It is sort of absurd to point to a half dozen largly experimental systems and point out that Hurd's features can be found in them. (Why does C++ exist? Algol68, PL/1 and Simula have all the features C++ does.)
The Hurd is aimed at being a Free, POSIX, usable system, unlike BeOS and QNX (not Free), Minix (a teaching system), Eros (a experimental system) and Plan9 (not Free, and not POSIX.) As for L4, the article points out that the Hurd can be ported to L4, it's just that nobody has put in the elbow grease yet.
Whatever. The point was, that he believed (and many others agreed with him) that there was a license violation. Coming to an opinion based on facts and taking action based on that opinion is not an act of lunacy, even if that opinion is wrong.
It would be interesting, however, to find that a contract written by a lawyer, and found to be solid by other lawyers (NeXT's, for example), doesn't work the way those lawyers believed, and people without legal training. Almost like those lawyers with no computer training pointing out a security hole in OpenBSD's base install.
> The KDE controversy, the takeover attempt on GLIBC etc, makes him look more like a raving lunatic,
Why? The KDE controversy was because he saw massive license violation, and wanted to at least make sure others weren't deluded into following their example. The glibc takeover is like complaining about Bill Gates' takeover of Microsoft Windows; glibc is a FSF project, subject to FSF whims. If Ulrich Drepper doesn't want to work with the FSF, he's free to fork.
Neither of these show insanity, however much you might disagree with them.
> I strongly believe RMS has gone from evangelist to extremist.
I don't think he's changed behaviors; he's doing the same things he's always done.
> Claiming to be the father of OpenSource
When did he say that? From the way you use the word OpenSource, I'd you don't really understand anything that RMS has done, or why he objects to OpenSource.
> true or not
If it is true, then how can you fault him for saying it? What, "I don't like you because you know who you are"?
> just wants to be in the lime-light
There aren't that many times you can really say RMS wants to be in the lime-light. It's not RMS/Linux he's pushing for, for example, it's GNU/Linux. He wants you to assign the copyrights on GNU projects to the Free Software Foundation, not himself. He wants his project, his beliefs to be in the limelight.
> if he wasn't so anti commercial products and accepted that they do have a place and are necessary
Then there would probably be little free software. The only thing that enabled free Linux was free shells, free utilities and a free compiler from the GNU project. Some could have been rewritten; some could have been taken from the BSD projects when they were released and the lawsuits were over. But it would have taken a lot of time to remake the compiler, and the work needed to replace the shells and utilities would have made early work on Linux much harder. He could have used commercial software; but then why replace all the little pieces that permitted complete Open Source operating systems, if they come with Unix already?
Democratic systems suck. Massive corruption, the blind (citizens) leading the blind (senators), all sorts of problems. They just happen to be one of the best systems found so far. One of the great possibilities of a democratic system, is that when the next great political system comes along, it can be overthrown in peaceable voting, instead of violent revolution.
I've always found it interesting that a country that saw first hand what Nazism can do still has a problem with it, but a country that has never had a problem with Nazis doesn't. Maybe it's because America doesn't try and censor it; it lets the Nazis make asses of themselves in public. They don't get the glory of being an oppressed group that society reacts panically to; they're seen as the idiots they are.
If you noticed, they have a link to a wav file of the letters and digits, for the blind. Nothing requires them to really care about the other groups; if you want an account, turn on your images or get on a computer with a graphical browser.
See the Jerusalem Post. The Mohammed Atta who committed a bus bombing in '86 is a different person from the one who was involved in the WTC attack. People sometimes have the same names, and Mohammed is not exactly a rare name among Muslims. Furthermore, he didn't get released because of US arm twisting; he got released due to the Israeli legal system.
Had we abused Mr. Atta's rights, it would hurt us; discriminating against Arabs because they were Arabic does not the cause of righteousness make.
> In order for the exploit to work, someone must convince you to go to a specially-formed URL.
No. They must convince you to go to a webpage or open an HTML email. Have you never gone to a webpage where it loads a popup (i.e. another webpage)? Or redirects you to another webpage? That's all they have to do.
A professional converter doesn't use gOCR. Any decent OCR (I use Finereader Pro) blows the socks off of gOCR in quality, and in the $100 range, would pay for itself quickly. It would probably have saved you a good hour or two or maybe even three.
Re:Will we have to revise unicode?
on
XML for Ancients
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· Score: 1
See "Why Unicode Will Work on the Internet". Basically, Unicode has more characters than just about any other character set - it includes 70,000 Han ideographs. All unified by a Japanese unification principle agreed to by all the pertinent Asian countries. All the Asian classics have been published in Unicode with their characters. This all, with over 800,000 code points to add new characters, if needs be.
Re:Will we have to revise unicode?
on
XML for Ancients
·
· Score: 2
We've always had UTF-32. Due to some hacks in UTF-16, Unicode can include up to a million characters, more than anyone anticipates needing. Cuniform has already been (very) tenatively allocated to U+12800-U12C80. Apparently, no one has come up with a complete proposal for including cuniform, though.
Or, hey, put your name in the ID3 tag. Doesn't mess with the music and it automatically comes up when you play it. Sure it's easier to remove, but how many people would want to remove it?
If I have a choice, I'd rather download something from a web source. There's more confidence that it'll be there, that it's what it says it is, and that it hasn't been trojaned, and if it has been messed with, I know who did it.
Frankly, that's one of the big legal problems with peer-to-peer. I'd rather go to www.promo.net/pg for my public domain texts; I'd rather go to www.debian.org for my packaged linux software. If an artist put up a webpage with his music, I'd go to that webpage for the music. So Gnutella and most other peer-to-peer systems end up being 95% stuff that can't have an official source on the web (copyrighted music, movies, porn, etc.) with the other 5% crank stuff and the occaisonal free song that got slipped in there or someone's personal porn creations or the like. Peer-to-peer just isn't an efficent method for legal stuff.
Very few cases exists where retokenizing is useful, compared to the cases where you have to quote and doublequote and use -print0 and whatever else. It could have been provided by a function instead of as a default behavior.
I don't see why we should blame the programming language. The fact that
#!/bin/sh
rm $1
doesn't work is nonintuitive and painful. If a programming language has a 'feature' that results in a lot of bugs then that feature should have been designed a different way, especially in a language like shell where bugs like these can be so dangerous.
Blaming the programming language is like blaming Apple; the programmer should have double checked his code, but trusted the language not to annihilate everything on a simple typo; the end-user should have double checked the code, but trusted Apple not to annihilate everything on a simple uninstall.
You mean computer scientists, who keep creating more and more abstract programming languages? The guys who invented call by name? Virtual machines? Languages with only infinite precision numbers? Languages with Church numbers (numbers represented through lists) only (Lisp 1.0)? Garbage collection? Bounds checking?
Computer scientists _are_ the classic "we have all this power, why don't we use it" people.
> use those css to make your site more readable and more enjoyable
Why do you use css to make the sites more readable? You know your reading situation; your monitor size, your vision, your favorite fonts.
Do you not read books? So many times I've curled up with a several hundred page book (with a drawing per chapter, if that) for several hours. I can't ever have remember saying that having things suddenly change while I was looking at them (mouse-over effects) would be nice. Nor can I remember wishing for more animation or even art.
I am creative, but I'm not an art student. If I had a problem with pages of pure text, I wouldn't be in compsci.
I don't want any filesystem that can _literally_ blow away ext2. If it produces that much wind as to somehow get rid of a filesystem, it will probably damage the harddrive and other parts of the computer.
> Finally, you have to consider reliability in decisions such as these. NTFS just doesn't lose data
Then why is the Linux write-drivers marked "dangerous" and "back up your NTFS volume first, because it will probably get damaged"[!!!]? Trying to run Linux off NTFS just sounds like a bad idea.
This program became destructive because of the "error management."
This program became destructive because of poor managers. Any test would have shown that the rocket would tilt more than the computer could handle. The reason the computer couldn't handle it was because it wasn't designed to run on that rocket, and no one bothered to check to see if it could run on that rocket. (That exception couldn't have been raised on the Ariane 4 so the check was removed because they didn't have the spare cycles.) On the Ariane 4 (the rocket it was designed for) it worked fine.
It's like ripping a heat sink off a CPU and blaming the CPU for melting down. Maybe the CPU should run cooler, but the big problem was that the CPU was never designed to run without a heat sink.
Data loss, control loss, vital services suspended, etc.
Like you can't get all of those by ignoring exceptions. When a hacker tries a buffer overflow, I'd prefer my webserver to crash rather than give him root. I'd rather a program crash with a pointer to the bug (where the exception was thrown) then just spit garbage and hang or crash. Either way it's dead, but one way is a clean, safe, informative death.
Re:The ultimate irony..
on
Debian On DVD
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· Score: 2
This is massively inaccurate. Debian is not German; it's pretty close to international, with an occasional US bias (and an occasional Japanese bias, if a little rarer.)
Debian has not had a 5.x release; woody will be 3.0.
DeCSS won't be included since Debian is too uncomfortable with the legal aspects, and we'd rather not get ourselves, or CheapBytes or some other distributor in legal trouble. (One of our developers is currently in court over his personal distribution of DeCSS in the US.)
The code was designed for the Ariane 4; due to money and political reasons, none of the programmers knew it was going to be used for the Ariane 5, and no one ever checked to see if it would work right for the Ariane 5. Pretty nasty circumstances. If I understand the case correctly, it was a hardware exception, not a software exception, in any case.
what are essentially COMEFROM statements with scope management
And for loops are essentially if-goto statements. The added structure is what makes them useful.
there's no reason to assume that halting the program is better than just allowing it to run.
So you would prefer a hacker gain root because of a buffer overflow, rather than the attempt crash your webserver? A lot of the exception-causing problems, if just left to run, will spew garbage and crash, exchanging clear debugging info for a few microseconds of trash. If it's important that it continue to run, I can put a exception net at any level (esp. the highest level) and restart whenever an exception is caught, possibly taking different code routes.
Re:How to write tiny applications
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 2
If you're looking at compressing disk space or memory usage, shell is almost always a win in a Unix system, as it's already on the disk and almost always in memory. Perl is a little more sketchy, but if it's already there, it saves disk space. Same thing for a library; if it's already on the disk and in memory, you save by using it, no matter what the "true" size is.
Re:How to write tiny applications
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
Meaning, of course, that just moving them from i386 to the Alpha, even for the same OS requires a complete rewrite. Debian's choice for small boot-floopy editor was made in part because one of the competitors was in Assembly and hence worthless, unless someone wanted to rewrite it 6 or 7 times.
How important is fast for most utilities, in most places? Is 20-30% improvement for one processor (i.e. Pentium IV, not ix86, since each chip needs different optimizations) such a great trade off for easy of coding, maintainability and portability? Sure, key parts of a video player or a math library should have assembly versions, but most things aren't that speed dependent. If you really want size, try rewriting in Perl or maybe Shell, which can easily get below the minimal ELF binary in size.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time Heavy Metal comes on VH-1, watch it for a few minutes. That's some pretty heavy censoring on a movie.
It is sort of absurd to point to a half dozen largly experimental systems and point out that Hurd's features can be found in them. (Why does C++ exist? Algol68, PL/1 and Simula have all the features C++ does.)
The Hurd is aimed at being a Free, POSIX, usable system, unlike BeOS and QNX (not Free), Minix (a teaching system), Eros (a experimental system) and Plan9 (not Free, and not POSIX.) As for L4, the article points out that the Hurd can be ported to L4, it's just that nobody has put in the elbow grease yet.
> No, there was no license violation.
Whatever. The point was, that he believed (and many others agreed with him) that there was a license violation. Coming to an opinion based on facts and taking action based on that opinion is not an act of lunacy, even if that opinion is wrong.
It would be interesting, however, to find that a contract written by a lawyer, and found to be solid by other lawyers (NeXT's, for example), doesn't work the way those lawyers believed, and people without legal training. Almost like those lawyers with no computer training pointing out a security hole in OpenBSD's base install.
Right, because Bill Gates doesn't particularly want to be in the limelight, either.
> The KDE controversy, the takeover attempt on GLIBC etc, makes him look more like a raving lunatic,
Why? The KDE controversy was because he saw massive license violation, and wanted to at least make sure others weren't deluded into following their example. The glibc takeover is like complaining about Bill Gates' takeover of Microsoft Windows; glibc is a FSF project, subject to FSF whims. If Ulrich Drepper doesn't want to work with the FSF, he's free to fork.
Neither of these show insanity, however much you might disagree with them.
> I strongly believe RMS has gone from evangelist to extremist.
I don't think he's changed behaviors; he's doing the same things he's always done.
> Claiming to be the father of OpenSource
When did he say that? From the way you use the word OpenSource, I'd you don't really understand anything that RMS has done, or why he objects to OpenSource.
> true or not
If it is true, then how can you fault him for saying it? What, "I don't like you because you know who you are"?
> just wants to be in the lime-light
There aren't that many times you can really say RMS wants to be in the lime-light. It's not RMS/Linux he's pushing for, for example, it's GNU/Linux. He wants you to assign the copyrights on GNU projects to the Free Software Foundation, not himself. He wants his project, his beliefs to be in the limelight.
> if he wasn't so anti commercial products and accepted that they do have a place and are necessary
Then there would probably be little free software. The only thing that enabled free Linux was free shells, free utilities and a free compiler from the GNU project. Some could have been rewritten; some could have been taken from the BSD projects when they were released and the lawsuits were over. But it would have taken a lot of time to remake the compiler, and the work needed to replace the shells and utilities would have made early work on Linux much harder. He could have used commercial software; but then why replace all the little pieces that permitted complete Open Source operating systems, if they come with Unix already?
Democratic systems suck. Massive corruption, the blind (citizens) leading the blind (senators), all sorts of problems. They just happen to be one of the best systems found so far. One of the great possibilities of a democratic system, is that when the next great political system comes along, it can be overthrown in peaceable voting, instead of violent revolution.
I've always found it interesting that a country that saw first hand what Nazism can do still has a problem with it, but a country that has never had a problem with Nazis doesn't. Maybe it's because America doesn't try and censor it; it lets the Nazis make asses of themselves in public. They don't get the glory of being an oppressed group that society reacts panically to; they're seen as the idiots they are.
If you noticed, they have a link to a wav file of the letters and digits, for the blind. Nothing requires them to really care about the other groups; if you want an account, turn on your images or get on a computer with a graphical browser.
See the Jerusalem Post. The Mohammed Atta who committed a bus bombing in '86 is a different person from the one who was involved in the WTC attack. People sometimes have the same names, and Mohammed is not exactly a rare name among Muslims. Furthermore, he didn't get released because of US arm twisting; he got released due to the Israeli legal system.
Had we abused Mr. Atta's rights, it would hurt us; discriminating against Arabs because they were Arabic does not the cause of righteousness make.
> In order for the exploit to work, someone must convince you to go to a specially-formed URL.
No. They must convince you to go to a webpage or open an HTML email. Have you never gone to a webpage where it loads a popup (i.e. another webpage)? Or redirects you to another webpage? That's all they have to do.
A professional converter doesn't use gOCR. Any decent OCR (I use Finereader Pro) blows the socks off of gOCR in quality, and in the $100 range, would pay for itself quickly. It would probably have saved you a good hour or two or maybe even three.
See "Why Unicode Will Work on the Internet". Basically, Unicode has more characters than just about any other character set - it includes 70,000 Han ideographs. All unified by a Japanese unification principle agreed to by all the pertinent Asian countries. All the Asian classics have been published in Unicode with their characters. This all, with over 800,000 code points to add new characters, if needs be.
We've always had UTF-32. Due to some hacks in UTF-16, Unicode can include up to a million characters, more than anyone anticipates needing. Cuniform has already been (very) tenatively allocated to U+12800-U12C80. Apparently, no one has come up with a complete proposal for including cuniform, though.
Or, hey, put your name in the ID3 tag. Doesn't mess with the music and it automatically comes up when you play it. Sure it's easier to remove, but how many people would want to remove it?
If I have a choice, I'd rather download something from a web source. There's more confidence that it'll be there, that it's what it says it is, and that it hasn't been trojaned, and if it has been messed with, I know who did it.
Frankly, that's one of the big legal problems with peer-to-peer. I'd rather go to www.promo.net/pg for my public domain texts; I'd rather go to www.debian.org for my packaged linux software. If an artist put up a webpage with his music, I'd go to that webpage for the music. So Gnutella and most other peer-to-peer systems end up being 95% stuff that can't have an official source on the web (copyrighted music, movies, porn, etc.) with the other 5% crank stuff and the occaisonal free song that got slipped in there or someone's personal porn creations or the like. Peer-to-peer just isn't an efficent method for legal stuff.
Very few cases exists where retokenizing is useful, compared to the cases where you have to quote and doublequote and use -print0 and whatever else. It could have been provided by a function instead of as a default behavior.
I don't see why we should blame the programming language. The fact that
#!/bin/sh
rm $1
doesn't work is nonintuitive and painful. If a programming language has a 'feature' that results in a lot of bugs then that feature should have been designed a different way, especially in a language like shell where bugs like these can be so dangerous.
Blaming the programming language is like blaming Apple; the programmer should have double checked his code, but trusted the language not to annihilate everything on a simple typo; the end-user should have double checked the code, but trusted Apple not to annihilate everything on a simple uninstall.
You mean computer scientists, who keep creating more and more abstract programming languages? The guys who invented call by name? Virtual machines? Languages with only infinite precision numbers? Languages with Church numbers (numbers represented through lists) only (Lisp 1.0)? Garbage collection? Bounds checking?
Computer scientists _are_ the classic "we have all this power, why don't we use it" people.
> use those css to make your site more readable and more enjoyable
Why do you use css to make the sites more readable? You know your reading situation; your monitor size, your vision, your favorite fonts.
Do you not read books? So many times I've curled up with a several hundred page book (with a drawing per chapter, if that) for several hours. I can't ever have remember saying that having things suddenly change while I was looking at them (mouse-over effects) would be nice. Nor can I remember wishing for more animation or even art.
I am creative, but I'm not an art student. If I had a problem with pages of pure text, I wouldn't be in compsci.
Oh, and BTW:
I don't want any filesystem that can _literally_ blow away ext2. If it produces that much wind as to somehow get rid of a filesystem, it will probably damage the harddrive and other parts of the computer.
> Finally, you have to consider reliability in decisions such as these. NTFS just doesn't lose data
Then why is the Linux write-drivers marked "dangerous" and "back up your NTFS volume first, because it will probably get damaged"[!!!]? Trying to run Linux off NTFS just sounds like a bad idea.
This program became destructive because of the "error management."
This program became destructive because of poor managers. Any test would have shown that the rocket would tilt more than the computer could handle. The reason the computer couldn't handle it was because it wasn't designed to run on that rocket, and no one bothered to check to see if it could run on that rocket. (That exception couldn't have been raised on the Ariane 4 so the check was removed because they didn't have the spare cycles.) On the Ariane 4 (the rocket it was designed for) it worked fine.
It's like ripping a heat sink off a CPU and blaming the CPU for melting down. Maybe the CPU should run cooler, but the big problem was that the CPU was never designed to run without a heat sink.
Data loss, control loss, vital services suspended, etc.
Like you can't get all of those by ignoring exceptions. When a hacker tries a buffer overflow, I'd prefer my webserver to crash rather than give him root. I'd rather a program crash with a pointer to the bug (where the exception was thrown) then just spit garbage and hang or crash. Either way it's dead, but one way is a clean, safe, informative death.
This is massively inaccurate. Debian is not German; it's pretty close to international, with an occasional US bias (and an occasional Japanese bias, if a little rarer.)
Debian has not had a 5.x release; woody will be 3.0.
DeCSS won't be included since Debian is too uncomfortable with the legal aspects, and we'd rather not get ourselves, or CheapBytes or some other distributor in legal trouble. (One of our developers is currently in court over his personal distribution of DeCSS in the US.)
what are essentially COMEFROM statements with scope management
And for loops are essentially if-goto statements. The added structure is what makes them useful.
there's no reason to assume that halting the program is better than just allowing it to run.
So you would prefer a hacker gain root because of a buffer overflow, rather than the attempt crash your webserver? A lot of the exception-causing problems, if just left to run, will spew garbage and crash, exchanging clear debugging info for a few microseconds of trash. If it's important that it continue to run, I can put a exception net at any level (esp. the highest level) and restart whenever an exception is caught, possibly taking different code routes.
If you're looking at compressing disk space or memory usage, shell is almost always a win in a Unix system, as it's already on the disk and almost always in memory. Perl is a little more sketchy, but if it's already there, it saves disk space. Same thing for a library; if it's already on the disk and in memory, you save by using it, no matter what the "true" size is.
Meaning, of course, that just moving them from i386 to the Alpha, even for the same OS requires a complete rewrite. Debian's choice for small boot-floopy editor was made in part because one of the competitors was in Assembly and hence worthless, unless someone wanted to rewrite it 6 or 7 times.
How important is fast for most utilities, in most places? Is 20-30% improvement for one processor (i.e. Pentium IV, not ix86, since each chip needs different optimizations) such a great trade off for easy of coding, maintainability and portability? Sure, key parts of a video player or a math library should have assembly versions, but most things aren't that speed dependent. If you really want size, try rewriting in Perl or maybe Shell, which can easily get below the minimal ELF binary in size.