under the present system, you don't have ownership rights to that data.
In the UK, you do - it's called the data protection act. If you hold data about other people, you have to register under it, and anybody you hold data on has the right to demand that you show it (you get to charge a fairly nominal fee, under certain circumstances). Apparently demanding data-protection rights is a good anti-telemarketer technique, but I've never tried it (the rights are exercised so rarely that most companies don't have a good system in place to deal with demands, so you can cause them a real headache)
Mainly what the "optimizing" stage of installation is concerned with is updating the prebindings of various applications. You can do this manually with the redo_prebinding command if you like - if there's a problem with prebinding, it'll show up in system.log as a lot of fix_prebinding messages (though sometimes these are normal). I think this can happen if the dates of certain files change, even if the contents do not - if there is a problem, it will slow down the launch time of applications.
With OS X the biggest source of slowdown for me has been HFS+, though. Apple's fsck is really subpar and can leave a disk full of errors (some of which can cause kernel panics). Something like Diskwarrior is a must.
Will you only be allowed to buy your fuel cells from your laptop manufacturer for an overpriced ammount?
Probably. The fuel for the fuel cells, on the other hand... Depends. If this takes off, a nonproprietary method of refuelling will doubtless be much more popular as refills will be much more widely available as a result.
And how long until they start emplacing mechanisms that ensure that your fuel cell can't be refilled outside of the factory?
Never, because it's not as if battery technology will go away. If this can't compete, it will die. (Would anyone buy something that has to be sent back to the factory every 40 or so hours?)
And worse yet, when will they start using the DMCA to enforce these policies?
DMCA! DMCA! There, I said it! Now mod me insightful! (Sheesh). I bet they'll patent 'em, too, the evil corporate pigopolists that they are. Probably copyright the manuals, too, the bastards.
Still, it was nice of the terminal designers to make Ctrl+S do exactly the same thing on Linux as it does on Windows (wait... Ctrl+S doesn't mean 'Stop' on Windows?)
RISC OS has a fairly unusual design, heavily derived (due to funding shortages, apparently), from the MOS of the BBC Micro. Part of that design was based on the concept of 'Sideways ROM' (and later Sideways RAM), a simple mechanism that allowed extension of the operating system.
RISC OS uses modules, the design being *heavily* based on the old BBC Sideways ROM design (extended with various new features, most notably support for the SWI system). Most modules can be removed temporarily with *RMKILL, and ROM modules can be removed permanently with *UNPLUG. Last I used RISC OS (version 3.6), it consisted of about 186 modules, one of which (UtilityModule) contained the kernel, and was just about the only one that couldn't be removed.
Now, the press release is not that clear, but it does imply that Castle have used the GPL code in a module seperate from the main kernel (which would be consistent with RISC OS design). It's quite likely, therefore, that it can be *RMKILLed to unload it or *UNPLUGged to stop it from loading. If so, this is *in no way* a GPL violation: the GPL provides a specific exception for external programs that merely link to operating system code. That's why cygwin can distribute binaries without owning the rights to Windows source code. There would also be a strong case to argue in that case that the code is a seperate work from the RISC OS kernel. Modules can also be soft-loaded from disk, which allows a considerable portion of RISC OS to be upgraded 'in the field': it's likely that this module could be saved out from ROM and loaded from disk as required (which implies that it is seperate. The GPL doesn't apply to everything that's stored on the same storage medium, whether that medium is magnetic disk or ROM)
(I could be more sure if I could actually get a look at the code in question, but Castle do seem to be doing the bare minimum required to comply with the GPL, if they are at all). It's likely that the code intercepts OS calls and replaces them with its own (if it interacts with the kernel at all).
An important question with the GPL is where its influence ends. In order that GNU software could be run on proprietary operating systems such as those it was originally written on, it has an exemption to allow a GPL binary to contain operating system code (with a fairly broad definition of what constitutes operating system code) without that code itself being covered by the GPL.
I'm at a loss to understand how some idiotic tax (in an area that is already well known for outrageous VAT taxes) is supposed to help sales. Basic economics will indicate that if an item becomes more expensive, fewer items will be sold.
I think the point is to help EU companies' sales as opposed to US ones. They already pay VAT (and you have to pay VAT on goods imported through the usual distribution channels, too), so the idea is to level the playing field. This does seem completely unenforcable, though.
Er, the UK already has one of the highest rates of tax on fuel. The idea of this scheme is to encourage people not to drive at peak times: tax revenue that was previously made through fuel tax would be made up instead through road tax (hem-hem, knowing our government, they won't be able to resist adding some extra tax in there while no-one's looking).
The idea to discourage people from driving at peak times is a good one - less congestion = less pollution, and it encourages the use of public transport. Or it would if the UK had decent public transport, which it doesn't in general - our rail system sucks, most cities bus system sucks. The government, having seen the resounding crashes, er, 'successes' caused by the previous governments privatisation of the railways appear to have decided to privatise anything that isn't nailed down[1]... Grrmutterbah...
Andrew.
[1] Hey, railtrack have only admitted responsibility for one major rail disaster. Great, let's privatise air traffic control! And the NHS, that'd be good, too.
Umm, in the UK we already *do* get speeding fines in the mail. The police have speed cameras set up in various places that photograph registration plates of anything exceeding the speed limit. They are very effective at reducing the number of accidents in blackspots.
The BSD licence is more permissive than the GPL (notably binaries without source and none of the so-called virus-like properties). The (modified) BSD licence is 'compatable' with the GPL, in that BSD licenced code can also be distributed under the GPL (the dark side is that it is equally compatable with, say, the.NET licence).
GPL != public domain. It is a licence to copy (and not a licence to use), and requires that copyright be held on the covered material. Copyright is not against the FSF's principles, and without it the GPL would not exist. All GNU software has a prominent copyright notice on it.
It really shouldn't need repeating, but, FREE AS IN SPEECH. Damnit. Not that this is a particularily popular notion with the Chinese government, so there is a certain irony in a free software magazine being published there.
Therefore, I would suggest that your points are utter hogwash. There are legitimate critisms of this magazine, but these ain't them (except the one about b0rked links).
Andrew.
Re:Anything more on supercavitation & Kursk?
on
Raising the Kursk
·
· Score: 1
ObURL:
The BBC has a transcript of that programme.
Andrew.
Re:Anything more on supercavitation & Kursk?
on
Raising the Kursk
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The BBC did a followup Horizon programme about what sunk the Kursk. They suggested that a torpedo had had its engine switched on and left running while it was still in the armoury, which caused a fuel line to burst.
Apparently, Russian torpedos are powered by hydrogen peroxide, which reacts with metal to produce a gas (expanding several hundred times), so when the fuel line burst, the peroxide reacted to the metal casing of the torpedo, and caused it to eventually explode, starting a fire which couldn't be controlled, causing the rest of the armaments to explode. (A British submarine was sunk due to a similar incident sometime around WWII, which is why we don't use peroxide torpedos)
True, but open-source software is usually associated with other forms of openness - developers mailing lists and so forth. Had general principles of openness been applied here, the scoring problem would not have been allowed to affect test results. As the problem was known about anyway, it should not have been allowed to affect the results in the first place.
In this incidence, the use of a central location did not ensure that the ground was even. Maybe open source is not the solution, but more openness in general would at least have made the problem more inexecusable, and maybe would have prevented it from affecting peoples test scores. A problem was found, and no one was told about it, and it was allowed to do harm.
Sheesh, read the article. The very first paragraph states that someone outside the company had found out about the problem and notified the company, who promptly sat on it until it went bad.
A school district might not be able to justify the money to check a system, but I suspect it could not justify using a system with known errors and would have an interest in getting it fixed.
There's not a lot new here, and an awful lot of rubbish. Lets look at the differences page...
"Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code", well, no, they are heavily tied to their syntax representation as a context-free language, usually one that has to be LALR(1). The syntax of the language is ultimately represented by a tree. If you don't like the usual textual representation of that tree, why not make a utility that manipulates the structure output by the compiler's parser directly? (Because the tree is fiddly to build, which is why we don't do that). LISP or Scheme have a syntax that show the tree structure of the language very explicitly.
A text file can represent anything that can be stored in a computer (a sequence of numbers seperated by spaces is all that's required). Admittedly that's not terribly easy to manipulate; if it were we'd all be very happy with writing machine code with no assembler. So we try to invent computer languages that better represent how we use natural language, because we are very good at using natural languages (what we got was things like COBOL). Mathematicians are very good at using mathematical languages, so we also got languages like ML. Engineers gave us FORTRAN (probably because they hate us). Computer Scientists noticed early on that higher-level languages were well represented by trees and lists, and gave us LISP and Scheme (and lots of parentheses)
They say that the other two of the general differences exist in one of C++ or Java. Um, so they're nothing new, then.
"Explicit member inheritance". Hmm, would it really be helpful to be able to inherit a function from a superclass but not the member variables it uses? I can't find any reference to what they mean by a signature, though context would indicate that they mean declaration here, though that still makes no sense... In the languages I have used that have 'signatures', they are pure type definitions. Usually these languages also have type inference, so the compiler can spot an error in your code by ensuring that it matches the type, but this definition seems to be too strict for their usage of the word. Last time I wrote Java, it did not have these, and doesn't do type inference anyhow so it doesn't need them anyhow. (C's extern declaration does have some of these properties, though)
I can't see through the bollockon field on the Multiple Inheritance thing. Are they talking about aggregation here?
"Virtual members". Hmm, that's just overloading the new operator. Operator overloading is all yuck anyway from a type analysis point of view, which is why they have to generate type errors at/runtime/, which indicates a duff type system.
"Signature specialization". This is a problem that polymorhphism addresses much more neatly, with compile-time type checking too. C++'s templates does a sort-of impression of this, but a language like ML does it better.
- fun append a b = b::a;
> val 'a append = fn : 'a list -> 'a -> 'a list
- append [ "Hmm" ];
> val it = fn : string -> string list
- val newappend = it;
> val newappend = fn : string -> string list
- newappend "Blah";
> val it = ["Blah", "Hmm"] : string list
- newappend 1;
! Toplevel input:
! newappend 1;
! ^
! Type clash: expression of type
! int
! cannot have type
! string
"Multiple function outputs". Hmm...
- fun whoo (x, y) = (x+1, y*3);
> val whoo = fn : int * int -> int * int
- whoo (1, 2);
> val it = (2, 6) : int * int
They're talking about tuples here. C people call these mysterious things structs.
"Parameter names in signatures". Uhm... They didn't explain themselves very well here... Why? Parameter names only matter inside a function definition. Outside the types are all that matter, as you have to be able to pass the parameters.
O'course not all 'Infocom' (should really say Z-Code here) games are really classics, as new ones are getting written today. The if-archive is over at ftp.gmd.de and contains interpreters and games for many of the old text adventure systems. The original Zork series (I, II, III, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero) all appear to be freely available, as they were released by Activision, along with a new Zork (Zork: The Underground Empire) as a promo for one or other of the graphical ones.
Most of the Infocom titles can still be bought too, so they aren't really abandonware yet - for example from here. And yes, they are still well worth the money if you like games that require a bit more thought.
(Incidentally, I believe Activision has been contacted about the possibilty of releasing all the games that it can for free, and the response wasn't entirely negative. HHTGTG has some unfortunate copyright problems, though)
Thing is, a 1g black hole will be *very* small indeed, probably (and I haven't done the math) smaller than elementary particles, which means even if it were stable (no hawking radiation), it would be unlikely to actually intersect any matter. So, if you dropped it through your table, you could probably wait for it to come back to you, as it will enter a free orbit at this point, and won't mysteriously stop at the center of the Earth. A larger black hole (large enough to actually absorb something), might be slowed by passing through the Earth (but, thinking about this, it might actually speed up until it left the atmosphere. Friction doesn't apply to event horizons, y'see, so the only force that could slow it down would be gravity. Now, you have two orbitting masses, one of which is gaining mass from the other, and the fact they intersect is irrelevant...)
You wouldn't be worrying about this anyway, because a 1g black hole would rapidly release rather a lot of energy as it evaporates (E=mc^2...), so you'd probably have some rather more exciting problems to work on... (Like how to reattach severed limbs)
Hmm. I think you could actually write a Truetype->RISC OS font converter... EU patent laws are slightly more sensible that US ones (I'm not sure about the UK, though...). In addition, the patent infringements refer to TrueType rendering, so a converter is probably fine anyway.
Of course, Truetype is a really sucky font system anyway (its name being a bit of a misnomer, as the 'round to a whole pixel size' rendering method makes a joke out of Wysiwig). The free software community should really devise its own font standard, and design a renderer with proper subpixel antialiasing and millipoint precision... Hmm, guess what we've done:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Andrew.
Mainly what the "optimizing" stage of installation is concerned with is updating the prebindings of various applications. You can do this manually with the redo_prebinding command if you like - if there's a problem with prebinding, it'll show up in system.log as a lot of fix_prebinding messages (though sometimes these are normal). I think this can happen if the dates of certain files change, even if the contents do not - if there is a problem, it will slow down the launch time of applications.
With OS X the biggest source of slowdown for me has been HFS+, though. Apple's fsck is really subpar and can leave a disk full of errors (some of which can cause kernel panics). Something like Diskwarrior is a must.
Andrew.
Probably. The fuel for the fuel cells, on the other hand... Depends. If this takes off, a nonproprietary method of refuelling will doubtless be much more popular as refills will be much more widely available as a result.
Never, because it's not as if battery technology will go away. If this can't compete, it will die. (Would anyone buy something that has to be sent back to the factory every 40 or so hours?)
DMCA! DMCA! There, I said it! Now mod me insightful! (Sheesh). I bet they'll patent 'em, too, the evil corporate pigopolists that they are. Probably copyright the manuals, too, the bastards.
Still, it was nice of the terminal designers to make Ctrl+S do exactly the same thing on Linux as it does on Windows (wait... Ctrl+S doesn't mean 'Stop' on Windows?)
RISC OS has a fairly unusual design, heavily derived (due to funding shortages, apparently), from the MOS of the BBC Micro. Part of that design was based on the concept of 'Sideways ROM' (and later Sideways RAM), a simple mechanism that allowed extension of the operating system.
RISC OS uses modules, the design being *heavily* based on the old BBC Sideways ROM design (extended with various new features, most notably support for the SWI system). Most modules can be removed temporarily with *RMKILL, and ROM modules can be removed permanently with *UNPLUG. Last I used RISC OS (version 3.6), it consisted of about 186 modules, one of which (UtilityModule) contained the kernel, and was just about the only one that couldn't be removed.
Now, the press release is not that clear, but it does imply that Castle have used the GPL code in a module seperate from the main kernel (which would be consistent with RISC OS design). It's quite likely, therefore, that it can be *RMKILLed to unload it or *UNPLUGged to stop it from loading. If so, this is *in no way* a GPL violation: the GPL provides a specific exception for external programs that merely link to operating system code. That's why cygwin can distribute binaries without owning the rights to Windows source code. There would also be a strong case to argue in that case that the code is a seperate work from the RISC OS kernel. Modules can also be soft-loaded from disk, which allows a considerable portion of RISC OS to be upgraded 'in the field': it's likely that this module could be saved out from ROM and loaded from disk as required (which implies that it is seperate. The GPL doesn't apply to everything that's stored on the same storage medium, whether that medium is magnetic disk or ROM)
(I could be more sure if I could actually get a look at the code in question, but Castle do seem to be doing the bare minimum required to comply with the GPL, if they are at all). It's likely that the code intercepts OS calls and replaces them with its own (if it interacts with the kernel at all).
An important question with the GPL is where its influence ends. In order that GNU software could be run on proprietary operating systems such as those it was originally written on, it has an exemption to allow a GPL binary to contain operating system code (with a fairly broad definition of what constitutes operating system code) without that code itself being covered by the GPL.
I think the point is to help EU companies' sales as opposed to US ones. They already pay VAT (and you have to pay VAT on goods imported through the usual distribution channels, too), so the idea is to level the playing field. This does seem completely unenforcable, though.
Er, the UK already has one of the highest rates of tax on fuel. The idea of this scheme is to encourage people not to drive at peak times: tax revenue that was previously made through fuel tax would be made up instead through road tax (hem-hem, knowing our government, they won't be able to resist adding some extra tax in there while no-one's looking).
The idea to discourage people from driving at peak times is a good one - less congestion = less pollution, and it encourages the use of public transport. Or it would if the UK had decent public transport, which it doesn't in general - our rail system sucks, most cities bus system sucks. The government, having seen the resounding crashes, er, 'successes' caused by the previous governments privatisation of the railways appear to have decided to privatise anything that isn't nailed down[1]... Grrmutterbah...
Andrew.
[1] Hey, railtrack have only admitted responsibility for one major rail disaster. Great, let's privatise air traffic control! And the NHS, that'd be good, too.
Umm, in the UK we already *do* get speeding fines in the mail. The police have speed cameras set up in various places that photograph registration plates of anything exceeding the speed limit. They are very effective at reducing the number of accidents in blackspots.
Andrew.
- The BSD licence is more permissive than the GPL (notably binaries without source and none of the so-called virus-like properties). The (modified) BSD licence is 'compatable' with the GPL, in that BSD licenced code can also be distributed under the GPL (the dark side is that it is equally compatable with, say, the
.NET licence).
- GPL != public domain. It is a licence to copy (and not a licence to use), and requires that copyright be held on the covered material. Copyright is not against the FSF's principles, and without it the GPL would not exist. All GNU software has a prominent copyright notice on it.
- It really shouldn't need repeating, but, FREE AS IN SPEECH. Damnit. Not that this is a particularily popular notion with the Chinese government, so there is a certain irony in a free software magazine being published there.
Therefore, I would suggest that your points are utter hogwash. There are legitimate critisms of this magazine, but these ain't them (except the one about b0rked links).Andrew.
Andrew.
Apparently, Russian torpedos are powered by hydrogen peroxide, which reacts with metal to produce a gas (expanding several hundred times), so when the fuel line burst, the peroxide reacted to the metal casing of the torpedo, and caused it to eventually explode, starting a fire which couldn't be controlled, causing the rest of the armaments to explode. (A British submarine was sunk due to a similar incident sometime around WWII, which is why we don't use peroxide torpedos)
Andrew.
True, but open-source software is usually associated with other forms of openness - developers mailing lists and so forth. Had general principles of openness been applied here, the scoring problem would not have been allowed to affect test results. As the problem was known about anyway, it should not have been allowed to affect the results in the first place.
In this incidence, the use of a central location did not ensure that the ground was even. Maybe open source is not the solution, but more openness in general would at least have made the problem more inexecusable, and maybe would have prevented it from affecting peoples test scores. A problem was found, and no one was told about it, and it was allowed to do harm.
A school district might not be able to justify the money to check a system, but I suspect it could not justify using a system with known errors and would have an interest in getting it fixed.
These people seem to have something that may interest you, though.
There's not a lot new here, and an awful lot of rubbish. Lets look at the differences page...
/runtime/, which indicates a duff type system.
"Traditional programming languages are heavily tied to their representation as textual source code", well, no, they are heavily tied to their syntax representation as a context-free language, usually one that has to be LALR(1). The syntax of the language is ultimately represented by a tree. If you don't like the usual textual representation of that tree, why not make a utility that manipulates the structure output by the compiler's parser directly? (Because the tree is fiddly to build, which is why we don't do that). LISP or Scheme have a syntax that show the tree structure of the language very explicitly.
A text file can represent anything that can be stored in a computer (a sequence of numbers seperated by spaces is all that's required). Admittedly that's not terribly easy to manipulate; if it were we'd all be very happy with writing machine code with no assembler. So we try to invent computer languages that better represent how we use natural language, because we are very good at using natural languages (what we got was things like COBOL). Mathematicians are very good at using mathematical languages, so we also got languages like ML. Engineers gave us FORTRAN (probably because they hate us). Computer Scientists noticed early on that higher-level languages were well represented by trees and lists, and gave us LISP and Scheme (and lots of parentheses)
They say that the other two of the general differences exist in one of C++ or Java. Um, so they're nothing new, then.
"Explicit member inheritance". Hmm, would it really be helpful to be able to inherit a function from a superclass but not the member variables it uses? I can't find any reference to what they mean by a signature, though context would indicate that they mean declaration here, though that still makes no sense... In the languages I have used that have 'signatures', they are pure type definitions. Usually these languages also have type inference, so the compiler can spot an error in your code by ensuring that it matches the type, but this definition seems to be too strict for their usage of the word. Last time I wrote Java, it did not have these, and doesn't do type inference anyhow so it doesn't need them anyhow. (C's extern declaration does have some of these properties, though)
I can't see through the bollockon field on the Multiple Inheritance thing. Are they talking about aggregation here?
"Virtual members". Hmm, that's just overloading the new operator. Operator overloading is all yuck anyway from a type analysis point of view, which is why they have to generate type errors at
"Signature specialization". This is a problem that polymorhphism addresses much more neatly, with compile-time type checking too. C++'s templates does a sort-of impression of this, but a language like ML does it better.
- fun append a b = b::a;
> val 'a append = fn : 'a list -> 'a -> 'a list
- append [ "Hmm" ];
> val it = fn : string -> string list
- val newappend = it;
> val newappend = fn : string -> string list
- newappend "Blah";
> val it = ["Blah", "Hmm"] : string list
- newappend 1;
! Toplevel input:
! newappend 1;
! ^
! Type clash: expression of type
! int
! cannot have type
! string
"Multiple function outputs". Hmm...
- fun whoo (x, y) = (x+1, y*3);
> val whoo = fn : int * int -> int * int
- whoo (1, 2);
> val it = (2, 6) : int * int
They're talking about tuples here. C people call these mysterious things structs.
"Parameter names in signatures". Uhm... They didn't explain themselves very well here... Why? Parameter names only matter inside a function definition. Outside the types are all that matter, as you have to be able to pass the parameters.
Andrew.
Most of the Infocom titles can still be bought too, so they aren't really abandonware yet - for example from here. And yes, they are still well worth the money if you like games that require a bit more thought.
(Incidentally, I believe Activision has been contacted about the possibilty of releasing all the games that it can for free, and the response wasn't entirely negative. HHTGTG has some unfortunate copyright problems, though)
Andrew.
Thing is, a 1g black hole will be *very* small indeed, probably (and I haven't done the math) smaller than elementary particles, which means even if it were stable (no hawking radiation), it would be unlikely to actually intersect any matter. So, if you dropped it through your table, you could probably wait for it to come back to you, as it will enter a free orbit at this point, and won't mysteriously stop at the center of the Earth. A larger black hole (large enough to actually absorb something), might be slowed by passing through the Earth (but, thinking about this, it might actually speed up until it left the atmosphere. Friction doesn't apply to event horizons, y'see, so the only force that could slow it down would be gravity. Now, you have two orbitting masses, one of which is gaining mass from the other, and the fact they intersect is irrelevant...)
You wouldn't be worrying about this anyway, because a 1g black hole would rapidly release rather a lot of energy as it evaporates (E=mc^2...), so you'd probably have some rather more exciting problems to work on... (Like how to reattach severed limbs)
Andrwe.
Hmm. I think you could actually write a Truetype->RISC OS font converter... EU patent laws are slightly more sensible that US ones (I'm not sure about the UK, though...). In addition, the patent infringements refer to TrueType rendering, so a converter is probably fine anyway.
:-)
Of course, Truetype is a really sucky font system anyway (its name being a bit of a misnomer, as the 'round to a whole pixel size' rendering method makes a joke out of Wysiwig). The free software community should really devise its own font standard, and design a renderer with proper subpixel antialiasing and millipoint precision... Hmm, guess what we've done
Andrew.