Essentially I'd be profiting of the design of the Gameboy without paying any money to Nintendo. This would be wrong. Right?
Nope. You are not automatically entitled to make money off any work you chose to do, or to prevent others from benefiting for free. Society has certain laws that let you do so in special cases and which were supposed to promote overall progress and wealth. A clean re-implementation is not covered.
Anyhow, these laws are lately abused by a bunch of leeches who are trying to profit from other peoples' success while doing little or no work themselves. I hope backlash is coming soon and IP laws will be restricted in various cases, including the one of downloading a ROM for a GBA game you own.
And here we have - assuming you are accurate - an abusive government that is much worse than Microsoft or SCO, because they generally don't screw up your life personally.
A bribe is a bribe. A lunch is a lunch. If you can be bought for $5, you need a raise, not a threat of prison sentence. People should be allowed to install their free CDs and then actual purchasing decisions should be made by agreement of technically competent and financially competent people rather than google-eyed Microsoft adicts. If Office 2003 does have new features that justify its price, so be it.
slashdot's homepage for instance, its all publicly accessable data so why encrypt it?
Ah, but you may not want your company or your neighbors to know your slashdot username or your anonymous or regular posts. Think of all the SCO, Real or Microsoft employees who post here.
Yes, we need an SSL change to allow certificate owner to create additional certificates for "child" domains. And some traffic like multicast audio/video steams is not practical for SSL. But most things should be signed and encrypted as soon as technology permits.
Users already have trouble with a single lock icon, do you really want them to think about insecure vs signed vs encrypted? If people pay for the silliness of hardware XML accelerators (rather than using a nice binary protocol), they can pay for hardware SSL accelerators. ISPs should have no problem getting an SSL certificate and signing all users' pages with their username, given a small modification to SSL to support one more level of indirection.
In this way, most pages on the web will be https://, with the exception of some hobby and ultra-high-performance URLs. Those will be prominantly marked by the browser with a red title bar that says "Insecure page!"
(Patch the Fine Browser). It is responsible to tell users weather the site is secure and who owns the key. There are countless ways to do this, like putting a lock icon next to the standard window title bar controls such as minimize and close. MacOSX Safari does it already, why not others? Then, the page title can be prefixed with site's identity.
You can blaim user stupidity or phishers deviousness, but really it's a simple security bug and it should be fixed.
Just curious - what exactly are you doing with your home PC that needs 4 processors, is worth the price of 4-CPU hardware, is not worth the price of 4-CPU software and can not ported to Linux? Whatever are other MS failings, I guess CPU count is a good way to distinguish between business and home users for the moment.
I believe the parent is referring to civil disobedience because MS is not offering an OEM price refund for people who disagree with their license, not because they are charging for their stuff. You can use anything to justify anything, but just sometimes there is a good reason.
Wow. Attribution rules are for academic research and published books. Software licenses can well allow "plagarism" - GPL for example doesn't require attribution. As for one-paragraph slashdot comments - well they should be up for grabs unless we want to see 10 pages of references after each of them. Folk culture can't very well spread with academic research restrictions.
Yes, but there are lots of people who are good at (Visual) Basic, Javascript, Python or Perl and don't want to learn LISP with its new set of idioms and so on. Myself, I do know LISP and have only very cursory experience with those other languages. I am just being realistic about what most people consider suitable for casual programming like customizing a text editor these days.
By the way, you should give C++ a try. It looks overcomplicated on the first sight, but lets you write succint programs that are easy to read, get a big help from compiler to validate at compile time and run at near-assembler speed. I don't think any other language shines in all 3 aspects just yet, although such a high degree of C compatibility surely creates some shortcomings.
"These guys" don't run their demos on bare iron. They already have a working OS that may already have some graphics calls. I have a working MacOSX web browser in less than 4K of source code. All the difference is that it uses webkit.
As for the computer in the article, I somehow suspect the "OS" and application are stored in ROM, which is in addition to 32K of RAM. Quite reasonable, considering early Palm versions only gave programs that much heap.
Except that emacs is single threaded, unless it changed very recently. It's a great fun to to open w3, or gnus or any other package that does network requests and see your source editor window hang from time to time.
If emacs is an operating system, it is a single-task one like DOS. Now, if anyone wrote an extensible, multi-threaded editor with a modern scripting language like python and maybe hacked a lisp interpretor for emacs compatibility...
Print Screen was pretty useful when you could only run one program at a time and needed to keep some information for later reference.
Scroll lock came in handy when you had to switch between reading a document, when you wanted arrow keys to scroll and editing it, when they should move the cursor. Try it without mouse sometime.
On the other hand, Help is only marginally useful if a program comes with a full printed manual and a luminated reference card. Do you really have space to spare on a 360K floppy to hold a copy of the book.
For something as complicated as rocket science, they really need proper funding. Ever worked on a project with unrealistic schedule for an understuffed (say no QA), underpayed group? Was it real high quality when released?
And let people really doing the stuff cut through red tape when approporiate to save money for important things. If a component is not safety-critical and available cheaply off the shelf (say a notebook to check e-mail), let the engineer pick it up in Fry's and expense it rather than going through government bidding, approval and so on. Save that for things like ceramic tiles.
Well, they bundle with Internet Explorer and maybe even WMP - don't remember offhand, because I installed the latest version myself. They sell plenty of MS and other companies' software in the Apple shop.
RealONE player is obnoxious on the PC and I don't think even MS should be forced to suffer. Mac version would be actually Ok - it comes up, does it's job and goes away. For that matter, any bundled software, like Real or Quicktime, should disable any nagging screens, grabbing file types or calling home on every launch. Something like iTunes, that only connects to Apple if you click on the "Music store" is the maximum that can be tolerated.
Your eyes are only capable of seeing 20-25 fps. This is why you do not see fluorescent links blink on and off. For this reason you will not notice when cimema projection will increase speed from 25-60 fps.
Oh yeah? Then how come I can clearly see the monitor shimmering and parts of the screen darkening and brightening at 65Hz? 75 is the minimum tolerable, 85 is good, but you will have to pry my Apple cinema display from my cold, dead eyes. And by the way, software DVD players that don't hide interlacing suck badly.
It's not so simple. Say I find out that a web store uses a particular "small project" web module. I can then read the source code, find a way to get in and steal their credit card database. If it was a closed source component with a small user base, the barrier would be higher.
A driving school that teaches students to move the car by manually injecting fuel into the engine and shifting gears by pulling on things under the open hood.
Admitedly, one can not seriously use C++ without knowning assembler for debugging purposes. A corrupted virtual table pointer, for example, produces behaviour that can hardly be explained by language semantics.
Also, "production use" VM languages like Java or C# do not break down in the same way, but even the shortest possible program requires way too many things that will distract beginners - like a class, method calls like System.out.prinln, or even requirenment to declare the main function.
But these are not the only choices. BASIC is still pretty good. "input a,b,c : ? (-b+sqrt(b*b-4*a*c))/(2*a)" gives an introduction to sequential execution of program steps without too much unneccesary red tape. Algebraic notation could be better though. AWK, Python or Javascript would all be candidates for the first language that shows people how to use if statements and loops.
Then, once students know how to parallel-park an automatic car, they can go and learn stick shift and hand-tuning the engine if whatever they are trying to do requires such efficient driving. Or if they have to drive a car that keeps crashing because of slight driver errors and requires extensive poking under the hood to discover what went wrong.
More than that, Americans were playing a very risky game. If I was in charge of Soviet Union at that time and I somehow discovered what happened, I would certainly order a retaliation. Like a sea blockade to stop oil supply to US, for example.
Every country, including USA, steals technology from the rivals at every opportunity. US spy planes, for example, used titanium illegally exported from USSR. This is not a reason to murder people, or deprive them of basic comforts like heating and electricity.
These days, software and chip manufacturing are largely outsourced to countries that have political disagreements with US. I bet VXWorks has a nice offshore development center. Anyone checked the software in cruise missiles recently?
Because in commercial, closed-source companies people do review other people's code and hold bug hunts for critical modules. I guess some people would do the unpleasent work anyway, because they want Linux to succeed. But, according to Sardonix, this goes about as far as worker's cometition is socialist countries.
If you believe US government is so irrational that it would actively take sides in civil lawsuits because of a few viruses, how can you hope to fight SCO in legal ways?
I do think (news site and their own) front page publicity on how much SCO is hated has its benefits. Darl himself will not be deterred, but rank-and-file SCO employes and even lawyers must be sending resumes as we speak. Would you want to work for a company that was so hated? Nobody tries to DDOS the place where I work...
Also, if you were asked to pay $699x1000 for each of your Linux boxes, this kind of news might encourage you to wait and see.
What we need is to show Darl, in legal ways, how much he is hated in real life rather than just on Internet. If his residential community asks him to move out, restaurants refuse to serve him, hotels refuse his reservations, people spit on the ground and cross the street where he walks, he might just reconsider weather he wants this kind of life.
With Java, there is a free as in beer VM for most platforms and as far as I understand, you can port Sun's code to your platform for free. You can also develop a clean-room VM and call it something other than Java.
With Qt, it's either an expensive license (my company requires a senior VP approval for any software over $150) or your program is GPLed and Linux-only. I guess a clean room port would be Ok though?
I chose Java UI + JNI over embedded Qt before for just these reasons. For C++ programming, I just hope OpenStep really takes off.
Slashdot Mirror
Essentially I'd be profiting of the design of the Gameboy without paying any money to Nintendo. This would be wrong. Right?
Nope. You are not automatically entitled to make money off any work you chose to do, or to prevent others from benefiting for free. Society has certain laws that let you do so in special cases and which were supposed to promote overall progress and wealth. A clean re-implementation is not covered.
Anyhow, these laws are lately abused by a bunch of leeches who are trying to profit from other peoples' success while doing little or no work themselves. I hope backlash is coming soon and IP laws will be restricted in various cases, including the one of downloading a ROM for a GBA game you own.
And here we have - assuming you are accurate - an abusive government that is much worse than Microsoft or SCO, because they generally don't screw up your life personally.
A bribe is a bribe. A lunch is a lunch. If you can be bought for $5, you need a raise, not a threat of prison sentence. People should be allowed to install their free CDs and then actual purchasing decisions should be made by agreement of technically competent and financially competent people rather than google-eyed Microsoft adicts. If Office 2003 does have new features that justify its price, so be it.
slashdot's homepage for instance, its all publicly accessable data so why encrypt it?
Ah, but you may not want your company or your neighbors to know your slashdot username or your anonymous or regular posts. Think of all the SCO, Real or Microsoft employees who post here.
Yes, we need an SSL change to allow certificate owner to create additional certificates for "child" domains. And some traffic like multicast audio/video steams is not practical for SSL. But most things should be signed and encrypted as soon as technology permits.
No, as a Windows or Internet user, I want compensation for damaged files, lost bandwidth and spam.
Users already have trouble with a single lock icon, do you really want them to think about insecure vs signed vs encrypted? If people pay for the silliness of hardware XML accelerators (rather than using a nice binary protocol), they can pay for hardware SSL accelerators. ISPs should have no problem getting an SSL certificate and signing all users' pages with their username, given a small modification to SSL to support one more level of indirection.
In this way, most pages on the web will be https://, with the exception of some hobby and ultra-high-performance URLs. Those will be prominantly marked by the browser with a red title bar that says "Insecure page!"
(Patch the Fine Browser). It is responsible to tell users weather the site is secure and who owns the key. There are countless ways to do this, like putting a lock icon next to the standard window title bar controls such as minimize and close. MacOSX Safari does it already, why not others? Then, the page title can be prefixed with site's identity.
You can blaim user stupidity or phishers deviousness, but really it's a simple security bug and it should be fixed.
Just curious - what exactly are you doing with your home PC that needs 4 processors, is worth the price of 4-CPU hardware, is not worth the price of 4-CPU software and can not ported to Linux? Whatever are other MS failings, I guess CPU count is a good way to distinguish between business and home users for the moment.
I believe the parent is referring to civil disobedience because MS is not offering an OEM price refund for people who disagree with their license, not because they are charging for their stuff. You can use anything to justify anything, but just sometimes there is a good reason.
Wow. Attribution rules are for academic research and published books. Software licenses can well allow "plagarism" - GPL for example doesn't require attribution. As for one-paragraph slashdot comments - well they should be up for grabs unless we want to see 10 pages of references after each of them. Folk culture can't very well spread with academic research restrictions.
Yes, but there are lots of people who are good at (Visual) Basic, Javascript, Python or Perl and don't want to learn LISP with its new set of idioms and so on. Myself, I do know LISP and have only very cursory experience with those other languages. I am just being realistic about what most people consider suitable for casual programming like customizing a text editor these days.
By the way, you should give C++ a try. It looks overcomplicated on the first sight, but lets you write succint programs that are easy to read, get a big help from compiler to validate at compile time and run at near-assembler speed. I don't think any other language shines in all 3 aspects just yet, although such a high degree of C compatibility surely creates some shortcomings.
"These guys" don't run their demos on bare iron. They already have a working OS that may already have some graphics calls. I have a working MacOSX web browser in less than 4K of source code. All the difference is that it uses webkit.
As for the computer in the article, I somehow suspect the "OS" and application are stored in ROM, which is in addition to 32K of RAM. Quite reasonable, considering early Palm versions only gave programs that much heap.
Except that emacs is single threaded, unless it changed very recently. It's a great fun to to open w3, or gnus or any other package that does network requests and see your source editor window hang from time to time.
If emacs is an operating system, it is a single-task one like DOS. Now, if anyone wrote an extensible, multi-threaded editor with a modern scripting language like python and maybe hacked a lisp interpretor for emacs compatibility...
I lubricated a whinning PC fan with car oil before and it shut up for another half a year until I upgraded the whole thing anyway.
Print Screen was pretty useful when you could only run one program at a time and needed to keep some information for later reference.
Scroll lock came in handy when you had to switch between reading a document, when you wanted arrow keys to scroll and editing it, when they should move the cursor. Try it without mouse sometime.
On the other hand, Help is only marginally useful if a program comes with a full printed manual and a luminated reference card. Do you really have space to spare on a 360K floppy to hold a copy of the book.
Somehow I think NASA has to aim for more than "sometimes yes". Manned missions, expensive robots and stuff.
A casino using Linux for video poker machines or something. McBride could really use a friendly talk with Richardo just about now/.
For something as complicated as rocket science, they really need proper funding. Ever worked on a project with unrealistic schedule for an understuffed (say no QA), underpayed group? Was it real high quality when released?
And let people really doing the stuff cut through red tape when approporiate to save money for important things. If a component is not safety-critical and available cheaply off the shelf (say a notebook to check e-mail), let the engineer pick it up in Fry's and expense it rather than going through government bidding, approval and so on. Save that for things like ceramic tiles.
Well, they bundle with Internet Explorer and maybe even WMP - don't remember offhand, because I installed the latest version myself. They sell plenty of MS and other companies' software in the Apple shop.
RealONE player is obnoxious on the PC and I don't think even MS should be forced to suffer. Mac version would be actually Ok - it comes up, does it's job and goes away. For that matter, any bundled software, like Real or Quicktime, should disable any nagging screens, grabbing file types or calling home on every launch. Something like iTunes, that only connects to Apple if you click on the "Music store" is the maximum that can be tolerated.
Your eyes are only capable of seeing 20-25 fps. This is why you do not see fluorescent links blink on and off. For this reason you will not notice when cimema projection will increase speed from 25-60 fps.
Oh yeah? Then how come I can clearly see the monitor shimmering and parts of the screen darkening and brightening at 65Hz? 75 is the minimum tolerable, 85 is good, but you will have to pry my Apple cinema display from my cold, dead eyes. And by the way, software DVD players that don't hide interlacing suck badly.
It's not so simple. Say I find out that a web store uses a particular "small project" web module. I can then read the source code, find a way to get in and steal their credit card database. If it was a closed source component with a small user base, the barrier would be higher.
A driving school that teaches students to move the car by manually injecting fuel into the engine and shifting gears by pulling on things under the open hood.
Admitedly, one can not seriously use C++ without knowning assembler for debugging purposes. A corrupted virtual table pointer, for example, produces behaviour that can hardly be explained by language semantics.
Also, "production use" VM languages like Java or C# do not break down in the same way, but even the shortest possible program requires way too many things that will distract beginners - like a class, method calls like System.out.prinln, or even requirenment to declare the main function.
But these are not the only choices. BASIC is still pretty good. "input a,b,c : ? (-b+sqrt(b*b-4*a*c))/(2*a)" gives an introduction to sequential execution of program steps without too much unneccesary red tape. Algebraic notation could be better though. AWK, Python or Javascript would all be candidates for the first language that shows people how to use if statements and loops.
Then, once students know how to parallel-park an automatic car, they can go and learn stick shift and hand-tuning the engine if whatever they are trying to do requires such efficient driving. Or if they have to drive a car that keeps crashing because of slight driver errors and requires extensive poking under the hood to discover what went wrong.
More than that, Americans were playing a very risky game. If I was in charge of Soviet Union at that time and I somehow discovered what happened, I would certainly order a retaliation. Like a sea blockade to stop oil supply to US, for example.
Every country, including USA, steals technology from the rivals at every opportunity. US spy planes, for example, used titanium illegally exported from USSR. This is not a reason to murder people, or deprive them of basic comforts like heating and electricity.
These days, software and chip manufacturing are largely outsourced to countries that have political disagreements with US. I bet VXWorks has a nice offshore development center. Anyone checked the software in cruise missiles recently?
Because in commercial, closed-source companies people do review other people's code and hold bug hunts for critical modules. I guess some people would do the unpleasent work anyway, because they want Linux to succeed. But, according to Sardonix, this goes about as far as worker's cometition is socialist countries.
I wonder what RMS would say about this.
If you believe US government is so irrational that it would actively take sides in civil lawsuits because of a few viruses,
how can you hope to fight SCO in legal ways?
I do think (news site and their own) front page publicity on how much SCO is hated has its benefits. Darl himself will not be deterred, but rank-and-file SCO employes and even lawyers must be sending resumes as we speak. Would you want to work for a company that was so hated? Nobody tries to DDOS the place where I work...
Also, if you were asked to pay $699x1000 for each of your Linux boxes, this kind of news might encourage you to wait and see.
What we need is to show Darl, in legal ways, how much he is hated in real life rather than just on Internet. If his residential community asks him to move out, restaurants refuse to serve him, hotels refuse his reservations, people spit on the ground and cross the street where he walks, he might just reconsider weather he wants this kind of life.
With Java, there is a free as in beer VM for most platforms and as far as I understand, you can port Sun's code to your platform for free. You can also develop a clean-room VM and call it something other than Java.
With Qt, it's either an expensive license (my company requires a senior VP approval for any software over $150) or your program is GPLed and Linux-only. I guess a clean room port would be Ok though?
I chose Java UI + JNI over embedded Qt before for just these reasons. For C++ programming, I just hope OpenStep really takes off.