Whilst excavating at the largest derviatives exchange in the world (highest no. of contracts traded). I look through the source code.
The most recent stuff is written in Java and a bit of C++.
Deeper, there is still some C here.
Oh what are all these negabytes of Cobol source????
A little Pascal for light relief.
ANd yes, some key monitoring utilities and a file maintenance tool are written in Fortran and are still used every day. Guess thats why we still have a Fortran compiler here.
"Vietnam has the world's highest piracy rate at 97 per cent, China has 95 per cent"
First, someone the other day referred to piracy as an act of theft or hijacking on the high-seas or in an aircraft, underway in international waters or airspace. What we are talking about is breach of copyright. There it sounds already easier, no cannons, murder or rapine, just the illegal copying of copyrighted or patented material.
The word piracy seems to have been coined for the so-called pirate radio stations that functioned offshore from the UK before broadcasting was opened up. These ran from ships in international waters who were deliberately operating outside the law (although, they would normally be registered under a flag of conveniance). The probable spread of the word piracy was from the movement of illegal broadcasting on-shore without the payment of a broadcast license or a fee for the 'needle-time'.
When software costs are greater than five times someone's annual salary, then it is to be expected that not much respect is given to something on a CD that may be copied for a dollar.
Has MS or whoever lost a sale? Probably not, those who copy usually can't afford it. One solution is to drastically reduce prices for version;-2. Those with money in these problematic economies generally want the latest release and even pay for it.
Back to Stallman's original point. Europe has different IP rules to the US. Certain types of IP are not patentable or copyrightable. If, for example, I reverse-engineer a program for the purposes of interoperation (explicitly allowed under EU), which breaks the US EULA, where can I be prosecuted if the offence is away from US soil?
If I in the EU then produce an interoperating product that is sold in in the US, am I now liable? This new convention would allow the proesecutiobn to window-shop to the stricter jurisdiction.
Pilotless combat aircraft are generally not totally pilotless and many work using extensive telemetry links. Even with frequency hopping, it would be difficult to make such an aircraft quiet and unless its transmissions were minimised.
This means some fairly good AI to minimise communications with the ground.
Of course, the MPAA want to protect their intellectual property from being ripped. And this is, of course, very effective.
This is why I see CD-R based MP4s advertised as being DVD sourced in Russia. Are these licensed?
Bit stream copies of DVDs are also popular and can be detected by the much lower price. What gives the game away is that they still carry the original region encoding, but are limited by the availability of source material.
I also saw some very nice video-cassettes of Pearl Harbor on sale. Good packaging.
All of this, is IP theft, but since a trip to the movies in Russia costs more than a trip to the theatre, you can see why it happens.
I have been using 1&1 as my webspace provider, as well as POP/SMTP. When ADSL became available, I moved to that. At first, I was forced to Telekom's relay. They seem to have two, one will substitute their own user-id and one will not.
It seems that this SMTP redirect does not occur when I send through the 1&1 server.
When I call T-Online, or any of the other registration-free services in Germany, I am using ISDN. The ISP then has a telephone number for me and can trace me.
I have atguard and it is also always wingeing about attacks from dialup users, usually Telekom dialup ports. However, I have had no problem getting Telekom to respond to the attacks. They will then send Cease and Desist letters to the perpetrator. I know that they do this because a friend was hit by a worm and received such a letter.
What Telekom don't do is block SMTP. At one stage they did, but the relay doesn't seem to be necessary from a Frankfurt based ADSL line.
If so, you will see an example of an artificial currency used by stall-holders who are selling refreshments, souvenirs, etc. It has a value of 1 Jazz = 1 Swiss Franc. The so-called 'Jazz' money is used because it has to be exchanged back through the organisers after the festival, the difference between the Swiss Frank and the Jazz on return is the way that stallholders pay for their stands.
The system either uses cash (confusing, because you often have real Swiss money in your pocket as well) or electronic tokens. The tokens may be charged using a debit card. They can link the token to me because of my debit card, so it isn't an anonymous system.
The system works well for at least the last four years, and is still going in this rather limited area.
I am tagging this reply hear rather than as a separate article because I believe that it belongs with the Microsoft vs. Linux/Open Software debate that this posting is part of.
"Linux plays a dominant role and is much stronger than in the US, and we must make this clare to the Americans" says Kurt Sibold, designated chief of Microsoft Germany.
he then goes on to say:
"There is no business model behind Linux and that makes things difficult. It is easier for us to go against other companies like Sun"
This is a senior person in Microsoft (Germany is not a small marketplace, saying that MS must take Linux seriously. The latter statement is a good admission why MS head-office seems to have problems to come up with sensible statements.
Next thing to quote Computerwoche David Turner, Lead programmer of MS's.NET commented on the open source availability of SOUP that:
In spite of the hype about Windows vs. Linux, many people want to use both.
What does this mean? Well MS seems to be tacitly accepting that Linux has already made serious inroads at SMEs and must be taken seriously as a given fact here. That GPL/Open Source is popular, particularly in Germany and Europe so it can not be ignored. It si certain that they will try their usual policy of embrace and extend and I hope that the OS/FSF can help fight this, then we are talking about a real alternative to MS which they can not just fight with disinformation as in Mundie et al.
Re:The real terrorists on Vodafone.......
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Echelon in the News
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· Score: 1
This is why there is a regulation in Germany requiring proof of identity and address when you register for a prepaid mobile SIM. I hear other EU contries are considering something similar.
Most stolen handsets are not hotlisted so it is easy for the thief to take over the phone.
Of course, no US company would ever *dream* of using bribery and corruption to win a deal. The nice thing about the lack of public accountability and the secrecy surrounding military procurement (even in the west) makes the process about as clear (and clean) as mud.
Note that I am not referring to Lockeed here, I am referring to current incidents. Unfortunately if a US/British company is the offender, who gets to monitor their behaviour?
Dunno about this one, but PocketQuake is up on CE. The sources are posted so if anyone wants to hack it for a PocketLinux port, they have the material.
Beep!!!!!! Japanese Diplomatic Cipher *was* broken
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Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
There was no intercept of communications between the shore and the task force because there was very little traffic. They were under strict radio suilence and the US interception network wasn't properly established.
However, and as was shown in Tora Tora Tora and better documented elsewhere (i.e. Kahn's Codebreakers), the diplomatic code was broken and the declaration of war was read before it was handed over by the Japanese. A notification went out to all major facilities that an attack was imminent. This warning was not necessarily marked as being urgent and was thus unseen by the bas commander until after the event.
Another point was that the US was already in a state of 'phony-war' with the Japanese. There was no declaration, but it was already expected that a war would take place. To have so many assets in one place under such circumstances was not exactly good planning. It was just chance that the other carrier group were at sea, away from Pearl at the time.
If you have information, send it in. US com panies are covered by the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) and contrary to popular belief is dosn't only apply to foreign companies competing with US ones.
Nice point, but it should be an 'officer' of the company, at least a VP. Corporate misdemeanors ultimately are the responsibility of the board.
To be fair, shouldn't it be the marketing company that gets their wrists slapped?
Re:He's getting closer, but it's still a miss...
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Mundie Responds
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· Score: 1
VAX/VMS OS fiche source listing was distributed at no additional charge until 4.5. I know, I have it still somewhere!!!!
This didn't mean that Digital gave up their copyright. In concrete terms, it helped me fix some issues with the the VMS debugger support for GCC and more particularly to produce well tuned progframs that worked. VMS documentation was excellent, but the commented source code was even better!!!!!
In Germany, the cult does not have the status of enjoying the tax privileges of more established religions. They also can not deduct money from their members paychecks through the tax system. They are allowed to practise though. If members choose to give them their money, no problem.
This is considered quite a big issue here in Germany and the US Foreign Service has a regular go at the authorities about their lack of religious tolerance. Your tax-dollars at work!
Business is business, religion is religion, mixing the two is not recommended for good digestion
With the refernce to the Guideand the Ford Motot Company in one article, I surprised that nobody has commented on DNA's refernce to the Ford Prefect.
Apparently Ford chose his name after an imperfect understanding of what would be a suitably common name in England (the Ford 'Prefect' was very popular model for a few years).
1) Not every OS does multiprocessing well (not every OS even does multiprocessing at all).
2) The more processors, the more overhead. Multiprocessor synchronisation can be a major headache at times, let alone contention for common resources such as memory.
The real guys who go out and buy this kind of stuff generally have money to spare for hardware but no time or resources to clean up their software. Think, the trading rooms of banks, for example.
Someone may have coded something wonderful as a VBA macro. Performance sucks, but there are no resouces to rewrite in a decent, compilable language.
Oh and btw, these guys do notgenerally buy individual chips or even motherboards. They buy the complete new PC and the old one is disposed of.
Another approach, think of the dolby system for sound encoding/decoding. This system is patented by Dolby Labs and uses electronics for encoding/decoding. Anyone can build a Dolby decoder at home and use it privately. If they want to sell it, they pay the license fee.
Dolby used to be pure hardware, now you can use a DSP which blurs the issue. However, everyone seems happy to stick to paying the license fee.
What is the difference between this and and CSS? Well, I can hear non-Dolbyed soundtracks if I don't have Dolby. This is not possible with CSS.
CSS is not about content protection. jcr has it right that it is a restriction on how you access the content, imposing the MPAA's market model and licensing monopolyy on the user.
LOL, but think of it this way. Win2K is around 30 million lines of code (wonder how is that measured, executable statements or what?).
If Linus got every man, woman and child in his native Finland to each write six lines of code, he would be able to reach Win 2K levels....
More seriously, the size of the code base is not a problem when you are discussing things like drivers and the range of hardware supported.
Re:GCC optimizations and benchmarking
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Kernel Benchmarks
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· Score: 1
The Linux Kernel is very good for GCC exercises. There is often a close linkage between a given kernel version, the GCC version that can compile it and the options used.
If you change the options, bits of the kernel can and does sometimes break the version of GCC used.
Playing with the optimisations is therefore a separate issue to the performance of a given kernel. However, it is an interesting exercise.
The company owning the pipes (also used for driving lifts in Victorian times) was a dead-one existing only on some lawyer's books. It was 'spotted' and purchased by Mercury for very little.
The real issue is not the work to lay cable. That costs money, but in a city, the problem is with the legal rights to cross property (Easements). I guess a Mercury employee worked somewhere previously where they came across all this stuff (probably BT) and was able to trace the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Hust look for a new image format with embedded watermarking, which will be the only format supported by IE 7.0....
The most recent stuff is written in Java and a bit of C++.
Deeper, there is still some C here.
Oh what are all these negabytes of Cobol source????
A little Pascal for light relief.
ANd yes, some key monitoring utilities and a file maintenance tool are written in Fortran and are still used every day. Guess thats why we still have a Fortran compiler here.
The word piracy seems to have been coined for the so-called pirate radio stations that functioned offshore from the UK before broadcasting was opened up. These ran from ships in international waters who were deliberately operating outside the law (although, they would normally be registered under a flag of conveniance). The probable spread of the word piracy was from the movement of illegal broadcasting on-shore without the payment of a broadcast license or a fee for the 'needle-time'.
When software costs are greater than five times someone's annual salary, then it is to be expected that not much respect is given to something on a CD that may be copied for a dollar.
Has MS or whoever lost a sale? Probably not, those who copy usually can't afford it. One solution is to drastically reduce prices for version;-2. Those with money in these problematic economies generally want the latest release and even pay for it.
Back to Stallman's original point. Europe has different IP rules to the US. Certain types of IP are not patentable or copyrightable. If, for example, I reverse-engineer a program for the purposes of interoperation (explicitly allowed under EU), which breaks the US EULA, where can I be prosecuted if the offence is away from US soil?
If I in the EU then produce an interoperating product that is sold in in the US, am I now liable? This new convention would allow the proesecutiobn to window-shop to the stricter jurisdiction.
This means some fairly good AI to minimise communications with the ground.
This is why I see CD-R based MP4s advertised as being DVD sourced in Russia. Are these licensed?
Bit stream copies of DVDs are also popular and can be detected by the much lower price. What gives the game away is that they still carry the original region encoding, but are limited by the availability of source material.
I also saw some very nice video-cassettes of Pearl Harbor on sale. Good packaging.
All of this, is IP theft, but since a trip to the movies in Russia costs more than a trip to the theatre, you can see why it happens.
It seems that this SMTP redirect does not occur when I send through the 1&1 server.
I have atguard and it is also always wingeing about attacks from dialup users, usually Telekom dialup ports. However, I have had no problem getting Telekom to respond to the attacks. They will then send Cease and Desist letters to the perpetrator. I know that they do this because a friend was hit by a worm and received such a letter.
What Telekom don't do is block SMTP. At one stage they did, but the relay doesn't seem to be necessary from a Frankfurt based ADSL line.
If so, you will see an example of an artificial currency used by stall-holders who are selling refreshments, souvenirs, etc. It has a value of 1 Jazz = 1 Swiss Franc. The so-called 'Jazz' money is used because it has to be exchanged back through the organisers after the festival, the difference between the Swiss Frank and the Jazz on return is the way that stallholders pay for their stands.
The system either uses cash (confusing, because you often have real Swiss money in your pocket as well) or electronic tokens. The tokens may be charged using a debit card. They can link the token to me because of my debit card, so it isn't an anonymous system.
The system works well for at least the last four years, and is still going in this rather limited area.
Whoops, we were talking about dollar bills weren't we?
I quote from an article in the Financial Times Deutschland. This is my own translation from the German so all disclaimers apply:
he then goes on to say: This is a senior person in Microsoft (Germany is not a small marketplace, saying that MS must take Linux seriously. The latter statement is a good admission why MS head-office seems to have problems to come up with sensible statements.Next thing to quote Computerwoche David Turner, Lead programmer of MS's .NET commented on the open source availability of SOUP that:
What does this mean? Well MS seems to be tacitly accepting that Linux has already made serious inroads at SMEs and must be taken seriously as a given fact here. That GPL/Open Source is popular, particularly in Germany and Europe so it can not be ignored. It si certain that they will try their usual policy of embrace and extend and I hope that the OS/FSF can help fight this, then we are talking about a real alternative to MS which they can not just fight with disinformation as in Mundie et al.Most stolen handsets are not hotlisted so it is easy for the thief to take over the phone.
Note that I am not referring to Lockeed here, I am referring to current incidents. Unfortunately if a US/British company is the offender, who gets to monitor their behaviour?
Dunno about this one, but PocketQuake is up on CE. The sources are posted so if anyone wants to hack it for a PocketLinux port, they have the material.
Another point was that the US was already in a state of 'phony-war' with the Japanese. There was no declaration, but it was already expected that a war would take place. To have so many assets in one place under such circumstances was not exactly good planning. It was just chance that the other carrier group were at sea, away from Pearl at the time.
In any case, Russia has been launching from Kazakhstan and is paying lots for the privilege.
If you have information, send it in. US com panies are covered by the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) and contrary to popular belief is dosn't only apply to foreign companies competing with US ones.
To be fair, shouldn't it be the marketing company that gets their wrists slapped?
This didn't mean that Digital gave up their copyright. In concrete terms, it helped me fix some issues with the the VMS debugger support for GCC and more particularly to produce well tuned progframs that worked. VMS documentation was excellent, but the commented source code was even better!!!!!
This is considered quite a big issue here in Germany and the US Foreign Service has a regular go at the authorities about their lack of religious tolerance. Your tax-dollars at work!
Business is business, religion is religion, mixing the two is not recommended for good digestion
Apparently Ford chose his name after an imperfect understanding of what would be a suitably common name in England (the Ford 'Prefect' was very popular model for a few years).
1) Not every OS does multiprocessing well (not every OS even does multiprocessing at all).
2) The more processors, the more overhead. Multiprocessor synchronisation can be a major headache at times, let alone contention for common resources such as memory.
The real guys who go out and buy this kind of stuff generally have money to spare for hardware but no time or resources to clean up their software. Think, the trading rooms of banks, for example.
Someone may have coded something wonderful as a VBA macro. Performance sucks, but there are no resouces to rewrite in a decent, compilable language.
Oh and btw, these guys do notgenerally buy individual chips or even motherboards. They buy the complete new PC and the old one is disposed of.
Dolby used to be pure hardware, now you can use a DSP which blurs the issue. However, everyone seems happy to stick to paying the license fee.
What is the difference between this and and CSS? Well, I can hear non-Dolbyed soundtracks if I don't have Dolby. This is not possible with CSS.
CSS is not about content protection. jcr has it right that it is a restriction on how you access the content, imposing the MPAA's market model and licensing monopolyy on the user.
If Linus got every man, woman and child in his native Finland to each write six lines of code, he would be able to reach Win 2K levels....
More seriously, the size of the code base is not a problem when you are discussing things like drivers and the range of hardware supported.
If you change the options, bits of the kernel can and does sometimes break the version of GCC used.
Playing with the optimisations is therefore a separate issue to the performance of a given kernel. However, it is an interesting exercise.
The real issue is not the work to lay cable. That costs money, but in a city, the problem is with the legal rights to cross property (Easements). I guess a Mercury employee worked somewhere previously where they came across all this stuff (probably BT) and was able to trace the company.