I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now...
I strongly believe we know how to set up technical systems for safe nuclear power. However I'm extremely sceptical of the idea that we know how to set up social / administrative systems for safe nuclear power. It's too easy to hide systemic weakness behind secrecy, or too embarrassing to identify and fix present failings, or the debate gets too polarised and ideological so people, politicians and regulatory systems lose sight of the actual safety issues because of the headline effect etc.
I wouldn't be quick to blame money or corruption or unscrupulous people, either. The key problem is secrecy -- even without malice, familiarity makes you blind to system flaws -- we software people know this very well. Only total transparency can ensure that flaws do not get hidden. On the other hand I don't know how this can be reconciled with security against sabotage.
There's a need for a sober, measured debate about all this and it's a pity that a few fundamentalists (on both sides) are making this impossible.
Google's own patent portfolio is [...] far too weak for what's undertaken in connection with Android.
[...]
Just today, Google was granted a typical "troll" patent... A company that seeks to monopolize such basic ideas -- behind which there really isn't any serious technology -- apparenty loves patents
He can't have it both ways -- either he wants Google to file defensive patents or he doesn't. A patent isn't a troll, a patent aggressor is a troll. If you just use a patent defensively you're not a patent troll.
He also seeks to draw an arbitrary distinction between "trivial" and "non-trivial" patents. The problem with patents is not triviality. The problem is that they can hit you even if you thought of the idea independently, or if you're just trying to conform to a de-facto standard.
The original IWF press release suggested that the "web page" at the blocked URL "was" a potentially illegal image. Whereas in reality, the main URL only contains HTML text -- and the image in question was only linked in and actually resided at another URL. This means material was blacklisted which was not alleged to be illegal in the UK. This wasn't just a side effect -- the HTML page was intentionally added to the list as well as the image itself.
As a Wikipedia and Media Wiki contributor, I wrote to the IWF complaining that the HTML text page was blacklisted (and not just the image). To their credit they have replied, but making no reference to the point I made.
If the IWF intends in future to blacklist text content which is not alleged to be illegal or abusive, this greatly changes the nature of the blacklist. In which case the public, legislators and industry should reconsider the high levels of co-operation which have been afforded to the IWF to date, offered on the understanding that it is purely trying to prevent crime and abuse.
Confusing England with the UK is like confusing California with the USA.
Well, this is a ruling of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, so theoretically it does not bind the courts of Scotland and Northern Ireland. (I agree "England and Wales" != "England", but everyone refers to "English law", and even the Court's title did not include "and Wales" until Lord Denning got the name fixed a few years back (IIRC), so it's unsurprising if a layman speaks of "England" in this context).
So in one sense this is more like a ruling of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in that it doesn't bind other circuits but is strongly persuasive. But the analogy breaks down somewhat because England has 85% of the UK population.
Actually, the situation is even more complicated, because the Patents Act 1977 (which applies to the whole of the UK) supposedly implements the European Patent Convention 1973, which applies in a number of jurisdictions across Europe. However, the way the Convention is interpreted varies between jurisdictions, so the exact same patent can be ruled invalid in one country and yet be enforceable in another.
Finally the European Court of Justice does *not* normally have a role in patent cases such as this. The European Patent Convention is completely separate from the European Community and covers countries such as Turkey and Norway which are not part of the EU. One reason European patent law varies between countries is that there is no single court with juristiction on patent matters across them all.
(That said, I have not RTFRuling so there could be some side point which touches on EC law somewhere, in which case that point could be subject to interpretation by the ECJ)
Never had the privilege of meeting you, but your last lecture really inspired me. Not cos you were going to die, but for everything you said about how to live.
You have to pay twice as much to use VoIP (see here). Otherwise, even over a VPN, they detect the statistical signature of the packets and insert a latency which makes VoIP unusable.
It is definitely statistical, because if you do "wget --limit-rate=2.5k http://huge/file.bin" over the VPN at the same time, the latency doesn't get inserted -- presumably because the overall VPN traffic no longer matches the VoIP statistical signature.
Beforehand, the prisoners number themselves from 0 to n - 1.
Prisoner 0 turns the chalice the first k + 1 times he gets called, then never again.
Prisoner 1 does not turn the chalice until he has seen it change state at least k + 1 times. Then he turns it the next k + 1 times he gets called, then never again.
Generally, Prisoner r does not turn the chalice until he has seen it change state at least r(k + 1) times. Then he turns it the next k + 1 times he gets called, then never again.
...
Finally, Prisoner n - 1 says "Yes" when he has seen the chalice change state (n - 1)(k + 1) times.
This strategy means that prisoner i does not turn the chalice until he knows that prisoner (i-1) has been called. But each prisoner's start threshold will eventually be reached. Basically the King can only obliterate k bits of information, and each prisoner sends a message of k + 1 bits to say he has been called.
The second part of the problem: There are more places where she could be. Describe where they are.
Within about 4000 feet of the South Pole. More precisely: 1km north of the 1km-circumferenced circle about the South Pole, or more generally 1km north of a 1/n km-circumferenced circle about the South Pole where n >= 1.
As a Java developer for the past 7 years, can someone remind me as to how Java will benefit from being open source?
Here's one real example:
I want to distribute OpenOffice.org 2 CDs to people in rural communities without broadband.
Large chunks of OOo2 depend on Sun's JVM.
I cannot legally redistribute Sun's JVM.
Therefore, to get a fully functional OOo 2, they have to spend hours downloading, and the install process is far more complicated.
Therefore, more people stick with Microsoft Office.
This exact issue kills off large parts of the desktop market for Java at the moment - end-users will go for a solution which is not such a pain to install, rather than one written in Java, if they have a choice.
Sorry, but what competitors to VB6 does the OSS community have? [...] PythonGTK is nice, but still nowhere near VB6 (look at the complexity of the runtimes).
I use both PyGTK and PyQt (professionally), deploying on Windows and GNU/Linux clients. There is no runtime issue. py2exe creates a standalone executable for Windows. Conceptually it's very similar to VBRUN600.DLL, except that your own extension modules can also go into the executable, so there's no need to leave rubbish lying around the system.
The UK is often being slapped down these days because of its draconian 'anti-terrorist' laws like imprisonment without trial... we have out own camp X-Ray called Belmarsh, and the EU Court has basically ordered the government to close it
It's actually even more complicated than that. There are two different "European courts":
The European Court of Human Rights, which rules on human rights issues. This an institution of the Council of Europe. It is not an EU institution. All EU member states belong to the Council of Europe, but the converse is not true; e.g. Russia is a member of the Council of Europe (see member states)
The non-aqua version [...] works fine until you actually want to use the wealth of rich, high-quality fonts that comes with OS X.
I've not tried OOo on OS X, so I'm not in a position to comment on the font quality. However, assuming it's using FreeType like the Linux version does, it's Apple's own patents which cause rendering quality problems.
Making it so that in order to use Subversion over an SSH tunnel, you first have to shut down your local apache server, modify/etc/hosts and set up the tunnel as root, because, of course, a non-root user can't tunnel port 80.
Not sure if I've understood correctly, but tunnelling as follows works ok for me: $ ssh -N me@remotebox -L8080:svn-server:80 & $ svn co http://localhost:8080/my-project
I feel that anyone who has taken the time to create software [...] has the right to define the terms upon how it is used.
I don't think anyone is trying to force Sun to open source the Java reference implementation. Rather, what are being highlighted are the practical deficiencies of its licence. There are undeniable business risks associated with using software whose future direction is so heavily under the control of a single company, whose priorities may conflict with the interests of your own business at some point in the future. Especially when there are viable, mature alternatives which are genuine free, open source software.
In contrast, Sun's LGPL licensing of OpenOffice.org, a much larger body of code than the Java reference implementation, is the single most important reason why OOo looks set to be the de-facto office standard in the long term.
Arphic released two open source ones: here and here. (Those are the versions in debian, but if you download the source TGZ, the TTF files are in there). They're also available in Traditional versions.
OTOH getting an open-source HKSCS (Cantonese) font seems to be impossible ATM...
Our [...] commitment to Java is very strong. [...] Java is most definitely not for sale. Not to IBM, not to anyone. [...] GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. [...] the [licence] for the JDK [has] a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing.
I'm sure James Gosling only wants Java to flourish. But the big catch about the JDK's licence (SCSL) is that it gives Sun a Nuclear Button. Sun has the power to force the Java platform's development to go only in directions they approve. And however pure their intentions are, as a public company they have a legal duty to use that power in a way that makes the most money for their shareholders. If it is ever more profitable to kill Java, for Microsoft cash, say, then Sun will be legally obliged to do it.
Compare this to Perl or Python, where there is no Nuclear Button. No-one has the power to prohibit derivatives. And so Perl and Python developers have a much more concrete guarantee that those languages will still be living languages in 20 years' time. Meanwhile there's no sign of the "fragmentation problem" which James Gosling argues they ought to suffer from being truly Open-Source.
I think the new name should be NotWindows. How can they complain? Its obviously not windows, right?:)
Oddly enough, in various domain-name cases, it has been held by the court that, e.g. "MicrosoftSucks.com" is confusingly similar to "Microsoft.com", because a non-native speaker of English might not understand the word "Sucks", and so think that MicrosoftSucks.com was an official Microsoft site.
In Wales we have had experience of this - Microsoft recently announced that they would make a Welsh LIP available. However:
The LIP only translates a minority of strings in the UI. OTOH most Open-Source software lets you do a full translation.
It is monolingual - once Welsh LIP is installed, all users of that computer get the Welsh interface. This is almost useless in a country like Wales, where most businesses are bilingual. Most Open-Source software supports UI language choice at start time, or at least lets you install multiple copies for different languages.
It is unsafe - there is no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to make this available in the future. When planning IT for a large organisation, you need more security than 2 years into the future. Open-Source licences guarantee that governments, or volunteers, will always have the power to translate software, at a predictable cost.
Having said that, it's certainly a start. I think we will see Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors, forced to provide localisation in the future, to compete with Open-Source software which enables this.
Re:"set -e" will go a long way to helping you
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 1
How does this get an "interesting" mod? [...] Scripts that simply die when they hit an error are not "fault tolerant" or "robust." [...] "Fault tolerant" systems KEEP WORKING in the presence of unexpected events. Emitting an error message and then leaving the user back at the command prompt is exactly the opposite.
An excellent point - I failed to mention how you handle the "exception". In your outer script:
if !./inner-script.sh ; then
# Handle the exception here fi
Then the outer script doesn't abort, it just runs your "exception handler".
"set -e" will go a long way to helping you
on
Fault Tolerant Shell
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The article says:
#!/bin/sh
cd/work/foo rm -rf bar cp -r/fresh/data.
Suppose that the/work filesystem is temporarily unavailable, perhaps due to an NFS failure. The cd command will fail and print a message on the console. The shell will ignore this error result -- it is primarily designed as a user interface tool -- and proceed to execute the rm and cp in the directory it happened to be before.
That shell script can be improved a lot by using "set -e" to exit on failure, as follows: #!/bin/sh
set -e # exit on failure
cd/work/foo rm -rf bar cp -r/fresh/data.
This means that, if any command in the script fails, the script will exit immediately, instead of carrying on blindly.
The script's exit status will be non-zero, indicating failure. If it was called by another script, and that had "set -e", then that too will exit immediately. This is a little bit like exceptions in some other languages.
The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation. If you think differently then you have never met RMS in person and listened to him for more than 30 minutes.
I don't think you're right about the objective, but that's largely irrelevant to the discussion. The point is, plenty of companies base their business model on the GPL. Trolltech are a good example - having discussed licensing matters with Trolltech sales staff in a business context, I can tell you that nobody believes in "IP rights" more strongly than they do. They sell proprietary software, too. The GPL "just works" for them - it's a practical business reality, not a political standpoint.
IBM has more patents every year than any other company(like the last 5 years running i think), but I haven't seen a high-profile case where IBM went after Joe's Software Shack for IP infringement(doesn't mean it hasn't happened).
I read this article about IBM going after Sun when Sun was small. According to the article, they ended up saying, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 US patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
That's basically saying it's impossible to run an innovative IT company without infringing on IBM patents.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder WTF their contingency plan is if a big tsunami hits now ...
I strongly believe we know how to set up technical systems for safe nuclear power. However I'm extremely sceptical of the idea that we know how to set up social / administrative systems for safe nuclear power. It's too easy to hide systemic weakness behind secrecy, or too embarrassing to identify and fix present failings, or the debate gets too polarised and ideological so people, politicians and regulatory systems lose sight of the actual safety issues because of the headline effect etc.
I wouldn't be quick to blame money or corruption or unscrupulous people, either. The key problem is secrecy -- even without malice, familiarity makes you blind to system flaws -- we software people know this very well. Only total transparency can ensure that flaws do not get hidden. On the other hand I don't know how this can be reconciled with security against sabotage.
There's a need for a sober, measured debate about all this and it's a pity that a few fundamentalists (on both sides) are making this impossible.
He can't have it both ways -- either he wants Google to file defensive patents or he doesn't. A patent isn't a troll, a patent aggressor is a troll. If you just use a patent defensively you're not a patent troll.
He also seeks to draw an arbitrary distinction between "trivial" and "non-trivial" patents. The problem with patents is not triviality. The problem is that they can hit you even if you thought of the idea independently, or if you're just trying to conform to a de-facto standard.
The original IWF press release suggested that the "web page" at the blocked URL "was" a potentially illegal image. Whereas in reality, the main URL only contains HTML text -- and the image in question was only linked in and actually resided at another URL. This means material was blacklisted which was not alleged to be illegal in the UK. This wasn't just a side effect -- the HTML page was intentionally added to the list as well as the image itself.
As a Wikipedia and Media Wiki contributor, I wrote to the IWF complaining that the HTML text page was blacklisted (and not just the image). To their credit they have replied, but making no reference to the point I made.
If the IWF intends in future to blacklist text content which is not alleged to be illegal or abusive, this greatly changes the nature of the blacklist. In which case the public, legislators and industry should reconsider the high levels of co-operation which have been afforded to the IWF to date, offered on the understanding that it is purely trying to prevent crime and abuse.
Well, this is a ruling of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, so theoretically it does not bind the courts of Scotland and Northern Ireland. (I agree "England and Wales" != "England", but everyone refers to "English law", and even the Court's title did not include "and Wales" until Lord Denning got the name fixed a few years back (IIRC), so it's unsurprising if a layman speaks of "England" in this context).
So in one sense this is more like a ruling of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in that it doesn't bind other circuits but is strongly persuasive. But the analogy breaks down somewhat because England has 85% of the UK population.
Actually, the situation is even more complicated, because the Patents Act 1977 (which applies to the whole of the UK) supposedly implements the European Patent Convention 1973, which applies in a number of jurisdictions across Europe. However, the way the Convention is interpreted varies between jurisdictions, so the exact same patent can be ruled invalid in one country and yet be enforceable in another.
Finally the European Court of Justice does *not* normally have a role in patent cases such as this. The European Patent Convention is completely separate from the European Community and covers countries such as Turkey and Norway which are not part of the EU. One reason European patent law varies between countries is that there is no single court with juristiction on patent matters across them all.
(That said, I have not RTFRuling so there could be some side point which touches on EC law somewhere, in which case that point could be subject to interpretation by the ECJ)
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Malbolge_programming
or perhaps
http://www.samaritans.org.uk/
Never had the privilege of meeting you, but your last lecture really inspired me. Not cos you were going to die, but for everything you said about how to live.
You have to pay twice as much to use VoIP (see here). Otherwise, even over a VPN, they detect the statistical signature of the packets and insert a latency which makes VoIP unusable.
It is definitely statistical, because if you do "wget --limit-rate=2.5k http://huge/file.bin" over the VPN at the same time, the latency doesn't get inserted -- presumably because the overall VPN traffic no longer matches the VoIP statistical signature.
Beforehand, the prisoners number themselves from 0 to n - 1.
This strategy means that prisoner i does not turn the chalice until he knows that prisoner (i-1) has been called. But each prisoner's start threshold will eventually be reached. Basically the King can only obliterate k bits of information, and each prisoner sends a message of k + 1 bits to say he has been called.
Within about 4000 feet of the South Pole. More precisely: 1km north of the 1km-circumferenced circle about the South Pole, or more generally 1km north of a 1/n km-circumferenced circle about the South Pole where n >= 1.
Here's one real example:
This exact issue kills off large parts of the desktop market for Java at the moment - end-users will go for a solution which is not such a pain to install, rather than one written in Java, if they have a choice.
I use both PyGTK and PyQt (professionally), deploying on Windows and GNU/Linux clients. There is no runtime issue. py2exe creates a standalone executable for Windows. Conceptually it's very similar to VBRUN600.DLL, except that your own extension modules can also go into the executable, so there's no need to leave rubbish lying around the system.
It's actually even more complicated than that. There are two different "European courts":
It's the former which has ruled on the UK's detention of prisoners without trial.
I've not tried OOo on OS X, so I'm not in a position to comment on the font quality. However, assuming it's using FreeType like the Linux version does, it's Apple's own patents which cause rendering quality problems.
Not sure if I've understood correctly, but tunnelling as follows works ok for me:
$ ssh -N me@remotebox -L8080:svn-server:80 &
$ svn co http://localhost:8080/my-project
I don't think anyone is trying to force Sun to open source the Java reference implementation. Rather, what are being highlighted are the practical deficiencies of its licence. There are undeniable business risks associated with using software whose future direction is so heavily under the control of a single company, whose priorities may conflict with the interests of your own business at some point in the future. Especially when there are viable, mature alternatives which are genuine free, open source software.
In contrast, Sun's LGPL licensing of OpenOffice.org, a much larger body of code than the Java reference implementation, is the single most important reason why OOo looks set to be the de-facto office standard in the long term.
They're also available in Traditional versions.
OTOH getting an open-source HKSCS (Cantonese) font seems to be impossible ATM
I'm sure James Gosling only wants Java to flourish. But the big catch about the JDK's licence (SCSL) is that it gives Sun a Nuclear Button. Sun has the power to force the Java platform's development to go only in directions they approve. And however pure their intentions are, as a public company they have a legal duty to use that power in a way that makes the most money for their shareholders. If it is ever more profitable to kill Java, for Microsoft cash, say, then Sun will be legally obliged to do it.
Compare this to Perl or Python, where there is no Nuclear Button. No-one has the power to prohibit derivatives. And so Perl and Python developers have a much more concrete guarantee that those languages will still be living languages in 20 years' time. Meanwhile there's no sign of the "fragmentation problem" which James Gosling argues they ought to suffer from being truly Open-Source.
Oddly enough, in various domain-name cases, it has been held by the court that, e.g. "MicrosoftSucks.com" is confusingly similar to "Microsoft.com", because a non-native speaker of English might not understand the word "Sucks", and so think that MicrosoftSucks.com was an official Microsoft site.
Having said that, it's certainly a start. I think we will see Microsoft, and other proprietary software vendors, forced to provide localisation in the future, to compete with Open-Source software which enables this.
An excellent point - I failed to mention how you handle the "exception". In your outer script:
if !
# Handle the exception here
fi
Then the outer script doesn't abort, it just runs your "exception handler".
That shell script can be improved a lot by using " set -e " to exit on failure, as follows:
#!/bin/sh
set -e # exit on failure
cd
rm -rf bar
cp -r
This means that, if any command in the script fails, the script will exit immediately, instead of carrying on blindly.
The script's exit status will be non-zero, indicating failure. If it was called by another script, and that had "set -e", then that too will exit immediately. This is a little bit like exceptions in some other languages.
I don't think you're right about the objective, but that's largely irrelevant to the discussion. The point is, plenty of companies base their business model on the GPL. Trolltech are a good example - having discussed licensing matters with Trolltech sales staff in a business context, I can tell you that nobody believes in "IP rights" more strongly than they do. They sell proprietary software, too. The GPL "just works" for them - it's a practical business reality, not a political standpoint.
I read this article about IBM going after Sun when Sun was small. According to the article, they ended up saying, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 US patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
That's basically saying it's impossible to run an innovative IT company without infringing on IBM patents.