Umm.. I'd be crying right now but there's not enough vapour here to make a tear drop. What the hell is the story here? "We're thinking of doing something with distributed data storage and we think there's gunna be a lot of it in the future because of mobile devices and that." sounds like a uncreative venture capital briefing. There's no technical details here. Even the web page posted above has an overview that is one sentence long (and contains very little content). Was there a page I missed? This is so non-existant they should make a new word for it.. I hereby coin the term "voidware" being vapourware that has not even formed yet. Sheesh, there's projects on sourceforge that have been abondoned for months that more in the planning stags than this!
The answer to this question (and every question in that area) hasn't changed in 2 years. There are many linux viruses in existance and a number have been found in the wild. There are viruses that infect the PLT table of ELF binaries to intercept library calls. There are viruses that use ptrace to infect every running program the user has access to debug (yes, that's right, download some infected binary, run it and every process you have running is simultaniously infected, including your shell) and there are viruses that can jump su to root. These are the viruses that "follow the user". Hell, all this stuff has been in Phrack. There are viruses that act like worms, they look in your.ssh known hosts file and try passwordless connections to all of them. Virus proliferation on linux is a serious issue and should be delt with by FAQ's like this. Two years ago I sat here and said if virus research on linux was not encouraged it would develop underground and we would have people like this denying their existance until it is too late. Well it's not too late, yet.
I give it about 10 years until we can download remotely interesting 3d objects, like food. But really, it wont be for at least 20 years before real nanotechnological developments start to happen and they will be pretty restricted to the aerospace industry. 30 years.. now that's a different story. We should see the appearance of the "make anything box" that will consume a whole lot of power and produce anything you have the information to produce. The information will be strongly controlled however and you will have to pay for it. Then I think there will be a big underground war. Revolution will happen and everything will be free for about 10 years and then people will come forward with all the stuff they have developed in secret in the last 10 years and demand that people pay for it again. The economy will pick back up and in 50 years we will be back to where we are. I also think there will be a huge political shift during all of this, but democracy will be just a faint memory after 20 years.
Jumpman.. no doubt and IK+.. god I love that game.. at least once a year I download a C64 emulator and IK+ and have a few games. It's just not the same without the Atari joysticks though.
havn't you heard? There were no games before 1990.. just like there were no operating systems before 1980. This is the computer industry, we're a community of children who fail to study the past.
this is really rubbing it in. When most of these games were released I was hacking away on a C-64 and the UNIX boxen I could connect to with my 1200/75 baud modem. I occasionally got to play on a PC at a user group or a friend's house (a friend of mine actually owned a computer shop but we weren't allowed to play games on the PC's). When I finally did get a PC (why parents sold the family home and splashed out to buy me one) I was utterly suprised to find that I could program in C on it. Luckily the first game I got on my new PC was Another World. A truely revolutionary game, both in it's graphics and story line and in the fact that it was put together by one man (ok ok, and a musician).
operating system (OS): The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
user when no application program is running.
The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs which use facilities provided by the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks, often acting as servers in a client-server relationship.
Some would include a graphical user interface and window system as part of the OS, others would not. The operating system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot time or when installing the operating system would generally not be considered part of the operating system, though this distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating system such as RISC OS.
The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around the machines on which it runs.
from the Free Online Dictionary of Computing. So as you can see, the definition of an operating system is different in different contexts, and from a Computer Science perspective, the operating system is the piece of software which provides an interface to applications that is independant of the hardware that it is running on. This is exactly what a kernel does.
I'm openly shocked that you would use the words "stealing" and "FSF" in the same sentence. RMS would be the first one to say that he is not stealing. What he is doing is violating the letter of copyright law and that has nothing to do with stealing. Now if he is indeed violating copyrights owned by the FSF (or anyone else's copyright on a GPL product) then he can expect to hear from FSF lawyers. They will then initiate a civil case against him. On the other hand. If he roamed around the FSF stealing pens and ingots of gold, he would be arrested and the government would bring a criminal case against him.
yes.. and for this reason Microsoft was being smart arses.. they could well of removed all portions of IE and replaced them with the win95 dll's but they didn't. If it had been my courtroom I would have sent them away and told them to come back when it was working.
indeed I did and if I recall correctly this is what caused the uproar. I honestly dont think people were upset because Bill is an ugly bastard. If I find the article (wired has removed all their early trial articles for some reason) I'll post that link too.
Errrrrm.. must I? How about Bill Gates.. is that a good enough representative of Microsoft? Remember he was on a big screen saying stuff that only 15 minutes before had been determined to be false? Remember the judge violating his own gag order to tell the media that he couldn't believe how brash Microsoft had been?
well that was in the trial.. but before the trial began there was a hearing to get a m$oft to offer windows to customers window IE preinstalled. They claimed this was impossible, that just removing the IE portions would make Windows unshippable.. which is true, but there's no reason why they couldn't put the old code base back in (or hell, even write a new code base) or for that matter, just remove the IE frontend. But such specific orders were beyond the judge. Frankly I don't think judges should be able to take computer related cases without a neutral friend of the court present to answer questions.
Yes, during the trial I really wished there was someone with half a brain in that court room. When the judge essentially said "take IE out of Windows until we determine if it is legal" and Microsoft's response was "If we do that Windows wont work!" the obvious and most sane response would have been "Well Windows 95 works just fine without have IE built in, you didn't have it before, why do you need it now?" but the judge couldn't say that because he isn't a computer programmer. Microsoft openly lied to this court on numerous occasions but no-one gets held in comtempt, no-one gets hit with perjury charges.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm.. I'd be crying right now but there's not enough vapour here to make a tear drop. What the hell is the story here? "We're thinking of doing something with distributed data storage and we think there's gunna be a lot of it in the future because of mobile devices and that." sounds like a uncreative venture capital briefing. There's no technical details here. Even the web page posted above has an overview that is one sentence long (and contains very little content). Was there a page I missed? This is so non-existant they should make a new word for it.. I hereby coin the term "voidware" being vapourware that has not even formed yet. Sheesh, there's projects on sourceforge that have been abondoned for months that more in the planning stags than this!
The answer to this question (and every question in that area) hasn't changed in 2 years. There are many linux viruses in existance and a number have been found in the wild. There are viruses that infect the PLT table of ELF binaries to intercept library calls. There are viruses that use ptrace to infect every running program the user has access to debug (yes, that's right, download some infected binary, run it and every process you have running is simultaniously infected, including your shell) and there are viruses that can jump su to root. These are the viruses that "follow the user". Hell, all this stuff has been in Phrack. There are viruses that act like worms, they look in your .ssh known hosts file and try passwordless connections to all of them. Virus proliferation on linux is a serious issue and should be delt with by FAQ's like this. Two years ago I sat here and said if virus research on linux was not encouraged it would develop underground and we would have people like this denying their existance until it is too late. Well it's not too late, yet.
and perhaps you would like to play them using a CD drive that doesn't work anymore because the firmware has been wiped. Nah.
Perhaps Sony would like to get ahold of this technology?
I give it about 10 years until we can download remotely interesting 3d objects, like food. But really, it wont be for at least 20 years before real nanotechnological developments start to happen and they will be pretty restricted to the aerospace industry. 30 years.. now that's a different story. We should see the appearance of the "make anything box" that will consume a whole lot of power and produce anything you have the information to produce. The information will be strongly controlled however and you will have to pay for it. Then I think there will be a big underground war. Revolution will happen and everything will be free for about 10 years and then people will come forward with all the stuff they have developed in secret in the last 10 years and demand that people pay for it again. The economy will pick back up and in 50 years we will be back to where we are. I also think there will be a huge political shift during all of this, but democracy will be just a faint memory after 20 years.
The whole point about flying cars is that my now we were supposed to have invented some cool form of hover technology, not just blowing air around.
right along with references to God every chapter.
they refer to it like "The International Machine Corporation" in Contact! :)
oh yer.. but we're on slashdot. I say Athena is a middle-ware.. surely we can both agree on that?
Perhaps in a few years time we will see some sort of free game released that never would have been developed because it just wouldn't sell.
Jumpman.. no doubt and IK+.. god I love that game.. at least once a year I download a C64 emulator and IK+ and have a few games. It's just not the same without the Atari joysticks though.
havn't you heard? There were no games before 1990.. just like there were no operating systems before 1980. This is the computer industry, we're a community of children who fail to study the past.
this is really rubbing it in. When most of these games were released I was hacking away on a C-64 and the UNIX boxen I could connect to with my 1200/75 baud modem. I occasionally got to play on a PC at a user group or a friend's house (a friend of mine actually owned a computer shop but we weren't allowed to play games on the PC's). When I finally did get a PC (why parents sold the family home and splashed out to buy me one) I was utterly suprised to find that I could program in C on it. Luckily the first game I got on my new PC was Another World. A truely revolutionary game, both in it's graphics and story line and in the fact that it was put together by one man (ok ok, and a musician).
the definition of a operating system is:
operating system (OS): The low-level software which handles the interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the
user when no application program is running.
The OS may be split into a kernel which is always present and various system programs which use facilities provided by the kernel to perform higher-level house-keeping tasks, often acting as servers in a client-server relationship.
Some would include a graphical user interface and window system as part of the OS, others would not. The operating system loader, BIOS, or other firmware required at boot time or when installing the operating system would generally not be considered part of the operating system, though this distinction is unclear in the case of a rommable operating system such as RISC OS.
The facilities an operating system provides and its general design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around the machines on which it runs.
from the Free Online Dictionary of Computing. So as you can see, the definition of an operating system is different in different contexts, and from a Computer Science perspective, the operating system is the piece of software which provides an interface to applications that is independant of the hardware that it is running on. This is exactly what a kernel does.
I'm openly shocked that you would use the words "stealing" and "FSF" in the same sentence. RMS would be the first one to say that he is not stealing. What he is doing is violating the letter of copyright law and that has nothing to do with stealing. Now if he is indeed violating copyrights owned by the FSF (or anyone else's copyright on a GPL product) then he can expect to hear from FSF lawyers. They will then initiate a civil case against him. On the other hand. If he roamed around the FSF stealing pens and ingots of gold, he would be arrested and the government would bring a criminal case against him.
actually that's exactly what a kernel is - an operating system.
yes.. and for this reason Microsoft was being smart arses.. they could well of removed all portions of IE and replaced them with the win95 dll's but they didn't. If it had been my courtroom I would have sent them away and told them to come back when it was working.
actually I think that may well be what I was thinking of.
indeed I did and if I recall correctly this is what caused the uproar. I honestly dont think people were upset because Bill is an ugly bastard. If I find the article (wired has removed all their early trial articles for some reason) I'll post that link too.
hey! and aussies too!
Yes, I have to agree with that, Jackson was out of line talking to the press and if anything will hurt his case more I don't know of it.
You can see the videos of Gates' deposition here. Apparently a number of them caused uproar in the court room.
a browser is a lot more than a HTML renderer.
Errrrrm.. must I? How about Bill Gates.. is that a good enough representative of Microsoft? Remember he was on a big screen saying stuff that only 15 minutes before had been determined to be false? Remember the judge violating his own gag order to tell the media that he couldn't believe how brash Microsoft had been?
well that was in the trial.. but before the trial began there was a hearing to get a m$oft to offer windows to customers window IE preinstalled. They claimed this was impossible, that just removing the IE portions would make Windows unshippable.. which is true, but there's no reason why they couldn't put the old code base back in (or hell, even write a new code base) or for that matter, just remove the IE frontend. But such specific orders were beyond the judge. Frankly I don't think judges should be able to take computer related cases without a neutral friend of the court present to answer questions.
Yes, during the trial I really wished there was someone with half a brain in that court room. When the judge essentially said "take IE out of Windows until we determine if it is legal" and Microsoft's response was "If we do that Windows wont work!" the obvious and most sane response would have been "Well Windows 95 works just fine without have IE built in, you didn't have it before, why do you need it now?" but the judge couldn't say that because he isn't a computer programmer. Microsoft openly lied to this court on numerous occasions but no-one gets held in comtempt, no-one gets hit with perjury charges.