Offshoring is NOT great for the overall economy. It's great for a certain (quite small) segment of the economy that makes it's living off of stock speculation and thats about it. Offshoring means that theres a whole assload of money pouring out of the US economy and going overseas. Outsourcing is the worst thing that can possible happen to a local economy - just ask anyone who used to work in the steel industry.
You're absolutely correct and this is a case where the market fails to take care of itself - and it's why we have protectionist policies in general. Keeping US workers employed makes the US economy stronger, and should be a goal. Since globalization pushes jobs to places with a lower cost of living (I should point out this happens within the US, too), we need incentives to keep jobs in the US.
_if_ Adobe really wants to do this, the proper (and obvious) way to implement it is to refuse to PRINT images of currency that don't comply with the legal restrictions. If it's illegal to simply image money (say, by taking a photo of it) thats fucking stupid and needs to be fixed. Producing (and especially distributing) fake currency obviously needs to be illegal.
High end Xerox copiers have this - they won't accurately reproduce the dot pattern/color scheme in US currency (I forget the exact details, I first read about this at least a couple years ago). There were some rumors about the copier watermarking "suspect" copies like currency as well. These were the very high end professional machines, like the kind used in print shops, not your regular office copiers.
Because those Vermontians (what the hell do you call people from Vermont?) are going to grow up and be part of the same country we're all part of. Education is a national issue, not a local one. One of the reason that the federal government exists at all is to ensure that the US ISN'T just a loosely bound collection of feudal states.
Now, you can argue all you want that we SHOULD be a loosely bound collection of feudal states, and you might even have reasonable and convincing arguments for it, but as long as we have a federal government, we may as well have something for it to do.
iRiver is a huge player in the portable audio market - go to any computer store in the US and you'll probably find a selection of thier stuff. The iPod has more mind share, but that doesn't mean all the companies competing with Apple are fly-by-night nobodies.
As for creating "new categories of software"... well, when you get around to doing that let me know. Open source is largely driven by "This doesn't work for me, so I'll make something that does" feeling, and if you don't get that then you aren't really going to be able to judge it reasonably.
In my experience that's rarely true. For example, the Python compiler does barely any optimization when it generates bytecode, if it does any at all - recent versions did not. Interperted/VM languages are cost-effective now because of the low price of memory and CPU time, not because of magical optimizations. Sure, you can do some spiffy stuff with JIT, but it's a very rare win over compiled code. You can write 3d rendering engines in Java, if you need to - it's a hell of a lot slower than comparable C code would be, but it can be fast enough.
Thats a cool idea. You might want to take a look at gcc_xml (which I haven't had a chance to work with in depth yet), which patches GCC to output an XML representation of your code.
It's a good rant but it's not really very relevent - writing your app in python (at least in the way he describes) simply isn't plausible if you're writing an app for commercial or even mass distribution - you can't rely on an existing Python installation and if you've got to package one with your installer then theres hardly any more work to embed an interperter instead.
Thinking on the popular applications out there that I know of that embed Python, you wouldn't want to write ANY of them in Python. Blender? Temple of Elemental Evil?
And, of course, the rant just ignores the best reason of all - if you don't WANT to write your app in Python.
The problem I've been having is that I mainly write in C++, and all the scripting languages I'm aware of only have the ability to call C interfaces, even the object oriented ones. Shouldn't it be possible to implement an interface to the C++ ABI so you can (semi-) directly map scripted objects to C++ ones without the annoyance and overhead of flattening to C (via SWIG or whatever)?
You're making the fundamental mistake of assuming that a corporation deserves protection as an entity, rather than the individuals who make it up. When _I_ talk about the law protection the people, I mean REAL people, not virtual ones.
It's not a "patch", its an IE helper object using IEs COM interface.
It's also a really crappy implementation thats full of it's own security and coding issues - it's cool that they did it and all but I kinda wish that they'd spent some more time checking the code, because this is exactly the sort of shit that MS is talking about when it brings up it's FUD about "it takes a long time because we have to test the patches".
Except that, in fact, it's not any of those OTHER options either. No, nobody besides the author is permitted to distribute the patch code (RTFLicense). The GPL not applying has nothing to do with it being a IE COM help object, the GPL doesn't apply because the code isn't under the GPL. Simple as that.
Notice the total lack of sanity checking on the lengths of those buffers... This is especially bad because surl is a stack based buffer and theres no reason whatsoever to not use strncat() in this case.
It actually changes faked URLS to a url pointing at thier home page - this page may simply do a redirect or it might be an alert page letting the user know that they were about to be spoofed (probably the latter). It's not really "phoning home" per se, but the certainly could (and probably do) track traffic to that page to try to analyze the use of this exploit.
That said, I'm not real impressed with this "patch" - theres alot of use of c-style string work in a C++ file, which is silly, and more than that it's not even safe use of c-strings - the file concatenation of the URL together involves just using strcat() (not even strncat()) without any sort of length or sanity checking on the buffer.
Sadly, the US won't permit the creation of that kind of tribunal (because it won't give US soldiers blanket immunity), so we'll probably just try him in US court, like we do with all foreign leaders that piss us off.
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Offshoring is NOT great for the overall economy. It's great for a certain (quite small) segment of the economy that makes it's living off of stock speculation and thats about it. Offshoring means that theres a whole assload of money pouring out of the US economy and going overseas. Outsourcing is the worst thing that can possible happen to a local economy - just ask anyone who used to work in the steel industry.
You're absolutely correct and this is a case where the market fails to take care of itself - and it's why we have protectionist policies in general. Keeping US workers employed makes the US economy stronger, and should be a goal. Since globalization pushes jobs to places with a lower cost of living (I should point out this happens within the US, too), we need incentives to keep jobs in the US.
_if_ Adobe really wants to do this, the proper (and obvious) way to implement it is to refuse to PRINT images of currency that don't comply with the legal restrictions. If it's illegal to simply image money (say, by taking a photo of it) thats fucking stupid and needs to be fixed. Producing (and especially distributing) fake currency obviously needs to be illegal.
High end Xerox copiers have this - they won't accurately reproduce the dot pattern/color scheme in US currency (I forget the exact details, I first read about this at least a couple years ago). There were some rumors about the copier watermarking "suspect" copies like currency as well. These were the very high end professional machines, like the kind used in print shops, not your regular office copiers.
Now, I'll need a nice short catchy name for it... oh! I know! I'll call it a heap!
Now, you can argue all you want that we SHOULD be a loosely bound collection of feudal states, and you might even have reasonable and convincing arguments for it, but as long as we have a federal government, we may as well have something for it to do.
As for creating "new categories of software"... well, when you get around to doing that let me know. Open source is largely driven by "This doesn't work for me, so I'll make something that does" feeling, and if you don't get that then you aren't really going to be able to judge it reasonably.
Ars Technica has one also - less technical than the Intel paper but very accessible and with pretty colored diagrams.
In my experience that's rarely true. For example, the Python compiler does barely any optimization when it generates bytecode, if it does any at all - recent versions did not. Interperted/VM languages are cost-effective now because of the low price of memory and CPU time, not because of magical optimizations. Sure, you can do some spiffy stuff with JIT, but it's a very rare win over compiled code. You can write 3d rendering engines in Java, if you need to - it's a hell of a lot slower than comparable C code would be, but it can be fast enough.
Go read more (groklaw is a good place to start), because you're both uninformed and wrong.
For an open source alternative, look at Delphi Web Script
Thats a cool idea. You might want to take a look at gcc_xml (which I haven't had a chance to work with in depth yet), which patches GCC to output an XML representation of your code.
Thinking on the popular applications out there that I know of that embed Python, you wouldn't want to write ANY of them in Python. Blender? Temple of Elemental Evil?
And, of course, the rant just ignores the best reason of all - if you don't WANT to write your app in Python.
The problem I've been having is that I mainly write in C++, and all the scripting languages I'm aware of only have the ability to call C interfaces, even the object oriented ones. Shouldn't it be possible to implement an interface to the C++ ABI so you can (semi-) directly map scripted objects to C++ ones without the annoyance and overhead of flattening to C (via SWIG or whatever)?
You're making the fundamental mistake of assuming that a corporation deserves protection as an entity, rather than the individuals who make it up. When _I_ talk about the law protection the people, I mean REAL people, not virtual ones.
You know what the word niggardly means, right? Hint: it has nothing to do with black people.
It's also a really crappy implementation thats full of it's own security and coding issues - it's cool that they did it and all but I kinda wish that they'd spent some more time checking the code, because this is exactly the sort of shit that MS is talking about when it brings up it's FUD about "it takes a long time because we have to test the patches".
Except that, in fact, it's not any of those OTHER options either. No, nobody besides the author is permitted to distribute the patch code (RTFLicense). The GPL not applying has nothing to do with it being a IE COM help object, the GPL doesn't apply because the code isn't under the GPL. Simple as that.
Notice the total lack of sanity checking on the lengths of those buffers... This is especially bad because surl is a stack based buffer and theres no reason whatsoever to not use strncat() in this case.
That said, I'm not real impressed with this "patch" - theres alot of use of c-style string work in a C++ file, which is silly, and more than that it's not even safe use of c-strings - the file concatenation of the URL together involves just using strcat() (not even strncat()) without any sort of length or sanity checking on the buffer.
SATA has alot of benefits besides the increased bus speed (which, as you infer, is not a very big deal).
Sadly, the US won't permit the creation of that kind of tribunal (because it won't give US soldiers blanket immunity), so we'll probably just try him in US court, like we do with all foreign leaders that piss us off.
Or the mindless rightwing drivel, for that matter. People should just shamelessly linkwhore, like me.
Thats not what the (rather hysterical) article implies, but if its true you can already trivially bypass this in later versions of Daemon tools.
It's not within the EULAs power to prevent you from making backup copies, especially if you make them before you install it.