I can't understand why Sun bothered with J2ME. Without even java.util implementation, there is practically no code reuse for J2SE programmers. In this case, why not a dedicated programming environment optimized for cell phones? Given the current J2ME "applications", a flash player would be far better at the job.
Your $35/hour salary is (hopefully!) not in a computer field. Otherwise, you would be asking $17.50 for fixing your friend's computer and $0 for your own, because you installed a firewall and kept up to date with Windows Update.
Sure, virus writters should be punished in some way, like a fine that is significant but not insane for their income. Your $245 is just because of how you chose to deal with the problem, and shouldn't be recognized as a reasonable expense by law.
I don't understand why people keep saying caning is a harsh treatment, but jail isn't? I say its more cruel to inflict long-term mental pain than just beat up someone. Although one month is not that long, a virus writer shouldn't be put together with violent (and horny) criminals.
Whatever happened to "make them help clean up the damage". This is obvious in grafitti writer's case. For MSBLAST it's not feasable directly, but you can make him install patches on a thousand machines, one by one (and of course authorities will know exactly where to look if anything suspicios is found of them later).
Isn't DRM/copy protection/activation a bit like a trojan? Its running unwanted code on user's machine, can cause denial of service and often resorts to making undocumented changes on user's system that can cause user to loose data (anyone remembers the TurboTax fiasco?). Talk about attacking whom you swore to protect.
Say a virus formats my hard drive and I restore from an infected backup? Will Norton Antivirus think its running on a different machine, deactivate itself and prevent me from getting an update to clean it up?
If you program for a Mac, how can you "miss" dynamic typing, events, serialization, RPC and more built in directly into C or C++ rather than a separate hack that requires bulky, unreadable code?
Think of it, you can also build GNU ObjC for Linux, Cygwin/MinGW or (with some heroic efforts, no doubt) prc-tools for Palm. Why borrow the concepts if you can have a better-designed real thing across the board?
And the link is on slashdot, the site that brought you countless dupes and hoaxes. And unbiased reporting on Microsoft and Linux. And such high, high journalistic standards. I would say the link is in the right place.
Well, basic morality is inborn. There are people we "feel good" to have around, like (hopefully) our family. We don't need religion or society to tell us to feel good, we just do. So naturally, we try to preserve these people's life. Humans tend to generalize, so if we have enough resources, we extend some of this protection to any human. Think of it, even animals avoid killing members of their own species. Surely, humans inherit the same evolutionary tendency.
Yes, this is primitive morality, but less primitive than "god told me so". Bush just recently claimed that "god told him to attack Iraq". Religious morality is too easily subverted by religious leaders, or by people interpreting the religion to serve themselves. Most dangerously, religion can subvert inborn morality. Look at how many religious leaders got their followers to kill people.
Basically, people can plugin their unprotected laptops into a network of unprotected machines. It would be a different story if laptops connected to a different segment that only allowed connecting to inside using safe protocols like ssh. But still not as good as running an OS that only exposes services that the user meant to provide to the network, with the default being none. No remote registry editing, thank you.
Surely operating systems should be very secure by default, as in not accepting ANY incoming connections, no ActiveX, no executable e-mail attachments. One shouldn't have to install security patches every week just to read e-mail and browse the web.
What we have here is one company's lack of responsibility and desire to make a quick buck without working on software quality. Its so fortunate they don't make cars.
On how to shape the "patching worm" activities so that it continues scanning for infected machines without causing serious congestion. Would it be enough for one of the worms to quit if it finds another one on the same subnet? Or should the worm just run for fixed time on each vunerable node it finds and patches and then quit permanently?
Actually this is a hypothetical question. I don't think Windows users can be helped by installing just one patch. More radical solutions are needed, like pointing them to the nearest Apple store. Someone with way more free time than me can consider writting a worm that activates XP firewall on every network interface and disables ActiveX in IE and OE.
But writting a truly benefitial warm/virus is still a fasinating topic to think about. Any thoughts?
Yes, but over a billion people just might include a few programmers that can produce a "good enough" OS and word processor for the government use. The whole point here is that government should consider factors other than software quality for its purchases.
Besides, many people, including government agencies) just buy what everyone else is using rather than really evaluating software quality. Otherwise how do you think Windows survives? Giving local software a jump start might well break this inertia and promote competition on technical merits.
It's slashdotted already. Here is the start of usr/sys/sys/malloc.c from the UNIX V7 historic source that SCO was kind enough to release a while ago. Hmm.. the Linux file was contributed by SGI rather than IBM, and they probably copied it from their own sources. But the code itself is publically available and may be in some textbook. So no violation after all?
/* * Allocate 'size' units from the given * map. Return the base of the allocated * space. * In a map, the addresses are increasing and the * list is terminated by a 0 size. * The core map unit is 64 bytes; the swap map unit * is 512 bytes. * Algorithm is first-fit. */ malloc(mp, size) struct map *mp; { register unsigned int a; register struct map *bp;
3) Spend money on local economy rather giving it away to a foreign company
Unlike private users, governments should take public interest into account when buying software. For example, US government could do well to avoid buying software from companies that have excessive foreign development centers:-)
They can still exchange documents with the rest of the world by exporting them to some standard format, like HTML or RTF. If there is no software to do it, government's demands will sure encourage some local programs to be written.
It would be another matter if they forced common people use a specific word processor, with a nice keyword scanner that reports suspicious documents to the government. Its not out of the question in China, and perhaps in US. But that's something unrelated to this article.
Why not install a free OS then? With a mass market like US school system, I bet you can find a vendor that doesn't make you pay MS tax and sells a system for $450. Even if you don't save much initially, think about upgrades.
Worried about support costs? Well, every school has a few geeks. Get them to download and install Redhat ISOs as a class project. Obviously, you might want to keep them away from PCs used for grading, but for student labs educational exprience you give them outweighs the risks.
Although I would hate to use a language without structured features, I hope its not imposed on students from day 0. A square equation program doesn't really need functions to be readable. Let them make spagetti code long enough to hang themselves first, then introduce structured programming as a way to simplify it.
By the same token, only someone working on a very big project can appreciate OOP.
VB is alive and well, and used for pretty much the same reason as original BASIC - simplicity. Although there are many additions, old stuff still works. The other day I "fixed" a friends program with some old fashioned for loops and labels.
It was a bug heaven at work yesterday. Everyone was walking around and complaining their PC just keeps crashing. I didn't even bother with Windows update. Just turned on firewall on XP (ZoneAlarm on W2K) and deleted msblast.exe. Since our mail server deletes executable attachments, I think things will be quiet for a while. Oh, and I am not in IT, so I don't feel bad for leaving them to update their own machine.
Who are responsible then. Search engines like google should remove sco.com matches from their search results. If you are a system administrator, block them at any router, DNS server and mail relay you are managing. Modify all your software, free or commercial to disable and remove itself if run on any machine within their IP address block. On a web server, reject requests from any browser running on their OS.
Ideally, office supplies companies (that might be running Linux!) should refuse to do business with SCO. And the city of Lindon, Utah can revoke their business permit for distrubtive behaviour and literally run them out of town.
Apple, IBM and a handful of other companies heavily invested in Open Source and gave a lot of their work back to public. Granted, they are out to make money, but they still took a big risk and huge number of users got free (both as in speech and as in beer) stuff without paying them a cent.
I wish FSF would spend more time to promote current leaders of open source and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. But all I see on their page is critisism:
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
So basically, they are more interested in "ideological purity" than promoting realistic progress towards their goal. This is fine as a PHD thesis of some MIT student. But it does show that RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement. The question is, who and which organizations are up to the task?
I guess you don't talk to Russian people much. Imagine that you worked for SCO and actually supported the lawsuit. Like worked in poverty 16 hours per day to find infringing code and help chairman McBride bring forth the golden future.
Now imagine you immigrated to IBM and made a good living working on free software you used to hate so much. Wouldn't you be ashamed of yourself and your ex-coworkers for putting up with this crap for so long?
Because lets face it, screwed goverment is always a result of mass idiocy. Saddam wouldn't last/live a minute if an angry mob showed up at his palace and military refused to protect him. Happens all the time, including the russian revolution. Or how long would SCO lawsuit last if employees quit in masse and start a new company? Now Taliban for a government is as screwed as you can get. I can see well how someone can be ashamed.
Nasty! So it throws an exception and you don't know where it came from; ever?
No, you turn off -Xnotrace and next time you see the complete call stack. Actually, C++ exceptions never record the call stack and it doesn't cause many problems. Why would you be opposed to the configuration option, turned on by the user of the application, when s\he is more interested in performance then debugging?
bully Sun to add -Xnotrace option to disable stack trace in exceptions and make them efficient? Its nonsense to change class design because some feature that could be fast happens to be slow.
Consider someone writting a low-level library that treats some condition (say, a math overflow) as an error and throws exception. Later someone else writes a program that generates a lot of overflows and handles them. Do you really want them to rewrite perfectly working code?
That the patent system is broken, one needs go no further. NTP, which never did any significant research itself (I think), trying to shut down the company that spent a tons of money making wireless e-mail practical. Hopefully it will attract attention of some Canandian politicians and induce them to put some strict limits on patents.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't understand why Sun bothered with J2ME. Without even java.util implementation, there is practically no code reuse for J2SE programmers. In this case, why not a dedicated programming environment optimized for cell phones? Given the current J2ME "applications", a flash player would be far better at the job.
Your $35/hour salary is (hopefully!) not in a computer field. Otherwise, you would be asking $17.50 for fixing your friend's computer and $0 for your own, because you installed a firewall and kept up to date with Windows Update.
Sure, virus writters should be punished in some way, like a fine that is significant but not insane for their income. Your $245 is just because of how you chose to deal with the problem, and shouldn't be recognized as a reasonable expense by law.
I don't understand why people keep saying caning is a harsh treatment, but jail isn't? I say its more cruel to inflict long-term mental pain than just beat up someone. Although one month is not that long, a virus writer shouldn't be put together with violent (and horny) criminals.
Whatever happened to "make them help clean up the damage". This is obvious in grafitti writer's case. For MSBLAST it's not feasable directly, but you can make him install patches on a thousand machines, one by one (and of course authorities will know exactly where to look if anything suspicios is found of them later).
Isn't DRM/copy protection/activation a bit like a trojan? Its running unwanted code on user's machine, can cause denial of service and often resorts to making undocumented changes on user's system that can cause user to loose data (anyone remembers the TurboTax fiasco?). Talk about attacking whom you swore to protect.
Say a virus formats my hard drive and I restore from an infected backup? Will Norton Antivirus think its running on a different machine, deactivate itself and prevent me from getting an update to clean it up?
If you program for a Mac, how can you "miss" dynamic typing, events, serialization, RPC and more built in directly into C or C++ rather than a separate hack that requires bulky, unreadable code?
Think of it, you can also build GNU ObjC for Linux, Cygwin/MinGW or (with some heroic efforts, no doubt) prc-tools for Palm. Why borrow the concepts if you can have a better-designed real thing across the board?
Wait, could it mean...? Holy shit!
And the link is on slashdot, the site that brought you countless dupes and hoaxes. And unbiased reporting on Microsoft and Linux. And such high, high journalistic standards. I would say the link is in the right place.
Well, basic morality is inborn. There are people we "feel good" to have around, like (hopefully) our family. We don't need religion or society to tell us to feel good, we just do. So naturally, we try to preserve these people's life. Humans tend to generalize, so if we have enough resources, we extend some of this protection to any human. Think of it, even animals avoid killing members of their own species. Surely, humans inherit the same evolutionary tendency.
Yes, this is primitive morality, but less primitive than "god told me so". Bush just recently claimed that "god told him to attack Iraq". Religious morality is too easily subverted by religious leaders, or by people interpreting the religion to serve themselves. Most dangerously, religion can subvert inborn morality. Look at how many religious leaders got their followers to kill people.
Basically, people can plugin their unprotected laptops into a network of unprotected machines. It would be a different story if laptops connected to a different segment that only allowed connecting to inside using safe protocols like ssh. But still not as good as running an OS that only exposes services that the user meant to provide to the network, with the default being none. No remote registry editing, thank you.
Surely operating systems should be very secure by default, as in not accepting ANY incoming connections, no ActiveX, no executable e-mail attachments. One shouldn't have to install security patches every week just to read e-mail and browse the web.
What we have here is one company's lack of responsibility and desire to make a quick buck without working on software quality. Its so fortunate they don't make cars.
On how to shape the "patching worm" activities so that it continues scanning for infected machines without causing serious congestion. Would it be enough for one of the worms to quit if it finds another one on the same subnet? Or should the worm just run for fixed time on each vunerable node it finds and patches and then quit permanently?
Actually this is a hypothetical question. I don't think Windows users can be helped by installing just one patch. More radical solutions are needed, like pointing them to the nearest Apple store. Someone with way more free time than me can consider writting a worm that activates XP firewall on every network interface and disables ActiveX in IE and OE.
But writting a truly benefitial warm/virus is still a fasinating topic to think about. Any thoughts?
Yes, but over a billion people just might include a few programmers that can produce a "good enough" OS and word processor for the government use. The whole point here is that government should consider factors other than software quality for its purchases.
Besides, many people, including government agencies) just buy what everyone else is using rather than really evaluating software quality. Otherwise how do you think Windows survives? Giving local software a jump start might well break this inertia and promote competition on technical merits.
It's slashdotted already. Here is the start of usr/sys/sys/malloc.c from the UNIX V7 historic source that SCO was kind enough to release a while ago. Hmm.. the Linux file was contributed by SGI rather than IBM, and they probably copied it from their own sources. But the code itself is publically available and may be in some textbook. So no violation after all?
/*
* Allocate 'size' units from the given
* map. Return the base of the allocated
* space.
* In a map, the addresses are increasing and the
* list is terminated by a 0 size.
* The core map unit is 64 bytes; the swap map unit
* is 512 bytes.
* Algorithm is first-fit.
*/
malloc(mp, size)
struct map *mp;
{
register unsigned int a;
register struct map *bp;
3) Spend money on local economy rather giving it away to a foreign company
:-)
Unlike private users, governments should take public interest into account when buying software. For example, US government could do well to avoid buying software from companies that have excessive foreign development centers
They can still exchange documents with the rest of the world by exporting them to some standard format, like HTML or RTF. If there is no software to do it, government's demands will sure encourage some local programs to be written.
It would be another matter if they forced common people use a specific word processor, with a nice keyword scanner that reports suspicious documents to the government. Its not out of the question in China, and perhaps in US. But that's something unrelated to this article.
Why not install a free OS then? With a mass market like US school system, I bet you can find a vendor that doesn't make you pay MS tax and sells a system for $450. Even if you don't save much initially, think about upgrades.
Worried about support costs? Well, every school has a few geeks. Get them to download and install Redhat ISOs as a class project. Obviously, you might want to keep them away from PCs used for grading, but for student labs educational exprience you give them outweighs the risks.
Although I would hate to use a language without structured features, I hope its not imposed on students from day 0. A square equation program doesn't really need functions to be readable. Let them make spagetti code long enough to hang themselves first, then introduce structured programming as a way to simplify it.
By the same token, only someone working on a very big project can appreciate OOP.
VB is alive and well, and used for pretty much the same reason as original BASIC - simplicity. Although there are many additions, old stuff still works. The other day I "fixed" a friends program with some old fashioned for loops and labels.
Not any more than the relationship between ATI and Apple? I don't think a company like ATI can survive with only one vendor using their stuff anyway.
It was a bug heaven at work yesterday. Everyone was walking around and complaining their PC just keeps crashing. I didn't even bother with Windows update. Just turned on firewall on XP (ZoneAlarm on W2K) and deleted msblast.exe. Since our mail server deletes executable attachments, I think things will be quiet for a while. Oh, and I am not in IT, so I don't feel bad for leaving them to update their own machine.
Who are responsible then. Search engines like google should remove sco.com matches from their search results. If you are a system administrator, block them at any router, DNS server and mail relay you are managing. Modify all your software, free or commercial to disable and remove itself if run on any machine within their IP address block. On a web server, reject requests from any browser running on their OS.
Ideally, office supplies companies (that might be running Linux!) should refuse to do business with SCO. And the city of Lindon, Utah can revoke their business permit for distrubtive behaviour and literally run them out of town.
Apple, IBM and a handful of other companies heavily invested in Open Source and gave a lot of their work back to public. Granted, they are out to make money, but they still took a big risk and huge number of users got free (both as in speech and as in beer) stuff without paying them a cent.
I wish FSF would spend more time to promote current leaders of open source and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. But all I see on their page is critisism:
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
So basically, they are more interested in "ideological purity" than promoting realistic progress towards their goal. This is fine as a PHD thesis of some MIT student. But it does show that RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement. The question is, who and which organizations are up to the task?
I guess you don't talk to Russian people much. Imagine that you worked for SCO and actually supported the lawsuit. Like worked in poverty 16 hours per day to find infringing code and help chairman McBride bring forth the golden future.
Now imagine you immigrated to IBM and made a good living working on free software you used to hate so much. Wouldn't you be ashamed of yourself and your ex-coworkers for putting up with this crap for so long?
Because lets face it, screwed goverment is always a result of mass idiocy. Saddam wouldn't last/live a minute if an angry mob showed up at his palace and military refused to protect him. Happens all the time, including the russian revolution. Or how long would SCO lawsuit last if employees quit in masse and start a new company? Now Taliban for a government is as screwed as you can get. I can see well how someone can be ashamed.
Hmm... How did you guys come to vote for Bush?
Nasty! So it throws an exception and you don't know where it came from; ever?
No, you turn off -Xnotrace and next time you see the complete call stack. Actually, C++ exceptions never record the call stack and it doesn't cause many problems. Why would you be opposed to the configuration option, turned on by the user of the application, when s\he is more interested in performance then debugging?
bully Sun to add -Xnotrace option to disable stack trace in exceptions and make them efficient? Its nonsense to change class design because some feature that could be fast happens to be slow.
Consider someone writting a low-level library that treats some condition (say, a math overflow) as an error and throws exception. Later someone else writes a program that generates a lot of overflows and handles them. Do you really want them to rewrite perfectly working code?
That the patent system is broken, one needs go no further. NTP, which never did any significant research itself (I think), trying to shut down the company that spent a tons of money making wireless e-mail practical. Hopefully it will attract attention of some Canandian politicians and induce them to put some strict limits on patents.