What about the curvature of space? It has to be be described along the axes of the other dimensions, and according to relativity it is caused by gravity. Gravity is the affect of mass on other mass across other dimensions.
So, what I'm saying (although probably not clearly), is what if mass itself is a dimension? Density is the amount of mass in a 3d volume. If mass isn't a dimension, how do we measure density?
Sure, there's the argument that mass is just based on the number of subatomic or sub-subatomic particles in a given 3d space at a given time. But some particles have very little mass, and others are relatively very massive. What causes the difference? Is the spin of a particle or the charge of a quark what _causes_ mass? Do we measure density by the exact number of every kind of particle within a particular 3d space at a particular time (if that was even possible for us to do)?
First, pools of oil took in nutrients and became cells. Then cells found a way to encode useful information for reproduction.
Organized life
Then multiple cells started forming together and specializing to form complex organisms. Then those complex organisms started to evolve specialized organs, and pass information along within their bodies.
Social life
Then groups of organisms started cooperating in packs, schools, or whatever you call a group of unspecified like organisms. They started to specialize their roles in the groups. Then they started conferring information about how to fill these roles.
Mechanical life
Then they started making specific changes to their environment to have it help them rather than harm them. Then they started to specialize in how they changed their environment, each doing his or her own thing to make the environment serve the group better. Then they started passing on information among themselves about how best to change their environment. They started to create machines.
Technological Life
Then the organisms started to make the environment help them communicate better. They learned to change their own bodies to overcome problems. Larger groups became feasible as more efficient communication and faster travel were developed than was possible through the use of purely organic means. Machines were used to make other machines.
Post-technological life?
What's next? We're already putting machines into the body -- simple ones. Mechanical hearts, insulin pumps, and cochlear implants are some examples. Our communications reach is pretty much global. We have machines in space that help us control the flow of information around the world. Some are looking to not just save lives and make them better, but to change the very genes that make up life and extend it radically. It's now fairly routine to change the genetic makeup of our food, although that's probably not such a great idea.
I think there's a case to be made that what we've got here is not a halt or even a slowing of evolution. It's an evolution into an ever-larger group of cooperating components (with some defective ones like Jim Jones, Zachary Meeks, and Cho Seung-hui). We're gathering new types of nutrients, assembling new types of organs with electronic nervous systems, and even thinking about reaching out to groups on other worlds if any are out there and will correspond with us. Maybe someday we'll form a nevolutionary group with them, too.
One of my favorite calls was when I was the junior network admin at a largish (40k customers) ISP. The phone techs would ask my advice if they were stumped. Our techs were all trained to reason through things instead of using a set script. It worked pretty well for the techs who actually stayed after the training.
So this call comes in, and this lady says our "software" is causing her screen to go solid yellow every time she dials the modem. Fair enough, the tech decides, we'll have her uninstall and reinstall the acceleration software. She isn't using acceleration software. So it's not _our_ software, at least. So he talks her through removing the modem from the Windows device manager and reinstalling the driver. Same problem.
So, the customer is quite upset, understandably. The tech is frustrated because he really doesn't want to suggest reinstalling Windows, which the customer assures us her husband just did last week. So he comes to me, and asks. We talk for a minute or two, and I deduce that if it's not software, it must be hardware. The tech can't understand how dialing the modem makes the screen go yellow, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't either. I'm just never quick to just assume the hardware is operating under normal circumstances or is fully operational in the first place.
So, he tells the customer it's a coincidence that it happens with our service, because it seems to be a problem with her hardware. She's slow to accept that her computer just suddenly stopped working (isn't that how they usually stop, suddenly?). So the tech comes back and asks what, specifically, would cause the screen to go screwy when the modem is dialed. So I suggest that either the motherboard is mis-routing signals on the bus or there's a circuit in the machine that shouldn't be there -- some loose screw, some bit of bracket that's shorting something, or something similar. I suggest to the tech that he suggest to her to just have her computer cleaned and checked.
Ten minutes later, the customer calls back and thanks the technician for the wonderful support. She had unplugged the system, popped the cover, and removed the Big Ball of Dust that was connecting the PCB of her modem to the PCB of her video adapter. With the cover back on and power restored, she could get online and still see what she was doing.
Desktop apps and server apps both, I think, are better examples than most web apps. Multithreaded or multi-process is a good way to go when you need to get more power to a program. Often, actually, it ends up easier to deal with the multiple threads or multiple processes in an application than to try cramming everything for a complex program into a single thread. The right amount of added complexity in the right places can actually cut down on overall complexity, and makes the program faster and easier to understand as a programmer both at once.
Wouldn't someone have to be used to _only_ Java to not be familiar with at least some of these concepts?
Enumerations are available in Pascal and pretty much all of its descendants IIRC. It's also a type of field in an SQL database for much the same purpose as enumerations in programming languages.
The foreach loop has been in Perl since 2.0 in 1988. C# got foreach in 2000. It's in PHP. It comes from earlier FOR..IN loops from shells.
I'm sure there are examples of the other features which are similar to the Java version of them. The syntax may be different, and the exact details of darker semantic corners may be different. The concepts, however, are pretty easy to have run across unless someone has only used the one language.
The review seems to imply that bringing in what has been proven to work well in other languages is too confusing and should be done at a slower pace. The truth is, people program in a subset of any general-purpose language at first, and that subset grows over time. If someone works with code from other programmers, one picks up the parts of the language to which they are exposed as they are exposed to them. No one needs to cram all night to be up on all the new features of a language the day after the manual gets updated.
Taking advantage of multiple cores with a single-threaded per-client application just requires having more than one simultaneous user on your server. It doesn't at all require having a multi-threaded application per client. Most HTTP connections don't do anything very fancy, and really won't be helped much internally by multiple cores. The web server software itself, the database server, the fact that popular sites (or shared servers) get more than one visitor at a time, and similar concerns will make a much bigger difference with multiple cores than making a CRUD application or a blog multi-threaded.
The main engineering questions, of course, being how much you lose in the massive amount of wiring it takes to route current from 40.5 million of these things to the massive capacitors as well as how much motion that 43,560 square feet still experience with all that on top of them. Sure, it'll still be some, but will it be the full 4W per square centimeter?
The thing is, it's the FSF that owns the copyright on GNU software, and only GNU software is 100% certain to come under the new license. The FSF as an organization has the right to license its software as it sees fit, so long as the license is legal and valid.
The big question becomes, I guess, whether there's some sort of problem with the fact that the FSF has partnered with all of these companies and acts as a hub of collusion for them.
As far as anti-competitive goes, though, Novell was competing in the market before Ximian and Suse. They can still compete with GPLv2 software once GNU software becomes GPLv3 licensed. How well they can compete may be in question, but their chance to compete I don't think has been impacted at all. Keep in mind that Novell sabotaging the very people from whom they got the license for the GPLed software they sell in the first place is not only anti-competitive, but rude and morally disgusting.
The funny thing about all of this is, if the people who originally contributed the code under the GPL are no longer allowed to distribute it because of something Novell promises Microsoft, that means it was really illegal for them to distribute it all along. This is because patents don't become an issue only once the issue is pointed out. If it was illegal for them to distribute it in the first place, then they couldn't really license it to Novell. If it couldn't really be licensed to Novell under the GPL, then Novell is in breach of copyright laws for redistributing it and for making derivative works. So how is it that Novell thinks they are going to take GPLed software proprietary, exactly, by claiming Microsoft holds patents on it? There's no upside for Novell here, unless the payoffs from MS were worth losing Suse as a product. I wish a lawyer would review this paragraph and tell me how far off base I am.
I don't get the whole anti-competitive thing either.
Let's look at three scenarios:
Let's say you grant me a license to your software, and license it GPL. If I give or sell a copy to my competitor, I must give him the same chance to make changes that I had. How is that anti-competitive? It sounds like it levels the field, not the opposite. If I write software that does the same thing later, I have the choice to write it from scratch, to pay for libraries, or to release my sources and build on what you licensed to me already.
If you grant me a closed-source license, then I might not be able to sell to my own competitors or customers, and I might not be able to give them the source even if I chose to do so. That gives you a competitive advantage over me, but that's okay because I bought the software from you according to my own judgment.
If I write the software myself, I can pick and choose which customers and competitors can buy licenses to my software at what prices and can determine who, if anyone, gets the source. If I don't advertise a price and only sell by inquiry and quote, then I can even charge one customer more than another based on how much of a threat I consider them to be in the marketplace. I can intentionally make it more difficult for certain competitors to use my software in their IT environment, and they may never know. If it's completely closed source, they can't easily fix it. If it's open or I grant them their own license to the source, they can. However, if I'm picking and choosing who gets source licenses, my biggest competitors won't, even if I offer source licenses to other customers.
It sounds to me like the first scenario is the most friendly to competition, not the least.
I haven't played the game. I might try it out, if only to see what's so "cringe-worthy" about it. Is it buggy? Is it just plain annoying? Those things are likely effected by the implementation language very little if at all. I doubt that for a game like Frozen Bubble, using a good dynamic language is any problem. It probably could have been done in Perl, Python, C, Pike, D, C++, or any other language with SDL bindings and been just as good (or just as bad).
OTOH, the dynamic language Lua is used for much of Supreme Commander. SC is known as a great game, but one must wonder if using Lua for the AI is part of the reason it takes so much processor to run it. The game is fun, but due to the number of individual units that can be active at once it can run like a dog on all but multi-core systems. Using a more efficient language for the AI may have made it scale a bit better, but the flexibility of using something like Lua I'm sure is worth the trade-offs involved. The hardware will catch up shortly, as with lots of other games when they were first released. It's nice to see one stress the CPU instead of the GPU for once, anyway.
Yes, the "largest spot groups" is exactly my point. They didn't have the precision we do today, so of course we'd see what they missed, unless the current study filtered out all but sunspots which could be seen with the naked eye.
Also, I realize that one doesn't have to look directly at the sun to see an image of it. If you can't tell that large parts of my previous post were tongue-in-cheek, perhaps you were tired or something when you skimmed it. The fact remains that the method of making the observations now is likely quite different from a thousand years ago. TFA didn't say what they did to account for this.
Yeah, if the GPS is what was screwed up in the first place... You could try dead reckoning based on the flight path already taken, but if you're a missile launched from a plane in flight, a mobile rack on the ground, or a submarine on the move, where will "base" be even if you get back to where you were?
I was under the distinct impression that telescopes, cameras, and computers that help interpret the data had undergone some upgrades since the 1600s. Must be that generation gap thing -- I only thought our instruments were better now or something.
Besides, how can the "observations" since 1610 give us 1000 years of data since 2007 - 1610 = 397? Are we talking about naked-eye observations before that? Has the sun gotten that much brighter that it didn't used to blind people staring at it trying to count the dots?
So, ice cores and growth rings from fossilized trees (which would also show drought and other issues pretty indistinguishably, yes?) might agree for 1000 years. But saying that we _see_ more sunspots now than 1000 years ago is a bit like saying that we _see_ more single-celled organisms now than before the microscope.
As for global warming, yes, man probably has something to do with it. How much is the issue, and better yet how to slow it or if we should. Remember, the planet changing doesn't necessarily mean things will be worse, just different. Perhaps we should have studies on what benefits and drawbacks the climate changes will have. Are cyclical mass extinctions due to warming and cooling necessarily a bad thing?
Of course, dead zones in the oceans due to more direct screw-ups like over-fishing, pollution, etc can't be good. A lack of bees to pollinate crops is a looming disaster, too. What Oscars are being won over these?
If a missile hits something besides its intended target, does it really matter whether it was properly understood wrong information or misunderstood junk data? It's not like missiles return to their point of origin with a "sorry, but I didn't understand that" error code. They still blow something to bits.
It's probably possible to disarm the warhead if the last few communications were misunderstood, but then you'd have enemies jamming it locally, collecting your still mostly-intact missile, and reverse engineering it.
You assume that neither PHP nor Perl are being used to do desktop apps. Perl certainly is. Ruby, Java, Python, and several other languages are being used to do web development, too.
In particular, it seems a shame to pigeonhole Perl. Using Perl and readily available libraries, one can develop console programs, GUI programs, daemons, or web apps. With Tk, SDL, OpenGL, WxWidgets, curses, GTK, Win32::GUI, or Prima, few languages have as many options for interface libraries last I checked. Just because Perl is very useful for web development doesn't mean it's not useful in other areas.
In a fun twist, I had to develop an app that worked the same over the web or on a Windows desktop with no net connection and no installation. It's written in PHP and Perl with a little client-side JavaScript and runs an Apache+MySQL instance from CD. So it's a web app, but it doesn't require net access.
And BTW, ADP (American Data Processing) and similar companies makes a lot of money doing payroll for other companies.
You know what, I did in fact read several posts all over the web that said Lxrun was GPL. However, I went to SCO's site to see if they really are distributing Linux libraries, and this is what I found:
1. There's a link to a linux-libs directory which no longer exists. that link is here. I have no proof there's been anything there in the last ten years or that there weren't sources under that directory somewhere when it did exist. The date on the link does not necessarily reflect when the directory actually existed, either.
2. There is actually a binary copy of something called ld.so in the lxrun tar.gz file available at this location So yes, there does seem to be an issue here after all. Now, I did say "seem to be". Let's dig a little more...
If you read the README files that come in the lxrun tar.gz file and the source comments for the ld-linux.c that's in the lxrun sources (hosted by SCO), they talk about including a fake ld-linux which just sets the environment in order to call the real ld-linux.so, and then go on to say where to get both the binary and the source for that. Look in this location and open any of the lxrun archive files there to see what I mean.
Now, there might still be some truth to the claims, since the fact that I didn't find it doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere. However, I went looking for some and still didn't see it. All I found for sure was there's an MPL-licensed package -- with source* -- which uses GPLed libraries. If that's what passes for a GPL violation, then I'm going to stop using GPLed software.
Now I hate SCO as much as the next guy. However, making accusations that can't be proven is their M.O., not mine. You can talk about anything you want being the real issue, but unless it's true and verifiable, it doesn't mean a damn. I don't actually doubt SCO has violated several licenses in several ways, because the people involved with them seem to have no respect for law or justice in any form. In this particular case, though, it may just be that there's not the smoking gun we'd all like.
* The versions available as binaries do not match exactly the versions for which source is available, but there are multiple binary versions and multiple source versions. The MPL, as I understand it, doesn't require one to distribute the source if it's unmodified anyway.
Lots of places have been accusing SCO of violating the GPL by providing lxrun but not the sources for it, and referring people to ibiblio for the sources. It's quite difficult, though, to violate the GPL when the project seems to be licensed exclusively under the Mozilla Public License.
Let's not sink to the level of SCO by making accusations which are easily demonstrated to be false. Of course, if there's GPLed code in lxrun which was relicensed without permission of the original author that's another matter, but I haven't seen any claims of that.
People really should not assume someone is violating a license without checking to even see what license is involved. That includes when the accused is a big ball of crud like SCO.
Who's going to publish the bad press? Where do most people get their news from? That's right: Fox, Universal, Viacom, Disney, and Warner.
Don't think Al Capone here. Think 1984. They have the support of the government, and they control the media most people see. They're not scared of anything but the internet, because they don't have a handle on how to control it yet.
I agree that there's still homebrew interest in the PSP. There seems to be a lot less than there could be, and I've seen quite a few people who were initially interested give up on it completely. Other systems are much more homebrew friendly, from Palm and PocketPC to the GP2X. Heck, Apple does less to mess with homebrew developers than Sony does for PSP homebrewers from what I can tell.
You're right, of course. It's a distinction that needs to be made and I failed to make it. Often, though, failing to properly credit quotes goes hand in hand with using too many quotes in the first place.
Copying and pasting ten pages of quotes for a ten (or even twenty) page paper, even if properly credited, is not just bad writing. It's failing to write at all. It's not technically plagiarism, but it could still be considered trying to skirt the work -- maybe even a form of cheating. Plagiarism is bad both because it's skirting the work and because it's stealing credit. Overuse of quotes is just skirting the work.
Homebrew sites were excited as flies at a freshly-fertilized organic tomato farm before Sony repeatedly updated the firmware to get rid of them. Sony seems worried enough about protecting a market for UMD games that they're willing to lose system sales to homebrew game fans.
People who want a $200-$300 handheld homebrew-friendly system may just go the GP2X route instead. I think last time I checked you could still get a PSP to boot Linux from MS Pro Duo and play games on that. If you want a GP2X, though you'll probably just buy a GP2X. The only advantage I can see to PSP over GP2X is that it also plays UMD games, but look at the list of games for the GP2X.
Also, try getting OpenSSH, a Gameboy emulator, etc on your PSP without the latest Sony firmware updates screwing all of that over.
My original understanding from the quotes was that the guy actually found a possible exploit vector by using JTAG. (I tend to read just the quotes first in articles which are interviews on technical topics -- it's often easier to get a sense of what the subject of the interview is talking about without misinterpretations by reporters.)
TFA talks about using JTAG itself to run exploits, which I don't care about since physical security is the first layer of any security plan. If someone has better physical access to a router than I do then from a security standpoint it's their router, not mine, no matter who paid for it. At that point, the route is already suspect.
If it's something about sending malformed network traffic that triggers something to happen at the processor level even if the firmware is solid, then that's an expensive thing to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the curvature of space? It has to be be described along the axes of the other dimensions, and according to relativity it is caused by gravity. Gravity is the affect of mass on other mass across other dimensions.
So, what I'm saying (although probably not clearly), is what if mass itself is a dimension? Density is the amount of mass in a 3d volume. If mass isn't a dimension, how do we measure density?
Sure, there's the argument that mass is just based on the number of subatomic or sub-subatomic particles in a given 3d space at a given time. But some particles have very little mass, and others are relatively very massive. What causes the difference? Is the spin of a particle or the charge of a quark what _causes_ mass? Do we measure density by the exact number of every kind of particle within a particular 3d space at a particular time (if that was even possible for us to do)?
What's new about JavaScript and SVG?
Proto-life
First, pools of oil took in nutrients and became cells. Then cells found a way to encode useful information for reproduction.
Organized life
Then multiple cells started forming together and specializing to form complex organisms. Then those complex organisms started to evolve specialized organs, and pass information along within their bodies.
Social life
Then groups of organisms started cooperating in packs, schools, or whatever you call a group of unspecified like organisms. They started to specialize their roles in the groups. Then they started conferring information about how to fill these roles.
Mechanical life
Then they started making specific changes to their environment to have it help them rather than harm them. Then they started to specialize in how they changed their environment, each doing his or her own thing to make the environment serve the group better. Then they started passing on information among themselves about how best to change their environment. They started to create machines.
Technological Life
Then the organisms started to make the environment help them communicate better. They learned to change their own bodies to overcome problems. Larger groups became feasible as more efficient communication and faster travel were developed than was possible through the use of purely organic means. Machines were used to make other machines.
Post-technological life?
What's next? We're already putting machines into the body -- simple ones. Mechanical hearts, insulin pumps, and cochlear implants are some examples. Our communications reach is pretty much global. We have machines in space that help us control the flow of information around the world. Some are looking to not just save lives and make them better, but to change the very genes that make up life and extend it radically. It's now fairly routine to change the genetic makeup of our food, although that's probably not such a great idea.
I think there's a case to be made that what we've got here is not a halt or even a slowing of evolution. It's an evolution into an ever-larger group of cooperating components (with some defective ones like Jim Jones, Zachary Meeks, and Cho Seung-hui). We're gathering new types of nutrients, assembling new types of organs with electronic nervous systems, and even thinking about reaching out to groups on other worlds if any are out there and will correspond with us. Maybe someday we'll form a nevolutionary group with them, too.
One of my favorite calls was when I was the junior network admin at a largish (40k customers) ISP. The phone techs would ask my advice if they were stumped. Our techs were all trained to reason through things instead of using a set script. It worked pretty well for the techs who actually stayed after the training.
So this call comes in, and this lady says our "software" is causing her screen to go solid yellow every time she dials the modem. Fair enough, the tech decides, we'll have her uninstall and reinstall the acceleration software. She isn't using acceleration software. So it's not _our_ software, at least. So he talks her through removing the modem from the Windows device manager and reinstalling the driver. Same problem.
So, the customer is quite upset, understandably. The tech is frustrated because he really doesn't want to suggest reinstalling Windows, which the customer assures us her husband just did last week. So he comes to me, and asks. We talk for a minute or two, and I deduce that if it's not software, it must be hardware. The tech can't understand how dialing the modem makes the screen go yellow, and under normal circumstances I wouldn't either. I'm just never quick to just assume the hardware is operating under normal circumstances or is fully operational in the first place.
So, he tells the customer it's a coincidence that it happens with our service, because it seems to be a problem with her hardware. She's slow to accept that her computer just suddenly stopped working (isn't that how they usually stop, suddenly?). So the tech comes back and asks what, specifically, would cause the screen to go screwy when the modem is dialed. So I suggest that either the motherboard is mis-routing signals on the bus or there's a circuit in the machine that shouldn't be there -- some loose screw, some bit of bracket that's shorting something, or something similar. I suggest to the tech that he suggest to her to just have her computer cleaned and checked.
Ten minutes later, the customer calls back and thanks the technician for the wonderful support. She had unplugged the system, popped the cover, and removed the Big Ball of Dust that was connecting the PCB of her modem to the PCB of her video adapter. With the cover back on and power restored, she could get online and still see what she was doing.
Desktop apps and server apps both, I think, are better examples than most web apps. Multithreaded or multi-process is a good way to go when you need to get more power to a program. Often, actually, it ends up easier to deal with the multiple threads or multiple processes in an application than to try cramming everything for a complex program into a single thread. The right amount of added complexity in the right places can actually cut down on overall complexity, and makes the program faster and easier to understand as a programmer both at once.
Wouldn't someone have to be used to _only_ Java to not be familiar with at least some of these concepts?
Enumerations are available in Pascal and pretty much all of its descendants IIRC. It's also a type of field in an SQL database for much the same purpose as enumerations in programming languages.
The foreach loop has been in Perl since 2.0 in 1988. C# got foreach in 2000. It's in PHP. It comes from earlier FOR..IN loops from shells.
I'm sure there are examples of the other features which are similar to the Java version of them. The syntax may be different, and the exact details of darker semantic corners may be different. The concepts, however, are pretty easy to have run across unless someone has only used the one language.
The review seems to imply that bringing in what has been proven to work well in other languages is too confusing and should be done at a slower pace. The truth is, people program in a subset of any general-purpose language at first, and that subset grows over time. If someone works with code from other programmers, one picks up the parts of the language to which they are exposed as they are exposed to them. No one needs to cram all night to be up on all the new features of a language the day after the manual gets updated.
Taking advantage of multiple cores with a single-threaded per-client application just requires having more than one simultaneous user on your server. It doesn't at all require having a multi-threaded application per client. Most HTTP connections don't do anything very fancy, and really won't be helped much internally by multiple cores. The web server software itself, the database server, the fact that popular sites (or shared servers) get more than one visitor at a time, and similar concerns will make a much bigger difference with multiple cores than making a CRUD application or a blog multi-threaded.
The main engineering questions, of course, being how much you lose in the massive amount of wiring it takes to route current from 40.5 million of these things to the massive capacitors as well as how much motion that 43,560 square feet still experience with all that on top of them. Sure, it'll still be some, but will it be the full 4W per square centimeter?
The thing is, it's the FSF that owns the copyright on GNU software, and only GNU software is 100% certain to come under the new license. The FSF as an organization has the right to license its software as it sees fit, so long as the license is legal and valid.
The big question becomes, I guess, whether there's some sort of problem with the fact that the FSF has partnered with all of these companies and acts as a hub of collusion for them.
As far as anti-competitive goes, though, Novell was competing in the market before Ximian and Suse. They can still compete with GPLv2 software once GNU software becomes GPLv3 licensed. How well they can compete may be in question, but their chance to compete I don't think has been impacted at all. Keep in mind that Novell sabotaging the very people from whom they got the license for the GPLed software they sell in the first place is not only anti-competitive, but rude and morally disgusting.
The funny thing about all of this is, if the people who originally contributed the code under the GPL are no longer allowed to distribute it because of something Novell promises Microsoft, that means it was really illegal for them to distribute it all along. This is because patents don't become an issue only once the issue is pointed out. If it was illegal for them to distribute it in the first place, then they couldn't really license it to Novell. If it couldn't really be licensed to Novell under the GPL, then Novell is in breach of copyright laws for redistributing it and for making derivative works. So how is it that Novell thinks they are going to take GPLed software proprietary, exactly, by claiming Microsoft holds patents on it? There's no upside for Novell here, unless the payoffs from MS were worth losing Suse as a product. I wish a lawyer would review this paragraph and tell me how far off base I am.
I don't get the whole anti-competitive thing either.
Let's look at three scenarios:
Let's say you grant me a license to your software, and license it GPL. If I give or sell a copy to my competitor, I must give him the same chance to make changes that I had. How is that anti-competitive? It sounds like it levels the field, not the opposite. If I write software that does the same thing later, I have the choice to write it from scratch, to pay for libraries, or to release my sources and build on what you licensed to me already.
If you grant me a closed-source license, then I might not be able to sell to my own competitors or customers, and I might not be able to give them the source even if I chose to do so. That gives you a competitive advantage over me, but that's okay because I bought the software from you according to my own judgment.
If I write the software myself, I can pick and choose which customers and competitors can buy licenses to my software at what prices and can determine who, if anyone, gets the source. If I don't advertise a price and only sell by inquiry and quote, then I can even charge one customer more than another based on how much of a threat I consider them to be in the marketplace. I can intentionally make it more difficult for certain competitors to use my software in their IT environment, and they may never know. If it's completely closed source, they can't easily fix it. If it's open or I grant them their own license to the source, they can. However, if I'm picking and choosing who gets source licenses, my biggest competitors won't, even if I offer source licenses to other customers.
It sounds to me like the first scenario is the most friendly to competition, not the least.
I haven't played the game. I might try it out, if only to see what's so "cringe-worthy" about it. Is it buggy? Is it just plain annoying? Those things are likely effected by the implementation language very little if at all. I doubt that for a game like Frozen Bubble, using a good dynamic language is any problem. It probably could have been done in Perl, Python, C, Pike, D, C++, or any other language with SDL bindings and been just as good (or just as bad).
OTOH, the dynamic language Lua is used for much of Supreme Commander. SC is known as a great game, but one must wonder if using Lua for the AI is part of the reason it takes so much processor to run it. The game is fun, but due to the number of individual units that can be active at once it can run like a dog on all but multi-core systems. Using a more efficient language for the AI may have made it scale a bit better, but the flexibility of using something like Lua I'm sure is worth the trade-offs involved. The hardware will catch up shortly, as with lots of other games when they were first released. It's nice to see one stress the CPU instead of the GPU for once, anyway.
I not only did that, but I read TF Article. How very un-slashdotty of me, I know.
<rhetorical>If you have nothing useful to say, why did you say it?</rhetorical>
Yes, the "largest spot groups" is exactly my point. They didn't have the precision we do today, so of course we'd see what they missed, unless the current study filtered out all but sunspots which could be seen with the naked eye.
Also, I realize that one doesn't have to look directly at the sun to see an image of it. If you can't tell that large parts of my previous post were tongue-in-cheek, perhaps you were tired or something when you skimmed it. The fact remains that the method of making the observations now is likely quite different from a thousand years ago. TFA didn't say what they did to account for this.
Yeah, if the GPS is what was screwed up in the first place... You could try dead reckoning based on the flight path already taken, but if you're a missile launched from a plane in flight, a mobile rack on the ground, or a submarine on the move, where will "base" be even if you get back to where you were?
I was under the distinct impression that telescopes, cameras, and computers that help interpret the data had undergone some upgrades since the 1600s. Must be that generation gap thing -- I only thought our instruments were better now or something.
Besides, how can the "observations" since 1610 give us 1000 years of data since 2007 - 1610 = 397? Are we talking about naked-eye observations before that? Has the sun gotten that much brighter that it didn't used to blind people staring at it trying to count the dots?
So, ice cores and growth rings from fossilized trees (which would also show drought and other issues pretty indistinguishably, yes?) might agree for 1000 years. But saying that we _see_ more sunspots now than 1000 years ago is a bit like saying that we _see_ more single-celled organisms now than before the microscope.
As for global warming, yes, man probably has something to do with it. How much is the issue, and better yet how to slow it or if we should. Remember, the planet changing doesn't necessarily mean things will be worse, just different. Perhaps we should have studies on what benefits and drawbacks the climate changes will have. Are cyclical mass extinctions due to warming and cooling necessarily a bad thing?
Of course, dead zones in the oceans due to more direct screw-ups like over-fishing, pollution, etc can't be good. A lack of bees to pollinate crops is a looming disaster, too. What Oscars are being won over these?
If a missile hits something besides its intended target, does it really matter whether it was properly understood wrong information or misunderstood junk data? It's not like missiles return to their point of origin with a "sorry, but I didn't understand that" error code. They still blow something to bits.
It's probably possible to disarm the warhead if the last few communications were misunderstood, but then you'd have enemies jamming it locally, collecting your still mostly-intact missile, and reverse engineering it.
You assume that neither PHP nor Perl are being used to do desktop apps. Perl certainly is. Ruby, Java, Python, and several other languages are being used to do web development, too.
In particular, it seems a shame to pigeonhole Perl. Using Perl and readily available libraries, one can develop console programs, GUI programs, daemons, or web apps. With Tk, SDL, OpenGL, WxWidgets, curses, GTK, Win32::GUI, or Prima, few languages have as many options for interface libraries last I checked. Just because Perl is very useful for web development doesn't mean it's not useful in other areas.
In a fun twist, I had to develop an app that worked the same over the web or on a Windows desktop with no net connection and no installation. It's written in PHP and Perl with a little client-side JavaScript and runs an Apache+MySQL instance from CD. So it's a web app, but it doesn't require net access.
And BTW, ADP (American Data Processing) and similar companies makes a lot of money doing payroll for other companies.
You know what, I did in fact read several posts all over the web that said Lxrun was GPL. However, I went to SCO's site to see if they really are distributing Linux libraries, and this is what I found:
1. There's a link to a linux-libs directory which no longer exists. that link is here. I have no proof there's been anything there in the last ten years or that there weren't sources under that directory somewhere when it did exist. The date on the link does not necessarily reflect when the directory actually existed, either.
2. There is actually a binary copy of something called ld.so in the lxrun tar.gz file available at this location So yes, there does seem to be an issue here after all. Now, I did say "seem to be". Let's dig a little more...
If you read the README files that come in the lxrun tar.gz file and the source comments for the ld-linux.c that's in the lxrun sources (hosted by SCO), they talk about including a fake ld-linux which just sets the environment in order to call the real ld-linux.so, and then go on to say where to get both the binary and the source for that. Look in this location and open any of the lxrun archive files there to see what I mean.
Now, there might still be some truth to the claims, since the fact that I didn't find it doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere. However, I went looking for some and still didn't see it. All I found for sure was there's an MPL-licensed package -- with source* -- which uses GPLed libraries. If that's what passes for a GPL violation, then I'm going to stop using GPLed software.
Now I hate SCO as much as the next guy. However, making accusations that can't be proven is their M.O., not mine. You can talk about anything you want being the real issue, but unless it's true and verifiable, it doesn't mean a damn. I don't actually doubt SCO has violated several licenses in several ways, because the people involved with them seem to have no respect for law or justice in any form. In this particular case, though, it may just be that there's not the smoking gun we'd all like.
* The versions available as binaries do not match exactly the versions for which source is available, but there are multiple binary versions and multiple source versions. The MPL, as I understand it, doesn't require one to distribute the source if it's unmodified anyway.
Lots of places have been accusing SCO of violating the GPL by providing lxrun but not the sources for it, and referring people to ibiblio for the sources. It's quite difficult, though, to violate the GPL when the project seems to be licensed exclusively under the Mozilla Public License.
Let's not sink to the level of SCO by making accusations which are easily demonstrated to be false. Of course, if there's GPLed code in lxrun which was relicensed without permission of the original author that's another matter, but I haven't seen any claims of that.
People really should not assume someone is violating a license without checking to even see what license is involved. That includes when the accused is a big ball of crud like SCO.
Who's going to publish the bad press? Where do most people get their news from? That's right: Fox, Universal, Viacom, Disney, and Warner.
Don't think Al Capone here. Think 1984. They have the support of the government, and they control the media most people see. They're not scared of anything but the internet, because they don't have a handle on how to control it yet.
I agree that there's still homebrew interest in the PSP. There seems to be a lot less than there could be, and I've seen quite a few people who were initially interested give up on it completely. Other systems are much more homebrew friendly, from Palm and PocketPC to the GP2X. Heck, Apple does less to mess with homebrew developers than Sony does for PSP homebrewers from what I can tell.
I think exploitable flaws at the CPU level is still pretty interesting. Being able to trigger those with traffic is much more interesting, though.
You're right, of course. It's a distinction that needs to be made and I failed to make it. Often, though, failing to properly credit quotes goes hand in hand with using too many quotes in the first place.
Copying and pasting ten pages of quotes for a ten (or even twenty) page paper, even if properly credited, is not just bad writing. It's failing to write at all. It's not technically plagiarism, but it could still be considered trying to skirt the work -- maybe even a form of cheating. Plagiarism is bad both because it's skirting the work and because it's stealing credit. Overuse of quotes is just skirting the work.
Homebrew sites were excited as flies at a freshly-fertilized organic tomato farm before Sony repeatedly updated the firmware to get rid of them. Sony seems worried enough about protecting a market for UMD games that they're willing to lose system sales to homebrew game fans.
People who want a $200-$300 handheld homebrew-friendly system may just go the GP2X route instead. I think last time I checked you could still get a PSP to boot Linux from MS Pro Duo and play games on that. If you want a GP2X, though you'll probably just buy a GP2X. The only advantage I can see to PSP over GP2X is that it also plays UMD games, but look at the list of games for the GP2X.
Also, try getting OpenSSH, a Gameboy emulator, etc on your PSP without the latest Sony firmware updates screwing all of that over.
My original understanding from the quotes was that the guy actually found a possible exploit vector by using JTAG. (I tend to read just the quotes first in articles which are interviews on technical topics -- it's often easier to get a sense of what the subject of the interview is talking about without misinterpretations by reporters.)
TFA talks about using JTAG itself to run exploits, which I don't care about since physical security is the first layer of any security plan. If someone has better physical access to a router than I do then from a security standpoint it's their router, not mine, no matter who paid for it. At that point, the route is already suspect.
If it's something about sending malformed network traffic that triggers something to happen at the processor level even if the firmware is solid, then that's an expensive thing to fix.