Obviously you've never worked on a very advanced project. You can document everything you've done to the hilt, but that won't help your successor solve the next problem, the one you haven't encountered. That takes skill and experience.
See, this is what happens when you don't continue to spend money on extremely advanced engineering projects: you lose the technology. Technology isn't just a textbook and some blueprints, it requires the experience and knowledge of scientists and engineers. It's a living thing: shelve it, and it dies.
It would be nice to think this would serve as an abject lesson to congresscritters, next time they think about cutting funding for something 'we don't need right now.' Although I'm cynical enough not to believe that.
No, Apple vs. Psystar is much clearer. By default you are allowed to modify software you have bought, but you aren't allowed to resell the derivative work without permission. Psystar is reselling a modified copy of OS X, in violation of copyright law (regardless of what Apple's EULAs say).
How much attention does this contest actually get? While there are lots of upstanding people who will participate, I would be surprised if there weren't quite a few talented individuals who will not be participating.
I mean, if you're a blackhat, an exploit for any of these targets is worth a lot more than a laptop or a mobile phone.
I wouldn't say their R&D budget goes into patents and lawyers. In the actual academic world, Microsoft Research is a very common institution to see on papers. They employ a lot of smart people who are coming up with a lot of good and useful ideas.
But there does seem to be a disconnect. Very little seems to crossover from their research people to the development teams.
NASA can design, test and man-rate a launch system in three years? You must be joking.
Whatever the theoretical advantages of DIRECT, in practice Ares has years of design and testing already. They've already got real working hardware for many of the major components.
Well, it seems to me like they did. There are effectively three versions:
Home Premium Professional Enterprise/Ultimate
Unlike Vista, each of these is a superset of the one below. It's not like that dumb licensing decision where Vista Business and Vista Home Premium have different sets of features. Enterprise and Ultimate are the same, except one is Volume licensed, the other Retail. Starter and Home Basic are primarily for 'emerging markets'.
Yes, because if you don't run Synergy as an administrator it's running at a lower integrity level than administrator apps. Vista enforces integrity level isolation and prevents lower integrity level software from fiddling with higher integrity.
What's pretty cool is it runs IE in an even lower integrity level than usual, so if your browser gets hijacked it can't do anything other than write to its own temp directory.
You could create non-admin user accounts in XP Home, you just couldn't customize access permissions beyond 'private' and 'non private' for your personal files.
XP and Vista Starter edition were cut-price, limited versions for developing markets, to combat piracy. I've seen no evidence that Microsoft plans on making Starter a netbook version- that would be a bizzare branding change.
How does using an API make your software a derived work? By that logic every program that runs on Windows is a derived work, since you're using Microsoft's API.
Does Microsoft get to dictate your license because your software runs on Windows?
Does this mean they want to force all plugins to use the GPL? How is that possible? I was under the impression that the GPL is purely a distribution license. It comes into force when you distribute software licensed under it, and requires you to distribute (or make available) source code and other things.
If I write a plugin and do not distribute it with GCC, what legal basis do they have to force me to GPL it? Nothing I distribute is copyrighted by the FSF, and so how can their distribution license apply to my code? I'm confused.
Maybe you don't have long waiting lines in Toronto and Montreal. But when my dad lost his vision it took four weeks until he could see his neurologist. When my sister developed a RSI it took her six months to see a specialist, and ended her music performance career.
So you can take your 'waiting lines are just a myth' and shove it.
As a HPC developer, there's a few areas where XP falls down. With the release of the new Core i7 line from Intel, the end of the FSB is in sight. Both Intel and AMD now use a ccNUMA memory architecture, which has tremendous implications on software design. In short, if your software isn't aware of the system's memory topology, you're going to end up with most of your memory traffic going over the processor interconnects and that's a substantial performance hit over going directly to memory (2-4 times slower).
XP's NUMA support is very weak. Sometimes the easiest solution is to write your own allocator (and preallocate huge chunks of ram).
And before somebody comes along and says 'no real HPC is done in Windows!' there are a lot of old, crusty engineering software packages that everybody is scared of porting.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you've never worked on a very advanced project. You can document everything you've done to the hilt, but that won't help your successor solve the next problem, the one you haven't encountered. That takes skill and experience.
See, this is what happens when you don't continue to spend money on extremely advanced engineering projects: you lose the technology. Technology isn't just a textbook and some blueprints, it requires the experience and knowledge of scientists and engineers. It's a living thing: shelve it, and it dies.
It would be nice to think this would serve as an abject lesson to congresscritters, next time they think about cutting funding for something 'we don't need right now.' Although I'm cynical enough not to believe that.
Because that's a pain in the ass and utterly unnecessary?
I just tried doing that and it doesn't work anymore. Unchecked kdawson on the editor list and yet his stories still appear to me. :(
No, Apple vs. Psystar is much clearer. By default you are allowed to modify software you have bought, but you aren't allowed to resell the derivative work without permission. Psystar is reselling a modified copy of OS X, in violation of copyright law (regardless of what Apple's EULAs say).
How much attention does this contest actually get? While there are lots of upstanding people who will participate, I would be surprised if there weren't quite a few talented individuals who will not be participating.
I mean, if you're a blackhat, an exploit for any of these targets is worth a lot more than a laptop or a mobile phone.
But I thought OS X is inherently more secure, and the perceived security has nothing to do with it being a less tempting target than Windows.
Or at least, that's what everybody tells me...
Moonlight is developed by Novell, not Microsoft.
I wouldn't say their R&D budget goes into patents and lawyers. In the actual academic world, Microsoft Research is a very common institution to see on papers. They employ a lot of smart people who are coming up with a lot of good and useful ideas.
But there does seem to be a disconnect. Very little seems to crossover from their research people to the development teams.
Yes, because lawyers don't work in corporations, they work in firms. And these people are all senior partners.
NASA can design, test and man-rate a launch system in three years? You must be joking.
Whatever the theoretical advantages of DIRECT, in practice Ares has years of design and testing already. They've already got real working hardware for many of the major components.
Well, it seems to me like they did. There are effectively three versions:
Home Premium
Professional
Enterprise/Ultimate
Unlike Vista, each of these is a superset of the one below. It's not like that dumb licensing decision where Vista Business and Vista Home Premium have different sets of features. Enterprise and Ultimate are the same, except one is Volume licensed, the other Retail. Starter and Home Basic are primarily for 'emerging markets'.
Yes, because if you don't run Synergy as an administrator it's running at a lower integrity level than administrator apps. Vista enforces integrity level isolation and prevents lower integrity level software from fiddling with higher integrity.
What's pretty cool is it runs IE in an even lower integrity level than usual, so if your browser gets hijacked it can't do anything other than write to its own temp directory.
You could create non-admin user accounts in XP Home, you just couldn't customize access permissions beyond 'private' and 'non private' for your personal files.
Some do not. So what's your point?
Huh? UAC is not in XP Pro, and it is in Vista Home.
When was the last time you used Windows?
Where?
XP and Vista Starter edition were cut-price, limited versions for developing markets, to combat piracy. I've seen no evidence that Microsoft plans on making Starter a netbook version- that would be a bizzare branding change.
Intel's Atom processor is 32-bit only.
Clever, so it's not the license of the GCC they're using to enforce this rule, but rather the license of the standard libraries.
Of course, one could always replace those GPL'd libraries with non-GPL'd ones, but that's starting to increase the amount of work required.
How does using an API make your software a derived work? By that logic every program that runs on Windows is a derived work, since you're using Microsoft's API.
Does Microsoft get to dictate your license because your software runs on Windows?
And when 2K was release, /. was giddy over the leaked '24,000 bugs' memo. Everybody was talking about how it was yet another crappy OS from Microsoft.
Does this mean they want to force all plugins to use the GPL? How is that possible? I was under the impression that the GPL is purely a distribution license. It comes into force when you distribute software licensed under it, and requires you to distribute (or make available) source code and other things.
If I write a plugin and do not distribute it with GCC, what legal basis do they have to force me to GPL it? Nothing I distribute is copyrighted by the FSF, and so how can their distribution license apply to my code? I'm confused.
Well, except that disabling the click isn't copyright circumvention.
Maybe you don't have long waiting lines in Toronto and Montreal. But when my dad lost his vision it took four weeks until he could see his neurologist. When my sister developed a RSI it took her six months to see a specialist, and ended her music performance career.
So you can take your 'waiting lines are just a myth' and shove it.
As a HPC developer, there's a few areas where XP falls down. With the release of the new Core i7 line from Intel, the end of the FSB is in sight. Both Intel and AMD now use a ccNUMA memory architecture, which has tremendous implications on software design. In short, if your software isn't aware of the system's memory topology, you're going to end up with most of your memory traffic going over the processor interconnects and that's a substantial performance hit over going directly to memory (2-4 times slower).
XP's NUMA support is very weak. Sometimes the easiest solution is to write your own allocator (and preallocate huge chunks of ram).
And before somebody comes along and says 'no real HPC is done in Windows!' there are a lot of old, crusty engineering software packages that everybody is scared of porting.