What makes you think that Microsoft will release the code of any of its core products under this "look but don't touch" license? Microsoft has only released licenses, not any code under any of these licenses. I bet you Microsoft will never release the code of Windows OS, IE, MS Office Suite etc. under any such license to general public. They may use such licenses to release code to thier client and partner companies but that remains to be seen.
The post just above yours by azuredragon23 tells what happened. azuredragon23 also corrects my statements. I hope it is more clear now. Oh btw, I am a Muslim and I know I'd have elected to be a part of India if there was an option. Although I don't speak for other Muslims and Kashmiris, I believe India is much safer for Muslims as a secular country. Atleast, I won't be called a refugee by India like Pakistan does to Muslims who migrated to Pakistan during independence.
Apparently you don't know the history. Kashmir is of great strategic importance to India, Pakistan and China. Kashmir was an autonomous state after the British rule ended and India & Pakistan were free. Pakistan invaded Kashmir. The King of Kashmir, Maharajah Hari Singh, sought India's help and agreed that Kashmir will merge with India but still have autonomy. Pakistan was defeated and Kashmir became a part of India. Pakistan tried again few years later and was defeated. The Kashmir issue is screwed up because the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to become an international peace hero, agreed in hurry to Simla agreement. Ever since then India has been suffering on Kashmir issue. It is ironic that India won three wars against Pakistan but the outcome was never favourable to India, sigh! India lost a war with China over Kashmir too so there is an on going dispute over the borders with China. Kashmir is, and always was, recognized as a part of India by UN.
India already has its own Linux Distribution:-) Take a look at ELX Linux. Every couple of months, PCQuest Magazine distributes a CD with the magazine with customized version of Debian on it. The customization is good enough to be called its own distro.
There is Biometrics Consortium which works towards creating standards for Biometrics. There is also BioAPI Consortium which which has standardized BioAPI. All the Biometric SDKs that I know of implement BioAPI.
Cobalt is already in version 6.1!!! (yes, even before the first release of the new version!). Palm announced this last week at DevCon in Munich. It is being speculated that Treo 650, the new version of Treo, will be running Palm OS 6.1 but I will believe it when I see it;-)
Take a look at Object Library for Palm OS (POL). Its been available for a while and hopefully will be ported to PalmOS 6. I don't think a lot of work would be required to do this since the API for v.6 is same as previous versions with addition of some new ones. Codewarrior already includes POL in the package. On the side note, the new Palm OS Development Suite (PODS) from PalmSource is based on Eclipse and the new 1.1 release of PODS is awesome.
Now only if they can add biometric security to the PDAs. None of the Palm OS based PDAs have fingerprint scanners like a couple of IPaqs do. Fingerprint authentication on IPaq has proven to be very useful to some. It would be a great value addition to Palm PDAs.
Just like you sign your own SSL certificates for websites, create a CA cert of your own. Install it on (internal) user's machines. Once installed, the nag screen goes away. We do our SSL testing this way.
Instead of having a opt-out list there should be an Opt-in list. The people who want to be called will enlist giving their explicit permission to telemarketers. It would clear the confusion and make it easy for everyone. Most of the people do not want to be called but they may not enlist in opt-out list and may end up getting calls. The opt-in list will solve the problem. To be fair, the telemarketers will be given one chance to call everyone and ask their permission to call in the future. They will get their answer right then and there from the horse's mouth;-)
The Guy doesn't make it clear what exactly was told to him about the law in India. There is certainly no law that restricts foreign workers in India. The point is, India has lot of programmers and other labor force that is locally generated. Why would they think of hiring someone from abroad when they have plenty in supply ? Plus the hassle of Visa drives them away too.
Oh and TCS, its a blood sucking bodyshop. They pay lowest possible wages to its employees (unless you are higher up) and thats how they are able to bid low on contracts and get many of them.
This is a good start. I hope they stick to it. I am glad to know what Wired reported is true that MIT has one of the best privacy protection record among all the universities in America. I hope others follow their path.
Match.com has ported their website to.NET. One of the developers of the site, Jason Alexander, has posted a post mortem on his blog. While they have 45 servers in their web farm running the site, he may be a very important source that can answer your question.
You may say Duh! But it is a fact of the industry. As noted in the story, the OSS projects usually start because a developer had an itch. The reason to start a project may be "just because I can", doing something different and innovative, this feature is not available in current applictions or I want it in a different way. If what you are developing is not available already then there may be a market for it. So once you get over the itch, try developing something that has demand in the market. Its same as developing commercially. You either need a VC or some kind of funding but requirement for getting it is same for both. Once the project grows, you have to provide commercially viable features, you have to give them what they want. It may be done your way but its what they want. Once the need of such a product is realized you may apply for grants to the organizations(like DARPA) who are known to provide grants to OSS projects. You may approach the leaders of other OSS projects and ask them how they managed to get funding. One another way is to open a service and support company for you project. If you manage to get enough clients then it will fund your project. You may customize it for them or add new features that they request - whatever brings in money. You may have to sacrifice some of your desires of what should and should not be there in your project but thats the way of life...
Are they saying that they will start doing the code review from now on ? Does it mean that they were not doing it before and not following the procedure that is standard in most of the software development firms ?
It is neither an undocumented feature nor a security issue. I haven't read the book in question but if the author says that it is an undocumented feature then I don't know where he got this idea from. The feature is well documented on MSDN and explained in number of advanced.NET books and articles. The classes that provide this information are part of System.Reflection namespace and for your reference here is the documentation for MemberInfo class which can give further information about the object. Reflection and Introspection has legitimate uses such as RTTI, Code Generation, AOP etc. ASP.NET heavily uses runtime code generation which is possible through these reflection classes in.NET framework.
- Jalil Vaidya
Re:Is this a C# or a .NET problem?
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It is same in.NET too..NET just provides classes for Reflection and Run-Time Type Information which will provide all the information about an object in memory. This information is available as a bunch of objects like MemberInfo, MethodInfo, PropertyInfo, ParameterInfo, FieldInfo etc. It is possible to change the values of private fields or invoke methods using these objects. It is in no way a security problem and relating it to sandbox is totally offtopic too. The runtime just provides the information, what you do with the information is upto you. As pointed out by others, it is possible to access private members in C++ too using some pointer artihmetic. Oh btw, it is possible to override private virtual method of a base class in a derived class in C++. Feeling surprized, aren't ya ?
A lot of Open Source projects are done because the primary developer(s) want something that is either not readily available in existing software (the original mantra of OSS) or they want certain things "their" way. Some developers are not even aware that a standard exists for what they are trying to do and will do it the way they think is the best while other developers would care less about the standards. Its is important to create awareness about standards and their importance (believe me, lot of developers don't understand the importance of standards and think of them as unnecessary burden). When a project idea comes to the mind of a developer, a lot of times the last thing a developer will think about is existence of any standards. Like the article described, ego and NIH syndrome also is a factor. The mentality is also that "if they developed standards, let them develop the product too. I will do it MY way." Again, this boils down to understanding the importance of standards and implementing them in your projects if one exists.
The.NET framework on Windows is entirely dependent on existing Win32 APIs and COM technology. Although Microsoft is encouring people to drop the use of COM and Win32 APIs, they themselves heavily depend on these technologies. As it is now, the.NET framework is just a wrapper around existing APIs (COM and Win32). The C# comipler has been implemented using COM, csc.exe being a wrapper around this COM C# compiler. The VS.NET IDE depends heavily on COM. The.NET framework is huge (more than 3000 classes) but only 15-20% of APIs have been covered by these classes. Apparantly, that is enough to write usual application.
<plug class="shameless" >
I have written an article called Whats the need for.NET where in I argue if there was a real need for MS to come up with.NET. The statements I made above have been backed up in the article by providing links to the comments that MS employees have made about this.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this will make Iraqis hate Americans more and more. For God's sake please stay away from imposing our rules (and ways) on them. Thats probably the last thing you want to do if you want to prove that we are there for liberation and not to force ourselves on them.
Since when did programmers start becoming good at social interractions ? Why do you need to interract in the first place ? There is email, IM, IRC and other ways to communicate. All you need to be a good programmer is bitter coffee and hard rock music. As far as good person thing goes, programmers are always good people, you just have to get accustomed to their way of goodness:-) And no, being a good person is not same as being good at interracting socially...
Top execs at Microsoft do understand OSS very well. This is one such example. I think they understand OSS much better than others and are able to come up with counter arguments that may sound silly to regular OSS supporters but do help Microsoft's point get across the corporate and home customers. It would be stupid to assume that they don't get what OSS is when you hear them making totally insane arguments against OSS.
Not to flame or anything but Phoenix 0.5 takes longer to start and uses more memory that Mozilla 1.0 on my P166 48MB box with latest Debian build. May be this Phoenix build is not for me:-( I use 0.4 on Windows box and it sure beats the hell out of IE as far as speed is concerned. Will get 0.5 for Windows box once the/. effect is over:-)
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think that Microsoft will release the code of any of its core products under this "look but don't touch" license? Microsoft has only released licenses, not any code under any of these licenses. I bet you Microsoft will never release the code of Windows OS, IE, MS Office Suite etc. under any such license to general public. They may use such licenses to release code to thier client and partner companies but that remains to be seen.
Just my $0.02!
Jalil Vaidya
The post just above yours by azuredragon23 tells what happened. azuredragon23 also corrects my statements. I hope it is more clear now. Oh btw, I am a Muslim and I know I'd have elected to be a part of India if there was an option. Although I don't speak for other Muslims and Kashmiris, I believe India is much safer for Muslims as a secular country. Atleast, I won't be called a refugee by India like Pakistan does to Muslims who migrated to Pakistan during independence.
- Jalil Vaidya
Apparently you don't know the history. Kashmir is of great strategic importance to India, Pakistan and China. Kashmir was an autonomous state after the British rule ended and India & Pakistan were free. Pakistan invaded Kashmir. The King of Kashmir, Maharajah Hari Singh, sought India's help and agreed that Kashmir will merge with India but still have autonomy. Pakistan was defeated and Kashmir became a part of India. Pakistan tried again few years later and was defeated. The Kashmir issue is screwed up because the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to become an international peace hero, agreed in hurry to Simla agreement. Ever since then India has been suffering on Kashmir issue. It is ironic that India won three wars against Pakistan but the outcome was never favourable to India, sigh! India lost a war with China over Kashmir too so there is an on going dispute over the borders with China. Kashmir is, and always was, recognized as a part of India by UN.
:-)
Hope that clears up the confusion a little bit
- Jalil Vaidya
India already has its own Linux Distribution :-) Take a look at ELX Linux. Every couple of months, PCQuest Magazine distributes a CD with the magazine with customized version of Debian on it. The customization is good enough to be called its own distro.
HTH,
Jalil Vaidya
There is Biometrics Consortium which works towards creating standards for Biometrics. There is also BioAPI Consortium which which has standardized BioAPI. All the Biometric SDKs that I know of implement BioAPI.
Jalil Vaidya
Cobalt is already in version 6.1!!! (yes, even before the first release of the new version!). Palm announced this last week at DevCon in Munich. It is being speculated that Treo 650, the new version of Treo, will be running Palm OS 6.1 but I will believe it when I see it ;-)
- Jalil Vaidya
Take a look at Object Library for Palm OS (POL). Its been available for a while and hopefully will be ported to PalmOS 6. I don't think a lot of work would be required to do this since the API for v.6 is same as previous versions with addition of some new ones. Codewarrior already includes POL in the package. On the side note, the new Palm OS Development Suite (PODS) from PalmSource is based on Eclipse and the new 1.1 release of PODS is awesome.
- Jalil Vaidya
Now only if they can add biometric security to the PDAs. None of the Palm OS based PDAs have fingerprint scanners like a couple of IPaqs do. Fingerprint authentication on IPaq has proven to be very useful to some. It would be a great value addition to Palm PDAs.
;-)
Just my $0.02
- Jalil Vaidya
Till I saw A Beautiful Mind I didn't know talking to yourself or imaginary people is not normal. Now it feels weird...
Can you drink it ???
Just like you sign your own SSL certificates for websites, create a CA cert of your own. Install it on (internal) user's machines. Once installed, the nag screen goes away. We do our SSL testing this way.
Jalil Vaidya
Instead of having a opt-out list there should be an Opt-in list. The people who want to be called will enlist giving their explicit permission to telemarketers. It would clear the confusion and make it easy for everyone. Most of the people do not want to be called but they may not enlist in opt-out list and may end up getting calls. The opt-in list will solve the problem. To be fair, the telemarketers will be given one chance to call everyone and ask their permission to call in the future. They will get their answer right then and there from the horse's mouth ;-)
Btw, Kudos to Dave!!!
- Jalil Vaidya
The Guy doesn't make it clear what exactly was told to him about the law in India. There is certainly no law that restricts foreign workers in India. The point is, India has lot of programmers and other labor force that is locally generated. Why would they think of hiring someone from abroad when they have plenty in supply ? Plus the hassle of Visa drives them away too .
Oh and TCS, its a blood sucking bodyshop. They pay lowest possible wages to its employees (unless you are higher up) and thats how they are able to bid low on contracts and get many of them.
- Jalil Vaidya
This is a good start. I hope they stick to it. I am glad to know what Wired reported is true that MIT has one of the best privacy protection record among all the universities in America. I hope others follow their path.
- Jalil Vaidya
Match.com has ported their website to .NET. One of the developers of the site, Jason Alexander, has posted a post mortem on his blog. While they have 45 servers in their web farm running the site, he may be a very important source that can answer your question.
- Jalil Vaidya
You may say Duh!
But it is a fact of the industry.
As noted in the story, the OSS projects usually start because a developer had an itch. The reason to start a project may be "just because I can", doing something different and innovative, this feature is not available in current applictions or I want it in a different way. If what you are developing is not available already then there may be a market for it. So once you get over the itch, try developing something that has demand in the market. Its same as developing commercially. You either need a VC or some kind of funding but requirement for getting it is same for both. Once the project grows, you have to provide commercially viable features, you have to give them what they want. It may be done your way but its what they want. Once the need of such a product is realized you may apply for grants to the organizations(like DARPA) who are known to provide grants to OSS projects. You may approach the leaders of other OSS projects and ask them how they managed to get funding. One another way is to open a service and support company for you project. If you manage to get enough clients then it will fund your project. You may customize it for them or add new features that they request - whatever brings in money. You may have to sacrifice some of your desires of what should and should not be there in your project but thats the way of life...
- Jalil Vaidya
Are they saying that they will start doing the code review from now on ? Does it mean that they were not doing it before and not following the procedure that is standard in most of the software development firms ?
- Jalil Vaidya
It is neither an undocumented feature nor a security issue. I haven't read the book in question but if the author says that it is an undocumented feature then I don't know where he got this idea from. The feature is well documented on MSDN and explained in number of advanced .NET books and articles. The classes that provide this information are part of System.Reflection namespace and for your reference here is the documentation for MemberInfo class which can give further information about the object. Reflection and Introspection has legitimate uses such as RTTI, Code Generation, AOP etc. ASP.NET heavily uses runtime code generation which is possible through these reflection classes in .NET framework.
- Jalil Vaidya
It is same in .NET too. .NET just provides classes for Reflection and Run-Time Type Information which will provide all the information about an object in memory. This information is available as a bunch of objects like MemberInfo, MethodInfo, PropertyInfo, ParameterInfo, FieldInfo etc. It is possible to change the values of private fields or invoke methods using these objects. It is in no way a security problem and relating it to sandbox is totally offtopic too. The runtime just provides the information, what you do with the information is upto you. As pointed out by others, it is possible to access private members in C++ too using some pointer artihmetic. Oh btw, it is possible to override private virtual method of a base class in a derived class in C++. Feeling surprized, aren't ya ?
- Jalil Vaidya
A lot of Open Source projects are done because the primary developer(s) want something that is either not readily available in existing software (the original mantra of OSS) or they want certain things "their" way. Some developers are not even aware that a standard exists for what they are trying to do and will do it the way they think is the best while other developers would care less about the standards. Its is important to create awareness about standards and their importance (believe me, lot of developers don't understand the importance of standards and think of them as unnecessary burden). When a project idea comes to the mind of a developer, a lot of times the last thing a developer will think about is existence of any standards. Like the article described, ego and NIH syndrome also is a factor. The mentality is also that "if they developed standards, let them develop the product too. I will do it MY way." Again, this boils down to understanding the importance of standards and implementing them in your projects if one exists.
- Jalil Vaidya
The .NET framework on Windows is entirely dependent on existing Win32 APIs and COM technology. Although Microsoft is encouring people to drop the use of COM and Win32 APIs, they themselves heavily depend on these technologies. As it is now, the .NET framework is just a wrapper around existing APIs (COM and Win32). The C# comipler has been implemented using COM, csc.exe being a wrapper around this COM C# compiler. The VS.NET IDE depends heavily on COM. The .NET framework is huge (more than 3000 classes) but only 15-20% of APIs have been covered by these classes. Apparantly, that is enough to write usual application.
.NET where in I argue if there was a real need for MS to come up with .NET. The statements I made above have been backed up in the article by providing links to the comments that MS employees have made about this.
<plug class="shameless" >
I have written an article called Whats the need for
</plug >
Jalil Vaidya
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this will make Iraqis hate Americans more and more. For God's sake please stay away from imposing our rules (and ways) on them. Thats probably the last thing you want to do if you want to prove that we are there for liberation and not to force ourselves on them.
Jalil Vaidya
Since when did programmers start becoming good at social interractions ? Why do you need to interract in the first place ? There is email, IM, IRC and other ways to communicate. All you need to be a good programmer is bitter coffee and hard rock music. As far as good person thing goes, programmers are always good people, you just have to get accustomed to their way of goodness :-) And no, being a good person is not same as being good at interracting socially...
Top execs at Microsoft do understand OSS very well. This is one such example. I think they understand OSS much better than others and are able to come up with counter arguments that may sound silly to regular OSS supporters but do help Microsoft's point get across the corporate and home customers. It would be stupid to assume that they don't get what OSS is when you hear them making totally insane arguments against OSS.
- Jalil Vaidya
Not to flame or anything but Phoenix 0.5 takes longer to start and uses more memory that Mozilla 1.0 on my P166 48MB box with latest Debian build. May be this Phoenix build is not for me :-( I use 0.4 on Windows box and it sure beats the hell out of IE as far as speed is concerned. Will get 0.5 for Windows box once the /. effect is over :-)
- Jalil