Why is it that, when it's the Government's word versus some cracker's, everyone always wants to believe the cracker? Doesn't the Justice Department have a lot more to lose by lying about this?
We don't have to trust anyone--we can look at the facts. The software is out there.
And there are two issues anyway. First, is Sklyarov guilty under current law? Second, is current law (DMCA, etc.) just or was it created in response to undue influence of large media corporations on the political process?
And if we really think our own government is so evil, why are we still here?
In real life, to most people, a corrupt or lying government is not sufficient reason to leave as long as it isn't too bad and the economy is working. I have certainly lived in countries with much better government than the US has. And I know many people who have voluntarily stayed in countries with worse governments (including East Germany).
The legal proceedings were started by the AG. What Adobe did is throw their weight around to get the AG to file charges against Sklyarov. Nor did Adobe "withdraw" or change their mind--they merely sent out a nice-sounding press release after the damage was done and there was nothing else for them to do. And Adobe's press release restates their position on copyright and the DMCA. Adobe hasn't gotten any nicer.
This is basically volume-based pricing and it makes a lot of sense. People want high bandwidth and low latencies, and the provider's cost structure simply doesn't permit giving everybody unlimited usage.
However, with volume-based pricing, the provider should remove any additional restrictions ("business use", "servers", etc.). While before, arguably, people weren't paying their fair share, with volume-based pricing, you pay what you use, and there is no excuse for providers to divide their users into classes.
Sounds like a bad legal decision and it reflects poorly on Intel. But one thing to keep in mind: workplaces are all about politics. People who play their cards right seem to be able to get away with murder. People who hack and don't shmooze, on the other hand, are very vulnerable. If you are of the latter persuasion, do things completely by the book and get permission for anything even remotely out of the ordinary in writing.
I don't see the point of putting in special cables for computer networking. Between phonline networking, powerline networking, wireless networking, and 100Mbps optical networking, I can get pretty much all the connectivity I want. High-speed internet access comes in through cable, DSL, or fixed wireless in most places without any special "techie" allowances. Computers have gotten small and powerful enough that I don't need a separate room or closet anymore either. If you want to get equipment at night, move to a civilized area where electronics stores are open when you may need something.
You can install Ghostscript on the Windows machine to automate that process, so that you can print to any Windows printer as if it were Postscript-capable.
"Why would anybody care about Mono? It's going to use non-standard APIs on a little-used platform."
Little-used platform (.NET?)? This wont be true for much longer.
Mono will not implement.NET--it can't, because there won't be anything like a complete spec for.NET. The Mono authors have already said that they really just care about implementing something that is kind of like.NET, not something that is fully compatible.
Since when did Microsoft's non-standard API's ever stop WINE from at least trying to implement anything? I guess you're saying WINE is also useless, along with support for NTFS, SMB, etc etc. The list goes on.
Wine is largely useless: it runs few programs, and almost none of them reliably enough for daily use. Even IBM (with a lot more resources) didn't manage to create a Windows compatible system that was sufficiently useful to catch on. Linux support for NTFS was a herculean effort of reverse engineering, took years to do, and still isn't recommended for writing. SMB is only well documented because it didn't come from Microsoft originally, and Microsoft has been trying to break it ever since (viz their password shenanigans). Yes, the list goes on, and it shows how Microsoft has been trying to use proprietary standards to maintain a monopoly and keep compatible implementations from springing up.
I don't agree that OSX is particularly interesting for developers. The only distinctive aspect of it is its NeXTStep heritage. That was great for commercial applications a decade ago, but today, it is a rather aging approach to OOP and GUI programming.
C# is an IEEE standard as well as the CLR. When mono is successful no one is going to want to use your proprietary JVM anymore.
Well, first of all, AFAIK, C# is an ECMA standard, not IEEE. Now, I don't get your complaint. You say that there is a problem with Sun "dumping proprietary libraries" into the Java spec. But the Java language, JVM, and core libraries are as-well specified as C#/CLR, and they are stable. Beyond the core ECMA specs, Microsoft is completely proprietary, with NO free implementation at all and NO decent specs. And there is no guarantee that Microsoft will even stick to their spec--they will likely extend the hell out of what they submitted as a standard. Sun at least writes pretty good specs for what goes into new releases of the Java platform and they give you a free implementation.
When mono is successful no one is going to want to use your proprietary JVM anymore.
Why would anybody care about Mono? It's going to use non-standard APIs on a little-used platform.
2. *WIN* Open Source license the JVM. Yes... I know it is scarry but this is you ONLY choice. Java still has a lot of great momentum. (*cough* Jakarta *cough*)
That makes no sense either. Why do you care about open sourcing Sun's JDK? Implementing C#/CLR as part of Mono is at least as hard as implementing Java/JVM. Yet, you seem convinced that Mono will be successful. Well, if the Mono people can hack up C#/CLR, why does it matter whether Sun open sources Java/JVM? Why can't someone else just implement a high-performance Java/JVM? And what has Microsoft done for the open source community later? Ever?
Sun makes available a great implementation under usable license terms. If you want something open source, rather than whining and stomping your foot that they aren't giving you more, go implement your own. Sun has already given you more than Microsoft likely ever will.
And, in fact, the equivalent of C#/CLR/CLI already exists for Java in open source form in the form of several open source Java compilers, the Intel ORP, and open source libraries. If that functionality is what you or the Mono project are after, you could have had that years ago.
The author displays typical Microsoft thinking: if you just put in enough features and make it snazzy enough, everybody will want it. One size fits all. Etc.
The author is also wrong in assuming that many Linux developers care one bit about competing with OSX. Maybe the KDE and Gnome developers have that peculiar obsessions. Most others don't give a damn. Why should they?
It doesn't work that way. I don't care one bit about the features in OSX, and I'm not willing to live with the limited range of systems Apple is offering. I'm also not willing to deal with a bunch of Apple-proprietary APIs--why waste my time? And I'm not willing to pay a premium for style and features that I don't want to use. I'm not alone in that.
OSX is a nice system--for consumers. Use it. Be happy. Stop thinking, though, that everybody is all the same.
He has alot of good thing to say about software management and programming..
I disagree.
read and learn instead of getting caught in Microsoft bashing..
Instead of repeating what other people tell you, turn on your brain and think for yourself. Most of the programming and management advice that self-proclaimed software experts give you is junk.
"my first software released under GPL (November 1988) -- now the Slashdot kiddies have to shut up; I was writing GPLed software before they were born, bwa ha ha!"
That makes him pretty young and inexperienced in my book.
Sure you can: through the miracle of cryptography.
Look at how UNIX passwords work. (The only reason
we have shadow passwords is because people tend to
choose weak passwords and because the crypt algorithm
has gotten kind of weak, but neither of those are
problems for game keys.)
Looks like nice, clean, readable C code. It's
not all that large--175kloc. Memory management via
functions wrapping malloc, using some
kind of zone strategy. It's interesting
that there don't seem to be that many complex
data structures--that's probably why this code
can still be written reasonably nicely in C
with manual storage management.
This code looks very different from what CS courses teach
you or expensive OOP consultants recommend. It's kind
of reminiscent of the traditional UNIX code: very
concrete and just tries to get the job done.
I don't think the GPL would require you to share
media that are associated with the engine, since
the GPL only talks about source code and
linking. So, if you want to create a commercial game
that people can't distribute freely based on the Quake2
engine, you can probably even do that.
Let's be clear: If you write code in any language and the code sucks, it's your fault, not the language's -- the language is just a tool. Don't blame the problems of programmers on their tools.
There is no problem. Good programmers can produce good code in any language. However, even good programmers take longer to produce good code in some languages than in others. Perl is a language in which, in my experience, it takes a lot of time to create good code. Perl's strength is that producing quick one-of solutions is fast, which is also good, which isn't bad either.
Not too long ago a link was posted to an interview with Joel Spolsky who used to work at Microsoft.
Yes, so if you want to write code like Microsoft, you follow their principles. However, unless you have the legal team and monopoly position to go with it, that strategy will probably not work as well for you as it does for Microsoft.
Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
Well, he is right to the extent that if you use the same tools and the same skills, you are going to end up with the same mess. Given that Microsoft has been using the same primitive tools for the last decade, it's not surprising that rewriting doesn't work for them.
It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd.
Again, that's Microsoft-think. Sure, for Microsoft, things don't change unless they change them. For the rest of us, code does "rust", because the environment changes. And for the rest of us, there are new and useful tools and programming languages that we can use.
Yes, and with enough practice, people can walk the highwire or keep five balls in the air or throw knives blindfolded. But intrinsically, a system relying on preprinted input areas with no tactile feedback requires most people to look if they don't want to lose data. With Xerox's and similar methods, if you know the strokes, you can write without looking (which is why it's called "touch typing with a pen"); unlike Palm's system, those systems are designed for writing without looking.
Squid are among the most complex invertebrates while jellyfish are pretty much at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. Squid have brains, muscles, a digestive tract, and circulation. An animal can't fake having those things any more than a bicycle can fake having a motorcycle engine. Jellyfish don't even have a mesoderm. It's a lot easier for squid to adopt jellyfish-like hunting strategies than for jellyfish to become anything like a squid.
The irony is that Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing (first released in 1992), while showing you separate boxes for characters in input fields, was actually perfectly happy to let you write characters all in one place, as large as you liked, without looking at the screen. It even (somehow) managed to sort out multistroke characters, and it was trainable. And it wasn't a particularly good recognizer by any means, but in retrospect, was still better than Graffiti is today.
Take a look at this patent. It seems like Palm has been trying to patent any kind of handheld that uses a separate, dedicated input area for handwriting or tapping on a preprinted keyboard. Here is another one that claims methods involving separate input areas for different character types.
The Squeak people talk about another recognizer called "GRAIL" that seems to be quite similar in spirit and was done in the 1960's. You can find Alan Kay's analysis of the patent on Yahoo (Alan Kay is the inventor of the Dynabook and one of the original inventors of Smalltalk).
Palm's input method is actually somewhat different from Xerox's: it is considerably slower, it has some multi-stroke characters, and it requires you to look at the device. The specific Unistroke design in Xerox's input method is actually considerably nicer. Palm knew about the patent and thought that even if it was valid, it wouldn't apply to their input method. The other irony is that writing a simple, trainable multistroke character recognizer isn't hard at all, so Palm could have avoided this issue altogether.
Personally, I think a broad patent shouldn't have been granted, although a narrow patent on the particular Unistrokes alphabet might have been sensible. And I just don't see why Palm's method, which lacks just about all the nice features that Unistrokes have, would infringe. But people who get paid much more than you and me have been working long and hard on this, and that's the outcome.
These things apparently can move quite fast and in a coordinated way. That goes way beyond what jellyfish are capable of. A biologist looking at a moving video image would be very unlikely to confuse the two, and I suspect lots of expert marine biologists have looked at them.
It's not a zero-sum game. As Linux gains
marketshare and viruses, the total threat from
viruses will decrease because even a serious virus
on one platfrom will likely not affect the other.
Furthermore, the incentive to create viruses
will decrease as well.
Microsoft's argument is "any popular OS will
have viruses, so we might as well all run
Microsoft software". But what we really need
is a dozen substantially different operating
systems with equal market share. Then, viruses
will have virtually no chance of doing much damage.
As an aside, the term "Linux" itself stands for
many different distributions, often with largely
disjoint vulnerabilities, so several Linux
distributions could make it simultaneously in
the marketplace and still give people the benefit
of diversity. Microsoft actively aims for
standardization and a single code-base. In fact,
the term "Linux"
doesn't even really stand for a single OS, while,
with XP, "Windows" pretty much does.
Linux will not dominate the market, and I don't
think it should. But, on balance, I think we'd be
better off if shared the market equally with Windows
and if there were several other big players,
including some that actually innovate a bit.
If 100 million users are on-line in the US, that would translate into 250000 Linux users on the desktop in the US. I'm sorry, but I think there are more primary Linux users than that.
I suspect the numbers for Windows are inflated in a number of ways: browsers disguise themselves, browsers may deliberately not give out any OS information, Linux users use Windows machines (I'm typing this from a Windows machine right now, not because I like the desktop or use it primarily but because Microsoft's monopoly meant I had to buy one to use proprietary software), and the sites they are sampling may be biased. If they rely on cookies in some way (Hitbox uses them and perhaps doesn't count people who don't accept them), many Linux users are probably not counted as well.
I suspect that Linux is on a few percent of desktops. It is also on the desktops of people who have lots of disposable income for tech gadgets. Advertisers, take notice.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have to trust anyone--we can look at the facts. The software is out there.
And there are two issues anyway. First, is Sklyarov guilty under current law? Second, is current law (DMCA, etc.) just or was it created in response to undue influence of large media corporations on the political process?
And if we really think our own government is so evil, why are we still here?
In real life, to most people, a corrupt or lying government is not sufficient reason to leave as long as it isn't too bad and the economy is working. I have certainly lived in countries with much better government than the US has. And I know many people who have voluntarily stayed in countries with worse governments (including East Germany).
The legal proceedings were started by the AG. What Adobe did is throw their weight around to get the AG to file charges against Sklyarov. Nor did Adobe "withdraw" or change their mind--they merely sent out a nice-sounding press release after the damage was done and there was nothing else for them to do. And Adobe's press release restates their position on copyright and the DMCA. Adobe hasn't gotten any nicer.
However, with volume-based pricing, the provider should remove any additional restrictions ("business use", "servers", etc.). While before, arguably, people weren't paying their fair share, with volume-based pricing, you pay what you use, and there is no excuse for providers to divide their users into classes.
Sounds like a bad legal decision and it reflects poorly on Intel. But one thing to keep in mind: workplaces are all about politics. People who play their cards right seem to be able to get away with murder. People who hack and don't shmooze, on the other hand, are very vulnerable. If you are of the latter persuasion, do things completely by the book and get permission for anything even remotely out of the ordinary in writing.
I don't see the point of putting in special cables for computer networking. Between phonline networking, powerline networking, wireless networking, and 100Mbps optical networking, I can get pretty much all the connectivity I want. High-speed internet access comes in through cable, DSL, or fixed wireless in most places without any special "techie" allowances. Computers have gotten small and powerful enough that I don't need a separate room or closet anymore either. If you want to get equipment at night, move to a civilized area where electronics stores are open when you may need something.
You can install Ghostscript on the Windows machine to automate that process, so that you can print to any Windows printer as if it were Postscript-capable.
Little-used platform (.NET?)? This wont be true for much longer.
Mono will not implement .NET--it can't, because there won't be anything like a complete spec for .NET. The Mono authors have already said that they really just care about implementing something that is kind of like .NET, not something that is fully compatible.
Since when did Microsoft's non-standard API's ever stop WINE from at least trying to implement anything? I guess you're saying WINE is also useless, along with support for NTFS, SMB, etc etc. The list goes on.
Wine is largely useless: it runs few programs, and almost none of them reliably enough for daily use. Even IBM (with a lot more resources) didn't manage to create a Windows compatible system that was sufficiently useful to catch on. Linux support for NTFS was a herculean effort of reverse engineering, took years to do, and still isn't recommended for writing. SMB is only well documented because it didn't come from Microsoft originally, and Microsoft has been trying to break it ever since (viz their password shenanigans). Yes, the list goes on, and it shows how Microsoft has been trying to use proprietary standards to maintain a monopoly and keep compatible implementations from springing up.
I don't agree that OSX is particularly interesting for developers. The only distinctive aspect of it is its NeXTStep heritage. That was great for commercial applications a decade ago, but today, it is a rather aging approach to OOP and GUI programming.
Well, first of all, AFAIK, C# is an ECMA standard, not IEEE. Now, I don't get your complaint. You say that there is a problem with Sun "dumping proprietary libraries" into the Java spec. But the Java language, JVM, and core libraries are as-well specified as C#/CLR, and they are stable. Beyond the core ECMA specs, Microsoft is completely proprietary, with NO free implementation at all and NO decent specs. And there is no guarantee that Microsoft will even stick to their spec--they will likely extend the hell out of what they submitted as a standard. Sun at least writes pretty good specs for what goes into new releases of the Java platform and they give you a free implementation.
When mono is successful no one is going to want to use your proprietary JVM anymore.
Why would anybody care about Mono? It's going to use non-standard APIs on a little-used platform.
2. *WIN* Open Source license the JVM. Yes... I know it is scarry but this is you ONLY choice. Java still has a lot of great momentum. (*cough* Jakarta *cough*)
That makes no sense either. Why do you care about open sourcing Sun's JDK? Implementing C#/CLR as part of Mono is at least as hard as implementing Java/JVM. Yet, you seem convinced that Mono will be successful. Well, if the Mono people can hack up C#/CLR, why does it matter whether Sun open sources Java/JVM? Why can't someone else just implement a high-performance Java/JVM? And what has Microsoft done for the open source community later? Ever?
Sun makes available a great implementation under usable license terms. If you want something open source, rather than whining and stomping your foot that they aren't giving you more, go implement your own. Sun has already given you more than Microsoft likely ever will.
And, in fact, the equivalent of C#/CLR/CLI already exists for Java in open source form in the form of several open source Java compilers, the Intel ORP, and open source libraries. If that functionality is what you or the Mono project are after, you could have had that years ago.
The author is also wrong in assuming that many Linux developers care one bit about competing with OSX. Maybe the KDE and Gnome developers have that peculiar obsessions. Most others don't give a damn. Why should they?
It doesn't work that way. I don't care one bit about the features in OSX, and I'm not willing to live with the limited range of systems Apple is offering. I'm also not willing to deal with a bunch of Apple-proprietary APIs--why waste my time? And I'm not willing to pay a premium for style and features that I don't want to use. I'm not alone in that.
OSX is a nice system--for consumers. Use it. Be happy. Stop thinking, though, that everybody is all the same.
I disagree.
read and learn instead of getting caught in Microsoft bashing..
Instead of repeating what other people tell you, turn on your brain and think for yourself. Most of the programming and management advice that self-proclaimed software experts give you is junk.
"my first software released under GPL (November 1988) -- now the Slashdot kiddies have to shut up; I was writing GPLed software before they were born, bwa ha ha!"
That makes him pretty young and inexperienced in my book.
Sure you can: through the miracle of cryptography. Look at how UNIX passwords work. (The only reason we have shadow passwords is because people tend to choose weak passwords and because the crypt algorithm has gotten kind of weak, but neither of those are problems for game keys.)
This code looks very different from what CS courses teach you or expensive OOP consultants recommend. It's kind of reminiscent of the traditional UNIX code: very concrete and just tries to get the job done.
I don't think the GPL would require you to share media that are associated with the engine, since the GPL only talks about source code and linking. So, if you want to create a commercial game that people can't distribute freely based on the Quake2 engine, you can probably even do that.
There is no problem. Good programmers can produce good code in any language. However, even good programmers take longer to produce good code in some languages than in others. Perl is a language in which, in my experience, it takes a lot of time to create good code. Perl's strength is that producing quick one-of solutions is fast, which is also good, which isn't bad either.
Yes, so if you want to write code like Microsoft, you follow their principles. However, unless you have the legal team and monopoly position to go with it, that strategy will probably not work as well for you as it does for Microsoft.
Deciding to completely rewrite your product from scratch, on the theory that all your code is messy and bug prone and is bloated and needs to be completely rethought and rebuild from ground zero.
Well, he is right to the extent that if you use the same tools and the same skills, you are going to end up with the same mess. Given that Microsoft has been using the same primitive tools for the last decade, it's not surprising that rewriting doesn't work for them.
It's not like code rusts if it's not used. The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd.
Again, that's Microsoft-think. Sure, for Microsoft, things don't change unless they change them. For the rest of us, code does "rust", because the environment changes. And for the rest of us, there are new and useful tools and programming languages that we can use.
Yes, and with enough practice, people can walk the highwire or keep five balls in the air or throw knives blindfolded. But intrinsically, a system relying on preprinted input areas with no tactile feedback requires most people to look if they don't want to lose data. With Xerox's and similar methods, if you know the strokes, you can write without looking (which is why it's called "touch typing with a pen"); unlike Palm's system, those systems are designed for writing without looking.
Squid are among the most complex invertebrates while jellyfish are pretty much at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. Squid have brains, muscles, a digestive tract, and circulation. An animal can't fake having those things any more than a bicycle can fake having a motorcycle engine. Jellyfish don't even have a mesoderm. It's a lot easier for squid to adopt jellyfish-like hunting strategies than for jellyfish to become anything like a squid.
The irony is that Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing (first released in 1992), while showing you separate boxes for characters in input fields, was actually perfectly happy to let you write characters all in one place, as large as you liked, without looking at the screen. It even (somehow) managed to sort out multistroke characters, and it was trainable. And it wasn't a particularly good recognizer by any means, but in retrospect, was still better than Graffiti is today.
Take a look at this patent. It seems like Palm has been trying to patent any kind of handheld that uses a separate, dedicated input area for handwriting or tapping on a preprinted keyboard. Here is another one that claims methods involving separate input areas for different character types.
Palm's input method is actually somewhat different from Xerox's: it is considerably slower, it has some multi-stroke characters, and it requires you to look at the device. The specific Unistroke design in Xerox's input method is actually considerably nicer. Palm knew about the patent and thought that even if it was valid, it wouldn't apply to their input method. The other irony is that writing a simple, trainable multistroke character recognizer isn't hard at all, so Palm could have avoided this issue altogether.
Personally, I think a broad patent shouldn't have been granted, although a narrow patent on the particular Unistrokes alphabet might have been sensible. And I just don't see why Palm's method, which lacks just about all the nice features that Unistrokes have, would infringe. But people who get paid much more than you and me have been working long and hard on this, and that's the outcome.
These things apparently can move quite fast and in a coordinated way. That goes way beyond what jellyfish are capable of. A biologist looking at a moving video image would be very unlikely to confuse the two, and I suspect lots of expert marine biologists have looked at them.
Who would have thought. A security flaw in Windows XP. Related to UPNP. What will they think of next.
Microsoft's argument is "any popular OS will have viruses, so we might as well all run Microsoft software". But what we really need is a dozen substantially different operating systems with equal market share. Then, viruses will have virtually no chance of doing much damage.
As an aside, the term "Linux" itself stands for many different distributions, often with largely disjoint vulnerabilities, so several Linux distributions could make it simultaneously in the marketplace and still give people the benefit of diversity. Microsoft actively aims for standardization and a single code-base. In fact, the term "Linux" doesn't even really stand for a single OS, while, with XP, "Windows" pretty much does.
Linux will not dominate the market, and I don't think it should. But, on balance, I think we'd be better off if shared the market equally with Windows and if there were several other big players, including some that actually innovate a bit.
I suspect the numbers for Windows are inflated in a number of ways: browsers disguise themselves, browsers may deliberately not give out any OS information, Linux users use Windows machines (I'm typing this from a Windows machine right now, not because I like the desktop or use it primarily but because Microsoft's monopoly meant I had to buy one to use proprietary software), and the sites they are sampling may be biased. If they rely on cookies in some way (Hitbox uses them and perhaps doesn't count people who don't accept them), many Linux users are probably not counted as well.
I suspect that Linux is on a few percent of desktops. It is also on the desktops of people who have lots of disposable income for tech gadgets. Advertisers, take notice.