First, I don't believe anybody's passed the tests on their first attempt.
With the tests not being generally available, most vendors focus on deskchecking against the spec (usually via their own test cases), plus doing what the reference implementation does. However, the reference implementation doesn't pass the official tests either.
Secondly, the test cases themselves are not perfect. They're software, and they have bugs. Just like the vendor software being tested, the test cases were written by someone interpreting the spec, and there's no assurance the interpretation was accurate.
If Sun allow more than one pass over the test cases, and give feedback on what's failed, I'm certain JBoss will be passing before long.
The main news here is that Mark Fleury won't be able to brag about how Sun won't let him show how good his software is anymore. If it makes Fleury shut up, then I only wish Sun had done this earlier...:)
The first point, of course, is some agreed means of tracing the sales or revenue. After all, if a company sets the mark fairly low, and then finds out they've got a killer product, they would have to be tempted to fudge the figures to keep the revenue coming in.
The second is that you'd probably want a nominated "end-of-life" date. At that point, the source should be released anyway, regardless of how much money has been raised. 5 years after release would be a suitable point, probably.
You could probably combine them, so that you can have a reducing threshold of revenue vs time.
What I would really like to see, however, is a legal requirement that companies either support software they've sold basically forever (either through patches or free upgrades to more recent releases), or release the source so that somebody else can do the support. There's a lot of machines still running Win95 out there that have major bugs, but MS will never lift a finger to help those people out. I have no problem with companies wanting to sell software, but if there's a bug that causes things to break in a product I've paid cash for, then I want it fixed, dammit!
Seriously, what law was broken here? If the university left a list of student/faculty names and SSNs on the sidewalk and someone picked it up, with no intent to commit fraud etc., would that be crime?
Well, by going past the cover page, you would have illegally bypassed the access device, and thus be in violation of the DMCA...
Ah, but unless your model rocket is a GyroJet, it's not likely that a prepubescent child will use your rocket to kill another prepubescent child in the preschool play ground, is it?
(Heck, it's not likely even if your model rocket is a GyroJet)
Columbus was an explorer and navigator (and a bad one), not a ship designer. He wouldn't have known what you could do with ship design if his life depended on it.
Secondly, at the time, English ships weren't anything special. Even at the time of the Spanish Armada being kicked by the English Navy (1588, some 96 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue), they weren't anything special.
I'd assume that Cornell are only looking to charge on traffic outside of their own network. Thus, P2P within the university wouldn't be restricted.
Such a charge would just mean that, instead of 200 students all going and getting their own copies of the latest movies, a few of them would and the rest would get it from those few (via the local network). More efficient use of resources, and all that. Work out a roster scheme with your friends.
IIRC, the Moon is currently believed to have been made by a large asteroid slamming into the primordial Earth. This smeared a large chunk of the Earth's crust and mantle (the crust is essentially solid mantle, and back then it was a lot thinner) out into space, where it coalesced into the Moon. Initially, the Moon's core would have been liquid as well, but being smaller and less dense it would have cooled fairly fast.
Well, power is cheap for starters. There's a lot of He3 for fusion, or you can just roll out a bunch of solar panels (made locally, of course!).
Once you've got power, you can do a lot. Shipping stuff into orbit is easy; a laser-based propulsion system will lift stuff of the Moon readily. Heck, even if all you can lift off is moon rocks, you can use that as construction material, you know.
Furthermore, the Moon is thought to be geologically like the Earth's mantle. You know, the top bit where we get all of our metals and minerals from. If that is the case, the Chinese could reasonably expect to mine metals up there, and use those for construction materials.
The point here is that you don't have to ship the stuff back down to Earth to be useful. You can leave it in orbit and use it there; orbital shipyards, anyone?
Of course, if you can ship it back to Earth, then you've got a weapon of enormous potential. A few tons of rock coming in at orbital velocities makes a big splash. And don't think that hasn't been thought of by the Chinese, either. Ever read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"?
Back in the '80s Microsoft was in the habit of screwing up/obfuscating the symbol tables on the software they released - until the courts made them stop that practice.
Now, instead of obfuscating at the compiled level, they obfuscate at the source level instead?
Stick a timestamped copy of the list into the Windows Update program on the install CD. Then, all Windows Update needs to do is ask for what's new since the last update time. If you run it on a regular basis (every couple of weeks or so), there shouldn't be a lot.
WTF would you want to download a complete list everytime? Doing an OS update isn't a one-off event, you know.
FWIW, this is exactly how the Mac's update utility works, and exactly how the various Linux update tools I've seen works. MS doesn't need to do it differently.
The Earth emits almost as much RF radiation as a star. Anyone ET who has been watching our system for the last century would have noticed the massive climb. Anyone ET who is just starting to look at us would notice the anomaly. This would be visible anywhere in the appropriate radius, (about 70 light years), AND that radius is limited by lightspeed, not signal strength.
Microsoft yanked Office for Mac before. The Mac survived as a platform, and even gave a place for the other office suites to survive (particularly WordPerfect).
If MS yanked Office for Mac again, Apple would still survive.
That was about the EU allowing non-skilled workers to work at the docks though. Heh... "sharing the wealth" somehow doesn't apply when it is their wealth". Of course they are just looking after the membership, but I wish they'd just say that, instead of always giving us that tired line that they do things for the greater good
Well, I'll like to see you volunteer to work with heavy equipment when you know that your neighbour doesn't know how to steer that forklift he's using...
It's one thing for union members to insist on only union workers. It's a very different thing for them to insist that all workers be suitably trained and certified.
It is extremely frustrating that Dawson won't release his tool to other researchers (or even better to the open source community at large).
There's probably a bunch of reasons why he hasn't done this. The most likely one is that he's using it as a research tool, and he doesn't want someone else to beat him to the punch in his research. A second is that it's probably not really in a fit state for sharing as yet (the tool is not the goal of the research, after all).
He's got a bunch of papers up describing how the tool works, so it can be reimplemented. Also, if he's like most academics, he'll probably talk your ear off if you ask him how it works.:)
MS should terrify MS. The XBox is rapidly starting to evolve into the long awaited "computing appliance" and it doesn't run windows (tho it can run linux).
Just as a side point, I found out the other day that there really isn't any sort of fair use for taping TV in Australia. The advice [copyright.org.au] from the Australian Copyright Council website says explicitly it's not even allowed in order to watch the show later the same day!!!
Actually, there is. When VCRs came out in Australia, the TV companies took this issue to court and lost. However, the court noted that the "fair use" rights were implicit, not explicit, and may not apply in all cases.
The Australian Copyright Council, BTW, represents copyright _holders_. As such, it is in their interests to keep repeating this FUD. The state of play in Australia is that all broadcasted media (TV and radio) _is_ copyable for private use, legally and without any guilt attached. The reason for this is that broadcasters pay copyright holders for the privilege.
So, my money is a 'resource' to be allocated and redistributed? How would that 'resource' be there, if it wasn't for me?
Actually, your money is an IOU from the government. Check the fine print.
It's their decision that, because they've given you some services (such as clean water, health services, etc) that they don't owe you as much as you think they do.
They don't steal from you, they simply don't honour their debt. Big difference. In order for it to be compulsory taxation, per se, they would have to force you to donate time and labour. Most governments don't do this any more, and those that do restrict it to national defence.
If you don't want your return for your time and effort to be in the form of a government-backed IOU, that's a different matter all together. You know the tax rates up front, and you should have adjusted your expectations (or your prices) accordingly.
If this goes before the government for real, there's a few points I'll be talking to my MP about:
1) The money better go to the artists, not the record companies. After all, what expenses do the record companies have for stolen music? (Well, maybe advertising)
2) The money had better go to the artists in a proportional matter. So some mechanism for working out which artists get copied the most better be decided on. Don't look at what's selling well; arguably, that's what's being copied the least.
3) I should be able to take a CD that hasn't been used for copying music, and get a refund on the levy. Not sure how this would work for CDRWs, but that's not my problem.
4) Fair use rights should be encoded explicitly in law. They are there in Australia's copyright legisilation implicitly (and have been upheld in court), but let's end the legal challenges, okay?
5) Copy-protected CDs should be illegal; after all, by paying the levy on the media, I've explicitly paid for the right to copy music on to it, haven't I?
6) I should have the right to return a CD that I don't like to the distributor (ideally, to the store), and get a full refund on the price.
7) People who use that lame excuse that CD sales were down last year should be shot unless they immediately point out that so were new titles and that sales/title were actually up in 2002, same as every year in the last 10.
The problem isn't the fact that embedding the software causes license problems. The problem is that the company may not be aware that the software has been embedded, due to the ease that a single developer can do it.
This is not FUD. It's a real problem. However, the solution is not to outlaw the GPL, but for companies to have better oversight over what is going into their software. The damage that a single developer can cause, either intentionally or through negligence, makes the accidental GPL embedding seem rather trivial.
This isn't the angle that MS is pushing. They aren't saying that people should be able to use software without restriction (that would be silly).
What they are saying is that GPL software is a problem for developers, and software companies. The scenario that they tend to paint is one where a lowly developer (either not knowing or not caring about the license problems) grabs some GPL software to solve a problem, without upper management knowing about it. The project that the developer was working on gets turned into a product and sold. Two years later, the FSF notices that the product has GPL software in it, and starts lawsuits firing.
This problem is unique to the so-called "viral" licenses. Software with no restrictions (e.g. BSD-style licenses) do not cause it; commercial software wouldn't be able to be embedded without management noticing a purchase order. And it is something that a development company needs to know about.
Of course, that's not the real reason MS attacks the GPL, but it's still something to think about.
I love the example of Singapore Telecom and Airlines. I remember a TV interview with John Howard (current Prime Minister of Australia for you Yanks out there), where he said that governments have no business owning big business like Telstra and Qantas (the national telecomms and airline companies), because they can't run them efficiently.
Then, not a minute later, he endorsed SingTel buying out Optus Australia, and Singapore Airlines buying a major share in Ansett (the major rival telecomms and airline companies, respectively).
When the host pointed out that SingTel and Singapore Airlines are both government owned businesses, he spent the next five minutes trying to back away from the debate.
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.
That would be why, for example, the giant animals of the last ice age are still around, surely? Oops, wait; they're not!
Bigger isn't necessarily better. Bigger animals make for a bigger snack, so might be preferred by predators. They can't hide behind things. They may well be slower or have less stamina. Contrawise, the small agile version may well be able to run away a lot better.
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?
Evolution is a one-way path, but that path can loop back over itself a lot. Take dolphins, for example. There isn't anything that says that birds could not evolve into larger versions, possibly with teeth, and that these larger versions wouldn't resemble large feathery dinosaurs. And, of course, the feathers would presumably evolve away in a land-bound animal, and would probably revert back to scales, or just soft skin (similar to humans).
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First, I don't believe anybody's passed the tests on their first attempt.
:)
With the tests not being generally available, most vendors focus on deskchecking against the spec (usually via their own test cases), plus doing what the reference implementation does. However, the reference implementation doesn't pass the official tests either.
Secondly, the test cases themselves are not perfect. They're software, and they have bugs. Just like the vendor software being tested, the test cases were written by someone interpreting the spec, and there's no assurance the interpretation was accurate.
If Sun allow more than one pass over the test cases, and give feedback on what's failed, I'm certain JBoss will be passing before long.
The main news here is that Mark Fleury won't be able to brag about how Sun won't let him show how good his software is anymore. If it makes Fleury shut up, then I only wish Sun had done this earlier...
The first point, of course, is some agreed means of tracing the sales or revenue. After all, if a company sets the mark fairly low, and then finds out they've got a killer product, they would have to be tempted to fudge the figures to keep the revenue coming in.
The second is that you'd probably want a nominated "end-of-life" date. At that point, the source should be released anyway, regardless of how much money has been raised. 5 years after release would be a suitable point, probably.
You could probably combine them, so that you can have a reducing threshold of revenue vs time.
What I would really like to see, however, is a legal requirement that companies either support software they've sold basically forever (either through patches or free upgrades to more recent releases), or release the source so that somebody else can do the support. There's a lot of machines still running Win95 out there that have major bugs, but MS will never lift a finger to help those people out. I have no problem with companies wanting to sell software, but if there's a bug that causes things to break in a product I've paid cash for, then I want it fixed, dammit!
Seriously, what law was broken here? If the university left a list of student/faculty names and SSNs on the sidewalk and someone picked it up, with no intent to commit fraud etc., would that be crime?
Well, by going past the cover page, you would have illegally bypassed the access device, and thus be in violation of the DMCA...
Ah, but unless your model rocket is a GyroJet, it's not likely that a prepubescent child will use your rocket to kill another prepubescent child in the preschool play ground, is it?
(Heck, it's not likely even if your model rocket is a GyroJet)
Don't know why Columbus would have said that.
Columbus was an explorer and navigator (and a bad one), not a ship designer. He wouldn't have known what you could do with ship design if his life depended on it.
Secondly, at the time, English ships weren't anything special. Even at the time of the Spanish Armada being kicked by the English Navy (1588, some 96 years after Columbus sailed the ocean blue), they weren't anything special.
Why would it render it useless?
I'd assume that Cornell are only looking to charge on traffic outside of their own network. Thus, P2P within the university wouldn't be restricted.
Such a charge would just mean that, instead of 200 students all going and getting their own copies of the latest movies, a few of them would and the rest would get it from those few (via the local network). More efficient use of resources, and all that. Work out a roster scheme with your friends.
No, I'm pretty sure I meant mantle.
:)
IIRC, the Moon is currently believed to have been made by a large asteroid slamming into the primordial Earth. This smeared a large chunk of the Earth's crust and mantle (the crust is essentially solid mantle, and back then it was a lot thinner) out into space, where it coalesced into the Moon. Initially, the Moon's core would have been liquid as well, but being smaller and less dense it would have cooled fairly fast.
Could be wrong, of course...
Well, power is cheap for starters. There's a lot of He3 for fusion, or you can just roll out a bunch of solar panels (made locally, of course!).
Once you've got power, you can do a lot. Shipping stuff into orbit is easy; a laser-based propulsion system will lift stuff of the Moon readily. Heck, even if all you can lift off is moon rocks, you can use that as construction material, you know.
Furthermore, the Moon is thought to be geologically like the Earth's mantle. You know, the top bit where we get all of our metals and minerals from. If that is the case, the Chinese could reasonably expect to mine metals up there, and use those for construction materials.
The point here is that you don't have to ship the stuff back down to Earth to be useful. You can leave it in orbit and use it there; orbital shipyards, anyone?
Of course, if you can ship it back to Earth, then you've got a weapon of enormous potential. A few tons of rock coming in at orbital velocities makes a big splash. And don't think that hasn't been thought of by the Chinese, either. Ever read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"?
Q: How do you detect a radar detector? Aren't they merely passive devices that notice the radar beam?
And thoughtless Americans often build houses on top of Indian graveyards too!
Face it, almost no culture in the world cares that much about the previous occupiers of the land they're in right now.
Back in the '80s Microsoft was in the habit of screwing up/obfuscating the symbol tables on the software they released - until the courts made them stop that practice.
Now, instead of obfuscating at the compiled level, they obfuscate at the source level instead?
Tens of megabytes?? Oh please.
Stick a timestamped copy of the list into the Windows Update program on the install CD. Then, all Windows Update needs to do is ask for what's new since the last update time. If you run it on a regular basis (every couple of weeks or so), there shouldn't be a lot.
WTF would you want to download a complete list everytime? Doing an OS update isn't a one-off event, you know.
FWIW, this is exactly how the Mac's update utility works, and exactly how the various Linux update tools I've seen works. MS doesn't need to do it differently.
As a coherent signal, yes. As static, no way.
The Earth emits almost as much RF radiation as a star. Anyone ET who has been watching our system for the last century would have noticed the massive climb. Anyone ET who is just starting to look at us would notice the anomaly. This would be visible anywhere in the appropriate radius, (about 70 light years), AND that radius is limited by lightspeed, not signal strength.
Microsoft yanked Office for Mac before. The Mac survived as a platform, and even gave a place for the other office suites to survive (particularly WordPerfect).
If MS yanked Office for Mac again, Apple would still survive.
That was about the EU allowing non-skilled workers to work at the docks though. Heh... "sharing the wealth" somehow doesn't apply when it is their wealth". Of course they are just looking after the membership, but I wish they'd just say that, instead of always giving us that tired line that they do things for the greater good
Well, I'll like to see you volunteer to work with heavy equipment when you know that your neighbour doesn't know how to steer that forklift he's using...
It's one thing for union members to insist on only union workers. It's a very different thing for them to insist that all workers be suitably trained and certified.
It is extremely frustrating that Dawson won't release his tool to other researchers (or even better to the open source community at large).
:)
There's probably a bunch of reasons why he hasn't done this. The most likely one is that he's using it as a research tool, and he doesn't want someone else to beat him to the punch in his research. A second is that it's probably not really in a fit state for sharing as yet (the tool is not the goal of the research, after all).
He's got a bunch of papers up describing how the tool works, so it can be reimplemented. Also, if he's like most academics, he'll probably talk your ear off if you ask him how it works.
MS should terrify MS. The XBox is rapidly starting to evolve into the long awaited "computing appliance" and it doesn't run windows (tho it can run linux).
;)
Sorry, it had to be said.
Just as a side point, I found out the other day that there really isn't any sort of fair use for taping TV in Australia. The advice [copyright.org.au] from the Australian Copyright Council website says explicitly it's not even allowed in order to watch the show later the same day!!!
Actually, there is. When VCRs came out in Australia, the TV companies took this issue to court and lost. However, the court noted that the "fair use" rights were implicit, not explicit, and may not apply in all cases.
The Australian Copyright Council, BTW, represents
copyright _holders_. As such, it is in their interests to keep repeating this FUD. The state of play in Australia is that all broadcasted media (TV and radio) _is_ copyable for private use, legally and without any guilt attached. The reason for this is that broadcasters pay copyright holders for the privilege.
So, my money is a 'resource' to be allocated and redistributed? How would that 'resource' be there, if it wasn't for me?
Actually, your money is an IOU from the government. Check the fine print.
It's their decision that, because they've given you some services (such as clean water, health services, etc) that they don't owe you as much as you think they do.
They don't steal from you, they simply don't honour their debt. Big difference. In order for it to be compulsory taxation, per se, they would have to force you to donate time and labour. Most governments don't do this any more, and those that do restrict it to national defence.
If you don't want your return for your time and effort to be in the form of a government-backed IOU, that's a different matter all together. You know the tax rates up front, and you should have adjusted your expectations (or your prices) accordingly.
If this goes before the government for real, there's a few points I'll be talking to my MP about:
1) The money better go to the artists, not the record companies. After all, what expenses do the record companies have for stolen music? (Well, maybe advertising)
2) The money had better go to the artists in a proportional matter. So some mechanism for working out which artists get copied the most better be decided on. Don't look at what's selling well; arguably, that's what's being copied the least.
3) I should be able to take a CD that hasn't been used for copying music, and get a refund on the levy. Not sure how this would work for CDRWs, but that's not my problem.
4) Fair use rights should be encoded explicitly in law. They are there in Australia's copyright legisilation implicitly (and have been upheld in court), but let's end the legal challenges, okay?
5) Copy-protected CDs should be illegal; after all, by paying the levy on the media, I've explicitly paid for the right to copy music on to it, haven't I?
6) I should have the right to return a CD that I don't like to the distributor (ideally, to the store), and get a full refund on the price.
7) People who use that lame excuse that CD sales were down last year should be shot unless they immediately point out that so were new titles and that sales/title were actually up in 2002, same as every year in the last 10.
It is an order of magnitude. Observe:
New Speed = Old Speed x 10
If you think a doubling of speed isn't impressive, then you've been jaded too long.
The problem isn't the fact that embedding the software causes license problems. The problem is that the company may not be aware that the software has been embedded, due to the ease that a single developer can do it.
This is not FUD. It's a real problem. However, the solution is not to outlaw the GPL, but for companies to have better oversight over what is going into their software. The damage that a single developer can cause, either intentionally or through negligence, makes the accidental GPL embedding seem rather trivial.
This isn't the angle that MS is pushing. They aren't saying that people should be able to use software without restriction (that would be silly).
What they are saying is that GPL software is a problem for developers, and software companies. The scenario that they tend to paint is one where a lowly developer (either not knowing or not caring about the license problems) grabs some GPL software to solve a problem, without upper management knowing about it. The project that the developer was working on gets turned into a product and sold. Two years later, the FSF notices that the product has GPL software in it, and starts lawsuits firing.
This problem is unique to the so-called "viral" licenses. Software with no restrictions (e.g. BSD-style licenses) do not cause it; commercial software wouldn't be able to be embedded without management noticing a purchase order. And it is something that a development company needs to know about.
Of course, that's not the real reason MS attacks the GPL, but it's still something to think about.
I love the example of Singapore Telecom and Airlines. I remember a TV interview with John Howard (current Prime Minister of Australia for you Yanks out there), where he said that governments have no business owning big business like Telstra and Qantas (the national telecomms and airline companies), because they can't run them efficiently.
Then, not a minute later, he endorsed SingTel buying out Optus Australia, and Singapore Airlines buying a major share in Ansett (the major rival telecomms and airline companies, respectively).
When the host pointed out that SingTel and Singapore Airlines are both government owned businesses, he spent the next five minutes trying to back away from the debate.
Disregarding Cope's rule: The idea is that as things evolve, they get bigger. Bigger animals tend to win fights over mates, get more food, have fewer predators. It just makes sense. The last of the mammals being herded by spiders bigger than it? Nope.
That would be why, for example, the giant animals of the last ice age are still around, surely? Oops, wait; they're not!
Bigger isn't necessarily better. Bigger animals make for a bigger snack, so might be preferred by predators. They can't hide behind things. They may well be slower or have less stamina. Contrawise, the small agile version may well be able to run away a lot better.
Disregarding Dollo's law: Evolution is a one-way path. Dinosaurs evolve into birds which evolve into dinosaurs?
Evolution is a one-way path, but that path can loop back over itself a lot. Take dolphins, for example. There isn't anything that says that birds could not evolve into larger versions, possibly with teeth, and that these larger versions wouldn't resemble large feathery dinosaurs. And, of course, the feathers would presumably evolve away in a land-bound animal, and would probably revert back to scales, or just soft skin (similar to humans).