Unfortunately, this is the DotGNU team spreading their FUD again - they hate Mono and have been trying to kill it for ages.
The truth of the matter is the situation is reversed. Mono was written from published specifications, whereas DotGNU's Portable.NET was written after reverse engieneering parts of Microsoft's.NET Framework.
Who's on the shakey foundation now? The DotGNU people are just asses. Miguel de Icaza has done more good for Free Software than they ever will.
The CLR doesn't support templates, but C++.NET does - they're just exactly like normal C++ templates, completely static and implemented at compile time.
What the CLR doesn't support are more advanced runtime generics semantics (although this can be emulated somewhat, just not as efficiently). That's slated for a future version.
Yes, when they are really all the same language. The language support in.NET is really just marketing spin.
Better not tell the Eiffel# guys that!
You may be very enthusiastic, now, but you will become wiser in time. Underlying the different.NET implementations will be all the same platform-dependent crap that never went away. Do you really really think that something that works one way under Linux will really truly work identically under Windows?
If WINE is possible, then a clean implementation designed to be portable certainly is.
Actually, you can buy Microsoft servers (based on Windows 2000 Datacenter) that are gauranteed to be 99.999% reliable. HPaq, Dell, Motorolla, Unisys and Stratus sell 'em.
Well, you've got two academics on that ARB, including Mike McCool, who, if I remember correctly, is a Linux hack. I highly doubt Linux is his primary interest, but I wouldn't be surprised if the viability of Linux OpenGL implementations had no bearing on how he votes.
Re:denying the statistics, preaching to the choir
on
Will Earth Expire By 2050?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, as things stand right now, when we run out of oil, expect modern life as we know it to end. And I don't care how much power you can generate using wind, solar, nuclear, etc... the simple fact of the matter is that petroleum based products are pervasive in our society. Without oil, you can kiss goodbye to plastics, and most of the chemical production industry.
We don't have the ability to synthesise these long-chain organic compounds efficiently yet.
If I wanted to write a virus to hit a lot of Linux systems, I'd have it infect shell scripts, make files and executables, and would have two running modes.
In user mode, it is running as an unpriviledged user. It searches for configure scripts and make files to infect. The infected configure script/make file modifies the output binary of the build so it is infected with the virus immediately. How many of you check your configure scripts when you./configure; make; sudo make install? How many would even be able to tell what an infected configure script looked like. The moment the infected configure script/make file/binary is run as root, it switches to root mode...
Root mode. Infect every binary on the system. In fect the kernel. Infect the init scripts.
What about those people who only ever install packages from say, red hat, or debian? Well, as soon as red hat or debian ship a piece of software developed by someone infected with the virus, bam, the entire distro is infected.
This is all adided by the complexity of Linux development, the distribution model, and the fact that an extraordinary number of Linux users are under the mistaken impression that Linux's security model will protect them. There are too many user-created holes in security models, and there is a very poor trust mechanism. It's just waiting to be exploited. No Linux user expects to get hit by a virus, so it would take much, much longer to be detected than a Window virus.
Security is a good thing. A false impression of security is a bad thing.
NT has a much more advanced (and better) security model than Linux. But it doesn't do much good when people happily login to their computers using administrator accounts because some dumbass program wants administrator privileges.
A number of your ideas are bad ones, from Microsoft's perspective, here's why:
1. IIS
Replacing IIS with Apache is bad for two reasons, the first, technical reason is that Apache uses a very UNIX-centric I/O model (although Apache 2.0 has changed this a bit), which performs very badly under NT. It is very easy to demonstrate that Apache running under NT is very slow compared to IIS running on the same box. Apache is optimized for UNIX, IIS is optimized for NT.
The other reason is a total loss management reason: if MS was to start using Apache, they no longer have control over their webserver to a certain extent.
2. SQL Server
You don't use SQL as your database because it's easy to use. If that's why you're using SQL, you shouldn't be, since an SQL RDBMS is not the best solution for your problem. As for using PostgreSQL? MS has some of the best relational database researchers in the world working for them (if you don't believe me, take a look at research.microsoft.com), and SQL Server is a very good product. Why would they want to throw it away and switch to selling an inferior system which you can download for free anyway? Sure they wouldn't have to spend R&D money on the database, but they loose the associated benefits of the expenditure. They may as well just stop developing SQL Server and keep what they've got.
3. Access back-end
How many people using this care that much?
4. Outlook Express
Why would MS want OE showing up on other platforms? They're not trying to attract customers, they're trying to keep them. Hello, does 95% market share mean anything?
5. NetMeeting
Same argument as with OE. But NetMeeting does use a lot of open protocols.
6. MSN Messenger
Again, same as with OE. They're trying to keep people, not make it easier for them to leave.
I can't see how there could be many advantages to Microsoft by going open source. They're already the most profitable company in history, so they seem to be doing quite okay without it.
This is complete speculation, but compare a martian bacteria to an earth bacteria. It's probably highly optimized to survive the harsh martian climate, and not much used to competition.
On the other hand, organisms on earth are quite used to potentially hostile bacteria, and are quite good at defending themselves. I don't believe for one second a martian bacteria would survive more than 5 minutes against my immune system.
If you think/. and CNN are providing you with good information, I don't think I'd call you enlightened. I'd call you gullible; not as gullible as those who believe the national enquirer and the sun, but gullible nonetheless.
Given Lucas' reaction to most fan stuff (for example, the Phantom Edit), I think he would honestly like to see the fan stuff... but his legal advice thinks it's a very bad idea, and he's willing to go along with their judgement. His lawyers are probably right, too.
Beyond simple trademark dilution, Lucas puts himself at risk for copyright infringement suits since he is actively producing more movies in the same series. If Lucas sees one of these movies, then he risks the creator of the movie suing him for copyright infringement when he releases Episode 3, a long and possibly quite costly lawsuit. A lawsuit with base and no purpose other than to extort money from Lucas.
Does this happen? Well, I haven't heard of it happening in the movie biz, but most filmmakers are rarely in a position like this. In the music industry it does happen, quite a lot, to the point where one of the first things any professional musician (particularly successfull ones) learns is if someone hands you a demo tape, you hand it right back to them on the spot! It means nothing about the musician's opinion of you, or your music if he or she does this to you - it is simply an important legal defence in this age where you find unscrupulous people who will abuse the courts for their own personal gain, at the expense of others.
Just another situation where our litigous culture and the unscruplous few(?) screw things over for everybody.
I will agree, cell phone networks in North America suck compared to networks in Europe. But the uniform coverage trick doesn't actually apply to the UK.
There are several primary network operators in the UK (BT Wireless, now mm02, Orange, Vodaphone and One2One... and some others I think) who run their own seperate networks of towers, and then smaller providers which rent access of these networks (Virgin used to use One2One's network, I think).
But they are quite distinct networks, and they don't share towers. Even though, in theory, an mmO2 phone could use an Orange tower for full connectivity, it won't since there's no agreement between the companies to provide this service. I know lots of places where one provider's (for example, Orange) subscribers will have great reception and another's (for example, One2One), will have crappy reception.
Microsoft doesn't really want to build X-Boxes. I just can't see Bill Gates and Steve Balmer getting excited over a beige box. Anyway, it's just not very profitable.
Microsoft is interested in producing consumer hardware, but only to establish these devices as new platforms for them to sell software on. In this respect, they're simply interested in creating a market for new products. They also know what they're good at, and what they're not. Microsoft isn't a hardware company, they're not particularly good at building hardware, and they don't want to build hardware. Why are they carrying the X-Box, then? Simple business: they loose money on each X-Box sold to keep them competetive with PS2s and Game Cubes, but while Microsoft is willing to carry this loss for the promise of large future profits for them, it's much harder to convince independent hardware manafacturers to carry a loss for Microsoft's future profits.
I mean, hell, their original plan was to release a reference design for the "HomeStation" sometime later this year as a device that encapsulated functionality of both UltimateTV and XBoxes, and to let the hardware manafacturers produce these devices, just like you see now with PocketPCs.
So this is just a very low-powered ad hoc wireless network, then. *yawn*
They're talking about creating them to power themselves from their environment, and give examples of generating power from vibrations, or from small solar cells... which makes me wonder whether it would be possible to create picoreadio devices which power themselves from the ambient radiowaves. I know some British scientist built a radio which is entirely self-powered in this way, and it seems to me to be a great way of powering things like these (if their power requirement is low enough). Anyway...
For those who don't know, an ad hoc wireless network is a wireless network like IEEE 802.11, but entirely self configurating, etc... etc... They're pretty neat things, but there aren't any real implementations outside of the US military, so these guys will really have a first if they get picoradio done soon.
They're based on such great acronym^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprotocols such as ZRP (Zone Routing Procol) or DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector) and DSR (Dynamic Source Routing).
There is currently an IETF working group (MANET) trying to develop some standards, but there's a lot of research to be done first, so it could be a while before you see anything. Once they do put something out in a few years time, it'll kick IEEE 802.11's ass. =)
If you want more info on adhoc networks, you can look at MANET's 'official' webpage
here. That page is pretty useless though, so you should look at their unofficial website
here. It has links to a lot of great resources.
They're called ad-hoc wireless networks and the military is fully aware of their potential - both systems for maintaining reliable communications on a rapidly changing battlefield, and also the potential to drop thousands of small sensors from planes, etc... They first started looking into them in the early '70s, just after the development of the first wired packet-switching networks.
In 1972 DARPA (the same people that brought you ARPANet, which later grew into the Internet as we know it) created a research project into a packet radio network, a.k.a. PRNet. They didn't get it working until around 1980, but in the end it did work, and was pretty fast too.
The research was eventualy taken by the Army, Navy and Air Force who all started working on ad-hoc wireless networks tailored for their particular needs (for example, while the Army is mostly interested in fairly short-range applications, which this would be useful for, the Navy and Air Force are interested in algorithms to create reliable connectivity between ships, aircraft and ground stations that are below the horizon from each other through networks of satellites and aircraft).
Current US military implementations of ad-hoc wireless networks that I'm aware of are the US Army TF XXI's Tactical Internet, the US Navy's ELB (Extending the Littoral Battlespace) ACTD (Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration) and DARPA's GloMo (Global Mobile) Information Systems program. These are all, for the most part, a bit more high-powered and high-speed than the system these guys are working on.
In the public world, the IETF MANET working group are also trying to create a standard for ad-hoc wireless networking, but like the military implementations these are also a bit higher-end than picoradio. But if you're looking for something to wipe the floor with IEEE 802.11, IETF MANET is what to watch - but be prepared to wait a little while.
The security vulnerability is due to zlib trying to free the same section of memory twice. The glibc memory allocation routines aren't very smart, and will cause heap corruption if you try to do this. This heap corruption can be exploited.
The Microsoft runtime libraries have smarter memory allocation and deallocation - attempting to free the same area of memory twice does not result in heap corruption. Consequently the zlib bug isn't a security vulnerability in Windows.
There's a paper called Protecting Mobile Agents against Malicious Hosts by Tomas Sander and Christian F. Tschudin, which demonstrates it's possible to write a program which can compute a digital signature or other various functions in such a way that it's impossible for the host to hijack the process, i.e., it's cryptographically hard to reverse engineer the program to extract the public key being used, or the function being computed (This paper has been used for various purposes, including proving that it's theoreticaly possible to write computer viruses which have signatures which are impossible to detect).
These papers aren't contradictory, there are important differences between the results.
Ultimately, one paper demonstrates a certain type or program (which would be usefull in implementing a DRM scheme) is impossible, the other paper demonstrates another similar type program (which would also be usefull in implementing DRM schemes) is possible (and demonstrates how to create such a program, and gives a non-trivial example).
Is this the theoretical end of all DRM as the poster is suggesting? Not yet.
Piro misses the real reason as to why.com failed and why they're going to continue to have a rough time. Want the real answer? Ask an economist, the good ones were warning people at the start - they just chose not to listen.
There's two arguments as to why.com's should be successfull:
Lower costs
A larger customer base
As everyone knows now (at least, everyone should know by now), both of these arguments are flawed. As such.com greats as etoys.com discovered, when conducting business on a website, the website isn't the overriding expense. Amazon is now making money, and it really has little to do with saving some money hear and there on their network operations, they're making money because they streamlined their warehousing operations.
What about a larger customer base though? All the internet does is make it easier to trade - making it easier to trade doesn't mean you'll make more money, it means you'll get more and vigourous competition. Sure, people are resistant to paying for something they used to get for free, or at least for less, the car manafacturers have known this for years, but ultimately the problem is that for most of these services, it's so easy to enter the market that there's too much competition for anybody to make money, no one can run fast enough to keep ahead of everyone else. Sure, there are some highly innovative companies who can (for example, Google), but for the most part this is true.
Will.com's make money in the future? Sure, Amazon.com is making money, so is Google, so are a few others. Will e-retailing ever, as a whole, make the kind of money that was promised? No, it's just simple economics, the kind we were told for years and happily ignored because the economists just 'didn't get it.' So who did history prove to be the idiots who 'didn't get it'?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, WRONG. Both the language and the platform are standards.
The C# standard is ECMA-334 aand the platform is ECMA-335.
You should check your facts before spouting off in bold.
Unfortunately, this is the DotGNU team spreading their FUD again - they hate Mono and have been trying to kill it for ages.
The truth of the matter is the situation is reversed. Mono was written from published specifications, whereas DotGNU's Portable.NET was written after reverse engieneering parts of Microsoft's .NET Framework.
Who's on the shakey foundation now? The DotGNU people are just asses. Miguel de Icaza has done more good for Free Software than they ever will.
The CLR doesn't support templates, but C++.NET does - they're just exactly like normal C++ templates, completely static and implemented at compile time.
What the CLR doesn't support are more advanced runtime generics semantics (although this can be emulated somewhat, just not as efficiently). That's slated for a future version.
Yes, when they are really all the same language. The language support in .NET is really just marketing spin.
Better not tell the Eiffel# guys that!
You may be very enthusiastic, now, but you will become wiser in time. Underlying the different .NET implementations will be all the same platform-dependent crap that never went away. Do you really really think that something that works one way under Linux will really truly work identically under Windows?
If WINE is possible, then a clean implementation designed to be portable certainly is.
See subject. The author makes a very, very good point.
Take a look
Well, you've got two academics on that ARB, including Mike McCool, who, if I remember correctly, is a Linux hack. I highly doubt Linux is his primary interest, but I wouldn't be surprised if the viability of Linux OpenGL implementations had no bearing on how he votes.
Actually, as things stand right now, when we run out of oil, expect modern life as we know it to end. And I don't care how much power you can generate using wind, solar, nuclear, etc... the simple fact of the matter is that petroleum based products are pervasive in our society. Without oil, you can kiss goodbye to plastics, and most of the chemical production industry. We don't have the ability to synthesise these long-chain organic compounds efficiently yet.
In user mode, it is running as an unpriviledged user. It searches for configure scripts and make files to infect. The infected configure script/make file modifies the output binary of the build so it is infected with the virus immediately. How many of you check your configure scripts when you ./configure; make; sudo make install? How many would even be able to tell what an infected configure script looked like. The moment the infected configure script/make file/binary is run as root, it switches to root mode...
Root mode. Infect every binary on the system. In fect the kernel. Infect the init scripts.
What about those people who only ever install packages from say, red hat, or debian? Well, as soon as red hat or debian ship a piece of software developed by someone infected with the virus, bam, the entire distro is infected.
This is all adided by the complexity of Linux development, the distribution model, and the fact that an extraordinary number of Linux users are under the mistaken impression that Linux's security model will protect them. There are too many user-created holes in security models, and there is a very poor trust mechanism. It's just waiting to be exploited. No Linux user expects to get hit by a virus, so it would take much, much longer to be detected than a Window virus.
Security is a good thing. A false impression of security is a bad thing.
NT has a much more advanced (and better) security model than Linux. But it doesn't do much good when people happily login to their computers using administrator accounts because some dumbass program wants administrator privileges.
1. IIS
Replacing IIS with Apache is bad for two reasons, the first, technical reason is that Apache uses a very UNIX-centric I/O model (although Apache 2.0 has changed this a bit), which performs very badly under NT. It is very easy to demonstrate that Apache running under NT is very slow compared to IIS running on the same box. Apache is optimized for UNIX, IIS is optimized for NT.
The other reason is a total loss management reason: if MS was to start using Apache, they no longer have control over their webserver to a certain extent.
2. SQL Server
You don't use SQL as your database because it's easy to use. If that's why you're using SQL, you shouldn't be, since an SQL RDBMS is not the best solution for your problem. As for using PostgreSQL? MS has some of the best relational database researchers in the world working for them (if you don't believe me, take a look at research.microsoft.com), and SQL Server is a very good product. Why would they want to throw it away and switch to selling an inferior system which you can download for free anyway? Sure they wouldn't have to spend R&D money on the database, but they loose the associated benefits of the expenditure. They may as well just stop developing SQL Server and keep what they've got.
3. Access back-end
How many people using this care that much?
4. Outlook Express
Why would MS want OE showing up on other platforms? They're not trying to attract customers, they're trying to keep them. Hello, does 95% market share mean anything?
5. NetMeeting
Same argument as with OE. But NetMeeting does use a lot of open protocols.
6. MSN Messenger
Again, same as with OE. They're trying to keep people, not make it easier for them to leave.
I can't see how there could be many advantages to Microsoft by going open source. They're already the most profitable company in history, so they seem to be doing quite okay without it.
Next time you buy an intel server, try getting one with an actual server motherboard in it.
Whoops?
Don't believe me? look at the definitions for yourself.
...is better 8)
Incandescents flicker, but at something closer to 60,000hz, instead of 60hz. 60khz is far to fast to have any affect on the human eye.
This is complete speculation, but compare a martian bacteria to an earth bacteria. It's probably highly optimized to survive the harsh martian climate, and not much used to competition.
On the other hand, organisms on earth are quite used to potentially hostile bacteria, and are quite good at defending themselves. I don't believe for one second a martian bacteria would survive more than 5 minutes against my immune system.
If you think /. and CNN are providing you with good information, I don't think I'd call you enlightened. I'd call you gullible; not as gullible as those who believe the national enquirer and the sun, but gullible nonetheless.
Beyond simple trademark dilution, Lucas puts himself at risk for copyright infringement suits since he is actively producing more movies in the same series. If Lucas sees one of these movies, then he risks the creator of the movie suing him for copyright infringement when he releases Episode 3, a long and possibly quite costly lawsuit. A lawsuit with base and no purpose other than to extort money from Lucas.
Does this happen? Well, I haven't heard of it happening in the movie biz, but most filmmakers are rarely in a position like this. In the music industry it does happen, quite a lot, to the point where one of the first things any professional musician (particularly successfull ones) learns is if someone hands you a demo tape, you hand it right back to them on the spot! It means nothing about the musician's opinion of you, or your music if he or she does this to you - it is simply an important legal defence in this age where you find unscrupulous people who will abuse the courts for their own personal gain, at the expense of others.
Just another situation where our litigous culture and the unscruplous few(?) screw things over for everybody.
C'est la vie.
There are several primary network operators in the UK (BT Wireless, now mm02, Orange, Vodaphone and One2One ... and some others I think) who run their own seperate networks of towers, and then smaller providers which rent access of these networks (Virgin used to use One2One's network, I think).
But they are quite distinct networks, and they don't share towers. Even though, in theory, an mmO2 phone could use an Orange tower for full connectivity, it won't since there's no agreement between the companies to provide this service. I know lots of places where one provider's (for example, Orange) subscribers will have great reception and another's (for example, One2One), will have crappy reception.
Microsoft is interested in producing consumer hardware, but only to establish these devices as new platforms for them to sell software on. In this respect, they're simply interested in creating a market for new products. They also know what they're good at, and what they're not. Microsoft isn't a hardware company, they're not particularly good at building hardware, and they don't want to build hardware. Why are they carrying the X-Box, then? Simple business: they loose money on each X-Box sold to keep them competetive with PS2s and Game Cubes, but while Microsoft is willing to carry this loss for the promise of large future profits for them, it's much harder to convince independent hardware manafacturers to carry a loss for Microsoft's future profits.
I mean, hell, their original plan was to release a reference design for the "HomeStation" sometime later this year as a device that encapsulated functionality of both UltimateTV and XBoxes, and to let the hardware manafacturers produce these devices, just like you see now with PocketPCs.
So this is just a very low-powered ad hoc wireless network, then. *yawn*
They're talking about creating them to power themselves from their environment, and give examples of generating power from vibrations, or from small solar cells... which makes me wonder whether it would be possible to create picoreadio devices which power themselves from the ambient radiowaves. I know some British scientist built a radio which is entirely self-powered in this way, and it seems to me to be a great way of powering things like these (if their power requirement is low enough). Anyway...
For those who don't know, an ad hoc wireless network is a wireless network like IEEE 802.11, but entirely self configurating, etc... etc... They're pretty neat things, but there aren't any real implementations outside of the US military, so these guys will really have a first if they get picoradio done soon. They're based on such great acronym^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hprotocols such as ZRP (Zone Routing Procol) or DSDV (Destination Sequenced Distance Vector) and DSR (Dynamic Source Routing).
There is currently an IETF working group (MANET) trying to develop some standards, but there's a lot of research to be done first, so it could be a while before you see anything. Once they do put something out in a few years time, it'll kick IEEE 802.11's ass. =)
If you want more info on adhoc networks, you can look at MANET's 'official' webpage here. That page is pretty useless though, so you should look at their unofficial website here. It has links to a lot of great resources.
Ad hoc wireless networks are cool.
They're called ad-hoc wireless networks and the military is fully aware of their potential - both systems for maintaining reliable communications on a rapidly changing battlefield, and also the potential to drop thousands of small sensors from planes, etc... They first started looking into them in the early '70s, just after the development of the first wired packet-switching networks.
In 1972 DARPA (the same people that brought you ARPANet, which later grew into the Internet as we know it) created a research project into a packet radio network, a.k.a. PRNet. They didn't get it working until around 1980, but in the end it did work, and was pretty fast too.
The research was eventualy taken by the Army, Navy and Air Force who all started working on ad-hoc wireless networks tailored for their particular needs (for example, while the Army is mostly interested in fairly short-range applications, which this would be useful for, the Navy and Air Force are interested in algorithms to create reliable connectivity between ships, aircraft and ground stations that are below the horizon from each other through networks of satellites and aircraft).
Current US military implementations of ad-hoc wireless networks that I'm aware of are the US Army TF XXI's Tactical Internet, the US Navy's ELB (Extending the Littoral Battlespace) ACTD (Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration) and DARPA's GloMo (Global Mobile) Information Systems program. These are all, for the most part, a bit more high-powered and high-speed than the system these guys are working on.
In the public world, the IETF MANET working group are also trying to create a standard for ad-hoc wireless networking, but like the military implementations these are also a bit higher-end than picoradio. But if you're looking for something to wipe the floor with IEEE 802.11, IETF MANET is what to watch - but be prepared to wait a little while.
The security vulnerability is due to zlib trying to free the same section of memory twice. The glibc memory allocation routines aren't very smart, and will cause heap corruption if you try to do this. This heap corruption can be exploited.
The Microsoft runtime libraries have smarter memory allocation and deallocation - attempting to free the same area of memory twice does not result in heap corruption. Consequently the zlib bug isn't a security vulnerability in Windows.
There's a paper called Protecting Mobile Agents against Malicious Hosts by Tomas Sander and Christian F. Tschudin, which demonstrates it's possible to write a program which can compute a digital signature or other various functions in such a way that it's impossible for the host to hijack the process, i.e., it's cryptographically hard to reverse engineer the program to extract the public key being used, or the function being computed (This paper has been used for various purposes, including proving that it's theoreticaly possible to write computer viruses which have signatures which are impossible to detect).
These papers aren't contradictory, there are important differences between the results.
Ultimately, one paper demonstrates a certain type or program (which would be usefull in implementing a DRM scheme) is impossible, the other paper demonstrates another similar type program (which would also be usefull in implementing DRM schemes) is possible (and demonstrates how to create such a program, and gives a non-trivial example).
Is this the theoretical end of all DRM as the poster is suggesting? Not yet.
There's two arguments as to why
As everyone knows now (at least, everyone should know by now), both of these arguments are flawed. As such
What about a larger customer base though? All the internet does is make it easier to trade - making it easier to trade doesn't mean you'll make more money, it means you'll get more and vigourous competition. Sure, people are resistant to paying for something they used to get for free, or at least for less, the car manafacturers have known this for years, but ultimately the problem is that for most of these services, it's so easy to enter the market that there's too much competition for anybody to make money, no one can run fast enough to keep ahead of everyone else. Sure, there are some highly innovative companies who can (for example, Google), but for the most part this is true.
Will