the UNIX love triangle has gotten kind of absurd, but there is an amount, albeit a small amount of logic to it.
Especially considering that the UNIX code is owned by one company, the UNIX name is owned by another company (who licences the name to the code owners so that the code can be named by what it is), then there is the compatability certification, which really isn't all that good as you must know if you have ever tried to port between Unixes.
By the time you get all the licenced Unixes, the Unix code owners, the not-really-unix-but-like-it-generically OS's, the POSIX standard, and the historical Unix owners together, you're talking about hundreds of legal entities.
I can hardly wait for the GNU Hurd to be finished, but then these lawyers will go after the 'U' in GNU.
Granted, is should be horrible PR, but given the 90's predilection for sacrifice of users for the almighty dollar...
All it would take is *one* company using DRM to start disabling their OS remotely.
The Open Source and Free Software folks could all say "You have our code, you can see that it has no DRM in it. You don't need to worry about your system being disabled remotely."
As another poster quoted, it's hard to do specific experiments when you don't know what to look for. So are we trying to find proof of life LIKE US, Intelligent life LIKE US or just beings on Mars?
I think that they covered the issue pretty well in the article, and others like it.
The British-built 'Beagle 2' will be searching for specific organic properties as they are understood on Earth. Not for life, but for organic properties related to life on Earth.
The NASA-built probe is looking for water in various forms, because water is the basis for the posibility of life as we know it on Earth.
Dr. Levin is looking for other things (perhaps respiration and motion, I haven't looked to much into his work) representative of life that those probes don't look for, and that other people claim the earlier data have.
None of the tests are for intelligent beings, obviously.
It really depends on what you are looking for.
Science has got a fairly good, simple definition of 'life', but it certainly isn't what the probes are looking for. Even the two fundamental issues that we consider 'life' (1) Provisions for energy and nutrients, and (2) reproduction, may not hold. There is an interesting article in nature.com about that.
So what would be required? Motion? We have life that isn't particularly active. Water? There are animals like one on Animal Planet's "The Most Extreme" that was recently on (I forget the animal's name) that would actually lose all liquid water and be able to just be dormant for centuries, then re-hydrate when conditions improved. Certainly there is the posibility of a living thing that uses something else for circulation or motion. Respiration? Virii are technically clasified as a form of life, but they don't require breath. Reproduction is on the list of things needed for life, but that doesn't mean it will happen when the probe is there. Even if some unknown form of virus were present, it may just be missing the proper host to restore it to life.
I think that the scientists are right in dismissing the public assumption -- at least the perception that there is life on the planet Mars right now, that it intellegent, and that it is like us.
But then there are the idio^H^H^H^H^H people who believe that alien abductions happen every day, that alien UFO's are here but somehow they either avoid detection or are intentially kept quiet by air traffic controllers, the military, astronomers, private researchers, scholars, and armchair scientists, and that The Man has a Conspiricy to hide The Truth from The People. Or that We never made it to the Moon. Or whatever else the media or their religious dogma teaches them, regardless of the observed facts and probabilities.
I have more to say on a tangent to that, so I'll reply to myself.:)
It's always interesting to see such prejudiced views. People are people, not stereotypes. Pick any affilation or group, and you will find both good people and jerks. (Note -- your comments wouldn't fit in the 'good people' set.)
A simple test for prejudice:
Just replace any of your religious names you used with "Christian" (specialized with either 'church-going Christian' or 'once-a-year Christian' for your classes), "Muslim", "Jew", or "Hindu", or whatever other you want. Or replace it with "black", "woman" or {fill in country name here}.
If you could be fired or punished in court for the comments, it is badly prejudiced.
If you don't want to read the FAQ, here's the summary. In Slashdot, when you are logged in to your account you can get good Karma by posting useful comments, submitting stories, etc. Contrarywise, you get bad Karma from posting trolls and flaimbait.
If you have good Karma, you can add a 'Karma Bonus' to your posts. When you view posts, your preferences let you determine how much of a bonus the 'Karma Bonus' really is. That's under your preferences page. (click on preferences and go to the comments tab, or just follow this link). On that page you can also add or subtract scores for specific moderations, friends or foes, annonymous cowards, etc.
Since you are probably referring to my signature, when you look at any specific comment it will show the score at the bottom of the comment. The system clips the score from -1 to 5. It has been a long-standing joke about how the actual sum of the scores can be much different than the displayed score. In my sig, (which was a moderation score for one of my comments) you can see how the actual sum would be 10, but the total score (which is clipped) is 5.
That beyond all the hyperbole and other reasons, there is something that could be done but usually isn't.
In C++, which a great deal of software is written in, an exception block [or the language or system equivalent] placed around the entire application will catch just about any recoverable error. This is how most of the windows blue-screens or 'your application has performed an illigal operation and will be terminated' messages are brought up. This is how Linux and other unixes generates a core dump.
The actual handling may be in a signal handler, try/catch block, or abend, but the functionality is present in every activly developed language I have ever worked with from cobol and fortran to c, c++, java, and object pascal.
The main reason for applications actually crashing is programmer lazyness.
The main reason for applications getting into a state that they can crash is improper complexity management.
When it comes to drivers, I'm much more forgiving, since it is quite difficult to manage both the hardware and software, and the communication between different programs.
Finally, the operating system itself, which is the layer between the drivers and the applications, I haven't seen any in the last 5 years that has been unstable. Even Windows ME, for all its faults, was very stable in the actual 'operating system'.
Many supercomputers, most notably the 288 node AIX box that I worked with in grad school, can take snapshots of your application memory and CPU states at regular intervals.
One problem with that is that communications are not stored as part of that snapshot.
frob.
Re:sale of property an "accident"?
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The use of accidental is correct.
As you pointed out, SCO/Caldera did not have any outstanding claims to the source, so they had no integral or premediated claims to the source. The authors could have said 'adventitious' instead.
Your description of objects being bought and sold actually demonstrates how accidental or adventitious ownership works. If I bought a car, I had no previous ownership-interest in it; I'd be doing it out of legal chance, as accidental ownership -- I just bought the car because I could.
A company or person who built the car could say that they have some interest (may or may not be ownership) in the thing, and therefore have some intrinsic reason to buy it. Their ownership would not be accidental. They bought the car because they already had something at stake in the value of the it, perhaps as a demonstration of their workmanship.
This unresolved conflict is now coming to a head. I think any reasonable person can see which side the courts are likely to come down on. My hope is that IBM will settle by buying Unix into the public domain or otherwise freeing the source, but if that's not what happens, then SCO may very well succeed in enforcing its property rights, "accidental" as they may be.
Actually, the fact that SCO/Caldera never obtained *ALL* the rights from *ALL* the licences is one of the main points of the article. They make this clear several times by showing different systems that were licenced and SCO has no right to, and systems that SCO released to the public both freely and under the GPL. A second is that SCO/Caldera profited for several years from the actions, including distributing infringing code under the GNU licence and contributing to the code in a public work, but are only now attempting to assert some rights against another company. A third point is that SCO/Caldera probably does not have those rights that it is trying to assert, through the earlier settlement and licence issues, mutally accepted 'theft' of code [which isn't theft if both parties were aware of it and took no official actions], and other history.
I think that in spite of some slightly incorrect dates, omitting the free/open arguments and the GNU/Linux OS vs. the Linux kernel, and the inclusion of anecdotes like 'But that emperor has no clothes',
the authors have a very clear and solid attack against several aspects of the suit
A much better idea: make fake fan sites where the title, summary, and url look real, so anyone searching will have trouble finding the "artist's" page.
But then you can get to the problems of dilution of trademark and trademark infringement, since you obviously are attempting to do both. You could be responsible also for civil or criminal libel, civil or criminal defamation, slander, unfair competition, IP theft, or illigal use of copyrighted material. Unfortunately, the musician and band names are trademarks and generally qualify for protection. (*1)
Even better than fighting against RIAA (*2) is to ignore them all together. Visit IUMA(*2) and listen to the artists there. Sure, lots of them suck (*3), but if you stick to the top 40 each time it is updated you will get great music, I GUARANTEE IT (*4).
They also have a streamed radio of MP3's. They usually have good songs there, too, but some of those are also pretty bad (*3). Again, I GUARANTEE (*4) you will find good music on their site.
frob.
*1 - I'm very familiar with IP law but not a lawywer, and this is not legal advice. Get a lawyer and proper legal advice before doing anything that might offend any company on the planet.
*2 - trademarks like RIAA and IUMA are owned by their respective owners.
*3 - Any claims of music suckage or quality are the views of the author.
*4 - This is not a guarantee, but the author's view of a very likely event.
Sounds to me like "you can say what you want, when you want, and no consequences" to me.
Not quite true. The first ammendment does *NOT* apply when the speach is contrary to the purpose of the Constitution, which is:
[T]o form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity[.]
First, the standard IANAL but I play one on/., and seek legal advice regularly.
Now for an example, yelling about a fire or a bomb in a movie theater is a violation of the Constitutional protection on speech. The courts have been working on establishing the guidelines for different classes of speech that are protect and that are not, such as informational (IE: a book about ways to kill people) and those that are functional, or produce actions (a book that entices people to kill others). Informational speach is protected, functional speach may be restricted.
The same is true for technical issues, although I wouldn't want to be a lawyer in that case. Arguing on first-ammendment lines, you would have to demonstrate that the claims are purely factual, that the research was conducted legally (many laws explicitly allow exemptions for researchers), and that the paper is purely informational and not functional. If the paper were functional, then it might be interpreted as being restricted by the various laws.
But then, as other posters have said, if a student or university does lose money due to this flaw (which is likely) then they can take it back to the company and sue it for not repairing or disclosing a fatal, known flaw in their systems.
[sigh]
Maybe someday we will be free from the IP garbage that has been spewed out over the past decade. Or maybe we'll get a utopian world where everyone will be honest and do the 'right thing'. No more need for security systems, and software flaws will be presented, evaluated, and repaired quickly...
or should the person go tell the bank so it can fix it?
They DID try to tell the company, and were "blown off".
But what if the bank ignores you? Should someone be allowed to convey information about a problem with a system if the system controllers refuse to fix it? I'd still think not - it'd be one thing to state that there is a vulnerability, and that in good conscience could not state what the vulnerability is, and quite another thing to go explaining the vulnerability to everyone else.
This is something compuer security has had to deal with for quite some time. The normal ethical guidelines are to first contact the vendor and attempt to work with them to find a solution, and release the information once the vulnerability is corrected. If they either ignore it or fail to correct the problem in a reasonable time frame, the consensus is to take the problem to the security experts and users of the security system generally. This is based on the theory that criminals may already have such knowledge, and therefore the users need to know in order to protect themselves.
We had them when I worked as a lab rat in college. If I recall, we were burning through 5+ boxes of paper per day on M-F, and 1-2 on S-S in the bigger labs. They were used in almost all the labs on campus.
In three years doing lab-rat work, I never saw one replaced. I saw two of them have repair work done (fuser or something). As part of the lab rat duties, I had to print a test page each week and send the page count to the admins. I kept waiting for the page counts to roll back over to zero.
I don't remember how big they were, but several hundred million pages is about right.
Man... what a garbage it was. I'm making some product right now and I'm in charge. Also It's much better (looking) than Win1, 2, and 3. I must be able to tons of money over next 10 years.
For the time it was high-end. Nobody had 256 color displays, you were getting 'high end' EGA cards with 32 colors, and 256 colors was available for several thousand bucks. Your high-end machines were 32-bit and aproaching 33 Mhz, with 32-mb of disk space and, if you were rich, had 16 MB of RAM. A more common scenario was a 16-bit machine with a 20-mb hard disk, 12 or 16 Mhz, and up 2 MB of ram.
If you make make your app run nicely on that configuration, then have 15 years of development for improvement, then you might have something.
Norton's internet security tools, for example, has various degrees. You go from dropping all incomming packets, to trusting known hosts, to showing a message to the user each time an unknown connection attempt is made, and so on.
For example, when I use IRC at home on my XP box, and the IRC server immediately sends an identd request, I get a lovely message box telling me: 1) what server made a request to talk to me, 2) what port they are on, 3) what apps are listening to the request. Then I can decide if I should accept or deny the connection, or allow/deny all future connections from that host or port.
Since this is dealing with INBOUND traffic, there are only two sources: Legitimate requests that the user should be responsible for, and illigitimate requests from spammers, worms, and other attackers, where the attacker is responsible.
Under criminal and most other law, the criminal becomes liable for both direct and indirect damages. As an example, if a gang robs a bank and a gang member gets shot by a clerk, the gang leader is charged with homicide/murder/manslaughter, as appropriate. In this case, the spammer, worm originator, or other attacker should similarly be held liable for direct and indirect damages -- meaning everything from bandwidth to cleanup.
IPv6 allows many security features, including authentication and nonrepudiation. An ISP (or anyone for that matter) can easily use their logs to verify that packets are from a particular source. By rejecting all packets unless traceable, and then keeping the traces around, the responsible party can be easily found by talking to everyone along the chain until someone either has no logs or originated the attack.
Once you've found the person, simply either eat the cost as is done now (if they are a little person infected with a worm/virus but don't have logs), OR try to get money from them and blacklist from future systems (if they are a real criminal).
Something I would LOVE to see is a system that holds everyone responsible. An Internet where to get an address block you sign away certain rights. You would assert that you will either keep logs of all activities or pay for any damages [see above]. When any software is released for use on this new network, the software company would be held liable for damage done by their software [see Outlook worms]. Any software using the network would have to properly record all network transactions thorugh cryptographicly secure undeniable means. Lastly, all commercial communication, unless specific one-to-one talking or client/server requests like the web, would be strictly forbidden, again with damages paid [no spam]. That is my Dream Internet.
Microsoft releases the OS source to lots of groups. What's surprising is the reason they're doing it, not the fact that they are doing it.
They often releases it to schools with various NDA's, as well as businesses under various agreements, but that's usually for educational or development reasons.
The deal with China seems to be a combination of PR and sales, rather than education and development.
I believe this process would take a long time even to agree on what criteria is relevant and important, but I believe in the end, these facts will begin to spell out in clear and obvious ways where current strengths and weaknesses exist in the various platforms.
That, I believe, is the crux of the entire TCO argument.
Unfortunately, the demands of every situation are different enough that general TCO arguments are ineffective. There are many costs that are intangable, and many that are tangable but difficult to calculate. For example:
Software upgrades - frequency and cost? Is this required by licensing?
Software quality and patches - how good is it? How many exploits are known? Based on QA methods, what is the mean time to failure? Mean time to repair? Average estimated defects per hundred lines of code?
Software performance - Do different products perform similarly under system stress, including extreme amounts of data and limited or missing resources? How about under hardware failure and resistance to user error?
Software requirements - If feature x is in one product but not another, are the two products really interchangable?
Software usability - If one product is easier for a certain class of users, what are the costs of installing one over the other, or both, in terms of licensing, maintanence, and updates?
Software maintenence & expertise - What is the value of existing knowledge?
Software support - frequency and cost?
Hardware support - Does hardware x run equally well under OS a and OS b?
Hardware model - Are OS a and OS b disparate enough that choosing a different network or implementation model could drastically alter the TCO, initial cost, or other factors (such as buying a substantially larger, more capable server and many high-quality X terminals instead of buying many PC's running X-servers and a small server)
The TCO question should have many of the variables studied, perhaps even a large corpus of actual costs in many situations. Ultimatly, however, TCO depends on the variables specific to each entity and not on case studies.
I would like to see a completely unbiased study and it seems to me that the only way this is possible is to create it using opposing sides.
I think that several independant and accurate studies, biased or not, and placed into a public database or corpus would be a great asset to all sys-admins. The hardest part would be measuring factors like those I've listed above, where the interplay between factors also plays a part. For example, if a software has a high mean failure time, but a high repair time and low turnaround between when they detect errors and begin correcting them, is that better than software with a short time to failure, quick repair time, but long delays between learning about them and beginning work on correction?
As much as company officers love having a bottom-line TCO, non-monitary comparisons and risk analyses are also important and should not be overlooked.
Here is one of the best [funny] replies I've ever seen from what appears to be a native-English speaker.
The college i go to done even have an dual boot linux machines and when asking the question about it all i get is "nope can't do that?" www.wit.ie is the IT in general -- Source of quote.
If that is indeed a native-English speaker (implied because it's an English-speaking school in an English-speaking nation) then I pity the professors and TA's that correct or grade their essays.
If I were a member of the school, I'd find out who wrote it and put the poor soul into remedial English.
Craig uses the analogy of the telephone: You can unplug a telephone and move it to another room and plug it in, and 99.9999 per cent of the time it will work.
we will have to come up with a new name, because democracy will definitely NOT fit!
The US isn't a democracy, it's a democratic republic. Democratic = "benefitting the common pepole", republic = "A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them."
like this makes me wonder why I stay in the US.... every day I spend under the Bush administration.
You enjoy many freedoms in the US. You are free to leave the country. You are free to attempt to get citizenship in another country. You are free to vote for anybody you see fit for government officers, including yourself.
I often wish that people like you WOULD move out of the US, if for no other reason than to find out what like is like outside your little shell.
Slippery slope can be either a fallacy or a legitimate argument. See this place for the description.
It is one thing to say "because they took away liberty X, they will eventually take away liberty Y". It is quite another to say "Observe that liberties A,B,C, and D, have been taken, we should be concerned that it will continue for liberties E, F and G."
The first is a slippery-slope fallacy (asserting a possibility as a fact), the second is a legitimate argument for policy based on historical evidence and trends.
When I say 3D rendering I don't mean openGL/DirectX rendering....I mean full raytraced, reflection/refraction with global illumination, complex shaders, etc.
Reflection and refraction, global illumination and inside raytracing? That's not memory intensive, it's CPU intensive. Complex scenes? Raytracing being limited by RAM? Must be interesting research with very large 3D models that you're doing, because I've seen raytracings of multi-gigabyte objects; progressive loading and LRU discards are more than sufficient.
High-quality raytracing of complex scenes is extremely CPU intensive, not memory intensive. More memory beyond 4 GB won't help you there unless you have extremely complex scenes. Yes, it will take a long time per frame, and yes, 64-bit processors will help improve compute time, but more memory is *not* needed there, a better processor is needed.
and tell me you can buffer more than a few seconds in RAM.
Video editing doesn't need a few seconds at a time in RAM for most applications. That was the point I was trying to make. So you picked an image size of about 64-MB; big deal. Assuming you have full-screen processing kernels [filters and masks, in your words], gradients that are implemented as images instead of formulae, and movement and lighting that are not processed as simple matrix ops, then you are doing a great deal of wasteful processing. There are processors designed to do that -- and those are NOT the Intel x86 or Itanium chipset or the AMD chipsets. Memory isn't the problem, the choice of algorithms and processors is.
I'll say it again -- chose applications that match your class of machine. If your problem doesn't match the machine you are on, get a different machine. Don't think that just because a PC is good for word processing and web browsing that it is good for video editing, because it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time you get all the licenced Unixes, the Unix code owners, the not-really-unix-but-like-it-generically OS's, the POSIX standard, and the historical Unix owners together, you're talking about hundreds of legal entities.
I can hardly wait for the GNU Hurd to be finished, but then these lawyers will go after the 'U' in GNU.
frob
The Open Source and Free Software folks could all say "You have our code, you can see that it has no DRM in it. You don't need to worry about your system being disabled remotely."
That's great PR for us.
frob
The British-built 'Beagle 2' will be searching for specific organic properties as they are understood on Earth. Not for life, but for organic properties related to life on Earth.
The NASA-built probe is looking for water in various forms, because water is the basis for the posibility of life as we know it on Earth.
Dr. Levin is looking for other things (perhaps respiration and motion, I haven't looked to much into his work) representative of life that those probes don't look for, and that other people claim the earlier data have.
None of the tests are for intelligent beings, obviously.
It really depends on what you are looking for.
Science has got a fairly good, simple definition of 'life', but it certainly isn't what the probes are looking for. Even the two fundamental issues that we consider 'life' (1) Provisions for energy and nutrients, and (2) reproduction, may not hold. There is an interesting article in nature.com about that.
So what would be required? Motion? We have life that isn't particularly active. Water? There are animals like one on Animal Planet's "The Most Extreme" that was recently on (I forget the animal's name) that would actually lose all liquid water and be able to just be dormant for centuries, then re-hydrate when conditions improved. Certainly there is the posibility of a living thing that uses something else for circulation or motion. Respiration? Virii are technically clasified as a form of life, but they don't require breath. Reproduction is on the list of things needed for life, but that doesn't mean it will happen when the probe is there. Even if some unknown form of virus were present, it may just be missing the proper host to restore it to life.
I think that the scientists are right in dismissing the public assumption -- at least the perception that there is life on the planet Mars right now, that it intellegent, and that it is like us.
But then there are the idio^H^H^H^H^H people who believe that alien abductions happen every day, that alien UFO's are here but somehow they either avoid detection or are intentially kept quiet by air traffic controllers, the military, astronomers, private researchers, scholars, and armchair scientists, and that The Man has a Conspiricy to hide The Truth from The People. Or that We never made it to the Moon . Or whatever else the media or their religious dogma teaches them, regardless of the observed facts and probabilities.
I have more to say on a tangent to that, so I'll reply to myself. :)
frob
A simple test for prejudice:
Just replace any of your religious names you used with "Christian" (specialized with either 'church-going Christian' or 'once-a-year Christian' for your classes), "Muslim", "Jew", or "Hindu", or whatever other you want. Or replace it with "black", "woman" or {fill in country name here}.
If you could be fired or punished in court for the comments, it is badly prejudiced.
I can see why you posted as Anonymous Coward.
frob
That is, they USED to work there. They left a while before all this mess happened.
Just tell me when the Official Slashdot Protest is, and I'll take a day off. :)
frob
Seriously, thanks for the correction. :)
frob.
If you don't want to read the FAQ, here's the summary. In Slashdot, when you are logged in to your account you can get good Karma by posting useful comments, submitting stories, etc. Contrarywise, you get bad Karma from posting trolls and flaimbait.
If you have good Karma, you can add a 'Karma Bonus' to your posts. When you view posts, your preferences let you determine how much of a bonus the 'Karma Bonus' really is. That's under your preferences page. (click on preferences and go to the comments tab, or just follow this link). On that page you can also add or subtract scores for specific moderations, friends or foes, annonymous cowards, etc.
Since you are probably referring to my signature, when you look at any specific comment it will show the score at the bottom of the comment. The system clips the score from -1 to 5. It has been a long-standing joke about how the actual sum of the scores can be much different than the displayed score. In my sig, (which was a moderation score for one of my comments) you can see how the actual sum would be 10, but the total score (which is clipped) is 5.
frob
In C++, which a great deal of software is written in, an exception block [or the language or system equivalent] placed around the entire application will catch just about any recoverable error. This is how most of the windows blue-screens or 'your application has performed an illigal operation and will be terminated' messages are brought up. This is how Linux and other unixes generates a core dump.
The actual handling may be in a signal handler, try/catch block, or abend, but the functionality is present in every activly developed language I have ever worked with from cobol and fortran to c, c++, java, and object pascal.
The main reason for applications actually crashing is programmer lazyness.
The main reason for applications getting into a state that they can crash is improper complexity management.
When it comes to drivers, I'm much more forgiving, since it is quite difficult to manage both the hardware and software, and the communication between different programs.
Finally, the operating system itself, which is the layer between the drivers and the applications, I haven't seen any in the last 5 years that has been unstable. Even Windows ME, for all its faults, was very stable in the actual 'operating system'.
But that's just my 2 pesos.
frob
One problem with that is that communications are not stored as part of that snapshot.
frob.
As you pointed out, SCO/Caldera did not have any outstanding claims to the source, so they had no integral or premediated claims to the source. The authors could have said 'adventitious' instead.
Your description of objects being bought and sold actually demonstrates how accidental or adventitious ownership works. If I bought a car, I had no previous ownership-interest in it; I'd be doing it out of legal chance, as accidental ownership -- I just bought the car because I could.
A company or person who built the car could say that they have some interest (may or may not be ownership) in the thing, and therefore have some intrinsic reason to buy it. Their ownership would not be accidental. They bought the car because they already had something at stake in the value of the it, perhaps as a demonstration of their workmanship.
Actually, the fact that SCO/Caldera never obtained *ALL* the rights from *ALL* the licences is one of the main points of the article. They make this clear several times by showing different systems that were licenced and SCO has no right to, and systems that SCO released to the public both freely and under the GPL. A second is that SCO/Caldera profited for several years from the actions, including distributing infringing code under the GNU licence and contributing to the code in a public work, but are only now attempting to assert some rights against another company. A third point is that SCO/Caldera probably does not have those rights that it is trying to assert, through the earlier settlement and licence issues, mutally accepted 'theft' of code [which isn't theft if both parties were aware of it and took no official actions], and other history.I think that in spite of some slightly incorrect dates, omitting the free/open arguments and the GNU/Linux OS vs. the Linux kernel, and the inclusion of anecdotes like 'But that emperor has no clothes', the authors have a very clear and solid attack against several aspects of the suit
frob.
Even better than fighting against RIAA (*2) is to ignore them all together. Visit IUMA (*2) and listen to the artists there. Sure, lots of them suck (*3), but if you stick to the top 40 each time it is updated you will get great music, I GUARANTEE IT (*4).
They also have a streamed radio of MP3's. They usually have good songs there, too, but some of those are also pretty bad (*3). Again, I GUARANTEE (*4) you will find good music on their site.
frob.
*1 - I'm very familiar with IP law but not a lawywer, and this is not legal advice. Get a lawyer and proper legal advice before doing anything that might offend any company on the planet.
*2 - trademarks like RIAA and IUMA are owned by their respective owners.
*3 - Any claims of music suckage or quality are the views of the author.
*4 - This is not a guarantee, but the author's view of a very likely event.
That's supposed to be what http://www.slashdot.org/~ellem/journal is for.
First, the standard IANAL but I play one on /., and seek legal advice regularly.
Now for an example, yelling about a fire or a bomb in a movie theater is a violation of the Constitutional protection on speech. The courts have been working on establishing the guidelines for different classes of speech that are protect and that are not, such as informational (IE: a book about ways to kill people) and those that are functional, or produce actions (a book that entices people to kill others). Informational speach is protected, functional speach may be restricted.
The same is true for technical issues, although I wouldn't want to be a lawyer in that case. Arguing on first-ammendment lines, you would have to demonstrate that the claims are purely factual, that the research was conducted legally (many laws explicitly allow exemptions for researchers), and that the paper is purely informational and not functional. If the paper were functional, then it might be interpreted as being restricted by the various laws.
But then, as other posters have said, if a student or university does lose money due to this flaw (which is likely) then they can take it back to the company and sue it for not repairing or disclosing a fatal, known flaw in their systems.
[sigh]
Maybe someday we will be free from the IP garbage that has been spewed out over the past decade. Or maybe we'll get a utopian world where everyone will be honest and do the 'right thing'. No more need for security systems, and software flaws will be presented, evaluated, and repaired quickly...
frob.
Hope that helps with your question.
In three years doing lab-rat work, I never saw one replaced. I saw two of them have repair work done (fuser or something). As part of the lab rat duties, I had to print a test page each week and send the page count to the admins. I kept waiting for the page counts to roll back over to zero.
I don't remember how big they were, but several hundred million pages is about right.
If you make make your app run nicely on that configuration, then have 15 years of development for improvement, then you might have something.
Norton's internet security tools, for example, has various degrees. You go from dropping all incomming packets, to trusting known hosts, to showing a message to the user each time an unknown connection attempt is made, and so on.
For example, when I use IRC at home on my XP box, and the IRC server immediately sends an identd request, I get a lovely message box telling me: 1) what server made a request to talk to me, 2) what port they are on, 3) what apps are listening to the request. Then I can decide if I should accept or deny the connection, or allow/deny all future connections from that host or port.
Under criminal and most other law, the criminal becomes liable for both direct and indirect damages. As an example, if a gang robs a bank and a gang member gets shot by a clerk, the gang leader is charged with homicide/murder/manslaughter, as appropriate. In this case, the spammer, worm originator, or other attacker should similarly be held liable for direct and indirect damages -- meaning everything from bandwidth to cleanup.
IPv6 allows many security features, including authentication and nonrepudiation. An ISP (or anyone for that matter) can easily use their logs to verify that packets are from a particular source. By rejecting all packets unless traceable, and then keeping the traces around, the responsible party can be easily found by talking to everyone along the chain until someone either has no logs or originated the attack.
Once you've found the person, simply either eat the cost as is done now (if they are a little person infected with a worm/virus but don't have logs), OR try to get money from them and blacklist from future systems (if they are a real criminal).
Something I would LOVE to see is a system that holds everyone responsible. An Internet where to get an address block you sign away certain rights. You would assert that you will either keep logs of all activities or pay for any damages [see above]. When any software is released for use on this new network, the software company would be held liable for damage done by their software [see Outlook worms]. Any software using the network would have to properly record all network transactions thorugh cryptographicly secure undeniable means. Lastly, all commercial communication, unless specific one-to-one talking or client/server requests like the web, would be strictly forbidden, again with damages paid [no spam]. That is my Dream Internet.
frob.
They often releases it to schools with various NDA's, as well as businesses under various agreements, but that's usually for educational or development reasons.
The deal with China seems to be a combination of PR and sales, rather than education and development.
frob.
Unfortunately, the demands of every situation are different enough that general TCO arguments are ineffective. There are many costs that are intangable, and many that are tangable but difficult to calculate. For example:
The TCO question should have many of the variables studied, perhaps even a large corpus of actual costs in many situations. Ultimatly, however, TCO depends on the variables specific to each entity and not on case studies.
I think that several independant and accurate studies, biased or not, and placed into a public database or corpus would be a great asset to all sys-admins. The hardest part would be measuring factors like those I've listed above, where the interplay between factors also plays a part. For example, if a software has a high mean failure time, but a high repair time and low turnaround between when they detect errors and begin correcting them, is that better than software with a short time to failure, quick repair time, but long delays between learning about them and beginning work on correction?As much as company officers love having a bottom-line TCO, non-monitary comparisons and risk analyses are also important and should not be overlooked.
frob
If that is indeed a native-English speaker (implied because it's an English-speaking school in an English-speaking nation) then I pity the professors and TA's that correct or grade their essays.
If I were a member of the school, I'd find out who wrote it and put the poor soul into remedial English.
frob.
I often wish that people like you WOULD move out of the US, if for no other reason than to find out what like is like outside your little shell.
Sincerely, another US citizen.
Frob.
It is one thing to say "because they took away liberty X, they will eventually take away liberty Y". It is quite another to say "Observe that liberties A,B,C, and D, have been taken, we should be concerned that it will continue for liberties E, F and G."
The first is a slippery-slope fallacy (asserting a possibility as a fact), the second is a legitimate argument for policy based on historical evidence and trends.
Frob.
High-quality raytracing of complex scenes is extremely CPU intensive, not memory intensive. More memory beyond 4 GB won't help you there unless you have extremely complex scenes. Yes, it will take a long time per frame, and yes, 64-bit processors will help improve compute time, but more memory is *not* needed there, a better processor is needed.
Video editing doesn't need a few seconds at a time in RAM for most applications. That was the point I was trying to make. So you picked an image size of about 64-MB; big deal. Assuming you have full-screen processing kernels [filters and masks, in your words], gradients that are implemented as images instead of formulae, and movement and lighting that are not processed as simple matrix ops, then you are doing a great deal of wasteful processing. There are processors designed to do that -- and those are NOT the Intel x86 or Itanium chipset or the AMD chipsets. Memory isn't the problem, the choice of algorithms and processors is.
I'll say it again -- chose applications that match your class of machine. If your problem doesn't match the machine you are on, get a different machine. Don't think that just because a PC is good for word processing and web browsing that it is good for video editing, because it isn't.
frob.