to live up to the agreements it made when the cease-fire was negotiated. Iraq singularly failed in that matter and despite numerous warnings, second, third, and fourth chances they continued to play cat and mouse over it.
In fact, the producers were so smart that they actually got the production partially paid for by Brits and the show aired in the UK before Sci-Fi bothered with it here.
Let's see, we already had direct negotiations with North Korea over nuclear proliferation.
Turns out that after agreeing to everything and getting their huge bribes (errr, international aid) they still went ahead and built the nukes.
You know there's supposed to be something used besides a carrot to make a carrot work.
Right now, the ONLY way to break the dead-lock with North Korea is to get China involved. China is the single largest supplier of aid to North Korea. If they agree to clamp down then something can be done, otherwise we're just sending more bribe money to a liar and a cheat.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really though.
Referencing Samba's AD support is actually a big point. The point is that Samba can replace an AD system, just like you could use a box running Samba to be a PDC before.
SourcePuller can do no such thing. SourcePuller's one and only function is to pull stuff out of BitKeeper. There's no interoperability. What SCM software can SourcePuller put that data into? I know, let's write a CVS plug-in for it. Oh wait, BitMover already provided that!
Unlike Samba, SourcePuller is completely useless without the proprietary product. So, you need to violate a commercial license in order to use it at all.
Samba provides both client and server capability (and PDC and AD functionality now too) for non-Windows OS's.
There really is no BK core and BK client like there is in the CIFS world. In order to replace the "BK core" someone will have to write from the ground-up a complete distributed SCM system. If that effort is undertaken then I really see no benefit whatsoever to having a client that speaks BK's client commands and writes files in their format? (Aside from potential IP violations in duplicating their format.)
So, honestly, what does something like SourcePuller get you aside from losing use of a tool?
I just waded through a whole pile of "the ads are annoying/suck/induce epilepsy" comments as justification and they're all missing the point.
The "social contract" is not between the reader and the advertiser. The "contract" is between the reader and the content producer. Now in the case of some blogs and websites the revenue from advertising and clicks is used to defray the hosting costs. Using an ad blocker defeats that potential revenue source. So, in a way, it could be considered breaking an informal contract.
Now, I for one absolutely love Adblock and have enjoyed the less cluttered look of pages that I view as a result. I especially do like that it purges those obnoxious animated ads that make reading a page so difficult. I guess the right thing to do would be to push back to the content producers and tell them that the ads they're showing make it very difficult to consume their content and try to get them to change instead of simply blocking the ads.
But in the end, it's just so darn convenient...
The thing is that in order for it to work you needed to know at least one side of the conversation and to observe the behavior of the other side.
This is of course a good way to reverse engineer a protocol but you have to at least be able to compare what is requested with what is received. If the requests aren't documented and the received isn't documented either then how do you even start? In that case you'd probably have to know what is requested.
This is conjecture on my part but it certainly is on the telling side and so far Tridge's explanation is definitely light.
From Tridge's comments in the NewsForge article:
- In late February I wrote a tool that is interoperable with BitKeeper. The aim was to provide export to other source code management tools and provide a useful tool to the community.
- I did not use BitKeeper at all in writing this tool and thus was never subject to the BitKeeper license. I developed the tool in a completely ethical and legal manner.
I really just don't see what he was hoping to accomplish here. You can already export the code out of any CVS system. Was he trying to get the commit information and versions out too?
At the very least he would have had to monitor client-server communications to learn how to talk with the server in the first place. (This was how they did a lot of the SAMBA work.)
Additionally if you read that interview it would appear according to McVoy that Tridge wasn't living up to an agreement either:
We did get a verbal promise from OSDL that Tridge had discontinued his work and would not begin again as long as we were trying to work things out. We believed we had an uneasy truce, but it ends up Tridge was still working.
Now in the grand scheme of things after a lot of court rangling Tridge could maybe successfully claim that he was performing legal "clean room" reverse engineering but that's not something that he can decide and declare himself.
More detail on what he actually did would help to evaluate those claims. I find it difficult to think that he just simply started throwing random communications at the BitKeeper server and was able to check-in a file.
Did the files magically appear for him to work on? I find a little difficult to think that a CVS-type program could magically drop files onto someone's computer.
The thing is if you read the Samba talk about the French waiter you see that the type of reverse engineering work that they do requires actually conversing with the server. Obviously to make sense of the BitKeeper files you would have to take a snapshot of a file, make a change, and take another snapshot. By knowing what and where was changed you could then analyze the two files and start your reverse engineering process.
The thing is that you can't create those files without using a BitKeeper client.
The access to the product in question was based on a license agreement that said (in essence) in exchange for getting this for free to use for specific types of work I won't reverse engineer it.
Now if they wanted to pony up the cost of the licenses and then go to work on it then they might have had a case.
The argument about is "free as in beer" worse than "free as in speech" is unrelated to this. If they wanted a "free as in speech" code management system then they could have started with the concepts as they've absorbed them from working with BitKeeper and started coding.
They've already obliged our British friends with the P(R)IVEE
So we've got the POOPEE, the P-PEE, and the P(R)IVEE and we wonder why no one wants to analyze core dumps anymore.
Well thanks a ton, now I've got a stupid mental image of Ani going, "I'm Bat...errr...Darth Vader."
Hmm, maybe "Darth and the Giant Peach-Shaped Death Star" will be next?
The "sneak-n-peek" warrants are in-fact issued by a judge. I belive this would cover your "judicial oversight" requirement. Additionally, the conditions for a "sneak-n-peek" include provisions that the search warrant must eventually be disclosed (the time delay is set based on the sensitivity of the investigation and the time required to act on the information).
I remain amused how people post on a public forum and complain about how our police forces are like the gestapo. The beauty is that the people doing the complaining are not in the least bit worried about the possibility of being dragged out of their house in the middle of the night and shot.
You should have been a lawyer during the original trademark dispute between Apple Computer and Apple Records...
Oops.
Yeah, two different companies doing two different things using a common/generic name "Apple" and it still wound up in the courts.
I think you do not really understand the intricacies of trademarks.
The "shield laws" that apply in certain cases for protecting anonymous sources don't protect journalists in all cases.
In this particular case the issue is that information that was protected under NDA was disclosed. The information in question wasn't related to a felony or government abuse but rather a corporate trade secret. The company in question has every right to pursue the people who violated the terms of their NDA. In this case, the evidence of the violation is the posting of the information to a web site. Had the information been printed up in PC Week Apple would still have the right to sue the publisher for that information.
Is this good PR? Definitely not. Is it legal? Definitely.
So, who's going to file for "isToo"?
How can you be in any way confident in this opinion? Do you know anything about the methodology used? What simulations were run? How were they run? What was the time frame for his temperature comparisons? What was this time frame chosen?
The fact that it hasn't even been peer-reviewed yet means that it is way too early to be saying "case closed".
How much peer review have these models been subjected to? What assumptions are built into these models? How exactly do we control solely for sea temperature changes?
There's definitely way too much "we're right so shut up" attitude in this one.
There are excise and duties levied on items like cigarettes and liquor. I believe you'll see a little state seal on packs of cigarettes and what-not. Remember that taxes on cigarettes
So, I think we're mixing up two very different ideas and legal issues when we call it a sales tax.
Info from 2003 here
As you can see we're talking money well over and beyond the sales tax for these items.
Granted this is only an application but it attempts to lay claim to a rather wide field. If this is approved what affect would it have for similar functionality in Mono? We're talking about XML and remote procedure calls which would hurt things a lot worse than having to use something besides System.Windows.Forms.
The main thing is that we've already seen MS try to use patents to stop FOSS implementations (check SAMBA and CIFS patents) so this is not like it would require a huge change in corporate philosophy.
You can claim that Mono is FOSS but there are huge patent questions regarding implementing certain portions of .NET. Now Miguel and company have talked about "routing around" or simply not implementing portions that they can't do because of patents but if it's not compatible then there are going to be problems. Additionally, those patent problems could keep entire portions of Mono from being implemented because of similarities to .NET functions.
.NET?"
Meanwhile, Sun has legally committed themselves to allowing FOSS implementations of the Java spec. This includes licensing agreements for any relevant patents that would hinder a standard FOSS implementation.
Now you might bring up the "but Sun controls the spec" controversy. To answer that I'd ask: "Who controls
Microsoft released portions of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) and C# for standardization. The real nuts-and-bolts of .NET are decidedly NOT an open standard. This is what concers many people.
.NET is a wholly controlled "standard" by MS then Mono will be on the same treadmill that WINE and other groups chasing MS implementations have been on.
Additionally, since
I hope you feel better. I hope that the persecuation complex doesn't interfere with your life.
The point was that Iraq delcared that they had certain items. Thus it was their responsibility to reconcile the discrepencies. Maybe it was a book keeping error, maybe they actually had the stuff in question. The onus was on them to resolve the issue.
The way they "prove a negative" is to do exactly what South America did when it disarmed. Full, active cooperation with inspectors. You take them to the sites that they ask to see and direct them to some sites that they didn't even think to look at. You certainly don't bury parts and plans under rose bushes, keep biological samples in home refridgerators, or have a whole collection of labs hidden in jails.
Go read the reports from the Iraq Survey Group they're quite informative.
You're welcome to state your opinion as much as you want and I'm welcome to state mine too.
(Emphasis added)
I'm not sure how you categorize that as a paraphrase. link
I remember Hans Blix being quoted as saying that Iraq had failed to account for a large quantity of declared WMD stock piles.
Many people seem to have gotten the whole burden of proof thing ass-end-to. It was Iraq's responsibility to live up to the agreements it made when the cease-fire was negotiated. Iraq singularly failed in that matter and despite numerous warnings, second, third, and fourth chances they continued to play cat and mouse over it.
Sometimes the mouse gets eaten.
Definitely marketed for an American audience.
In fact, the producers were so smart that they actually got the production partially paid for by Brits and the show aired in the UK before Sci-Fi bothered with it here.
You sir, are an idjit.
Let's see, we already had direct negotiations with North Korea over nuclear proliferation.
Turns out that after agreeing to everything and getting their huge bribes (errr, international aid) they still went ahead and built the nukes.
You know there's supposed to be something used besides a carrot to make a carrot work.
Right now, the ONLY way to break the dead-lock with North Korea is to get China involved. China is the single largest supplier of aid to North Korea. If they agree to clamp down then something can be done, otherwise we're just sending more bribe money to a liar and a cheat.
Gee, I guess I misread Hans Blix's report where he said that Iraq was still in non-comliance with inspection requirements.
Or maybe you're talking about when Iraq kicked out inspectors back in '98?
Oh well, maybe we can just agree to ignore the facts in the quest for those +1 insightful mods.