Please, spare me the paranoia. That's like saying, the day author X murders all other authors is the day we all start reading author X. It could happen, but is it likely?
Time warp back 10 years
Please, spare me the paranoia. That's like saying, the day the maker of wordprocessor X murders all other wordprocessor makers is the day we all start using wordprocssor X. It could happen, but is it likely?
I think you're seeing a problem, but you're not diagnosing it properly. The problem is not the fanciness or expressivity of flash. It is the fact that flash is a programmtic language, not declarative. From a security perspective, if you're handed declaritive information, it's fairly easy to ensure that the programmtic code you have running over the declarative code isn't going to go haywire, since it is 'closed'. However, on the other hand, if you're simply handed programmtic code, you cannot tell what the program is going to do with certainty, given the tremendous amount of states it can enter.
This debate is currently being played out in the XSLT community. Some people want scripting information in XSLT, but that's a dangerous road to go down. XSLT appeals to me because it is powerful, yet fully declarative.
If I had taken the Language Theory instead of Advanced Algorithms (or whatever they were called) in college I could probably express myself better here (FSM's and similar).
If open source can't provide people with a viewer that can render one of the world's most widely used formats,
It's so popular yet is only one reader implementation that people use? I can't think of any PDF implementations in the non-Open Source world besides Adobe's offerings. Hence I would argue that the problem exists in both Open Source and non-Open Source offerings, which in turn leads me to speculate that PDF is not a great format (else there would likely be more implementations!).
I must say, the following quote from Linus from the article is one that strikes me with fear and awe:
Try to prove me wrong.
When someone with the prestige that Linus has says something as powerful as this, I cannot help but feel that this topic is something that he is absolutely passionate about, much in the same way Stallman is passionate about Free Software. Linus doesn't seem like the type of person to use this sort of phrase on a whim; like he says, "I'm deadly serious".
I don't see why this question is relevant. I have been using CFS for 3+ years on FreeBSD 2, 3, and 4, without a hitch. There does not seem to be a need for being 'updated'. It works very well.
Re:What the hell is wrong with the Judiciary
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Please. Someone told a professor that what he was doing might not be legal. Nothing more. There is no case. It was a stupid case to begin with.
You don't seem to even know what the RIAA sent to Felten. They didn't say "might not be legal". They said:
Unfortunately, the disclosure that you are contemplating could result
in significantly broader consequences and could directly lead to the
illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Such disclosure is not
authorized in the Agreement, would constitute a violation of the
Agreement and would subject your research team to enforcement actions
under the DMCA and possibly other federal laws.
That sounds a tad more threatening "oh, you might not be doing something legal.".
When I moved my domain, neverending.org, away from NSI, I didn't have to deal with NSI at all. I just told DomainDiscover that I wanted them to take over control of my domain, and after filling out the proper paperwork, I was homefree. I never had plow through NSI roadblocks.
I remember getting an email from NSI saying "We're so sorry to see you go; could you fill out this form and rank us?" I filled out the form, just to vent the problems I saw with NSI.
I highly recommend checking out the DomainNameBuyersGuide to see how various registrars rank among various dimensions (legal, pricing, etc). This is how I found my excellent registrar, DomainDiscover, which has proved to be great.
For the record, I too, am a huge fane of EasyDNS; they provide 4 secondary DNS sites and 2 backup MX for $15 yearly.
"On two occasions I have been asked (by members of Parliament), 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Along with the following quote (not Babbage):
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. -- Rich Cook
Well said; I can't say much more than that I heartily agree with you. I wish I could be as fluid with statements when I try to discuss similar topics with non-techie friends.
Because 802.11 becomes incredibly useless if you can't trust it. This sounds like you're questioning the need for security at all. If you are, then there's nothing I can say to convice you why a secure wireless medium is needed.
No, the original poster nailed it on the head. There is no real reason that wireless needs to be 'secure', just like email doesn't need to be 'secure'. It's the higher-level protocols, namely IPsec and OpenPGP that can be implemented on top of wireless and email that implement the security for us. Wireless security is about interface-to-interface security; this is precisely what IPsec solves.
The first camp is the gung-ho FSF group, who are somehow complaining about SourceForge Enterprise edition even though it's not what drives SF.net, and about how VA is plotting behind everyone's back to keep Free software locked up. Note that only the original author is truly in this camp. This camp talks about there beeing Freener pastures over at Savannah. From Patric McGovern's replies, I hope that those listening to this camp realize that these accusations are unfounded.
The second camp is the "I don't like SourceForge because of its look/feel/security/bugtracking/forums/mailinglists/moorman/precision/etc/etc." This camp is riding off of the first group's complaints, and are promoting every Joe and his mother host their own full-service development setup. If these people think they can provide the excellent quality of service that is scalang like SF.net, then, well, go try it out. Most of us are extremely pleased with the QoS that SF.net gives us.
As a Free Software and Open Source advocate, I have not yet seen any legitimate accusations of SF.net, just FUD.
While not trying to put down lisp, it seems like what is desired here is something analogous to Python's docstrings:
class Square(Shape):
"""An abstract representation of a box"""
def size():
"""Return the size of the box"""
return self.x * self.y
The docstrings are queriable (object.__doc__), and there exist excellent tools to give a module/class/method's documention: pydoc. pydoc is such a nice wonder.
IIRC, Python 2.2. has docstrings applicable to object attributes, too.
I'm still waiting for the option to recalculate the point value for articles based on my own preferences. I want funny to count as +0.
I find it hilariously ironic that I and many others would have never seen this message if it hadn't been modded +5. By getting people going directly against the author's proposal he get more people to see it.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the majority of the windows the screenshots for ion are terminal emulators? ion may be suitable for users who use terminal programs which don't need a lot of display for each of them or aren't 'updating', but for me, along with my 3 xterms I usually have 2 X irc clients, 2 Mozilla windows (2/5 of the display each), xemacs, xbuffy, and xconsole all running on one desktop (I use my other desktops for background tasks).
5 of those windows (2 IRC clients, an xterm, xbuffy, and xconsole) are what I consider to call 'background but updating' windows; I generally don't tab over to them untill I see them notify me of a change; currently I see change by overlapping them just enough to the point I can see updates.
And that's not even considering the three 'primary but static' windows I'd be working in (Mozilla, xemacs, and an xterm) which I want to be occupying the majority of the screen so that I can be reminded of the current context in each of them. What overlapping windows does is allow me to fine-grain how much of the Windows I want to see, and place them on the desktop in the arrangement I choose fit. I don't see cell-based ion doing that for me.
So what do you think of using XML for system configurations?
XML tends to be good for hierchial, widely-parseable data. In this sense, XML is good for configuration files, because many of the more advanced ones need some type of hierarchy to be sane. Also, it makes it easy to have one editing mode for many different configuration files, and configurations can be displayed/queried in a more universal manner.
There are two ways to charge for doing searches: one is subscription service for users, the other is to license the search technology for third parties. A surprising discovery of the information revolution is that the value of an invidual item is incredibly low, as the editors of Salon magazine, brill's content or Slate can attest to. Therefore users are not likely to jump in and pay for searchers.
I think you're mixing apples and oranges here. You're comparing Salon, which provides content, with Google, which provides a service, namely searching. You can replicate content easily; however, you cannot replicate Google's powerful indexing mechanisms. Hence, Google is the sole distributor of a high-quality service, and I think that they could charge for their service.
Mind you, I think that the cost of searchings would need to remain low (pennies a search), but even at 2 cents a search, they could probably make a bundle (given that you estimate a search costing the provider 1 cent). 1 cent profit on every search is probably a lot of money.
You do realize, hopefully, that the die syntax makes it very hard to selectively catch exceptions. If I have a subroutine that does some array manipulations, and opens a file, I might want to only catch the IOError (file opening error) at the level I'm on, and pass the ArrayIndexError on up. eval() can't handle that well.
CPAN has some modules that hack some exceptions, but it's all very, very unclean. Unclean and unreadable code can lead to just as many errors.
But you can program badly with exceptions just as easily as without them.
I disagree with this. I think it is much easier to program badly without exceptions than with. Without exceptions, your code suddenly becomes a lot more ripe for corrupting data and causing security issues, without the user knowing there is a problem. With exceptions falling all the way back up the execution stack, it's immediately known there is a problem, and the program is halted there notifying the user, not causing hours more of run-time corrupting data.
Well then, Fatal.pm handles the other 50% of your quibble.
No, it doesn't, because Fatal can only sanely be applied to core operations like open(), which don't deal with objects (another must for good software engineering). For example, when I write, Perl, I use IO::File to open files; Fatal doesn't help there there.
Also, Fatal is very crude in that it just checks for false values. Perhaps a function fails if it returns undef, but succeeds if it returns a defined scalar, like 0, which tests as false! Fatal will flag this as an error, incorrectly.
But the "or die" idiom of Perl is nice in that it encourages the programmer to come up with a meaningful error message that is associated directly with the failing statement.
When you raise exceptions, you can associate a human-readable string with them, so you point is moot. You aren't just returning an exception; the exception is an object, which turned into a string is meant for human consumption. At least Java and Python are capable of doing this.
At the same time, the "or die" idiom pushes the exceptional code off to the right where it doesn't obscure the intent of the flow very much.
But with exceptions you don't even have to try to check if something failed; it automatically dies! What can be less obscuring than not being there!
You mean like that Ariane rocket that blew up when its double-redundant computer system was halted because of an utterly irrelevant uncaught exception? Yeah, that's definitely a superior error-handling philosophy.
I'm not familiar with the rocket you describe, but yes, it is a superior error-handling philosophy. Imagine if there was an unchecked error, and the rocket, instead of detonating, landed in civilian housing? That's precisely what not using exceptions allows for: programs that become destructive because of lack of error management.
Aside from the conceptual problems of what are essentially COMEFROM statements with scope management, there's no reason to assume that halting the program is better than just allowing it to run.
That's like saying there's no reason to assume knowing about a bug is better than just allowing a program to go on its merry way. Uncaught bugs are the cause of 99% of the security holes out there. It's always better to know when there is a problem.
Well, you haven't seen Error.pm yet. It implements exceptions for Perl.
As I stated in my post, having high-level mechanisms for exceptions doesn't cut it. Your base operations must throw them, or else you've lost out on 50% of the reasons for having exceptions. Opening a non-existant file with open() won't raise an exception; this is a problem.
I'm not totally convinced that exceptions are necessary for good programming
Exceptions are not necessary for good programming, but they are necessary for good software engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Time warp back 10 years
Fill in the blanks: X=, X.maker=
I think you're seeing a problem, but you're not diagnosing it properly. The problem is not the fanciness or expressivity of flash. It is the fact that flash is a programmtic language, not declarative. From a security perspective, if you're handed declaritive information, it's fairly easy to ensure that the programmtic code you have running over the declarative code isn't going to go haywire, since it is 'closed'. However, on the other hand, if you're simply handed programmtic code, you cannot tell what the program is going to do with certainty, given the tremendous amount of states it can enter.
This debate is currently being played out in the XSLT community. Some people want scripting information in XSLT, but that's a dangerous road to go down. XSLT appeals to me because it is powerful, yet fully declarative.
If I had taken the Language Theory instead of Advanced Algorithms (or whatever they were called) in college I could probably express myself better here (FSM's and similar).
I'm missing the reference herecare to enlighten?
It's so popular yet is only one reader implementation that people use? I can't think of any PDF implementations in the non-Open Source world besides Adobe's offerings. Hence I would argue that the problem exists in both Open Source and non-Open Source offerings, which in turn leads me to speculate that PDF is not a great format (else there would likely be more implementations!).
I must say, the following quote from Linus from the article is one that strikes me with fear and awe:
When someone with the prestige that Linus has says something as powerful as this, I cannot help but feel that this topic is something that he is absolutely passionate about, much in the same way Stallman is passionate about Free Software. Linus doesn't seem like the type of person to use this sort of phrase on a whim; like he says, "I'm deadly serious".
I don't see why this question is relevant. I have been using CFS for 3+ years on FreeBSD 2, 3, and 4, without a hitch. There does not seem to be a need for being 'updated'. It works very well.
You don't seem to even know what the RIAA sent to Felten. They didn't say "might not be legal". They said:
That sounds a tad more threatening "oh, you might not be doing something legal.".
Quote curtesy of Politechbot.
I found your How to choose a free software license to be well written, and it is probably helpful to a lot of people.
When I moved my domain, neverending.org, away from NSI, I didn't have to deal with NSI at all. I just told DomainDiscover that I wanted them to take over control of my domain, and after filling out the proper paperwork, I was homefree. I never had plow through NSI roadblocks.
I remember getting an email from NSI saying "We're so sorry to see you go; could you fill out this form and rank us?" I filled out the form, just to vent the problems I saw with NSI.
I highly recommend checking out the DomainNameBuyersGuide to see how various registrars rank among various dimensions (legal, pricing, etc). This is how I found my excellent registrar, DomainDiscover, which has proved to be great.
For the record, I too, am a huge fane of EasyDNS; they provide 4 secondary DNS sites and 2 backup MX for $15 yearly.
Along with the following quote (not Babbage):
Well said; I can't say much more than that I heartily agree with you. I wish I could be as fluid with statements when I try to discuss similar topics with non-techie friends.
No, the original poster nailed it on the head. There is no real reason that wireless needs to be 'secure', just like email doesn't need to be 'secure'. It's the higher-level protocols, namely IPsec and OpenPGP that can be implemented on top of wireless and email that implement the security for us. Wireless security is about interface-to-interface security; this is precisely what IPsec solves.
I'm sensing two camps in the anti SF.net group
s /moorman/precision/etc/etc." This camp is riding off of the first group's complaints, and are promoting every Joe and his mother host their own full-service development setup. If these people think they can provide the excellent quality of service that is scalang like SF.net, then, well, go try it out. Most of us are extremely pleased with the QoS that SF.net gives us.
The first camp is the gung-ho FSF group, who are somehow complaining about SourceForge Enterprise edition even though it's not what drives SF.net, and about how VA is plotting behind everyone's back to keep Free software locked up. Note that only the original author is truly in this camp. This camp talks about there beeing Freener pastures over at Savannah. From Patric McGovern's replies, I hope that those listening to this camp realize that these accusations are unfounded.
The second camp is the "I don't like SourceForge because of its look/feel/security/bugtracking/forums/mailinglist
As a Free Software and Open Source advocate, I have not yet seen any legitimate accusations of SF.net, just FUD.
Heh, whoops; I forgot that my 'size' method's signature should've been "def size(self):".
While not trying to put down lisp, it seems like what is desired here is something analogous to Python's docstrings:
class Square(Shape):
"""An abstract representation of a box"""
def size():
"""Return the size of the box"""
return self.x * self.y
The docstrings are queriable (object.__doc__), and there exist excellent tools to give a module/class/method's documention: pydoc. pydoc is such a nice wonder.
IIRC, Python 2.2. has docstrings applicable to object attributes, too.
I find it hilariously ironic that I and many others would have never seen this message if it hadn't been modded +5. By getting people going directly against the author's proposal he get more people to see it.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the majority of the windows the screenshots for ion are terminal emulators? ion may be suitable for users who use terminal programs which don't need a lot of display for each of them or aren't 'updating', but for me, along with my 3 xterms I usually have 2 X irc clients, 2 Mozilla windows (2/5 of the display each), xemacs, xbuffy, and xconsole all running on one desktop (I use my other desktops for background tasks).
5 of those windows (2 IRC clients, an xterm, xbuffy, and xconsole) are what I consider to call 'background but updating' windows; I generally don't tab over to them untill I see them notify me of a change; currently I see change by overlapping them just enough to the point I can see updates.
And that's not even considering the three 'primary but static' windows I'd be working in (Mozilla, xemacs, and an xterm) which I want to be occupying the majority of the screen so that I can be reminded of the current context in each of them. What overlapping windows does is allow me to fine-grain how much of the Windows I want to see, and place them on the desktop in the arrangement I choose fit. I don't see cell-based ion doing that for me.
XML tends to be good for hierchial, widely-parseable data. In this sense, XML is good for configuration files, because many of the more advanced ones need some type of hierarchy to be sane. Also, it makes it easy to have one editing mode for many different configuration files, and configurations can be displayed/queried in a more universal manner.
I think you're mixing apples and oranges here. You're comparing Salon, which provides content, with Google, which provides a service, namely searching. You can replicate content easily; however, you cannot replicate Google's powerful indexing mechanisms. Hence, Google is the sole distributor of a high-quality service, and I think that they could charge for their service.
Mind you, I think that the cost of searchings would need to remain low (pennies a search), but even at 2 cents a search, they could probably make a bundle (given that you estimate a search costing the provider 1 cent). 1 cent profit on every search is probably a lot of money.
You do realize, hopefully, that the die syntax makes it very hard to selectively catch exceptions. If I have a subroutine that does some array manipulations, and opens a file, I might want to only catch the IOError (file opening error) at the level I'm on, and pass the ArrayIndexError on up. eval() can't handle that well.
CPAN has some modules that hack some exceptions, but it's all very, very unclean. Unclean and unreadable code can lead to just as many errors.
I disagree with this. I think it is much easier to program badly without exceptions than with. Without exceptions, your code suddenly becomes a lot more ripe for corrupting data and causing security issues, without the user knowing there is a problem. With exceptions falling all the way back up the execution stack, it's immediately known there is a problem, and the program is halted there notifying the user, not causing hours more of run-time corrupting data.
No, it doesn't, because Fatal can only sanely be applied to core operations like open(), which don't deal with objects (another must for good software engineering). For example, when I write, Perl, I use IO::File to open files; Fatal doesn't help there there.
Also, Fatal is very crude in that it just checks for false values. Perhaps a function fails if it returns undef, but succeeds if it returns a defined scalar, like 0, which tests as false! Fatal will flag this as an error, incorrectly.
When you raise exceptions, you can associate a human-readable string with them, so you point is moot. You aren't just returning an exception; the exception is an object, which turned into a string is meant for human consumption. At least Java and Python are capable of doing this.
But with exceptions you don't even have to try to check if something failed; it automatically dies! What can be less obscuring than not being there!
I'm not familiar with the rocket you describe, but yes, it is a superior error-handling philosophy. Imagine if there was an unchecked error, and the rocket, instead of detonating, landed in civilian housing? That's precisely what not using exceptions allows for: programs that become destructive because of lack of error management.
That's like saying there's no reason to assume knowing about a bug is better than just allowing a program to go on its merry way. Uncaught bugs are the cause of 99% of the security holes out there. It's always better to know when there is a problem.
As I stated in my post, having high-level mechanisms for exceptions doesn't cut it. Your base operations must throw them, or else you've lost out on 50% of the reasons for having exceptions. Opening a non-existant file with open() won't raise an exception; this is a problem.
Exceptions are not necessary for good programming, but they are necessary for good software engineering.