I'm sorry I don't share your belief that having others find your blunders is somehow "better" (or just as good as) having financial incentive.
Did you read a word I wrote? I said, one is motivated to find and fix problems in one's own code becuase if one doesn't and someone else finds it first one is embarrassed in front of the whole developer (and user) community. That seems to me a much more powerful incentive than any amount of money.
How would you recommend providing incentive for the OSS developer to create fewer vulnerabilities?
You don't need to provide an incentive for open source programmers to create fewer vulnerabilities. Our code's out there in the open for everyone to look at. If someone finds a vulnerability in our code that we haven't spotted and fixed first the egg is all over our faces, personally. It hits us right where it hurts, in the personal pride and self image. If your code is out there in public with your name and your email address on it you care that it's as good as you can make it.
Via broadband Internet access, the Streamium MC-i200 connects to the huge number of radio stations currently online
If the box won't connect to the 'huge range... currently on line', but only a smaller, Philips authorised, range, then that's false advertising, which, in Europe, anyway, is illegal. So before wasting time hacking the box it would be worth dropping a line to the Advertising Standards Authority or your national equivalent, or to your local Trading Standards office.
Remember, as Lessig points out, the law is also code, and has APIs you can use.
is here. I can't find a picture of the device anywhere. Does anyone know whether it will run QTopia? If so, the QTopia platform (already adopted by Sharp and IBM) will be getting some useful momentum.
Defending FrontPage (a truly horrible pile of dogshite):
Second, color coding. Forgot a "? Color coding makes writing my HTML so much simpler.
You don't put colour (or formatting) information in HTML. You put it in your stylesheet.
I use FrontPage. I write good HTML.
Impossible. I have, in the course of my job, done a technical evaluation of each successive version of FrontPage. None have been capable of generating valid HTML.
And go out of business. Slashdot readers in high school and college can talk about how "3l33t" Linux and OpenOffice.org are, but let's wander over into the real world that most businesses occupy. Businesses exchange documents in Word format. They exchange presentations in PowerPoint. Formatting matters. Features matter. Being able to hire secretaries that know the software matters. No matter how much you like Linux or FreeBSD, you won't find a talented pool of officeworkers that know how to use it.
Speaking as a middle aged businessman (yes, check my website, my CV is there) I'd say the costs to a business of not being able to read am MSWord document are far lower than the costs to a business of being exposed to the sorts of security problems that Microsoft products bring, irrespective of BSA audits. If you're serious about business, you cannot afford to do business with Microsoft.
We haven't signed the schengen treaty - French people still have to have passports - the problem that you have is with the geneva convention. Dumping that would work really well, I'm sure.
Which the USA already cheerfully ignores. We could join them in the new barbarity. Who needs civilisation and the rule of law, anyway? Who wants freedom? All those assylum seekers should be sent straight back to the torture chambers where they belong, or incarcerated somewhere convenient like Cuba. Yes, and while we're about it, what about the homosexuals, they're all probably subversivces, as well - they can go. And the jews. And those antisocial geeky types - the ones who read Slashdot when they should be working - intern the lot of them. Remember, what's good enough for the US of A is good enough for us. Hail Bush! Let's all go and kill a greasy raghead and liberate the oilfields! Fight for your right to drive an SUV!
If you go to the wayback machine you'll find (among many others)
this page which you'll see if you do a view source I wrote on 15th January 1996. This is the oldest page written by me and which I can find in the wayback machine which definitely is affected by SBC's patent claim.
The six 'buttons' surrounding the bull logo at the top of the page each link to dynamic content. The logo itself and it's surrounding block, however, form part of a static include file.
Incontrovertible prior art. I actually still have many of these files in their April 30th, 1996 form
Isn't anyone pleased to see this except me? Lighten up! This thing is cool.
I'm completely with you. I've been waiting for someone to do this for some time, and now all I'm thinking is 'where can I get one and what does it cost?'
What if Microsoft decides to implement NET for another platform different than Windows, offering some sense of full.NET compatibility with your already Windows-working "code investment", why would you like to use Mono instead of the "official" MS implementation?...similar to what happened to Sun's Linux JVM implementation, why you would like to use an open source JVM (like Black Down) if you can have the creator's implementation that gives you a security feeling that at least you're not going to have some compatibility issues...I'm assuming a business critical application, where your income depends, not a one-person pet/toy project...I believe this is one of the biggest challenges for open source.NET implementations...What if IBM decides to enter the.NET market and provide a high performance.NET runtime as they are doing it currently with Java, What about others?...I like the Mono effort, its community, but I haven't found the answer to this challenge myself...
Yes, what if? In my opinion it doesn't really matter whether it's a Mono or a Microsoft.NET implementation on [insert non-microsoft platform of your choice here]. It will be incompatible in subtle ways which can be passed off as 'unintended' or 'bugs' or 'well, we don't really recommend that platform'. Microsoft will work very hard to ensure that Microsoft.NET on a Microsoft platform works just a little differently in small subtle ways than anyone's.NET on any non-Microsoft platform, and that Microsoft's applications and tools exploit those small, subtle differences to make other platforms seem unreliable. It's the nature of the beast; it's how they live, how they've always lived, how they play the game. How they win.
Re:Interesting future indeed..
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Take away the business side, what are the advantages of using java versus C#? Looking at Mono it seems to marry both technologies -- correct me if I'm wrong, but they want to compile both.
I'm prepeared to bet a great deal (well, my career, in fact) that Mono will never reliably run.NET applications produced by Microsoft (or indeed by other people using Microsoft tools). If you write for the JVM, you will have a reliable ful-featured runtime both on Sun platforms and on platforms which compete with Sun platforms. We know this from Sun's historic behaviour: Java runs extremely well both on Linux and on IBM RS/6000 boxes. If you write for.NET, you will never have a reliable, full featured run time on any platform which Microsoft sees as a serious competitor. We know this, too, from Microsoft's historical behaviour. The leopard has not changed its spots.
Let's have a little relativism here. I didn't vote for Bush, nor do I care for him as a president. But before you start with the whole "so corrupt and broken" could you give a comparaison? Perhaps a past US government? The current one is certainly much less corrupt than any one of the 19th century. Compared to other modern countries?
Look, I'm not an American, but...
Bush's election was, seen from here, curious. It was 'won' in a state where the election officials were appointed by his own brother, and some very odd decisions were made about eligible voters and how votes should be counted. It doesn't, to an ignorant foreigner, look like a proper democratic procedure.
The Enron business was, to put it mildly, also interesting. From a foreign perspective, the fact that Bush was obiously quite close to the Enron people is troubling, particularly seeing how much the former senior people of Enrond have been allowed to get away with.
The relationship between Iraq's oil fields and the business interests of the Bush family also looks a bit odd.
You may say you had more corrupt governments in the 19th Century. I can't say, because I'm not that familiar with US history. But a situation in which a family can put a member into power by other members manipulating the electoral process, and then lead the whole nation into a war in order to bolster that family's commercial interests while simultaneously allowing friends and supporters to get away with the largest single theft in human history, seems to this foreigner to be corruption on a truly epic scale.
OK, I too have a Zaurus, and I don't agree with either of you.
Item, the keyboard.
When you're on the move, you don't want to carry anything bulky. So the built in thumb-board is fine. In any case I almost never use it, because I can handwrite on the Zaurus as quickly as I can on paper. When you're not on the move, use VNC and your desktop's keyboard. No problem.
Item, the battery The point about the Zaurus is that it's very small and light. Provided you don't plug anything else into it, the Zaurus battery lasts a long time - mine usually lasts a week of normal use. If you plug your 802.11b card in, it lasts about 45 minutes, in my experience. Which is fine for web browding in the bath, but not much use for browsing on the move. But if you IRDA it to your mobile phone, you can web browse on the move without having to search for hot spots and without draining your battery - so what's the problem?
Item, ethernet-over-USB
Granted, this doesn't really work (at least not for me). But if you can plug into USB, you've presumably got power, so shove your 802.11b card in and use wireless ethernet instead. The QTopia Desktop software is perfectly happy with this and will sync with no difficulty.
No, my gripe with the Zaurus is the poor security, - ports opern by default, desktop running as root - but that's mostly fixable. It isn't at all bad for a first cut.
fact that one could be running essentially a full system in a palm-like profile is very much more interesting than a limited pda. this i why i do not have one, but instead opted for a tablet. sure it costs more, but i can do more!
My Sharp Zaurus can run any Java application, and any Linux application that does not use Xwindows. Furthermore, some Linux applications which do use windowing (kde apps, particularly) are trivial to port. It measures less than 150x75x15mm and fits snuggly in my pocket. Web-server in your pocket? Why not?
And, more to the point, what can your table run that I can't run?
It looks to me from the pictures as it the machines is running Trolltech's QTopia palmtop environment, just like the Sharp Zaurus. This is good from at least two points of view. Firstly it means it's easy to port the existing software for the Zaurus, and relatively easy to port KDE and other Qt based apps; and secondly because it means that people producing software for Linux palmtop devices get a wider market with a consistent UI look-and-feel.
"Which Americans do you think invented the computer?"
Eckert and Mauchly.
ENIAC was not a stored program machine, and was inferior to COLOSSUS, which preceded it. EDVAC was Eckert and Mauchly's first stored program machine, but was not completed until significantly after Baby had first run. All these machines depended crucially on Turing's 'On Computable Numbers'.
So if you think ENIAC was a computer, COLOSSUS beat them to it. If you think that ENIAC wasn't a computer, Baby beat them to it. COLOSSUS, Baby and, of course, Turing, were all British.
As someone above pointed out, most languages (even the LISP I championed earlier) are written in C.
Sometimes I feel very, very old. This one reminds me about Zaphod Beeblebrox and the accident with the contraceptive and the time machine. LISP was written in 1958, one of the oldest high level languages for programming. BCPL (on which C is based) was written in 1967, and C was written in 1971. So are you trying to tell me that John McCarthy wrote LISP in a language which wasn't even going to be devised for another twenty three years? That was extremely clever of him.
What happens when they need functionality that the open source world doesn't offer. I'm thinking of things like the scalability and availability features you get from the big Unix guys (and no, sticking 100 Dells together is not always the answer for big systems). What about when something like SAP, Oracle Apps, Siebel, etc, etc is required?
Hey, we're talking about developing countries here. Have you seen what SAP, Oracle, Siebel charge for licences? Have you seen the GNP (and Government revenue) of a developing country? Can you put two and two together?
Big name mega software is often not an option for developing countries, whether they need it or not. They can't afford it.
Oh yes. I remember way back in the day seeing a PARC workstation with an actual GUI, mouse and 17" monitor.
Now I use fancy 48x48 truecolor SVG icons from Everaldo, but they're conceptually no different from those 16x16 black and white icons on the PARC.
Well, that just demonstrates your ignorance. Icon size on the Xerox boxes was entirely up to you; some of mine were substantially bigger than 48x48. And yes, 24 bit colour was available by 1982 at least (but it cost a lot and I didn't have it).
For those us who lived and worked in the real world during the 70's-80's and other Bronze Age periods we saw an awful great lot of new and good ideas from commerical vendors and universities. Most of it died out, was bought up or simply abandoned but this whole cargo cult ethos of PARC this and PARC that looking for the holy fucking grail of the First Good Idea of Computing
OK, but the point is that the stuff PARC did largely didn't die out. Is your computer connected to an ethernet? Where do you think that came from? Does it use a windowed interface, with icons and mice? Where do you think that came from? Do you send documents to people in as PDFs? Where do you think that came from? Do you have an optical mouse? And so on, and on, and on.
This isn't to say nothing useful happened elsewhere. But anyone who used PARC technology in the late seventies and early eighties, as I did, would find every aspect of Windows XP, KDE or Mac OS X entirely familiar.
While the failures of recognizing the loss of Xerox ideas seem obvious now, one must realize that nothing like that existed at the time. Developing any of those technologies would have involved huge risk and cost. The important thing is that certain people did realize it, and the technologies were marketed. Just not by Xerox.
Ideas are easy. Developing and marketing them takes real work.
That is really to under-rate PARC. I cut my teeth on PARC technology - Dandelions, Dandetigers, Daybreaks, running InterLisp-D and LOOPS. There were a few things that modern computers have that they lacked - the network security was pretty much non-existent, and you could easily do more or less anything on a colleague's machine over the network. But they came with word-processor, spreadsheet, object oriented graphics editor, bit map graphics editor, distributed hypertext browser, email client and so on, all built as LISP components so you could re-use them in your own programs easily. And while they weren't as reliable as you'd sometimes like - it was possible to crash them horribly - they were a lot more reliable than Windows 9X.
The boxes Xerox PARC produced were solid and usable, entirely ready for prime time. They were, of course, extremely expensive - but then in those days 4Mb of RAM and 80Mb of disk was very expensive. If Xerox had mass-produced the Daybreak hardware and been able to sell it at about 20% of the UK Pounds 25,000 which it cost in 1986, either with the 'Star' office productivity software build or with the InterLisp system, I am sure they would have found a market for it, just as it was. I'm sure that the development of the personal computer would have happened much faster and Xerox would still be a major and influential player. Compared to the Daybreak, with its 1100 by 900 pixel display and sleek chocolate brown cabinet, Lisa and Macintosh were just crude, clunky toys.
Sure, developing ideas to the point they're usable is hard work. But Xerox PARC had done that work. The work had been done. There were some people queuing at the doow with money, and if the production volumes had been increased and the price dropped, there would have been many more. All that was missing was the marketing vision...
Slashdot Mirror
Did you read a word I wrote? I said, one is motivated to find and fix problems in one's own code becuase if one doesn't and someone else finds it first one is embarrassed in front of the whole developer (and user) community. That seems to me a much more powerful incentive than any amount of money.
You don't need to provide an incentive for open source programmers to create fewer vulnerabilities. Our code's out there in the open for everyone to look at. If someone finds a vulnerability in our code that we haven't spotted and fixed first the egg is all over our faces, personally. It hits us right where it hurts, in the personal pride and self image. If your code is out there in public with your name and your email address on it you care that it's as good as you can make it.
If the box won't connect to the 'huge range... currently on line', but only a smaller, Philips authorised, range, then that's false advertising, which, in Europe, anyway, is illegal. So before wasting time hacking the box it would be worth dropping a line to the Advertising Standards Authority or your national equivalent, or to your local Trading Standards office.
Remember, as Lessig points out, the law is also code, and has APIs you can use.
is here. I can't find a picture of the device anywhere. Does anyone know whether it will run QTopia? If so, the QTopia platform (already adopted by Sharp and IBM) will be getting some useful momentum.
You don't put colour (or formatting) information in HTML. You put it in your stylesheet.
Impossible. I have, in the course of my job, done a technical evaluation of each successive version of FrontPage. None have been capable of generating valid HTML.
Uhhmmm... No, it's not.
If he's got this wrong, what else has he got wrong?
... which breaks in a very amusing way. Go to http://www.google-dance.com/, type (self-referentially) 'google dance', and hit return.
Sic transit gloria mundi, or something...
Speaking as a middle aged businessman (yes, check my website, my CV is there) I'd say the costs to a business of not being able to read am MSWord document are far lower than the costs to a business of being exposed to the sorts of security problems that Microsoft products bring, irrespective of BSA audits. If you're serious about business, you cannot afford to do business with Microsoft.
Which the USA already cheerfully ignores. We could join them in the new barbarity. Who needs civilisation and the rule of law, anyway? Who wants freedom? All those assylum seekers should be sent straight back to the torture chambers where they belong, or incarcerated somewhere convenient like Cuba. Yes, and while we're about it, what about the homosexuals, they're all probably subversivces, as well - they can go. And the jews. And those antisocial geeky types - the ones who read Slashdot when they should be working - intern the lot of them. Remember, what's good enough for the US of A is good enough for us. Hail Bush! Let's all go and kill a greasy raghead and liberate the oilfields! Fight for your right to drive an SUV!
Mom, what is irony?
The six 'buttons' surrounding the bull logo at the top of the page each link to dynamic content. The logo itself and it's surrounding block, however, form part of a static include file .
Incontrovertible prior art. I actually still have many of these files in their April 30th, 1996 form
I'm completely with you. I've been waiting for someone to do this for some time, and now all I'm thinking is 'where can I get one and what does it cost?'
It's not just you.
Yes, what if? In my opinion it doesn't really matter whether it's a Mono or a Microsoft .NET implementation on [insert non-microsoft platform of your choice here]. It will be incompatible in subtle ways which can be passed off as 'unintended' or 'bugs' or 'well, we don't really recommend that platform'. Microsoft will work very hard to ensure that Microsoft .NET on a Microsoft platform works just a little differently in small subtle ways than anyone's .NET on any non-Microsoft platform, and that Microsoft's applications and tools exploit those small, subtle differences to make other platforms seem unreliable. It's the nature of the beast; it's how they live, how they've always lived, how they play the game. How they win.
I'm prepeared to bet a great deal (well, my career, in fact) that Mono will never reliably run .NET applications produced by Microsoft (or indeed by other people using Microsoft tools). If you write for the JVM, you will have a reliable ful-featured runtime both on Sun platforms and on platforms which compete with Sun platforms. We know this from Sun's historic behaviour: Java runs extremely well both on Linux and on IBM RS/6000 boxes. If you write for .NET, you will never have a reliable, full featured run time on any platform which Microsoft sees as a serious competitor. We know this, too, from Microsoft's historical behaviour. The leopard has not changed its spots.
Look, I'm not an American, but...
Bush's election was, seen from here, curious. It was 'won' in a state where the election officials were appointed by his own brother, and some very odd decisions were made about eligible voters and how votes should be counted. It doesn't, to an ignorant foreigner, look like a proper democratic procedure.
The Enron business was, to put it mildly, also interesting. From a foreign perspective, the fact that Bush was obiously quite close to the Enron people is troubling, particularly seeing how much the former senior people of Enrond have been allowed to get away with.
The relationship between Iraq's oil fields and the business interests of the Bush family also looks a bit odd.
You may say you had more corrupt governments in the 19th Century. I can't say, because I'm not that familiar with US history. But a situation in which a family can put a member into power by other members manipulating the electoral process, and then lead the whole nation into a war in order to bolster that family's commercial interests while simultaneously allowing friends and supporters to get away with the largest single theft in human history, seems to this foreigner to be corruption on a truly epic scale.
OK, I too have a Zaurus, and I don't agree with either of you.
No, my gripe with the Zaurus is the poor security, - ports opern by default, desktop running as root - but that's mostly fixable. It isn't at all bad for a first cut.
My Sharp Zaurus can run any Java application, and any Linux application that does not use Xwindows. Furthermore, some Linux applications which do use windowing (kde apps, particularly) are trivial to port. It measures less than 150x75x15mm and fits snuggly in my pocket. Web-server in your pocket? Why not?
And, more to the point, what can your table run that I can't run?
It looks to me from the pictures as it the machines is running Trolltech's QTopia palmtop environment, just like the Sharp Zaurus. This is good from at least two points of view. Firstly it means it's easy to port the existing software for the Zaurus, and relatively easy to port KDE and other Qt based apps; and secondly because it means that people producing software for Linux palmtop devices get a wider market with a consistent UI look-and-feel.
ENIAC was not a stored program machine, and was inferior to COLOSSUS, which preceded it. EDVAC was Eckert and Mauchly's first stored program machine, but was not completed until significantly after Baby had first run. All these machines depended crucially on Turing's 'On Computable Numbers'.
So if you think ENIAC was a computer, COLOSSUS beat them to it. If you think that ENIAC wasn't a computer, Baby beat them to it. COLOSSUS, Baby and, of course, Turing, were all British.
Oh? When was this?
Sometimes I feel very, very old. This one reminds me about Zaphod Beeblebrox and the accident with the contraceptive and the time machine. LISP was written in 1958, one of the oldest high level languages for programming. BCPL (on which C is based) was written in 1967, and C was written in 1971. So are you trying to tell me that John McCarthy wrote LISP in a language which wasn't even going to be devised for another twenty three years? That was extremely clever of him.
Hey, we're talking about developing countries here. Have you seen what SAP, Oracle, Siebel charge for licences? Have you seen the GNP (and Government revenue) of a developing country? Can you put two and two together?
Big name mega software is often not an option for developing countries, whether they need it or not. They can't afford it.
Well, that just demonstrates your ignorance. Icon size on the Xerox boxes was entirely up to you; some of mine were substantially bigger than 48x48. And yes, 24 bit colour was available by 1982 at least (but it cost a lot and I didn't have it).
OK, but the point is that the stuff PARC did largely didn't die out. Is your computer connected to an ethernet? Where do you think that came from? Does it use a windowed interface, with icons and mice? Where do you think that came from? Do you send documents to people in as PDFs? Where do you think that came from? Do you have an optical mouse? And so on, and on, and on.
This isn't to say nothing useful happened elsewhere. But anyone who used PARC technology in the late seventies and early eighties, as I did, would find every aspect of Windows XP, KDE or Mac OS X entirely familiar.
That is really to under-rate PARC. I cut my teeth on PARC technology - Dandelions, Dandetigers, Daybreaks, running InterLisp-D and LOOPS. There were a few things that modern computers have that they lacked - the network security was pretty much non-existent, and you could easily do more or less anything on a colleague's machine over the network. But they came with word-processor, spreadsheet, object oriented graphics editor, bit map graphics editor, distributed hypertext browser, email client and so on, all built as LISP components so you could re-use them in your own programs easily. And while they weren't as reliable as you'd sometimes like - it was possible to crash them horribly - they were a lot more reliable than Windows 9X.
The boxes Xerox PARC produced were solid and usable, entirely ready for prime time. They were, of course, extremely expensive - but then in those days 4Mb of RAM and 80Mb of disk was very expensive. If Xerox had mass-produced the Daybreak hardware and been able to sell it at about 20% of the UK Pounds 25,000 which it cost in 1986, either with the 'Star' office productivity software build or with the InterLisp system, I am sure they would have found a market for it, just as it was. I'm sure that the development of the personal computer would have happened much faster and Xerox would still be a major and influential player. Compared to the Daybreak, with its 1100 by 900 pixel display and sleek chocolate brown cabinet, Lisa and Macintosh were just crude, clunky toys.
Sure, developing ideas to the point they're usable is hard work. But Xerox PARC had done that work. The work had been done. There were some people queuing at the doow with money, and if the production volumes had been increased and the price dropped, there would have been many more. All that was missing was the marketing vision...
I can't help thinking it's really, really sad.