(sorry - caught the submit when I tried to preview:+)
From the patent: a central computer means in which plural blocks of information are stored at respectively corresponding locations, each of which locations is designated by a predetermined address therein by means of which a block can be selected, each of said blocks comprising a first portion containing information for display and a second portion containing information not for display but including the complete address for each of plural other blocks of information;
now I could be wrong, but I can't see this being HYPERTEXT unless all the links are in a block at the end of the file - and all the destinations are on the same server. Surely a pretty restricted patent? --
From the patent:a central computer means in which plural blocks of information are stored at respectively corresponding locations, each of which locations is designated by a predetermined address therein by means of which a block can be selected, each of said blocks comprising a first portion containing information for display and a second portion containing information not for display but including the complete address for each of plural other blocks of information;
now I could be wrong, but I can't see this being HYPERTEXT unless all the links are in a block at the end of the file - surely a pretty restricted patent? --
Hmm. I can see two big new markets as the transmeta cached crosscompiler model takes off:
Products will have a "burn in" time on new machines - Optimising and path mapping of the cached version will take many passes through the code; I can see an active after-market of pre-burned-in copies of popular packages, provided the optimisation image is extractable
If the transmeta model can support ONE ISA, it can support two or three. We should start to see manufacturers competing over new ISA designs that best utilise the underlieing hardware, without being so restrictive that the next generation of chips run legacy ISA programs faster than the new ones. Bonus points if you can get "new model" code to run under an "old model" os such as Windows, and vice versa - I would expect new-model Linux (for example) to support old-model RPMs, at least in emulation.
The Linux computers in question are 148 VA Linux 501's in 8 racks, all black. And they're planning on getting more. Then they'll probably be mandating ear protection in that room; with 148 fans, the noise is already up to half-shouting-to-be-heard. Hmm. maybe they should be looking at some of the pump-cooled systems then - they are much more effective than fans in confined quarters, and much, much quieter. --
Check out Peter Bennett's website it contains a fair block of data, and some free/shareware programs. Unfortunately, Garman are keeping some cards close to their chest, so you can't (for example) upload maps for handheld tracking unless you use the "official" windows-based software. --
Hmm. I am assuming you expect to get the majority of your business from companies whose host countries have intercept or key escrow provisions in place. What measures do you expect to take to secure the data on the platform and while in transit (both physically and cryptographically)? If a CEO of a customer comes to you and says he needs to obtain a key to his data in your safekeeping, but can't say why, what will your response be? --
Hmm. Despite an earlier ruling that Sealand lay outside of.uk's territorial waters back in the 3-mile days, the Home Office have announced to the press that Sealand DOES fall under their juristiction for purposes of the RIP bill. Do you have any plans to get official recognition by the European parliment or UK courts of Sealand's status before you go ahead? --
Hmm. I have had a great deal of success with the "part" boot loader - not just for the switching (which of course is good) but for working around the usual four-partition limit per HD. --
1) host your own web site. Get a T1 and your own hardware. This puts the responsablity onto your own sholders. I don't know about the US, but here in.uk it doesn't - the ISP that sold you the T1 is still liable, and will happily redirect your DNS entry to a 404 server of their own if someone threatens them with a lawsuit.
2) Don't put stuff up in violation of copyright. It does not belong to you. Under copyright law there is usually a "fair use" clause (much eroded under DMCA) - and a simple copyright claim doesn't cover most defamation and libel lawsuits, which are the most common form of takedown request here.
3) If anyone does send you a letter asking you to take stuff down. Talk to your lawyer. Near as I can tell the stuff that they are going after falls into a few very specific catagories. (Copyright violations etc) You will end up talking to a lawyer anyhow - usually to try and get your site back after the ISP shuts down it's end of the pipe. I virtually guarantee there is a clause in the contract that allows them to do that. --
After a quick read of the claims, there's very little here that isn't part of "POST request with a load-balancing server" (claim 16 requires a load-balancing setup). Nope, 16 is an "optional extra" that reads "all the above, but applied to a load-balanced setup"
I'm not sure about claim 17, "The apparatus of claim 13, wherein said local host computer comprises a plurality of physical hosts, interconnected to act together as a single local host computing" means. Spoofing proxy server or firewall - a lan that has access to the web, but that looks like a single machine (or IP address) from the outside. --
I don't think it was his intention to say that CSS is better than OSS (hence the lack of evidence to support such an argument). He is, I gather, suggesting that on the point he considers, OSS is no better than CSS (which is false, because, all things being equal, having the source has to be better than not having it). Hmm. It could be said that CSS was praised by omission, but I think now I have reread it that you are right.
Not me. I don't use VB:) Great - can I have your job?:+)
This supports his point that on a reliability level, OSS and CSS come out the same. I didn't hear him arguing that CSS had less bugs, merely that the "OSS is more reliable" argument didn't hold in his experience. Unfortunately, this IS a example of praise by omission - he states that, due to fixes that were promised for a OSS package and didn't arrive, his project had to be scrapped. WTF? What bug could be so bad that it forces the discard of months of man-hours of work, so insoluble that the Dev team for the package *and* his own personal programmers couldn't come up with a fix or a workaround, even given the full code for the compiler, and why was his code so compiler-specific that the code couldn't be ported to another Commerical compiler to complete the project?
and he is right - it is. Yes, of course he is - but he is judging the whole of the OSS based on RMS and the fact Eric likes guns - That is like judging the entire Christian body on the attitudes of one Religious Zealot and a Deacon that likes to go shooting. Personally, I believe that OSS is not automagically better than CSS by some innate nature, but feel that OSS is able to GET better faster and easier, as there is less incentive to hang onto patches to release them as a payware "upgrade" I also believe that to release a package as CSS is an equally moral choice - but it is more moral to support an OSS project on principle if it is as good as, or has the potential to be better than, a CSS equivilent. If the CSS is the perfect $50 package BM gave as an example though, then the OSS package would need to be pretty good to beat it - but equally, if an existing product has bugs (and they ALL do) and the OSS package has bugs (and THEY all do) then you are more likely to get a bugfix for the OSS then the CSS - as a normal user. I don't doubt that exceptional customers can get the undivided attention of the CSS development team - but this obviously cuts into the amount of attention they could pay to the rest of us.
So, then from a users point of view, CSS is ethical. And if users are willing to chose a closed product over an open one, then I consider it ethical to produce CSS, and so the FSF argument that it is immoral to write closed software is shown to be false for me (since morality is to some extent subjective). I would argue that OSS is no less ethical, at a minimum - and that given you gain the "additional" advantages of open source and free software (maintainability, freedom to choose your own support structure, inability to find yourself "orphaned" if the manufacturer should go bust or just drop the product), it should be considered more ethical to support it - the quality of the product being equal. To state that CSS has no moral value at all ranks alongside the "property is theft" declaration - neither has even the smallest basis, and is almost guaranteed to lose you support from normal people.
<snip "one gets you three" argument> Which interacts with ethics, only in the realm of business ethics. Which means, that it is up to the owner of the resource to decide whether releasing the source to their product is the right thing. That's what I said, yes:+) In ESRs essays, he says that on one occasion, he told a querient that Opening his product's source would be the WRONG thing to do - he would gain nothing from a business perspective and would probably lose customers he already had. RMS would have ranted for twenty minutes on how he had stolen the money from his current user base and should immediately release the code. Many companies now take the middle road - sell their software commercially for as long as it is viable, then release it to the open source community - and that opens a whole new moral can of worms.
For an individual that's fine. For a corporate entity, the case can be made, and the representative of the corportation will make the decision. I'm not sure how it works with tax-payer funded software (ie universities). If the software was developed for an educational purpose, which is has served, then it should be release open-source, since that should deliver the most value back to the tax-payers. However when professors start writing software on work time because they want to, should the tax-payer be funding it? If it directly competes with his duties, then the University is entitled to see SOMETHING to compensate them for that loss - either monetary compensation, or prestige. It would be unusual for a professor NOT to research his own papers and publications on Paid time; Universities accept this, and indeed know that the prestige of their institution depends partly on the prestige of their staff, and that prestige depends on their output within their field. Such papers are freely cited by further papers once they are published, and a tree of documents can be built pointing from the latest, cutting edge discoveries right back to the earliest principles. In a university setting, I can't see any reason why such should be limited to dry paper, if a Professor can give theory, Practice and Proof in one tidy bundle anyone can download and admire.
<Snip "pro-gun"> Yes but that's not why his arguments were straw-men. ERS's arguments are so easy to push over because they are ridiculous. eg: 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. WTF? Just because his personal project was a personal itch doesn't mean every piece of software is. A lot of good software scratches someone else's itch. ESR takes the features of his project and applies them as universal axioms of software development. It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that OS advocates keep quoting it. Yep, it is a good example of ESR taking his own personal values and mapping them onto the OSS movement as a whole - a bit similar to the way BM took HIS personal values as a universal moral baseline, and used them like a hammer:+) However, BM didn't find this (I think largely because he didn't read any of the essays, his moral indignation over Gun Advocacy getting the better of him) so I can only repeat that BM made an unqualified, ad-hom attack on ESR.
It attempts to argue for open, collaborative development processes, but spends half of the essay talking about some useful software engineering methods. eg Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Sure it's true, but it's as applicable to Cathedrals and Bazaars. Indeed - but these are essays, So wander a bit. they are not political manifestos for Bazaar mode OR Cathedral mode programming, or for OSS in general; no doubt if he knew they would be eventually held up as the Icons of the OSS movement, he would have been a bit tider:+) He is arguing for the sort of programming he would like to see - and quite a lot of OSS code is pretty shabby (so is CSS of course, but this is in the open where you can see it)
<Snip "work in progress"> This is all very well, but it's not what advocates argue. The argument is, "OSS is more reliable". "You can trust our code because its open". If it's buggy, then it's buggy. Most people don't care why, or how easy it is to fix, they just want to know when it will work. If OSS really can deliver better software, then great, but if it can't (and I don't believe that, on the whole, OSS is by definition better), then ESR (et al) should be honest about it. I agree - OSS is massively overhyped at the moment; many of the advocates heaping glowing praise on OSS software couldn't code if their lives depended on it, they have made a political commitment and can't miss an opportunity to wave the flag. Add to that the penchant of reporters to "simplify" statements down to soundbites, and such misrepresentations become a little more expected.
Experienced coder says: "OSS can be more reliable, because when a bug IS found, you aren't forced to wait for the owners to sell you an update, but can look in the code and fix it yourself. If you do the responsible thing and pass that fix back to the maintainers, you have just improved the product as a whole; if two thousand people do this, then you have had two thousand developers work on your code, and what CSS project can afford that? A project's improvement ramps up the more people that join."
Advocate hears this, and what *doesn't* go over his head is this: When I see projects go wrong, I fix them. When thousands of other people see it go wrong, they fix it too. Eventually we will run out of bugs to fix, and everything will be perfect" and thinks: all I have to do is wait
Reporter hears Advocate's version, and finally writes: OSS software is free, and patches are free; thousands of people are giving you this free, there will soon be no bugs left. Get this now before they wake up and start charging! The reporter isn't going to write what the Coder said - even if he had heard it, it is far too Geekish. And just publishing "Project X is getting better faster for free than CSS product Y" isn't going to sell papers - he is a reporter, he has a duty to tell people the REAL meaning of his news, and if he jumps the gun a little, he will be eventually proved right - and will have got it in before $COMPETING_PAPER
The only real difference between this process for CSS and OSS is that CSS pay their Advocates, and call them marketing executives.... OSS get them (like everything else it seems:+) for free - and sometimes you DO get what you pay for. --
Does he? The main thrust of his article (although it wanders a lot) is that free (in so much as anything is really free) is fine, but it isn't necessarily better or "the only moral action". Yes, in my opinion he does. He paints OSS software as untrustworthy, while giving no examples of CSS doing it better; he brings up the spectre of life-critical systems, when most are coded directly to bare metal just because you CAN'T trust code higher up the chain to function, and even then, I am sure most people remember what happens if you try to use rigidly designed and tested fly-by-wire Passenger Aircraft software in an airshow. He also performs ad-hom attacks on key figures in the OSS world, expecting to prove thereby that OSS is itself tainted. His crowning glory is a project he had serious setbacks on due to (unspecified) bugs in the compiler. I don't know about you, but *I* have had serious setbacks time and again using Visual Basic and Visual C++ - things the complier just wasn't willing to wear, and you had to go back and code around them. Did I submit bug reports to MS? yes. Were patches rushed out? no, because there was a workaround. They may or may not be fixed in the next release - buy it and see....... Personally, if *I* was on the GCC development team, then having such a high-profile programmer as Bertrand Meyer stand and bitch without just looking in the code and submitting a patch would be a disincentive for me to do that patch myself - If someone who considers himself a leading light in programming can't contribute a little of his team's time to help out a program his OWN PROJECT desparately needs, why should I knock myself out trying?
The point in question was whether open-source software meets the hype about reliabilty. Any piece of software in which known bugs go unfixed, does not provide the level of reliability he seeks. I am force to assume that he avoids Visual C (currently on release 6, with 7 in the pipeline) and MS Office then (now on release NINE!). Any large non-critical project will have bugs. OSS doesn't expect you to pay for them, and will often respond to bug reports with patches and/or workarounds in days - not usually the case for CSS manufacturers, who would prefer you purchased the "upgrade".
If I need to hire a C-compiler developer everytime I find a bug in gcc, then it's probably not a worthwhile investment for me, if I can simply buy a licence for a (non-free) compiler that suits my needs. You don't - but you don't get to expect fixes to magically appear overnight, either. The whole point is that core-team bugfixes take about as long as a commercial development team does - quick fixes rely on someone hitting that bug, writing together a patch, and folding that back into the pool - the Core team may need to tidy it to avoid it breaking something else, but most of the hard work is done already.
In his mind a working piece of proprietry software is a better choice than an almost-working piece of free software. and he is right - it is. Users will have to balance out their needs - they can pay money out to purchase a copy of software that has no known bugs (but will have little benefit if they are the ones that find it) or get free software that has known bugs, and either work around them or actively help the fixing process. A big development team shouldn't take the risk of working with known-buggy software, if they can't afford the extra man-days of workarounds and/or bughunting - it is a gamble that the cost of the workarounds will be less than the cost of the expensive commercial software. If he couldn't afford to lose that gamble, he shouldn't have made it.
ESR needs to separate his OSS "work" and his personal web-site more. When he hosts the much praised "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" on the same site as his gun pages, he links them into the same package in the eyes of the reader. I suspect you are half-right - ESR's "random writings" page were originally just that - ESR's Advocacy of Guns, mixed with ESR's advocacy of OSS and his experiences with meditation, strange languages, and the Hacker Lore. Now that he is "officially" an OSS spokesman, they could well do with their own page. The choice to host them all together was good when they WERE just a bundle of his interests, but now the OSS is his "official" designation, he should consider it "work" not "play".
Apache proves his point. The original basis for Apache was Free Software written at Uni of Illinois (I think) Pretty close - The apache group started out by collecting together the patches for a Public Domain HTTP server written there; the very first version called "apache" was simply a patched-to-date version. However, it was quickly re-written from scratch, and as far as I know, the current version does not contain code from the original. I will quote (slightly edited - you may wish to look at the Original):
In February of 1995, the most popular server software on the Web was the public domain HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. However, development of that httpd had stalled after Rob left NCSA in mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of these webmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered together for the purpose of coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches").
Using NCSA httpd 1.3 as a base, we added all of the published bug fixes and worthwhile enhancements we could find, tested the result on our own servers, and made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache server in April 1995. The early Apache server was a big hit, but we all knew that the codebase needed a general overhaul and redesign. During May-June 1995, Robert Thau designed a new server architecture (code-named Shambhala) which included a modular structure and API for better extensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forking process model. The group switched to this new server base in July and added the features from 0.7.x, resulting in Apache 0.8.8 (and its brethren) in August. After extensive beta testing, many ports to obscure platforms, a new set of documentation (by David Robinson), and the addition of many features in the form of our standard modules, Apache 1.0 was released on December 1, 1995.
That's it. That's the point. Someone's time/resources went into the patch. Whose? Why? The FSF/OSI/SPI (etc) suggest that the fruit of the funder's resources should be able to be used freely by everyone. Why is that the case? Justify your answer. It's the same one that ESR gives - if you contribute a single patch to the shared pool, and receive just ONE patch in return, you have broken even; if you get TWO, you have made a profit. If your patch is so wonderful that you could make more from selling it than it would cost you to reproduce every patch you have received for free, then you have lost by adding it to the pool - the whole system only works on the basis that patches you contribute are worthless compared to the whole. What the FSF and kin say is, if you add a small increment of value to what you have received for free, then you should not profit from that portion of the work that you DIDN'T do - if you can make your own work function standing alone, then fine - but if it depends on the work of others and THEY gave freely, why should you profit?
Regardless, you just accepted his point. If such software existed, would you be willing to give up your "freedom" (the source) in order to use it? If so, then your value system is NOT the same as RMS's. you are right - I am *not* the sort of zealot that RMS is. OSS is *potentially* better than CSS - If there is a OSS alternative, I will gladly work on it, contribute as much of my time as I feel is right, in the hope that it will eventually surpass the CSS product. But I will still be using the CSS product in the meantime - because it is BETTER.
That's because RMS and ESR set themselves up as straw-men. I would argue the point about ESR - RMS was attacked because he can't consider any other position but Free software - to an extreme few other members of the OSS community would agree with. ESR was attacked for being Pro-Guns - What the hell has that got to do with it?
If OSS is so reliable, why do I get these bugs? Because it isn't finished - OSS is a work in progress, released to the public. Mind you, I sometimes think MS products are the same, with the distinction you have to pay for them:+)
then does that mean a free product without warranty is morally better than a closed product with warranty? No, if you think you will suffer losses on the failure of a piece of code, you had better either have 100% confidence in that code, or a legal right to sue for compensation. Problem is, most CSS explicitly denies you that right in shrinkwrap, no-liability-beyond-purchase-price licences that, now you have the DMCA, even restrict you from warning other users that a bug might destroy their businesses too. I invite you to demonstrate to me the morality in that....
>I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website And yet you posted this to slashdot. Yes I did - if I make a public statement in a forum where there is little or no chance of user dissent (as Bertrand Meyer did in a national paper-based publication) then I am unaccountable; if I post my beliefs in a forum such as this, where you can immediately give your own opinions, prove me wrong publicly if you can, and the very next reader sees not just MY writings, but yours as well - that is a completely different matter. If BM had posted this to Slashdot, I would have disputed his points - but not disputed his morality in making them a pronouncement from the pulpit, as he has done. --
*sigh* I hate to tell you this, but Hashes have been around for a lot longer than their cryptographic use. One of the useful functions of a hash (in a programming sense) is to throw away or minimise changing elements of data so as to locate a record; multiple items of data that converge to the same hash value are called Hash Collisions - Cryptographic hashes are written to minimise collisions between similar inputs (error propagation hashing); data filtering hashes are written to maximise collisions between related data items (error reduction hashing)
Might I suggest you locate and READ one or two books on programming and pattern matching before you start being abusive online? XNormal made a reasonable reply, based on his knowledge of Cryptographic hashing and the way a fingerprint matching database works (the police one, for example). However, I am not trying to match a fingerprint, I am trying to extract a repeatable value from the fingerprint, not the same thing and not the usual way to do this. You merely read his reply and added an abusive postscript. All I can suggest is to either acquire Clue or go back to your hot grits and petrified females. --
You can't generate a consistent hash from a biometric - two readings will never be exactly the same and in cryptographic applications single bit error will render the hash useless. On the whole, you are right - not that you can't generate a consistent number from a fingerprint (you can - it's awkward, but you can. In place of trying for an exact photographic match, you look for features (whorls, loops, junctions) and form a mesh of those features. you then store the mesh in such a way that relative position is preserved, but distances and angles are not.However, I agree it is awkward and requires quite a high res scan, plus a fair wadge of computing power and storage space) No, the problem is that, if someone steals your device, it is very likely to be COVERED in your fingerprints - after all, you handle the damned thing. all they need do is use a child's fingerprint kit to lift one intact print on sticky-tape, transfer it to the sensor, and they have unlimited access to your key. Not to mention a anyone sufficiently desperate to force the device from you at gunpoint, will probably be desperate enough to remove a suitable "key" from your person with an axe..... not a risk I would want to undergo. but its still a cool idea, though:+) --
Hmm. well, Sealand is given at least official overlooking, if not actual recognition - Apparently, they are even considering adding additional material to the seabed to bring an actual area of "land" into existence, as currently they are an abandoned seafort.
However, they couldn't be considered to be in any shape or form "floating" - they are solidly attached to the seabed that is only a few meters deep at that point:+) --
Not sure about any mapi compliant client - but I know for a fact CCMail doesn't execute the autoforward bit - but DOES allow any fool that double-clicks the file the full weight of their own errors..... --
Hmm. If it could be restructured slightly to be compatable with the OpenPGP standard, I can see how this could be very useful indeed. Store a standard PGP key inside it, with the code to decrypt and digitally sign built in. Lock the key, not with a passphrase, but with a unique hash from the biometric data; user presses thumb to scanner, device goes "live" and accepts data from PC interface to sign or decrypt; after sixty seconds, device signs off and requires another scan to go live again. Add a suitable "cradle" interface, and it could form a digital credit-card / debit card that is personalized to the carrier, and can be simply dropped into a cradle at the checkout when your purchases have been scanned...... Only real problem would be if you damaged the fingerprint - and there is no reason why the key can't be stored ten times, one per digit. --
2) And then we have the nice "My company isn't big enough to make the changes in the code ourselves. If we have a commercial product then at least we can complain." Indeed - in fact, we have here an authority on OO programming, who apparently has a group of coders going so deep into something that they find the bugs lurking in the unexplored depths of the compiler. (I note the exact bugs aren't named though - not unreasonable for a non-technical piece, but it would have been nice) if they were so terrible, they should indeed have been assigned a higher priority by the core coders (but I can't judge, as I don't know what they were). If they were in some obscure area of a library, or in fact merely differed from how the MS compiler handled that function, then a reply of "work around it or fix it yourself" to such an obviously name-heavy development group might well have been in order. The only true strength of OSS is that with CSS, you can only recognise the bug; with OSS, you can recognise it, trace it to it's home, and either fix it yourself or at least give the coders a good idea of what is broken; and give we are STILL waiting for MS to fix Multiple Inheritance in their compilers....... --
Obviously, he doesn't understand that free software isn't a gift from God, it's a collaborative process. Rather than cancelling his projects, he should have fixed whatever he perceived to be wrong with those tools and submitted the fixes to the free software community. Whatever he thought was wrong couldn't have taken his people more than than a few months. I agree entirely. He wants a world where nothing is free - well I hate to dissapoint him, but often, OSS is not free - and the price you pay is to fit the OSS product to fit your needs (a cost in programmer time) and preferably to fold those changes back into the pool. you do *not* stand about and snivel that the other developers haven't fixed the problem yet - they may have things they need to work more than whatever bugged you.
The problem seems to be he is working from a set of preconcieved results as definite as the ones he claims for Eric and RS - who he immediately demolishes for their personal behavior (by anecdote for RS, though probably true, and because Eric is a self-confessed gun nut, and DARES to be pro-gun on his own, personal website, suddenly everything he has said about OSS is worthless....) He claims there exists an Absolute base moral code, when in fact all such things are established by the society they exist in (his main example is that killing a innocent man is morally wrong - and indeed, most acceptable societies agree with him; however, it all depends on who gets to define "innocent". if I am "guilty" of holding certain beliefs, refusing to do certain things *I* find morally unacceptable, having certain deformities or genetic abnormalities, I may well be sentenced to death in some societies, who would believe they were doing what was morally right). Second, he states the ONLY reasons free software is free: that it was developed at public expense, that it was given away by a company, or that it was developed by someone with no other monetary concerns. (I am forced to assume here he got so distracted by Eric's gun essay that he forgot to read the OSS stuff on that page). Apache is the prime example here - it was developed by a group of people who, individually, needed to write a webserver, and decided one really good one between them would be easier than one mediocre one each.
ok, to get back to the plot. He then comes up with a mythical Closed Source product, so good that its manufacturer is willing to indemnify the users for loss due to its use, rather than the standard "loss limited to purchase price of goods" deal. Can I have one of those? All I can seem to find on MY shelves are products of the latter kind - whose bugs take months to fix, and often the newer, less bug-ridden package requires you repurchase, rather than get a free update. Most of the rest of this piece seems to be of the same quality - generate a straw-man that can be easily attacked, then attack it. I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website, and can't imagine having it in a nationally-distributed magazine....... --
Additionally, you can get patches for Linux 2.2.9 and 2.2.14 here: Hmm. it is worth mentioning that they are currently running positive discrimination - if you are using most common Webbrowsers under Windows (with the noticable exception of Lynx) you will be refused access to the site. --
Hmm. The main problem seems to be that there is a perception of "oh, GPLed stuff is free, therefore if we get caught there will be no damages because they can't show a loss". However, given that the GPL is simply one of a number of different licences the author(s) could issue, I can see a case for a varient of the GPL that gives the developers a choice:
obey the restrictions and conditions of the GPL, and not just after you get caught but at the point you release the software, or
Pay a "standard usage fee" to the FSF, in trust to be split between the authors / donated to charity as seems reasonable, in the following amounts; $5000us, an immediate payment, and 10% of the sales price of the software, or if the software is supplied bundled with other products (hardware or software) 5% of the sale price of the bundle, whichever is higher.
Being caught in violation of the GPL after the software has been available should automatically disqualify the company from reverting to the GPL for units already shipped and paid for, unless the FSF or the authors are happy it was a genuine mistake and the remedial action the company has taken is adequate. Given this, I doubt any company would be complacent about allowing OSS routines to be shipped in their products without checking with a lawyer first..... --
It strikes me ironic that he's complaining about getting a pre-overclocked processor. Not really - if he was planning to overclock it to (say) 800, he will probably be annoyed to find he can't, as it has already been upped to reach 700, and without a cooling device (which probably means that in normal service it would have been more likely to fry than a "real" 700..... --
Slashdot Mirror
From the patent:
a central computer means in which plural blocks of information are stored at respectively corresponding locations, each of which locations is designated by a predetermined address therein by means of which a block can be selected, each of said blocks comprising a first portion containing information for display and a second portion containing information not for display but including the complete address for each of plural other blocks of information;
now I could be wrong, but I can't see this being HYPERTEXT unless all the links are in a block at the end of the file - and all the destinations are on the same server. Surely a pretty restricted patent?
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now I could be wrong, but I can't see this being HYPERTEXT unless all the links are in a block at the end of the file - surely a pretty restricted patent?
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The Linux computers in question are 148 VA Linux 501's in 8 racks, all black. And they're planning on getting more.
Then they'll probably be mandating ear protection in that room; with 148 fans, the noise is already up to half-shouting-to-be-heard.
Hmm. maybe they should be looking at some of the pump-cooled systems then - they are much more effective than fans in confined quarters, and much, much quieter.
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Check out Peter Bennett's website it contains a fair block of data, and some free/shareware programs.
Unfortunately, Garman are keeping some cards close to their chest, so you can't (for example) upload maps for handheld tracking unless you use the "official" windows-based software.
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Hmm. I am assuming you expect to get the majority of your business from companies whose host countries have intercept or key escrow provisions in place. What measures do you expect to take to secure the data on the platform and while in transit (both physically and cryptographically)? If a CEO of a customer comes to you and says he needs to obtain a key to his data in your safekeeping, but can't say why, what will your response be?
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Hmm. Despite an earlier ruling that Sealand lay outside of .uk's territorial waters back in the 3-mile days, the Home Office have announced to the press that Sealand DOES fall under their juristiction for purposes of the RIP bill. Do you have any plans to get official recognition by the European parliment or UK courts of Sealand's status before you go ahead?
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Hmm. I have had a great deal of success with the "part" boot loader - not just for the switching (which of course is good) but for working around the usual four-partition limit per HD.
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1) host your own web site. Get a T1 and your own hardware. This puts the responsablity onto your own sholders. .uk it doesn't - the ISP that sold you the T1 is still liable, and will happily redirect your DNS entry to a 404 server of their own if someone threatens them with a lawsuit.
I don't know about the US, but here in
2) Don't put stuff up in violation of copyright. It does not belong to you.
Under copyright law there is usually a "fair use" clause (much eroded under DMCA) - and a simple copyright claim doesn't cover most defamation and libel lawsuits, which are the most common form of takedown request here.
3) If anyone does send you a letter asking you to take stuff down. Talk to your lawyer. Near as I can tell the stuff that they are going after falls into a few very specific catagories. (Copyright violations etc)
You will end up talking to a lawyer anyhow - usually to try and get your site back after the ISP shuts down it's end of the pipe. I virtually guarantee there is a clause in the contract that allows them to do that.
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Nope, 16 is an "optional extra" that reads "all the above, but applied to a load-balanced setup"
I'm not sure about claim 17, "The apparatus of claim 13, wherein said local host computer comprises a plurality of physical hosts, interconnected to act together as a single local host computing" means. Spoofing proxy server or firewall - a lan that has access to the web, but that looks like a single machine (or IP address) from the outside.
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Hmm. It could be said that CSS was praised by omission, but I think now I have reread it that you are right.
Not me. I don't use VB :) :+)
Great - can I have your job?
This supports his point that on a reliability level, OSS and CSS come out the same. I didn't hear him arguing that CSS had less bugs, merely that the "OSS is more reliable" argument didn't hold in his experience.
Unfortunately, this IS a example of praise by omission - he states that, due to fixes that were promised for a OSS package and didn't arrive, his project had to be scrapped. WTF? What bug could be so bad that it forces the discard of months of man-hours of work, so insoluble that the Dev team for the package *and* his own personal programmers couldn't come up with a fix or a workaround, even given the full code for the compiler, and why was his code so compiler-specific that the code couldn't be ported to another Commerical compiler to complete the project?
and he is right - it is.
Yes, of course he is - but he is judging the whole of the OSS based on RMS and the fact Eric likes guns - That is like judging the entire Christian body on the attitudes of one Religious Zealot and a Deacon that likes to go shooting.
Personally, I believe that OSS is not automagically better than CSS by some innate nature, but feel that OSS is able to GET better faster and easier, as there is less incentive to hang onto patches to release them as a payware "upgrade"
I also believe that to release a package as CSS is an equally moral choice - but it is more moral to support an OSS project on principle if it is as good as, or has the potential to be better than, a CSS equivilent. If the CSS is the perfect $50 package BM gave as an example though, then the OSS package would need to be pretty good to beat it - but equally, if an existing product has bugs (and they ALL do) and the OSS package has bugs (and THEY all do) then you are more likely to get a bugfix for the OSS then the CSS - as a normal user. I don't doubt that exceptional customers can get the undivided attention of the CSS development team - but this obviously cuts into the amount of attention they could pay to the rest of us.
So, then from a users point of view, CSS is ethical. And if users are willing to chose a closed product over an open one, then I consider it ethical to produce CSS, and so the FSF argument that it is immoral to write closed software is shown to be false for me (since morality is to some extent subjective).
I would argue that OSS is no less ethical, at a minimum - and that given you gain the "additional" advantages of open source and free software (maintainability, freedom to choose your own support structure, inability to find yourself "orphaned" if the manufacturer should go bust or just drop the product), it should be considered more ethical to support it - the quality of the product being equal. To state that CSS has no moral value at all ranks alongside the "property is theft" declaration - neither has even the smallest basis, and is almost guaranteed to lose you support from normal people.
<snip "one gets you three" argument> :+)
Which interacts with ethics, only in the realm of business ethics. Which means, that it is up to the owner of the resource to decide whether releasing the source to their product is the right thing.
That's what I said, yes
In ESRs essays, he says that on one occasion, he told a querient that Opening his product's source would be the WRONG thing to do - he would gain nothing from a business perspective and would probably lose customers he already had. RMS would have ranted for twenty minutes on how he had stolen the money from his current user base and should immediately release the code. Many companies now take the middle road - sell their software commercially for as long as it is viable, then release it to the open source community - and that opens a whole new moral can of worms.
For an individual that's fine. For a corporate entity, the case can be made, and the representative of the corportation will make the decision. I'm not sure how it works with tax-payer funded software (ie universities). If the software was developed for an educational purpose, which is has served, then it should be release open-source, since that should deliver the most value back to the tax-payers.
However when professors start writing software on work time because they want to, should the tax-payer be funding it?
If it directly competes with his duties, then the University is entitled to see SOMETHING to compensate them for that loss - either monetary compensation, or prestige. It would be unusual for a professor NOT to research his own papers and publications on Paid time; Universities accept this, and indeed know that the prestige of their institution depends partly on the prestige of their staff, and that prestige depends on their output within their field. Such papers are freely cited by further papers once they are published, and a tree of documents can be built pointing from the latest, cutting edge discoveries right back to the earliest principles.
In a university setting, I can't see any reason why such should be limited to dry paper, if a Professor can give theory, Practice and Proof in one tidy bundle anyone can download and admire.
<Snip "pro-gun"> :+)
Yes but that's not why his arguments were straw-men. ERS's arguments are so easy to push over because they are ridiculous. eg:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
WTF? Just because his personal project was a personal itch doesn't mean every piece of software is. A lot of good software scratches someone else's itch. ESR takes the features of his project and applies them as universal axioms of software development. It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that OS advocates keep quoting it.
Yep, it is a good example of ESR taking his own personal values and mapping them onto the OSS movement as a whole - a bit similar to the way BM took HIS personal values as a universal moral baseline, and used them like a hammer
However, BM didn't find this (I think largely because he didn't read any of the essays, his moral indignation over Gun Advocacy getting the better of him) so I can only repeat that BM made an unqualified, ad-hom attack on ESR.
It attempts to argue for open, collaborative development processes, but spends half of the essay talking about some useful software engineering methods. eg Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Sure it's true, but it's as applicable to Cathedrals and Bazaars. :+)
Indeed - but these are essays, So wander a bit. they are not political manifestos for Bazaar mode OR Cathedral mode programming, or for OSS in general; no doubt if he knew they would be eventually held up as the Icons of the OSS movement, he would have been a bit tider
He is arguing for the sort of programming he would like to see - and quite a lot of OSS code is pretty shabby (so is CSS of course, but this is in the open where you can see it)
<Snip "work in progress">
:+) for free - and sometimes you DO get what you pay for.
This is all very well, but it's not what advocates argue. The argument is, "OSS is more reliable". "You can trust our code because its open". If it's buggy, then it's buggy. Most people don't care why, or how easy it is to fix, they just want to know when it will work. If OSS really can deliver better software, then great, but if it can't (and I don't believe that, on the whole, OSS is by definition better), then ESR (et al) should be honest about it.
I agree - OSS is massively overhyped at the moment; many of the advocates heaping glowing praise on OSS software couldn't code if their lives depended on it, they have made a political commitment and can't miss an opportunity to wave the flag. Add to that the penchant of reporters to "simplify" statements down to soundbites, and such misrepresentations become a little more expected.
Experienced coder says:
"OSS can be more reliable, because when a bug IS found, you aren't forced to wait for the owners to sell you an update, but can look in the code and fix it yourself. If you do the responsible thing and pass that fix back to the maintainers, you have just improved the product as a whole; if two thousand people do this, then you have had two thousand developers work on your code, and what CSS project can afford that? A project's improvement ramps up the more people that join."
Advocate hears this, and what *doesn't* go over his head is this:
When I see projects go wrong, I fix them. When thousands of other people see it go wrong, they fix it too. Eventually we will run out of bugs to fix, and everything will be perfect"
and thinks:
all I have to do is wait
Reporter hears Advocate's version, and finally writes:
OSS software is free, and patches are free; thousands of people are giving you this free, there will soon be no bugs left. Get this now before they wake up and start charging!
The reporter isn't going to write what the Coder said - even if he had heard it, it is far too Geekish. And just publishing "Project X is getting better faster for free than CSS product Y" isn't going to sell papers - he is a reporter, he has a duty to tell people the REAL meaning of his news, and if he jumps the gun a little, he will be eventually proved right - and will have got it in before $COMPETING_PAPER
The only real difference between this process for CSS and OSS is that CSS pay their Advocates, and call them marketing executives.... OSS get them (like everything else it seems
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Yes, in my opinion he does. He paints OSS software as untrustworthy, while giving no examples of CSS doing it better; he brings up the spectre of life-critical systems, when most are coded directly to bare metal just because you CAN'T trust code higher up the chain to function, and even then, I am sure most people remember what happens if you try to use rigidly designed and tested fly-by-wire Passenger Aircraft software in an airshow. He also performs ad-hom attacks on key figures in the OSS world, expecting to prove thereby that OSS is itself tainted.
His crowning glory is a project he had serious setbacks on due to (unspecified) bugs in the compiler. I don't know about you, but *I* have had serious setbacks time and again using Visual Basic and Visual C++ - things the complier just wasn't willing to wear, and you had to go back and code around them. Did I submit bug reports to MS? yes. Were patches rushed out? no, because there was a workaround. They may or may not be fixed in the next release - buy it and see.......
Personally, if *I* was on the GCC development team, then having such a high-profile programmer as Bertrand Meyer stand and bitch without just looking in the code and submitting a patch would be a disincentive for me to do that patch myself - If someone who considers himself a leading light in programming can't contribute a little of his team's time to help out a program his OWN PROJECT desparately needs, why should I knock myself out trying?
The point in question was whether open-source software meets the hype about reliabilty. Any piece of software in which known bugs go unfixed, does not provide the level of reliability he seeks.
I am force to assume that he avoids Visual C (currently on release 6, with 7 in the pipeline) and MS Office then (now on release NINE!). Any large non-critical project will have bugs. OSS doesn't expect you to pay for them, and will often respond to bug reports with patches and/or workarounds in days - not usually the case for CSS manufacturers, who would prefer you purchased the "upgrade".
If I need to hire a C-compiler developer everytime I find a bug in gcc, then it's probably not a worthwhile investment for me, if I can simply buy a licence for a (non-free) compiler that suits my needs.
You don't - but you don't get to expect fixes to magically appear overnight, either. The whole point is that core-team bugfixes take about as long as a commercial development team does - quick fixes rely on someone hitting that bug, writing together a patch, and folding that back into the pool - the Core team may need to tidy it to avoid it breaking something else, but most of the hard work is done already.
In his mind a working piece of proprietry software is a better choice than an almost-working piece of free software.
and he is right - it is. Users will have to balance out their needs - they can pay money out to purchase a copy of software that has no known bugs (but will have little benefit if they are the ones that find it) or get free software that has known bugs, and either work around them or actively help the fixing process. A big development team shouldn't take the risk of working with known-buggy software, if they can't afford the extra man-days of workarounds and/or bughunting - it is a gamble that the cost of the workarounds will be less than the cost of the expensive commercial software. If he couldn't afford to lose that gamble, he shouldn't have made it.
ESR needs to separate his OSS "work" and his personal web-site more. When he hosts the much praised "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" on the same site as his gun pages, he links them into the same package in the eyes of the reader.
I suspect you are half-right - ESR's "random writings" page were originally just that - ESR's Advocacy of Guns, mixed with ESR's advocacy of OSS and his experiences with meditation, strange languages, and the Hacker Lore. Now that he is "officially" an OSS spokesman, they could well do with their own page. The choice to host them all together was good when they WERE just a bundle of his interests, but now the OSS is his "official" designation, he should consider it "work" not "play".
Apache proves his point. The original basis for Apache was Free Software written at Uni of Illinois (I think)
Pretty close - The apache group started out by collecting together the patches for a Public Domain HTTP server written there; the very first version called "apache" was simply a patched-to-date version. However, it was quickly re-written from scratch, and as far as I know, the current version does not contain code from the original. I will quote (slightly edited - you may wish to look at the Original):
That's it. That's the point. Someone's time/resources went into the patch. Whose? Why? The FSF/OSI/SPI (etc) suggest that the fruit of the funder's resources should be able to be used freely by everyone. Why is that the case? Justify your answer.
It's the same one that ESR gives - if you contribute a single patch to the shared pool, and receive just ONE patch in return, you have broken even; if you get TWO, you have made a profit. If your patch is so wonderful that you could make more from selling it than it would cost you to reproduce every patch you have received for free, then you have lost by adding it to the pool - the whole system only works on the basis that patches you contribute are worthless compared to the whole. What the FSF and kin say is, if you add a small increment of value to what you have received for free, then you should not profit from that portion of the work that you DIDN'T do - if you can make your own work function standing alone, then fine - but if it depends on the work of others and THEY gave freely, why should you profit?
Regardless, you just accepted his point. If such software existed, would you be willing to give up your "freedom" (the source) in order to use it? If so, then your value system is NOT the same as RMS's.
you are right - I am *not* the sort of zealot that RMS is. OSS is *potentially* better than CSS - If there is a OSS alternative, I will gladly work on it, contribute as much of my time as I feel is right, in the hope that it will eventually surpass the CSS product. But I will still be using the CSS product in the meantime - because it is BETTER.
That's because RMS and ESR set themselves up as straw-men.
I would argue the point about ESR - RMS was attacked because he can't consider any other position but Free software - to an extreme few other members of the OSS community would agree with. ESR was attacked for being Pro-Guns - What the hell has that got to do with it?
If OSS is so reliable, why do I get these bugs? :+)
Because it isn't finished - OSS is a work in progress, released to the public. Mind you, I sometimes think MS products are the same, with the distinction you have to pay for them
then does that mean a free product without warranty is morally better than a closed product with warranty?
No, if you think you will suffer losses on the failure of a piece of code, you had better either have 100% confidence in that code, or a legal right to sue for compensation. Problem is, most CSS explicitly denies you that right in shrinkwrap, no-liability-beyond-purchase-price licences that, now you have the DMCA, even restrict you from warning other users that a bug might destroy their businesses too. I invite you to demonstrate to me the morality in that....
>I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website
And yet you posted this to slashdot.
Yes I did - if I make a public statement in a forum where there is little or no chance of user dissent (as Bertrand Meyer did in a national paper-based publication) then I am unaccountable; if I post my beliefs in a forum such as this, where you can immediately give your own opinions, prove me wrong publicly if you can, and the very next reader sees not just MY writings, but yours as well - that is a completely different matter. If BM had posted this to Slashdot, I would have disputed his points - but not disputed his morality in making them a pronouncement from the pulpit, as he has done.
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you also might like to check out the story on Slashdot :+)
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I've got better things to do with my life. back to your Hot Grits, little troll......
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I hate to tell you this, but Hashes have been around for a lot longer than their cryptographic use. One of the useful functions of a hash (in a programming sense) is to throw away or minimise changing elements of data so as to locate a record; multiple items of data that converge to the same hash value are called Hash Collisions - Cryptographic hashes are written to minimise collisions between similar inputs (error propagation hashing); data filtering hashes are written to maximise collisions between related data items (error reduction hashing)
Might I suggest you locate and READ one or two books on programming and pattern matching before you start being abusive online?
XNormal made a reasonable reply, based on his knowledge of Cryptographic hashing and the way a fingerprint matching database works (the police one, for example). However, I am not trying to match a fingerprint, I am trying to extract a repeatable value from the fingerprint, not the same thing and not the usual way to do this. You merely read his reply and added an abusive postscript. All I can suggest is to either acquire Clue or go back to your hot grits and petrified females.
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You can't generate a consistent hash from a biometric - two readings will never be exactly the same and in cryptographic applications single bit error will render the hash useless. :+)
On the whole, you are right - not that you can't generate a consistent number from a fingerprint (you can - it's awkward, but you can. In place of trying for an exact photographic match, you look for features (whorls, loops, junctions) and form a mesh of those features. you then store the mesh in such a way that relative position is preserved, but distances and angles are not.However, I agree it is awkward and requires quite a high res scan, plus a fair wadge of computing power and storage space)
No, the problem is that, if someone steals your device, it is very likely to be COVERED in your fingerprints - after all, you handle the damned thing. all they need do is use a child's fingerprint kit to lift one intact print on sticky-tape, transfer it to the sensor, and they have unlimited access to your key. Not to mention a anyone sufficiently desperate to force the device from you at gunpoint, will probably be desperate enough to remove a suitable "key" from your person with an axe..... not a risk I would want to undergo. but its still a cool idea, though
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However, they couldn't be considered to be in any shape or form "floating" - they are solidly attached to the seabed that is only a few meters deep at that point :+)
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Not sure about any mapi compliant client - but I know for a fact CCMail doesn't execute the autoforward bit - but DOES allow any fool that double-clicks the file the full weight of their own errors.....
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Hmm. If it could be restructured slightly to be compatable with the OpenPGP standard, I can see how this could be very useful indeed.
Store a standard PGP key inside it, with the code to decrypt and digitally sign built in. Lock the key, not with a passphrase, but with a unique hash from the biometric data; user presses thumb to scanner, device goes "live" and accepts data from PC interface to sign or decrypt; after sixty seconds, device signs off and requires another scan to go live again. Add a suitable "cradle" interface, and it could form a digital credit-card / debit card that is personalized to the carrier, and can be simply dropped into a cradle at the checkout when your purchases have been scanned...... Only real problem would be if you damaged the fingerprint - and there is no reason why the key can't be stored ten times, one per digit.
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2) And then we have the nice "My company isn't big enough to make the changes in the code ourselves. If we have a commercial product then at least we can complain."
Indeed - in fact, we have here an authority on OO programming, who apparently has a group of coders going so deep into something that they find the bugs lurking in the unexplored depths of the compiler. (I note the exact bugs aren't named though - not unreasonable for a non-technical piece, but it would have been nice)
if they were so terrible, they should indeed have been assigned a higher priority by the core coders (but I can't judge, as I don't know what they were). If they were in some obscure area of a library, or in fact merely differed from how the MS compiler handled that function, then a reply of "work around it or fix it yourself" to such an obviously name-heavy development group might well have been in order. The only true strength of OSS is that with CSS, you can only recognise the bug; with OSS, you can recognise it, trace it to it's home, and either fix it yourself or at least give the coders a good idea of what is broken; and give we are STILL waiting for MS to fix Multiple Inheritance in their compilers.......
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I agree entirely. He wants a world where nothing is free - well I hate to dissapoint him, but often, OSS is not free - and the price you pay is to fit the OSS product to fit your needs (a cost in programmer time) and preferably to fold those changes back into the pool. you do *not* stand about and snivel that the other developers haven't fixed the problem yet - they may have things they need to work more than whatever bugged you.
The problem seems to be he is working from a set of preconcieved results as definite as the ones he claims for Eric and RS - who he immediately demolishes for their personal behavior (by anecdote for RS, though probably true, and because Eric is a self-confessed gun nut, and DARES to be pro-gun on his own, personal website, suddenly everything he has said about OSS is worthless....)
He claims there exists an Absolute base moral code, when in fact all such things are established by the society they exist in (his main example is that killing a innocent man is morally wrong - and indeed, most acceptable societies agree with him; however, it all depends on who gets to define "innocent". if I am "guilty" of holding certain beliefs, refusing to do certain things *I* find morally unacceptable, having certain deformities or genetic abnormalities, I may well be sentenced to death in some societies, who would believe they were doing what was morally right). Second, he states the ONLY reasons free software is free: that it was developed at public expense, that it was given away by a company, or that it was developed by someone with no other monetary concerns. (I am forced to assume here he got so distracted by Eric's gun essay that he forgot to read the OSS stuff on that page). Apache is the prime example here - it was developed by a group of people who, individually, needed to write a webserver, and decided one really good one between them would be easier than one mediocre one each.
ok, to get back to the plot. He then comes up with a mythical Closed Source product, so good that its manufacturer is willing to indemnify the users for loss due to its use, rather than the standard "loss limited to purchase price of goods" deal. Can I have one of those? All I can seem to find on MY shelves are products of the latter kind - whose bugs take months to fix, and often the newer, less bug-ridden package requires you repurchase, rather than get a free update. Most of the rest of this piece seems to be of the same quality - generate a straw-man that can be easily attacked, then attack it. I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website, and can't imagine having it in a nationally-distributed magazine.......
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Additionally, you can get patches for Linux 2.2.9 and 2.2.14 here:
Hmm. it is worth mentioning that they are currently running positive discrimination - if you are using most common Webbrowsers under Windows (with the noticable exception of Lynx) you will be refused access to the site.
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However, given that the GPL is simply one of a number of different licences the author(s) could issue, I can see a case for a varient of the GPL that gives the developers a choice:
- obey the restrictions and conditions of the GPL, and not just after you get caught but at the point you release the software, or
- Pay a "standard usage fee" to the FSF, in trust to be split between the authors / donated to charity as seems reasonable, in the following amounts; $5000us, an immediate payment, and 10% of the sales price of the software, or if the software is supplied bundled with other products (hardware or software) 5% of the sale price of the bundle, whichever is higher.
Being caught in violation of the GPL after the software has been available should automatically disqualify the company from reverting to the GPL for units already shipped and paid for, unless the FSF or the authors are happy it was a genuine mistake and the remedial action the company has taken is adequate.Given this, I doubt any company would be complacent about allowing OSS routines to be shipped in their products without checking with a lawyer first.....
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It strikes me ironic that he's complaining about getting a pre-overclocked processor.
Not really - if he was planning to overclock it to (say) 800, he will probably be annoyed to find he can't, as it has already been upped to reach 700, and without a cooling device (which probably means that in normal service it would have been more likely to fry than a "real" 700.....
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I sincerely hope they don't try imposing this on non-US citizens - I am damned if I am giving them MY credit card details just to keep ICQ...
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