Err Cardiff has been there quite a bit longer than either NewYork or LA. Of course it can be done if the city wants it to be done.
The Underground in London probably got a similar response when they first built it. Then they built one in Paris and the rest is history.
Cardiff isn't a new town, which is why it has problems, it was started a long long time before cars and hence it needs new solutions as its not been built for cars ala NewYork and LA.
Aimed at Microsoft, George Bush's friends in Redmond. Asking for them and others to actually produce secure and reliable software, and making them responsible for their actions.
Sounds ridiculous that this shouldn't already be covered by things like Consumer Protection but in fact those licenses make sure that they have no responsibilities. And no-one is going to change that in the US when there is a president who doesn't want to prosecute for monopolistic practice the bigger violator of security concerns out there.
These patents that only get granted in the US don't happen in Europe. Certainly in the UK this is because other people can challenge the acceptance of a patent, and the people investigating it put it out to experts in that field.
Sounds all to simple, but why not just switch to a system that has worked elsewhere.
I once worked on a project where we used LISP to processes elements of Radar data. Our reason for choosing LISP was two fold, firstly we were doing List transformation, mapping and comparison. Secondly and most importantly though....
we knew that when it worked, that was it and we didn't want people buggering with it if they didn't understand it. LISP makes sure that the people writing it are going to have a better grasp on computing that the average C/C++/Java person.
Of course the comment at the top of "If you come here thinking you've found a bug, you are wrong, look elsewhere. If you are 100% certain then remember this.... everyone relies on this, if you bugger it up thats a lot of angry people" also probably helped. But using LISP enabled us to write a small piece of very tight code that made understanding the task simple.
You can also write the most evil code in the world in LISP, variables that become functions... occasionaly, excellent stuff >:-)
Hang on, thats my face they are capturing, imaging, processing and then storing. Clearly I own broadcast rights to my own face and all of its characteristics.
If they match my face then they've reverse engineered my face into another format to circumvent its current storage mechanism.
Totally silly application of DMCA... but then again its a pretty silly bill.
I am well aware that MS have submitted C# to ECMA, but then they also sat on the SOAP 1.1 expert group and their implementation didn't meet the standard.
Implementing ECMA on its own is pointless,.NET is the only implementation that matters. In the same way as JBoss and Enhydra have to stick to the J2EE spec because implementing just the language spec is pointless then Mono will have to implement.NET or just become a sideline.
MS don't have a great history of backwards compatibility, they have a great history of patches that upgrade their old stuff to match the new stuff. DR-DOS, Samba et al all demonstrate the changing nature of those supposedly backwards compatible APIs.
Not being a revolution isn't a problem, but it would be nice for once if we could actually move beyond a problem set that was effectively solved around 8 years ago rather than just spinning then same one over and over again.
COM is superior to CORBA ? Sorry to be rude but on what planet is that true.
COM runs on one platform on one protocol.
CORBA, federated networks of loosely coupled elements are possible. Transactional mapping is better than in COM (new versions of CORBA).
CORBA is more established and has a better history.
If you meant COM+ rather than COM then there is a slight merit to actually having a debate but COM is a poor and simple mans version of CORBA, even MS realised this, hence the massive overhall for COM+.
CORBA IMO still remains the best of the bunch out there but it doesn't have the marketing might of EJB or.NET COM+. Smart ideas don't often win in the world of marketing technology.
Isn't it wonderful having C# and.NET on Linux, after all they won't have the problems that Samba boys have trying to keep up with MS deliberately changing things to stop them, and it won't be miles worse.
Mono is a nice idea, but unfortunately.NET isn't a revolution, its a way to build poor quality mainframes, lots of boxes, poor IO. In terms of distribution there is none. Full credit to the guys for doing this but it does remind me of a Larson cartoon, you know the one with the Sheep Bar and the line
Err the normal configuration is to have all nodes in a redundant loop so their isn't a single point of failure. But you bet it will be noticed if the number of nodes in the ring goes down by one.
Unique key stuff, two pieces of hardware driven off the same algorithm with the same base, odds of matching it are practically zero. Physical connection isn't required its about the integrity of the two devices.
Military Sats use encryption for two reasons, one to make sure they can't be cracked, two to make sure they can't be listened two. The second is the more important. As long as the command sequence to the sat is tied to a physical device (which I'd hope at the very least) then your fine as long as you don't get invaded.
The easiest way to secure these systems is to ensure that there is a closed VPN which is tied to two devices, one on the sat, one on the ground. Redundant nodes come into play but its again only the physical that matters.
It takes a hell of a rich hacker to set up the transmission equipment to crack a satellite, and then the sat should just be saying "who are you ?" standard H/W ident stuff should block them off.
Physical rules, if you aren't using H/W paired security then its very worrying as its very simple to do and very standard (I assume it is as anyone with half a brain is going to do that) from then on its just a matter of how important is the information and does it need to be encrypted as listening is miles easier than transmitting.
After all we know that the universe is around 6,000 years old so you don't need a very big telescope, and anything that looks older is wrong so you don't need funding.
This announcement was brought to you by the State of Kansas Research Funding Department.
:-)
Xenophobia and pig headedness ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Is one answer, there are others, our economy is out of step with that of Europe, we have very different tax rules.
But IMO as a Brit the real reason is that we hate the fact that someone else came up with a better idea. Personally I can't wait to use the Euro in the UK as then it will make getting a mortgage or a loan from A.N. Other country much easier and I can pick the rates in a much more competative way.
The next few years should be great for the UK as we aren't going into recession (touch wood) so we'll hopefully steal a march. We could steal a much bigger march as the strongest fish in the Euro.
What always suprises me about "internet" law is that international shipping law is never mentioned with it. Take the following standard case
Shipping company is Danish lets say Maersk
Sony want to ship 100,000 units from its Corp HQ in Japan to its Inc in the US.
The ship is due to go via Hong Kong for loading onto a larger container ship, it will also go via the Panama canal.
In the carribean it is hit by a freak storm and the articles are damaged.
The contracts that Sony have with Maersk will have clearly defined countries in which the court cases will take place and for the most part this is defined by Maersk.
Why are the internet cases any different, the basic model is the same.
Of course it could just be lawyers generating money for themselves.
I read the article with an ever increasing sense of disbelief. Perl is definately a lanaguage for the individual rather than for groups or projects. One person on their own okay, but in a project....
Perl lets me to program in a style that suits me, rather than enforcing a style that some language designer thought would be best for me.
Now that is a quick way to bugger a project, everyone with their "own" style.
Perl is multi-paradigm: I can write code that's procedural, or object-oriented, or functional, or declarative; whatever solves my problem best. I can even mix styles when the optimal solution calls for that.
Leaving asside discussions on whether Perl is "mutli-paradigm" or indeed any language can be. This is another case of great for me, sucks on a project. You would never want to take this approach on a large project, it increases maintainance costs and learning costs for new people.
And then of course the piece de la Resistance... the most important skill is...
programming itself
Let me get this straight, its CODING ? Not Design, not Engineering, requirements, risk analysis or whatever but banging the code out.
I know this will probably get moded as "Flamebait" or whatever, but the reality is this is exactly the sort of language and approach that holds back software development and keeps us in the Dark Ages. Languages like Ada demonstrated clear advantages and had lower development and maintainance costs than C, so all new languages have their syntax based on.... C. Scripting languages have a history of producing huge amounts of unreadable and unmaintainable code.
Why can't we just grow up and realise that this is an Engineering discipline that deserves the same respect and approach as structural, mechanical or whatever engineering. If someone said "well I like using bamboo to build bridges, I'm going to build a 6 lane highway with it" we'd laugh. This guy is talking about the same sorts of things and promoting a language that has none of the advantages of bamboo for bridge building.
At least with people and languages like this, I'll never be unemployed, as there will always be buggered systems to fix or replace.
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, we fail even to build on the work of pygmies.
MPEG 4 allows you to put lots of things inside the stream, all of them can be platform specific, or hardware specific or whatever. MPEG2 was a rendering of video standard. MPEG4 is a bundling of multimedia content standard. HTML, MPEG2, whatever can be bundled.
So maybe they'll just bundle QuickTime movies inside the MPEG4 stream but allow a "Flash" style overlay in another content stream.
WAP has failed once, and will fail again. Look to the Far East to see where the market will go, it isn't WAP its rich guis and more complex apps.
Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones. WAP was a short term attempt to con people into buying pointless phones. WAP requires always on networking, something that doesn't exist in a tunnel or a tube, rich apps handle network failure and network blips.
The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP, and the providers don't really like WAP as its not giving them the sorts of services they feel people will pay for. Go grap the Nokia 9210, bulky today it maybe, but this is the sort of capabilities that all devices will have in the next year. Its got full web-browsing, not just WAP, Java, full PIM etc etc etc.
RICH Apps, Reliable Apps, and an end to crappy browser screens. Over the air provisioning of services, its already in the Far East, and it will come to Europe next.
And when did I finish re-wiring my house ? 2 months ago.
They did this on purpose didn't they ? Its just to annoy me I can tell, its a personal thing, well I'm going to take it like a man and blub in the corner.
Great idea, would have been perfect rather than the mini hubs or manual wiring jobs I had to use.
Bugger. I'll get them for this, just you see if I don't:)
Pretty impressive reading. It reads as a bunch of guys on the NetBSD front being pretty reasonable and just wanting him to stop behaving like a prat. His response is to throw his toys out the pram and storm off in a huff.
Full credit to him for getting this sort of stuff done, but I hope he has grown up since then.
What embedded systems do you work on ? Most embedded systems (controllers, switches etc etc) run a very very small RTOS, DOS is not an RTOS (Real Time Operating System).
DOS is not an RTOS, Linux is not an RTOS. These systems are not really talking about embedded stuff at all, they are talking about small PC architectures, which have their place. But embedded is about small footprint and 100% reliability. I wouldn't like to know that the medical controller my life relied upon was using DOS.
Scope is an Open Source HMVC Java thingy developed by someone at the company where I work. The license he uses is BSD like and was accepted as okay by the lawyers here, so we rely on his work both OSS and internal with no issues. It also means we can invest company resources in building up the OSS project while mainting our differentiator in the company.
On the point that "all copyright changes" don't take into account the user this isn't the case in the EU where some changes have been done for that reason.
One issue that isn't often addressed is the cultural differences between countries that lead to different approaches being appropriate in different countries. The same is true within different parts of an organisation ("If I can't pay it ain't worth it" to "If its free then it fits in my budget"). Licensing is about the _writer_ of the software or work which may make sense in their environment but not in that of another. Thus a proprietary license and ownership but free distribution (eg Java) may make a lot of sense if it ties in with the aims of the program.
IMO Writers of a work have a right on how it should be used, it is not for _users_ to say how it should be used as it is not their effort that created it. That said the Writer's right does not extend once the users effort has been expended, whether that be by paying cash or by building upon the artefact.
If I buy a brick, I do not expect to pay a regular license for the house.
Cultural differences are just as important. If a certain practice seems strange or odd to you probably means that your approach seems odd to them. Basically tolerance is the important deal, being dictatorial makes you as much as a fool as the guy you are arguing against.
Slashdot Mirror
Err Cardiff has been there quite a bit longer than either NewYork or LA. Of course it can be done if the city wants it to be done.
The Underground in London probably got a similar response when they first built it. Then they built one in Paris and the rest is history.
Cardiff isn't a new town, which is why it has problems, it was started a long long time before cars and hence it needs new solutions as its not been built for cars ala NewYork and LA.
Aimed at Microsoft, George Bush's friends in Redmond. Asking for them and others to actually produce secure and reliable software, and making them responsible for their actions.
Sounds ridiculous that this shouldn't already be covered by things like Consumer Protection but in fact those licenses make sure that they have no responsibilities. And no-one is going to change that in the US when there is a president who doesn't want to prosecute for monopolistic practice the bigger violator of security concerns out there.
"Industry standard boilerplate"
Also reads as "Lawyers just cut and paste and didn't actually bother working out what it was for"
These patents that only get granted in the US don't happen in Europe. Certainly in the UK this is because other people can challenge the acceptance of a patent, and the people investigating it put it out to experts in that field.
Sounds all to simple, but why not just switch to a system that has worked elsewhere.
I once worked on a project where we used LISP to processes elements of Radar data. Our reason for choosing LISP was two fold, firstly we were doing List transformation, mapping and comparison. Secondly and most importantly though....
we knew that when it worked, that was it and we didn't want people buggering with it if they didn't understand it. LISP makes sure that the people writing it are going to have a better grasp on computing that the average C/C++/Java person.
Of course the comment at the top of "If you come here thinking you've found a bug, you are wrong, look elsewhere. If you are 100% certain then remember this.... everyone relies on this, if you bugger it up thats a lot of angry people" also probably helped. But using LISP enabled us to write a small piece of very tight code that made understanding the task simple.
You can also write the most evil code in the world in LISP, variables that become functions... occasionaly, excellent stuff >:-)
Hang on, thats my face they are capturing, imaging, processing and then storing. Clearly I own broadcast rights to my own face and all of its characteristics.
If they match my face then they've reverse engineered my face into another format to circumvent its current storage mechanism.
Totally silly application of DMCA... but then again its a pretty silly bill.
I am well aware that MS have submitted C# to ECMA, but then they also sat on the SOAP 1.1 expert group and their implementation didn't meet the standard.
.NET is the only implementation that matters. In the same way as JBoss and Enhydra have to stick to the J2EE spec because implementing just the language spec is pointless then Mono will have to implement .NET or just become a sideline.
Implementing ECMA on its own is pointless,
MS don't have a great history of backwards compatibility, they have a great history of patches that upgrade their old stuff to match the new stuff. DR-DOS, Samba et al all demonstrate the changing nature of those supposedly backwards compatible APIs.
Not being a revolution isn't a problem, but it would be nice for once if we could actually move beyond a problem set that was effectively solved around 8 years ago rather than just spinning then same one over and over again.
COM is superior to CORBA ? Sorry to be rude but on what planet is that true.
COM runs on one platform on one protocol.
CORBA, federated networks of loosely coupled elements are possible. Transactional mapping is better than in COM (new versions of CORBA).
CORBA is more established and has a better history.
If you meant COM+ rather than COM then there is a slight merit to actually having a debate but COM is a poor and simple mans version of CORBA, even MS realised this, hence the massive overhall for COM+.
CORBA IMO still remains the best of the bunch out there but it doesn't have the marketing might of EJB or
Isn't it wonderful having C# and
Mono is a nice idea, but unfortunately
"What do you know, I'm a follower too"
Err the normal configuration is to have all nodes in a redundant loop so their isn't a single point of failure. But you bet it will be noticed if the number of nodes in the ring goes down by one.
Big flashing lights
Unique key stuff, two pieces of hardware driven off the same algorithm with the same base, odds of matching it are practically zero. Physical connection isn't required its about the integrity of the two devices.
Military Sats use encryption for two reasons, one to make sure they can't be cracked, two to make sure they can't be listened two. The second is the more important. As long as the command sequence to the sat is tied to a physical device (which I'd hope at the very least) then your fine as long as you don't get invaded.
The easiest way to secure these systems is to ensure that there is a closed VPN which is tied to two devices, one on the sat, one on the ground. Redundant nodes come into play but its again only the physical that matters.
It takes a hell of a rich hacker to set up the transmission equipment to crack a satellite, and then the sat should just be saying "who are you ?" standard H/W ident stuff should block them off.
Physical rules, if you aren't using H/W paired security then its very worrying as its very simple to do and very standard (I assume it is as anyone with half a brain is going to do that) from then on its just a matter of how important is the information and does it need to be encrypted as listening is miles easier than transmitting.
After all we know that the universe is around 6,000 years old so you don't need a very big telescope, and anything that looks older is wrong so you don't need funding.
This announcement was brought to you by the State of Kansas Research Funding Department.
:-)
Is one answer, there are others, our economy is out of step with that of Europe, we have very different tax rules.
But IMO as a Brit the real reason is that we hate the fact that someone else came up with a better idea. Personally I can't wait to use the Euro in the UK as then it will make getting a mortgage or a loan from A.N. Other country much easier and I can pick the rates in a much more competative way.
The next few years should be great for the UK as we aren't going into recession (touch wood) so we'll hopefully steal a march. We could steal a much bigger march as the strongest fish in the Euro.
What always suprises me about "internet" law is that international shipping law is never mentioned with it. Take the following standard case
Shipping company is Danish lets say Maersk
Sony want to ship 100,000 units from its Corp HQ in Japan to its Inc in the US.
The ship is due to go via Hong Kong for loading onto a larger container ship, it will also go via the Panama canal.
In the carribean it is hit by a freak storm and the articles are damaged.
The contracts that Sony have with Maersk will have clearly defined countries in which the court cases will take place and for the most part this is defined by Maersk.
Why are the internet cases any different, the basic model is the same.
Of course it could just be lawyers generating money for themselves.
I read the article with an ever increasing sense of disbelief. Perl is definately a lanaguage for the individual rather than for groups or projects. One person on their own okay, but in a project....
Perl lets me to program in a style that suits me, rather than enforcing a style that some language designer thought would be best for me.
Now that is a quick way to bugger a project, everyone with their "own" style.
Perl is multi-paradigm: I can write code that's procedural, or object-oriented, or functional, or declarative; whatever solves my problem best. I can even mix styles when the optimal solution calls for that.
Leaving asside discussions on whether Perl is "mutli-paradigm" or indeed any language can be. This is another case of great for me, sucks on a project. You would never want to take this approach on a large project, it increases maintainance costs and learning costs for new people.
And then of course the piece de la Resistance... the most important skill is...
programming itself
Let me get this straight, its CODING ? Not Design, not Engineering, requirements, risk analysis or whatever but banging the code out.
I know this will probably get moded as "Flamebait" or whatever, but the reality is this is exactly the sort of language and approach that holds back software development and keeps us in the Dark Ages. Languages like Ada demonstrated clear advantages and had lower development and maintainance costs than C, so all new languages have their syntax based on.... C. Scripting languages have a history of producing huge amounts of unreadable and unmaintainable code.
Why can't we just grow up and realise that this is an Engineering discipline that deserves the same respect and approach as structural, mechanical or whatever engineering. If someone said "well I like using bamboo to build bridges, I'm going to build a 6 lane highway with it" we'd laugh. This guy is talking about the same sorts of things and promoting a language that has none of the advantages of bamboo for bridge building.
At least with people and languages like this, I'll never be unemployed, as there will always be buggered systems to fix or replace.
Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, we fail even to build on the work of pygmies.
MPEG 4 allows you to put lots of things inside the stream, all of them can be platform specific, or hardware specific or whatever. MPEG2 was a rendering of video standard. MPEG4 is a bundling of multimedia content standard. HTML, MPEG2, whatever can be bundled.
So maybe they'll just bundle QuickTime movies inside the MPEG4 stream but allow a "Flash" style overlay in another content stream.
and another for the Poor.
And this suprises us how ?
Welcome to freedom by cheque book.
WAP has failed once, and will fail again. Look to the Far East to see where the market will go, it isn't WAP its rich guis and more complex apps.
Java and other "rich" languages will be running on the next generation of mobile phones. WAP was a short term attempt to con people into buying pointless phones. WAP requires always on networking, something that doesn't exist in a tunnel or a tube, rich apps handle network failure and network blips.
The future is out there in Japan and the Far East. It is SMS, it is MMS (multi-media messaging system) and it is rich apps. Its not WAP, and the providers don't really like WAP as its not giving them the sorts of services they feel people will pay for. Go grap the Nokia 9210, bulky today it maybe, but this is the sort of capabilities that all devices will have in the next year. Its got full web-browsing, not just WAP, Java, full PIM etc etc etc.
RICH Apps, Reliable Apps, and an end to crappy browser screens. Over the air provisioning of services, its already in the Far East, and it will come to Europe next.
WTF is it ? Solves all of these problems, increases security, increases reliability adds predictability to networking.
Its been trialed and used on long haul cables and backbones. Most decent OSes support it. IPv4 would still work over IPv6.
Isn't it time to flick the switch ?
And when did I finish re-wiring my house ? 2 months ago.
They did this on purpose didn't they ? Its just to annoy me I can tell, its a personal thing, well I'm going to take it like a man and blub in the corner.
Great idea, would have been perfect rather than the mini hubs or manual wiring jobs I had to use.
Bugger. I'll get them for this, just you see if I don't
Pretty impressive reading. It reads as a bunch of guys on the NetBSD front being pretty reasonable and just wanting him to stop behaving like a prat. His response is to throw his toys out the pram and storm off in a huff.
Full credit to him for getting this sort of stuff done, but I hope he has grown up since then.
What embedded systems do you work on ? Most embedded systems (controllers, switches etc etc) run a very very small RTOS, DOS is not an RTOS (Real Time Operating System).
DOS is not an RTOS, Linux is not an RTOS. These systems are not really talking about embedded stuff at all, they are talking about small PC architectures, which have their place. But embedded is about small footprint and 100% reliability. I wouldn't like to know that the medical controller my life relied upon was using DOS.
Scope is an Open Source HMVC Java thingy developed by someone at the company where I work. The license he uses is BSD like and was accepted as okay by the lawyers here, so we rely on his work both OSS and internal with no issues. It also means we can invest company resources in building up the OSS project while mainting our differentiator in the company.
On the point that "all copyright changes" don't take into account the user this isn't the case in the EU where some changes have been done for that reason.
One issue that isn't often addressed is the cultural differences between countries that lead to different approaches being appropriate in different countries. The same is true within different parts of an organisation ("If I can't pay it ain't worth it" to "If its free then it fits in my budget"). Licensing is about the _writer_ of the software or work which may make sense in their environment but not in that of another. Thus a proprietary license and ownership but free distribution (eg Java) may make a lot of sense if it ties in with the aims of the program.
IMO Writers of a work have a right on how it should be used, it is not for _users_ to say how it should be used as it is not their effort that created it. That said the Writer's right does not extend once the users effort has been expended, whether that be by paying cash or by building upon the artefact.
If I buy a brick, I do not expect to pay a regular license for the house.
Cultural differences are just as important. If a certain practice seems strange or odd to you probably means that your approach seems odd to them. Basically tolerance is the important deal, being dictatorial makes you as much as a fool as the guy you are arguing against.