BZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! It's a "stability freeze". That means that the stabilizers are frozen, and can't function. So, it will be unstable until they get the stabilizers repaired.
My laptop gets 24 hours battery life on 4 AA batterys. Of course, it's a Tandy 102. Of course, it's not my primary laptop. It is still useful when I want to be able to do some writing on the go.
The point is that we have become accustomed to absurdly short battery life in devices which are supposed to be portable.
... flying pigs are not like intellectual property just because both are not to be found in nature.
I doubt that's a valid criticism. The point (which must be expressed in less than 121 characters) is that there is no intellectual property, just as there are no winged pigs (would a winged pig be a pigasus?). We can of course put pigs on a plane, and we can pass laws creating intellectual property. We can't make pigs into birds, and we can't give IP the same moral standing as property.
... reifying; just like "Nature abhors a vacuum", this is not a meaningful statement, you are comparing concepts (abstractions) to reality.
IP is an abstraction. Flying pigs seem, if not abstract, at least counterfactual. I'm not stating the abstract is real, I'm stating that the two are similar in that they are both nonsense. Again, I think your criticism is a bit off. Finally, ``Nature abhors a vacuum'' seems more an example of anthropomorphizing than reifying.
Using: ``Talking about intellectual property is as silly as talking about flying pigs.'' might seem a bit clearer, but I'll stick to my original for the moment. It seems pretty clear, too, and does a better job of getting across the idea that intellectual property is a modern legal construct, rather than a natural, fundamental part of how things ought to be.
Lastly, the alternate form might be misconstrued as pointing out that IP is a fuzzy, almost meaningless term, since it lumps together trade secrets, copyrights, patents and who knows what else.
Second, it'll be nice to have the GPL tested out in court if for no other reason than the ability to point to it and say "it's been tested, it stands up".
That's not going to happen; at least, not with a sane defendent. The GPL doesn't restrict my rights to (for example) the Linux kernel: it adds rights which copyright law would not give me. If I ``defeated'' the GPL in court, I would lose, since I would lose those additional rights. Anyone who considers challenging the GPL will soon find that it's a fight he can't afford to win... or lose.
Only an insane party would challenge the GPL under those terms. SCO has talked about it, but they haven't put any of those loony ``legal theories'' in any of their court filings, so far as I know.
... it's important to the industry in general to work out any "bugs" in the GPL and get a prescident established sooner than later.
Well, yes, it is. But we won't be able to do it in court: no one who is compos mentis is going to take us there, or let us drag him there.
For the tin-foil-hat crowd, Microsoft might gain by eliminating the GPL. The temporary confusion and delay could give them a few months of breathing room. Still, even if they are funding SCO's sillyness, I doubt that ``break the GPL'' is on their list for Santa, let alone a serious plan.
You want him to drop out of college for a few thousand dollars?
I don't want him to do anything.
If we're really talking about a ``few thousand dollars'', that would be a few long weekends of intense work, or a reasonable part time job during the semester. No need to leave school.
His question sounded as if this might be a little more than a part time job. If he's going to take a contract to supply professional services/produce a deliverable product, it won't be just a few thousand dollars, and he'd be cheating the company he's contracted to if he tried to carry on with school. He'd be cheating himself, too: his grades and learning would both suffer. No one can serve two masters.
Stay in school, get your degree, the money will come soon enough.
This is the part I really wanted to reply to. With the possible exception of government jobs, you don't get paid for a degree. You get paid for your experience, and for the next thing you're going to deliver. One old boy, who's been selling HR consulting for decades, told me: ``I'm always selling them on the last job I did.''
This young fellow should definitely finish his degree. Someday. Large bureaucracies often have standards which aren't performance related, and they usually involve easily-quantified things like degrees. The degree is a minimum threshold to keep out the riff raff, not a job ticket. Always, it's the experience which matters, and schooling is a weak substitute for experience.
I think that if he can land a contract which will keep him busy full time for a semester or two, and let him produce something which he can point to as evidence of competence, that will more than justify putting off the degree for a year or so. The fact that it would let him finish school without any student loan debt is just gravy.
I don't know if Linus Torvalds ever finished his grad degree, but he finished an open source program to which he can point as evidence of his abilities. He seems to be eating regularly, and able to change jobs at will. I realize that this kid's project isn't in that league at all, but it can have the same effect on a smaller scale: it can set him up for a good next job.
If the company wants to encourage you to get your degree, and keep banging away at this in your spare time, they won't expect to get much, and won't expect to pay much.
If the company expects that their contract will be your focus, $1000.00 per day is a reasonable day rate in my field. It's close to the $100/hour other posts have quoted. Plan to drop out of school for the duration of the contract. If you're a grad student, talk to your advisor. He might be willing to keep writing ``satisfactory'' on your progress reports while you work exclusively on this.
If the company wants to let you own the code, I'd suggest working relatively cheaply. I might let them bargain down from that $1000 per day. As another post said, you're building capital. If the company expects that they will own your output, then $1000/day is too low, in my opinion. When you're done, you'll have nothing but the money, so it had better be a BIG pile. After all, this will monopolize your life, you're putting off graduation, and so on. Either way, make sure that ownership of the resulting code is clearly spelled out in the contract. Hire a lawyer to review the contract.
Finally, have you talked to your university's legal department? Is there any way that this project could belong to the Uni? Are you sure about that? If you are an undergrad, you are probably in the clear. If you are a grad student, there is a very good chance that ALL your work is the property of either the Uni or some granting agency. If this was part of work you did for the Uni, it is almost certainly theirs. I'd ask for permission to release it under your favorite Libre license BEFORE I mentioned the commercial interest. Most Uni's are VERY interested in exploiting their ``intellectual property''.
Above, I told you to hire a lawyer to review the contract. Do NOT depend on the University's lawyers to do this for you. They are working for the Uni, not for you. Their responsibility is ONLY to the Uni, and if you get screwed, tough. If you're not paying the lawyer, he's not on your side, period.
If Microsoft can offer a better TCO, then the government should buy Microsoft products.
If pigs can fly, then the government should buy them instead of bombers. But pigs can't fly, and MS generally can't offer a lower TCO. Just think about the cost of the viruses. Then think about the cost of keeping MS's high profit margins and high growth rates going, year after year. MS simply can't compete on cost, except in pathological cases.
... I fail to see how their current procurement procedures are inadequate for making that sort of decision.
Their current procurement procedures require that, in order for a product to be considered, SOMEONE must submit a bid. If we are talking about implementing a system with hardware, software and services, then bidders can put together a package which includes Libre software. If we are talking about buying 300 copies of MS Office for the helpdesk guys to install, who's going to submit a bid proposing to supply Openoffice free, instead?
The process assumes that money will be spent, and that vendors will be willing to jump through many expensive hoops to get fat contracts.
Finally, we have the fact that for many RFP's, the primary objective is to SPEND THE MONEY! Getting something in return is secondary to using up the budget, so that next year's budget is bigger rather than smaller. Free or Libre solutions aren't an obvious solution to this problem, especially if they have lower TCO! Managers know this, and are careful to write their specs so that they can spend what they have their hearts set on spending, and get what they want, rather than the best tool for the job.
Managers who purchase large systems from companies like MS or Oracle can count on being visited, flattered, lunched on expense accounts, given offers of political kickbacks[1], and whatever else it takes to make a sale. Managers who implement a low-cost, Libre solution can count on a smaller budget for software purchases next year, and nobody will make them feel important, or even buy them a sandwich at Subway.
The government's job is not to interfere with the market by promoting one product over another.
Then why is it appropriate to have our current procurement procedure, which effectively locks out
most free and Libre offerings? The current system certainly promotes proprietary solutions at the expense of all other possibilities.
[1]Remember the big scandal of Oracle's big sale to California?
The 15c was the model which had built-in support for complex numbers, and could do matrix math. It was perfect for my undergrad EE classes.
I started college with an HP41C, but soon found (halfway through my sophmore year) that it was too slow. I sold it, card reader and all, and bought the 15C (for the RPN calculator) and a Sharp PC-1500 for programmability. This combo did it for me until I was able to buy a compaq (the old, original luggable with two 5 1/4 floppies).
I really liked the 15C, and it's still one of my prized posessions. I recently bought a 41CX, and still like it, but it has corroded battery terminals. I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet, largely because I really like the 15C better.
Those 15's are great little machines. If you're an EE, you need one. Of course, HP hasn't made them for years.
Ed Black ain't no security expert. He's a lobbyist.
Imagine for a moment that you were right[1] about the author's credentials. That would make him the IDEAL spokesman for a very valid idea: that a software monoculture (even if it were a good one, rather than a MS monoculture) is BAD.
Think about this: who listens to lobbyists? Why, Senators and Congresscritters do! The very people we're going to have to convince on this issue, to have a prayer of overcoming the bureaucrat's resistance to change. If the authors include some lobbyists, that would be a great thing.
Imagine that! IBM, Oracle and Sun bashing Microsoft.
The idea that software monocultures are bad, and MS's products are insecure, is correct. It's true, even if SCO, or Satan say it. You should avoid ad hominem attacks; they make the attacker look silly.
[1] The authors, by the way, were (from the pdf):
Daniel Geer, Sc.D - Chief Technical Officer, @Stake
Charles P. Pfleeger, Ph.D - Master Security Architect, Exodus
Communications, Inc.
Bruce Schneier - Founder, Chief Technical Officer, Counterpane
Internet Security
John S. Quarterman - Founder, InternetPerils, Matrix
NetSystems, Inc.
Perry Metzger - Independent Consultant
Rebecca Bace - CEO, Infidel
Peter Gutmann - Researcher, Department of Computer Science,
University of Auckland
Some of these people know what they're talking about. Some are respectable in political circles. That's all good.
A happy coincidence
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 5, Informative
By a happy coincidence, I just today got my copies of the x86-64 programmer's manuals. There are five volumes:
1) Application Programming
2) Ssytems Programming
3) General Purpose and System Instructions
4) 128-Bit Media Instructions
5) 64-Bit Media and x87 Floating-Point Instructions
Neither of these projects are dead, quite, but neither is terribly active, either. Sourceforge shows one developer for CIPE, for example.
As an earlier post said, crypto demands skills which aren't generally available, in an unusual combination. Many competent eyes make bugs shallow. Many competent coders make bugfixes quick. It looks as if those packages haven't drawn the competent eyes and coders yet.
Maybe Mr. Gutman's post will draw some good folks who are able to do the work to these projects. Or maybe it will inspire the maintainers to simply let them fade away. Either way, we're better off for his efforts.
A third possibility is that folks will just not care. Gutman tells us:
- These programs have been around for years (CIPE goes back to 1996 and vtun
to 1998) and (apparently) have quite sizeable user communities without
anyone having noticed (or caring, after flaws were pointed out) that they
have security problems.
This kind of thing needs to be fixed or abandoned; bad security is worse than no security
... Gates donated $168 million to fund malaria research...
Someone made a foolish argument like this before, and I replied to it. The gist of the reply was that BillG is paying out a piddly few bucks that he'll never need or miss, to buy a bit of cheap good PR and maybe quiet his conscience.
If you want to see some impressive charitable giving, look at the folks who are just scraping by, but still give money that they NEED to help others who are worse off. When charity means giving up things that you really want, when giving really hurts, and when that giving can never do you any good in this world, then I'm impressed. Rich folks can give away more in one afternoon than you and I will make in our lives, but they never go that far. Even Andrew Carnegie never went so far as to miss a meal to help someone else.
BillG's ``giving''[1] doesn't impress me at all.
[1] Does it make sense to call it giving, when he's using that ``gift'' to purchase good PR, and to try to win marketshare for his company in places like India and Africa? I don't think so.
Too many patent issues - it's impossible to create a new graphics engine without having to license dozens of patents from the major players. They've probably signed licensing agreements preventing them from releasing the source.
So, what's wrong with that picture?
Patents require full disclosure. If it's patented, it's NOT secret. There's no possibility that anyone could gain by keeping patented stuff secret; the cat's already out of the bag.
Are there trade secrets in the hardware, which are being secretly cross-licenced? Well, anything's possible, but I sort of doubt that any company (say, maybe, Nvidia)which had a hot, new thing that no one else knew about would licence it to their only real competitor (say, maybe, ATI or Matrox).
Are there trade secrets in the software or firmware, which would be revealed if they showed the drivers or the spec's to write them? Maybe. But I doubt that they're being licenced.
Even if Nvidia needs some super-secret receipe to get bleeding-edge performance, I don't need bleeding-edge performance. I wouldn't be at all surprised if S3 could make a usable-for-me 3D chip without the 11 secret herbs and spices.
Oee way that S3 could compete with the big boys would be to offer a decent, usable, not-bleeding-edge, hardware-accelerated 3D card WITH OPEN SOURCE DRIVERS. This would appeal to the niche market of Linux users, and all the folks who ask them for advice.
It wouldn't have to be the latest, fastest, most expensive board out there. The really hard-core gamers are the only ones who need to spend $100+ on a video card, and I suspect that most of them run Windows.
S3 wouldn't even have to write the drivers themselves! I'm sure that if they published the spec's needed to write the drivers, that some Linux geeks would write better drivers than S3 could, and it wouldn't cost S3 a cent. Since we're talking about middle-aged technology here, there shouldn't be any worry about ``intellectual property'' leaking out through the spec's.
I'd ditch my GF2 in a minute, and pay around $80 (that's what I paid for my old Nvidia) to get opensource, no-hassle drivers, and a card that's no worse than the old GF2.
I believe the reason why they keep the database application in StarOffice "to themselves" and not release it with OpenOffice.org is that Adabas is commercial software...
I believe that you're right.
Get it here. Free, but not Libre, I think. Read the licence.
...you might know this, but I doubt the former poster understood it.
You're mostly right on that. I liked the C64 so much that I got one for my father for Christmas one year (He was a ham, and the C64 had excellent RF shielding.), but I never got very deeply into it myself. I had a nifty single board computer that I did most of my playing on. One of the neatest things about it was that it could use an oscilloscope as a CRT.
Yes, the 6510 was a version of the 6502. As I recall, it had the same special instructions for quickly accessing the bottom hundred or so bytes of ram, which I always thought were a really nifty feature. The Sharp PC 1500 had a similar feature in its (totally unrelated) CPU.
It means the Commadore was released more then 21 years ago, which is that age at which its legal to drink alcohol in the US. I believe the original release was in 1982.
I had been ``legal to drink'' in the U.S. for several years in 1982. My, how time flies.
I have fond memories of the C64. It was much cheaper than the Apple II, and (except for the painfully slow disk drives) equally capable. A good little machine for hardware hacking, using the 6502. Of course, the Tandy 102 even better, if you liked the 8085 chip.
Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf? It would be pretty funny if someday the astronomers found a big asteroid that really was going to wipe out all of us, and everyone said: ``Right. Just like the last 42 asteroids you said would wipe us out.''
Well, it would be funny if I had someway to get to another earth-like planet...
Of course, with essentially no space program, there's nothing we could do even if we DID believe them, so maybe they're worrying over nothing.
... but when it comes to even slightly complex word docs with images and lots of formatting OO chokes badly. Sure you end up with most of the text and images, but then you have to spend 5 minutes trying to move everything back to whre it should be...
I'm sure you're right about OO's performance here. Unfortunately, you can say exactly the same thing about Word opening slightly complex.doc files. Word will choke when trying to make them, choke when trying to save them and (it's wonderously consistant!) choke trying to open them.
I have opened a ``moderately complex'' Word document on the same version of Word on two machines, and had it paginated differently. I have seen one copy of Word fail to import some of the features of a document created on another copy (again, same version).
... I just don't think its right to outright lie to people and say OO can easily open all Word files.
I think that's no different, and no more lying, than pretending that Word can easily open all Word files.
Dr. B.D. McCullaugh is a big name in statistics, and has made a name for himself in (among other things) testing statistical software. In this article, he says:
The problems that rendered Excel 97 unfit for use as a statistical package have not been fixed in either Excel 2000 or Excel 2002 (also called "Excel XP"). Microsoft attempted to fix errors in the standard normal random number generator and the inverse normal function, and in the former case actually made the problem worse.
That's the entire abstract!
According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.
that's convenient that you can pick and choose which parts of the Bible you "have" to obey.
Actually, we're told, pretty explicitly, what parts we have to obey. ALL of it. Including the parts about us not being under the law anymore. Check out first Corinthians 6:12: ``All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.'' Taken in context, I think it's pretty clear. Our salvation doesn't depend on our following the law, it depends on God's grace and our acceptance of it.
Aren't all the anti-homosexual laws from Leviticus? Would that mean that modern Christianity (not being under Old Testament law) should have no problem with homosexuality today?
God's love, and salvation, are open to all who repent their sins and accept them. We're all sinners, and all in need of His grace. The idea that homosexuality is a sin is woven throughout the bible, old and new testament alike. In the new testament, that's reinforced, not abandoned. God makes it plain that He loves all of us, homosexuals included, and that He hates all of our sins, homosexuality included.
I don't really understand why homosexuality is sinful. I'm not sure why some of my little pleasures are sinful, either. I am sure that God expects us to love and care for all sinners, and especially the ones we really don't like. One part of that is being kind and helpful to our fellow sinners; another part is gently telling our fellow sinners that what they're doing is sinful, even when they don't want to hear it. See Proverbs 12 for a commentary on how some of them receive that.
Slashdot Mirror
BZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! It's a "stability freeze". That means that the stabilizers are frozen, and can't function. So, it will be unstable until they get the stabilizers repaired.
Sheesh. Goofy kids these days...
Finally stopped blaming the stork for those little surprises, eh?
My third is just today six months old. We're in about the same boat as you.
The point is that we have become accustomed to absurdly short battery life in devices which are supposed to be portable.
I doubt that's a valid criticism. The point (which must be expressed in less than 121 characters) is that there is no intellectual property, just as there are no winged pigs (would a winged pig be a pigasus?). We can of course put pigs on a plane, and we can pass laws creating intellectual property. We can't make pigs into birds, and we can't give IP the same moral standing as property.
IP is an abstraction. Flying pigs seem, if not abstract, at least counterfactual. I'm not stating the abstract is real, I'm stating that the two are similar in that they are both nonsense. Again, I think your criticism is a bit off. Finally, ``Nature abhors a vacuum'' seems more an example of anthropomorphizing than reifying.
Using: ``Talking about intellectual property is as silly as talking about flying pigs.'' might seem a bit clearer, but I'll stick to my original for the moment. It seems pretty clear, too, and does a better job of getting across the idea that intellectual property is a modern legal construct, rather than a natural, fundamental part of how things ought to be.
Lastly, the alternate form might be misconstrued as pointing out that IP is a fuzzy, almost meaningless term, since it lumps together trade secrets, copyrights, patents and who knows what else.
That's not going to happen; at least, not with a sane defendent. The GPL doesn't restrict my rights to (for example) the Linux kernel: it adds rights which copyright law would not give me. If I ``defeated'' the GPL in court, I would lose, since I would lose those additional rights. Anyone who considers challenging the GPL will soon find that it's a fight he can't afford to win ... or lose.
Only an insane party would challenge the GPL under those terms. SCO has talked about it, but they haven't put any of those loony ``legal theories'' in any of their court filings, so far as I know.
Well, yes, it is. But we won't be able to do it in court: no one who is compos mentis is going to take us there, or let us drag him there.
For the tin-foil-hat crowd, Microsoft might gain by eliminating the GPL. The temporary confusion and delay could give them a few months of breathing room. Still, even if they are funding SCO's sillyness, I doubt that ``break the GPL'' is on their list for Santa, let alone a serious plan.
I don't want him to do anything.
If we're really talking about a ``few thousand dollars'', that would be a few long weekends of intense work, or a reasonable part time job during the semester. No need to leave school.
His question sounded as if this might be a little more than a part time job. If he's going to take a contract to supply professional services/produce a deliverable product, it won't be just a few thousand dollars, and he'd be cheating the company he's contracted to if he tried to carry on with school. He'd be cheating himself, too: his grades and learning would both suffer. No one can serve two masters.
Stay in school, get your degree, the money will come soon enough.
This is the part I really wanted to reply to. With the possible exception of government jobs, you don't get paid for a degree. You get paid for your experience, and for the next thing you're going to deliver. One old boy, who's been selling HR consulting for decades, told me: ``I'm always selling them on the last job I did.''
This young fellow should definitely finish his degree. Someday. Large bureaucracies often have standards which aren't performance related, and they usually involve easily-quantified things like degrees. The degree is a minimum threshold to keep out the riff raff, not a job ticket. Always, it's the experience which matters, and schooling is a weak substitute for experience.
I think that if he can land a contract which will keep him busy full time for a semester or two, and let him produce something which he can point to as evidence of competence, that will more than justify putting off the degree for a year or so. The fact that it would let him finish school without any student loan debt is just gravy.
I don't know if Linus Torvalds ever finished his grad degree, but he finished an open source program to which he can point as evidence of his abilities. He seems to be eating regularly, and able to change jobs at will. I realize that this kid's project isn't in that league at all, but it can have the same effect on a smaller scale: it can set him up for a good next job.
If the company expects that their contract will be your focus, $1000.00 per day is a reasonable day rate in my field. It's close to the $100/hour other posts have quoted. Plan to drop out of school for the duration of the contract. If you're a grad student, talk to your advisor. He might be willing to keep writing ``satisfactory'' on your progress reports while you work exclusively on this.
If the company wants to let you own the code, I'd suggest working relatively cheaply. I might let them bargain down from that $1000 per day. As another post said, you're building capital. If the company expects that they will own your output, then $1000/day is too low, in my opinion. When you're done, you'll have nothing but the money, so it had better be a BIG pile. After all, this will monopolize your life, you're putting off graduation, and so on. Either way, make sure that ownership of the resulting code is clearly spelled out in the contract. Hire a lawyer to review the contract.
Finally, have you talked to your university's legal department? Is there any way that this project could belong to the Uni? Are you sure about that? If you are an undergrad, you are probably in the clear. If you are a grad student, there is a very good chance that ALL your work is the property of either the Uni or some granting agency. If this was part of work you did for the Uni, it is almost certainly theirs. I'd ask for permission to release it under your favorite Libre license BEFORE I mentioned the commercial interest. Most Uni's are VERY interested in exploiting their ``intellectual property''.
Above, I told you to hire a lawyer to review the contract. Do NOT depend on the University's lawyers to do this for you. They are working for the Uni, not for you. Their responsibility is ONLY to the Uni, and if you get screwed, tough. If you're not paying the lawyer, he's not on your side, period.
I tell you, they teach it a whole lot less, here in the US!
If pigs can fly, then the government should buy them instead of bombers. But pigs can't fly, and MS generally can't offer a lower TCO. Just think about the cost of the viruses. Then think about the cost of keeping MS's high profit margins and high growth rates going, year after year. MS simply can't compete on cost, except in pathological cases.
Their current procurement procedures require that, in order for a product to be considered, SOMEONE must submit a bid. If we are talking about implementing a system with hardware, software and services, then bidders can put together a package which includes Libre software. If we are talking about buying 300 copies of MS Office for the helpdesk guys to install, who's going to submit a bid proposing to supply Openoffice free, instead?
The process assumes that money will be spent, and that vendors will be willing to jump through many expensive hoops to get fat contracts.
Finally, we have the fact that for many RFP's, the primary objective is to SPEND THE MONEY! Getting something in return is secondary to using up the budget, so that next year's budget is bigger rather than smaller. Free or Libre solutions aren't an obvious solution to this problem, especially if they have lower TCO! Managers know this, and are careful to write their specs so that they can spend what they have their hearts set on spending, and get what they want, rather than the best tool for the job.
Managers who purchase large systems from companies like MS or Oracle can count on being visited, flattered, lunched on expense accounts, given offers of political kickbacks[1], and whatever else it takes to make a sale. Managers who implement a low-cost, Libre solution can count on a smaller budget for software purchases next year, and nobody will make them feel important, or even buy them a sandwich at Subway.
The government's job is not to interfere with the market by promoting one product over another.
Then why is it appropriate to have our current procurement procedure, which effectively locks out most free and Libre offerings? The current system certainly promotes proprietary solutions at the expense of all other possibilities.
[1]Remember the big scandal of Oracle's big sale to California?
I started college with an HP41C, but soon found (halfway through my sophmore year) that it was too slow. I sold it, card reader and all, and bought the 15C (for the RPN calculator) and a Sharp PC-1500 for programmability. This combo did it for me until I was able to buy a compaq (the old, original luggable with two 5 1/4 floppies).
I really liked the 15C, and it's still one of my prized posessions. I recently bought a 41CX, and still like it, but it has corroded battery terminals. I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet, largely because I really like the 15C better.
Those 15's are great little machines. If you're an EE, you need one. Of course, HP hasn't made them for years.
Imagine for a moment that you were right[1] about the author's credentials. That would make him the IDEAL spokesman for a very valid idea: that a software monoculture (even if it were a good one, rather than a MS monoculture) is BAD.
Think about this: who listens to lobbyists? Why, Senators and Congresscritters do! The very people we're going to have to convince on this issue, to have a prayer of overcoming the bureaucrat's resistance to change. If the authors include some lobbyists, that would be a great thing.
Imagine that! IBM, Oracle and Sun bashing Microsoft.
The idea that software monocultures are bad, and MS's products are insecure, is correct. It's true, even if SCO, or Satan say it. You should avoid ad hominem attacks; they make the attacker look silly.
[1] The authors, by the way, were (from the pdf):
Some of these people know what they're talking about. Some are respectable in political circles. That's all good.1) Application Programming
2) Ssytems Programming
3) General Purpose and System Instructions
4) 128-Bit Media Instructions
5) 64-Bit Media and x87 Floating-Point Instructions
Get them here.
Then go make your favorite compiler or windowing system work better on this.
Rating: 8.35/10.00 (Rank N/A)
Vitality: 0.01% (Rank 4941)
Popularity: 2.72% (Rank 1001)
VTUN
Rating: 8.55/10.00 (Rank N/A)
Vitality: 0.02% (Rank 2787)
Popularity: 2.69% (Rank 1017)
Neither of these projects are dead, quite, but neither is terribly active, either. Sourceforge shows one developer for CIPE, for example.
As an earlier post said, crypto demands skills which aren't generally available, in an unusual combination. Many competent eyes make bugs shallow. Many competent coders make bugfixes quick. It looks as if those packages haven't drawn the competent eyes and coders yet.
Maybe Mr. Gutman's post will draw some good folks who are able to do the work to these projects. Or maybe it will inspire the maintainers to simply let them fade away. Either way, we're better off for his efforts.
A third possibility is that folks will just not care. Gutman tells us:
This kind of thing needs to be fixed or abandoned; bad security is worse than no securitySomeone made a foolish argument like this before, and I replied to it. The gist of the reply was that BillG is paying out a piddly few bucks that he'll never need or miss, to buy a bit of cheap good PR and maybe quiet his conscience.
If you want to see some impressive charitable giving, look at the folks who are just scraping by, but still give money that they NEED to help others who are worse off. When charity means giving up things that you really want, when giving really hurts, and when that giving can never do you any good in this world, then I'm impressed. Rich folks can give away more in one afternoon than you and I will make in our lives, but they never go that far. Even Andrew Carnegie never went so far as to miss a meal to help someone else.
BillG's ``giving''[1] doesn't impress me at all.
[1] Does it make sense to call it giving, when he's using that ``gift'' to purchase good PR, and to try to win marketshare for his company in places like India and Africa? I don't think so.
So, what's wrong with that picture?
Patents require full disclosure. If it's patented, it's NOT secret. There's no possibility that anyone could gain by keeping patented stuff secret; the cat's already out of the bag.
Are there trade secrets in the hardware, which are being secretly cross-licenced? Well, anything's possible, but I sort of doubt that any company (say, maybe, Nvidia)which had a hot, new thing that no one else knew about would licence it to their only real competitor (say, maybe, ATI or Matrox).
Are there trade secrets in the software or firmware, which would be revealed if they showed the drivers or the spec's to write them? Maybe. But I doubt that they're being licenced.
Even if Nvidia needs some super-secret receipe to get bleeding-edge performance, I don't need bleeding-edge performance. I wouldn't be at all surprised if S3 could make a usable-for-me 3D chip without the 11 secret herbs and spices.
It wouldn't have to be the latest, fastest, most expensive board out there. The really hard-core gamers are the only ones who need to spend $100+ on a video card, and I suspect that most of them run Windows.
S3 wouldn't even have to write the drivers themselves! I'm sure that if they published the spec's needed to write the drivers, that some Linux geeks would write better drivers than S3 could, and it wouldn't cost S3 a cent. Since we're talking about middle-aged technology here, there shouldn't be any worry about ``intellectual property'' leaking out through the spec's.
I'd ditch my GF2 in a minute, and pay around $80 (that's what I paid for my old Nvidia) to get opensource, no-hassle drivers, and a card that's no worse than the old GF2.
I believe that you're right.
Get it here. Free, but not Libre, I think. Read the licence.
You're mostly right on that. I liked the C64 so much that I got one for my father for Christmas one year (He was a ham, and the C64 had excellent RF shielding.), but I never got very deeply into it myself. I had a nifty single board computer that I did most of my playing on. One of the neatest things about it was that it could use an oscilloscope as a CRT.
Yes, the 6510 was a version of the 6502. As I recall, it had the same special instructions for quickly accessing the bottom hundred or so bytes of ram, which I always thought were a really nifty feature. The Sharp PC 1500 had a similar feature in its (totally unrelated) CPU.
I had been ``legal to drink'' in the U.S. for several years in 1982. My, how time flies.
I have fond memories of the C64. It was much cheaper than the Apple II, and (except for the painfully slow disk drives) equally capable. A good little machine for hardware hacking, using the 6502. Of course, the Tandy 102 even better, if you liked the 8085 chip.
Well, it would be funny if I had someway to get to another earth-like planet ...
Of course, with essentially no space program, there's nothing we could do even if we DID believe them, so maybe they're worrying over nothing.
I'm sure you're right about OO's performance here. Unfortunately, you can say exactly the same thing about Word opening slightly complex .doc files. Word will choke when trying to make them, choke when trying to save them and (it's wonderously consistant!) choke trying to open them.
I have opened a ``moderately complex'' Word document on the same version of Word on two machines, and had it paginated differently. I have seen one copy of Word fail to import some of the features of a document created on another copy (again, same version).
I think that's no different, and no more lying, than pretending that Word can easily open all Word files.
According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.
More information means more readable. This surprises you?
Actually, we're told, pretty explicitly, what parts we have to obey. ALL of it. Including the parts about us not being under the law anymore. Check out first Corinthians 6:12: ``All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.'' Taken in context, I think it's pretty clear. Our salvation doesn't depend on our following the law, it depends on God's grace and our acceptance of it.
Aren't all the anti-homosexual laws from Leviticus? Would that mean that modern Christianity (not being under Old Testament law) should have no problem with homosexuality today?
God's love, and salvation, are open to all who repent their sins and accept them. We're all sinners, and all in need of His grace. The idea that homosexuality is a sin is woven throughout the bible, old and new testament alike. In the new testament, that's reinforced, not abandoned. God makes it plain that He loves all of us, homosexuals included, and that He hates all of our sins, homosexuality included.
I don't really understand why homosexuality is sinful. I'm not sure why some of my little pleasures are sinful, either. I am sure that God expects us to love and care for all sinners, and especially the ones we really don't like. One part of that is being kind and helpful to our fellow sinners; another part is gently telling our fellow sinners that what they're doing is sinful, even when they don't want to hear it. See Proverbs 12 for a commentary on how some of them receive that.