they may use licensed code which they can't release.
Yes, because often you can release code in binary form that you're not allowed to release in source form. That happens, umm, never.
Or they may be using unlicensed code and don't want to be caught.
Which is fail for the exact same reasons.
Or the code quality may be shit.
I almost guarantee it is.. but that will be evidenced by the binary also.
Or maybe it sends back interesting things.
That might be one of those secrets that I was alluding to, yes. It's pretty obvious that such a thing will be discovered in just as short an amount of time as it would in source code and be much more interesting due to the fact that they tried to hide it.
Yep, lots of stupid reasons not to release the source code.
Yup, I've never heard of Spotify and I can't imagine why I'd be interested in this. But hey, I always love it with people release "binary only" libraries. They typically provide a nice big fat header file and a.so file. Sometimes they even strip the.so file, that's what I like to call "a challenge". Today I am not sufficiently bored to reverse engineer this crap, but I'm sure someone, who knows what Spotify is and actually gives a shit, will be. How hard something is to reverse engineer is determined by three things:
1) Armoring 2) Symbols 3) Relocation information
When it comes to Linux stuff, no-one ever does armoring, so we might as well not even think about that. All the interesting symbols for this library have come from the header file.. but ELF binaries leak lots of symbols, even when you strip them, so yeah, no problem there. Finally, relocation information, makes the so called "hard problem" of reverse engineering, separating code from data, pretty easy.. and.so files require you to provide them.
So I don't know why they bother. If there's secrets you're trying to hide from developers by not giving out source code, you're just failing.
Welcome to the modern pharmaceutical industry. We live in the era of "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" medical treatment. If you find a drug that stops mice from dying when you inject them with the plague (or staph or whatever nasty will get you the most funding this week) then you've done all the basic research you need. Now all you need to do is patent it, find yourself a buyer and they'll start the long death march to a clinical trial, all the while trying to figure out how best to make it for pennies and charge millions.
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
There's no fucking consideration.. how can it possibly be a legal contract. For fuck sake, even if you're willing to accept that pressing a button is signing a contract, there's not even dual signing. Click wrap licensing is like the retarded urban myth form of legal nonsense that dominates the software industry. No-one would try this shit in any other industry because it's so fuckin' petty.
Heh, TED is a conference for rich people and washed out movie stars who wanna smooze with scientists. The price of admission is this kind of pandering.
I believe that even breaking copy protection isn't illegal.. distributing tools and publishing techniques may be in some places. Here in Australia, it's only illegal if you're charging people for the tools.
Ya know, not driving that SUV might be what causes the heat death of the universe. It's a chaotic system.. that's just like a butterfly flapping its wings. Simply put, you have no fucking idea whether or not your individual actions will have a positive or negative effect but you're happy to preach at people.
Actually, no, they don't do that. Maybe you should set aside your biases and listen. I admit it's hard to hear what she's saying through the rudimentary level of discussion.
The first 10 seconds after the obligatory TED intro spam she says something stupid - "Bacteria are the oldest organisms on the planet", Oh Really? I guess "Archaea" are just called that for fun.
And after 15 minutes of completely horrid microbiology 101, which, btw, she claims her group she discovered, she finally gets to the "please give us grant money" pitch. Quorum sensing blocking drugs may have theraputic efforts. Wooo, ya don't say. But the silliest thing is that she suggests these might replace anti-biotics. Cause, apparently, stopping pathogenic bacteria from enacting their "we're in the majority now" payload is just as good as killing them. Nevermind that eventually these drugs will wear off, and that population of bacteria won't be getting any smaller.. and that the whole mechanism of our immune system is based on detecting the harm that pathogens cause.. just keep taking the drug, forever, and you'll never get the symptoms that your immune system needs to tell it to fight off the infection. Problem solved once and for all. But.. once and for all!!
Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week, or next year or next century (and if it does, I probably don't give a shit, it's a century from now, meh), so how am I supposed to react? "Shit keeps changing, I don't like it!"
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
Wow, ya think the self-destructing AP PR machine could put anymore negative spin on this article?
An official of an administration that was voted in for "change" has suggested something different to the status quo - which, on climate change, seems to be "let's wait and see" - shock!
When shit gets bad enough people will finally start calling for solutions. Let's have some ready. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
Indeed, and that's the point. Only the lowest end machines have Linux on them because they are seen as too underpowered to run Windows. But, call me crazy here, I think manufacturers should keep trying to push that price lower so as to get more people into the market. The "got no need for a computer" crowd are still out there and their biggest complaint is cost. That market also includes the "got 5 kids, they can't all have a netbook, so none of them can" crowd.
painstaking process of getting Ubuntu onto the machine.
Umm, yeah, that took like 15 minutes for me. But maybe you tried doing it long before the process was worked out by those Ubuntu ubergeeks on the forums.
Yeah, cause that'd be such a terrible problem to have.. insanely great bandwidth inside our own country.. I can't even imagine what the economic result of that would be. Oh wait.. yeah I can: the election promise made by the Labor government.
Why bother? Did I miss the memo where Gigabit Ethernet was uninvented? For 8 years effort and billions of dollars I want fiber to my gigabit ethernet card, sheesh.
Says you. I have a friend who tells me that he would happily pay up to $1000 for a netbook form factor machine with grunt. But the point is, there are still low price machines but they are grunty enough to run Microsoft's bloated software. Providing the original specs with Linux would require cutting the price even more and manufacturers don't have the margin.
For a short while people were willing to forgo Windows for the form factor and price of a netbook. Then Moore's law ticked over and Microsoft was able to enter that market - same price for the machine but with the specs that XP needs. Next iteration they'll be selling units with Vista on them. The only way to keep Microsoft out is to race to the bottom and there's no economic incentive for the hardware manufacturers to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
they may use licensed code which they can't release.
Yes, because often you can release code in binary form that you're not allowed to release in source form. That happens, umm, never.
Or they may be using unlicensed code and don't want to be caught.
Which is fail for the exact same reasons.
Or the code quality may be shit.
I almost guarantee it is.. but that will be evidenced by the binary also.
Or maybe it sends back interesting things.
That might be one of those secrets that I was alluding to, yes. It's pretty obvious that such a thing will be discovered in just as short an amount of time as it would in source code and be much more interesting due to the fact that they tried to hide it.
Yep, lots of stupid reasons not to release the source code.
There, fixed that for ya.
Yup, I've never heard of Spotify and I can't imagine why I'd be interested in this. But hey, I always love it with people release "binary only" libraries. They typically provide a nice big fat header file and a .so file. Sometimes they even strip the .so file, that's what I like to call "a challenge". Today I am not sufficiently bored to reverse engineer this crap, but I'm sure someone, who knows what Spotify is and actually gives a shit, will be. How hard something is to reverse engineer is determined by three things:
1) Armoring
2) Symbols
3) Relocation information
When it comes to Linux stuff, no-one ever does armoring, so we might as well not even think about that. All the interesting symbols for this library have come from the header file.. but ELF binaries leak lots of symbols, even when you strip them, so yeah, no problem there. Finally, relocation information, makes the so called "hard problem" of reverse engineering, separating code from data, pretty easy.. and .so files require you to provide them.
So I don't know why they bother. If there's secrets you're trying to hide from developers by not giving out source code, you're just failing.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/10/teslas-elon-musk-grows-a-pair-good-for-him/
Awesome.
Welcome to the modern pharmaceutical industry. We live in the era of "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" medical treatment. If you find a drug that stops mice from dying when you inject them with the plague (or staph or whatever nasty will get you the most funding this week) then you've done all the basic research you need. Now all you need to do is patent it, find yourself a buyer and they'll start the long death march to a clinical trial, all the while trying to figure out how best to make it for pennies and charge millions.
Katrina was only a surprise to the retards who decided it was a good idea to live between two rivers that flood all the fucking time. The rest of us were like "had to happen sooner or later".
There's no fucking consideration.. how can it possibly be a legal contract. For fuck sake, even if you're willing to accept that pressing a button is signing a contract, there's not even dual signing. Click wrap licensing is like the retarded urban myth form of legal nonsense that dominates the software industry. No-one would try this shit in any other industry because it's so fuckin' petty.
Or you could watch the video and form your own opinion.. that might involve thinking though, so perhaps you shouldn't try it.
Heh, TED is a conference for rich people and washed out movie stars who wanna smooze with scientists. The price of admission is this kind of pandering.
I believe that even breaking copy protection isn't illegal.. distributing tools and publishing techniques may be in some places. Here in Australia, it's only illegal if you're charging people for the tools.
WTF is an illegal copy?
Show me the law that makes installing a purchased copy of Microsoft Office on more than one computer illegal.
There isn't one, that's why they need technological measures and scare tactics to enforce it.
Ya know, not driving that SUV might be what causes the heat death of the universe. It's a chaotic system.. that's just like a butterfly flapping its wings. Simply put, you have no fucking idea whether or not your individual actions will have a positive or negative effect but you're happy to preach at people.
Actually, no, they don't do that. Maybe you should set aside your biases and listen. I admit it's hard to hear what she's saying through the rudimentary level of discussion.
The first 10 seconds after the obligatory TED intro spam she says something stupid - "Bacteria are the oldest organisms on the planet", Oh Really? I guess "Archaea" are just called that for fun.
And after 15 minutes of completely horrid microbiology 101, which, btw, she claims her group she discovered, she finally gets to the "please give us grant money" pitch. Quorum sensing blocking drugs may have theraputic efforts. Wooo, ya don't say. But the silliest thing is that she suggests these might replace anti-biotics. Cause, apparently, stopping pathogenic bacteria from enacting their "we're in the majority now" payload is just as good as killing them. Nevermind that eventually these drugs will wear off, and that population of bacteria won't be getting any smaller.. and that the whole mechanism of our immune system is based on detecting the harm that pathogens cause.. just keep taking the drug, forever, and you'll never get the symptoms that your immune system needs to tell it to fight off the infection. Problem solved once and for all. But.. once and for all!!
The drug companies will love it though.
Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week, or next year or next century (and if it does, I probably don't give a shit, it's a century from now, meh), so how am I supposed to react? "Shit keeps changing, I don't like it!"
No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude. Disasters will be the call to action. So basically only when the weather is completely out of control will people start demanding action.. and by then there will likely be nothing we can do.
It also happens to be slowly spinning out of control. Do you want to try to understand it and fix it now, or when you're having trouble breathing?
Wow, ya think the self-destructing AP PR machine could put anymore negative spin on this article?
An official of an administration that was voted in for "change" has suggested something different to the status quo - which, on climate change, seems to be "let's wait and see" - shock!
When shit gets bad enough people will finally start calling for solutions. Let's have some ready. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/05/27/
Oblig.
Indeed, and that's the point. Only the lowest end machines have Linux on them because they are seen as too underpowered to run Windows. But, call me crazy here, I think manufacturers should keep trying to push that price lower so as to get more people into the market. The "got no need for a computer" crowd are still out there and their biggest complaint is cost. That market also includes the "got 5 kids, they can't all have a netbook, so none of them can" crowd.
painstaking process of getting Ubuntu onto the machine.
Umm, yeah, that took like 15 minutes for me. But maybe you tried doing it long before the process was worked out by those Ubuntu ubergeeks on the forums.
Yeah, cause that'd be such a terrible problem to have.. insanely great bandwidth inside our own country.. I can't even imagine what the economic result of that would be. Oh wait.. yeah I can: the election promise made by the Labor government.
Why bother? Did I miss the memo where Gigabit Ethernet was uninvented? For 8 years effort and billions of dollars I want fiber to my gigabit ethernet card, sheesh.
Start your own company providing WiMax.. Australia has some of the most open regulations in the world when it comes to broadband providers.
Says you. I have a friend who tells me that he would happily pay up to $1000 for a netbook form factor machine with grunt. But the point is, there are still low price machines but they are grunty enough to run Microsoft's bloated software. Providing the original specs with Linux would require cutting the price even more and manufacturers don't have the margin.
For a short while people were willing to forgo Windows for the form factor and price of a netbook. Then Moore's law ticked over and Microsoft was able to enter that market - same price for the machine but with the specs that XP needs. Next iteration they'll be selling units with Vista on them. The only way to keep Microsoft out is to race to the bottom and there's no economic incentive for the hardware manufacturers to do that.