Isn't eMule a peer-to-peer filesharing program? Do you actually believe that people developing programs for the sole purpose of distributing digital copies of copyrighted (+ proprietary) computer software, music and movies, are going to care much about copyright and the GPL? The strength of the GPL comes directly from copyright law, you know.
Yeah, eMule obviously can be used for distribution of legal GPL/open source/freeware software too, but - come on - that's not what it mainly is used for.
Not only are their legal precedents shaky (to say the least), they didn't even bother to check their facts very well. For one thing, they refer to the "ping" program as "Packet Internet Groper (ping)". This meaning of the program's name is a well-known backronym of the original meaning which the author of ping stated had to do with the similarity to submarines.
Maybe this is a hint as to how much actual investigative work they have put into this spectacle.
I think it's one of the coolest "free" projects I've ever seen.
It isn't particularly "free".
Given this company's track record, Skype is likely to be riddled with spyware. I'm not sure I would like to trust my personal communication to such a company.
I don't know what algorithm the original poster refer to, but I believe that implementations of heap algorithms become slightly different depending on arrays start at [0] or [1]. I've fallen into this trap myself a few times when implementing said algorithms in C since C arrays start at [0] whereas the algorithms book I used denoted the first array element with [1].
Even if technically, "Its a UNIX system" is incorrect [...]
Exactly! And that's the hillarious part of the joke. A lot of people think that what she is running is not UNIX because it does not look like the UNIX they are used to (command line interface). But we geeks know that what she is running is not UNIX because IRIX was not UNIX certified until two or three years later. And that's what makes the joke so funny.
Furthermore, the fact that IRIX was BSD-derived, and not SysV-derived makes it even more funny, because we all know of the battle between the Berkeley folks and the AT&T/UNIX people.
IRIX didn't become a UNIX system until 1995 (with IRIX 5.3) and Jurassic park was released in 1993. So, no, it wasn't a UNIX system, it was an IRIX system.
Of course, we geeks know why the parent post is so funny: it wasn't a UNIX system in Jurassic Park, it was an IRIX system! (Running the fsn 3d filesystem naviagator.)
With that logic, you could also say that using an OS with 90% marketshare (i.e. MS Windows) kind of makes more sense than using one with 3% of the same (i.e. Linux).
The number of users is not a always good indicator of software quality or technical merits.
Something very similar to this seems to have already been done. Back in 2000, the Swedish Interactive Insititute developed a game they called BrainBall. The game used the brain waves of the contestants to move a ball back and forth a table. The one with the least brain activity would win.
As a previous poster said, if a GUI system "feels" slow, it is slow. If the system "gives the impression" of being fast, it is fast.
The only evaluation criteria of a GUI is user perception, not "number of widgets per second" or "number of window moves per second". User perception is notoriously hard to measure, however, so people tend to revert to the "number of X per second" style measurements. Such measurements are useless, unless they can be tied to user perception (such as "more widgets per second makes the system feel more responsive").
Linux probably would a bit too large to fit, but a port of Contiki might be worth waiting for, given their track record... Now if only someone would care to make a mechanical Ethernet NIC and we could build a fully mechanical webserver. You wouldn't be able to stand the noise a slashdotting of that would make!
One of the main points of the article is that the (earlier) Linux versions lack any kind of CVS logs. The situation has been remedied when Linus started using BitKeeper, but there are years of development that cannot be tracked using a single source revision control system. This makes things quite complicated as the developers must dig through mailing lists and other means of communication to find out who really wrote what. "[...] they will have to dig themselves out of the swamp [...]", as said by McKusick.
(Oh yes, and just so you know, Marshall Kirk McKusick isn't just some law-monkey, he is one of the leading BSD developers and has, among a lot of other stuff, written stuff such as the SoftUpdates FreeVSD filesystem extension which allows for running fsck as a background process during normal system operation.)
Have you ever heard that story about Columbus and the egg, where Columbus shows how you make an egg stand on end?
This TCP RST vulnerability seems to be another of those "it is obvious after I've shown you how" moments.
Everybody knew that TCP RST segments could be forged to kill connections. Everybody "knew" that you didn't have much chance to succeed if you couldn't sniff the TCP connection because you had a probability of 2^-32 to make a correct guess. But nobody had thought of the possibility to only try those TCP segment numbers that fell into appropriate sized TCP windows...
Yes, Microsoft is acknowledging the use of BSD licensed code. I don't know if they are doing it in the source code, but since they are putting copyright notices in the release notes for their software they probably have copyright notices in the source code too. Look at the copyright information on their page, they not only honor Berkeley but also a lot of other people that have been actively contributing to various BSD software such as Luigi Rizzo.
There is a lot of talk about how this new license would be incompatible with the GPL. Still, no one seems to have noticed the similarity between the new X license and the revised BSD license, the one without the "obnoxious" advertising clause. This version of the BSD license has already been "approved" by RMS. The full text of this licens reads:
Copyright (c) YEAR, OWNER All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1 Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2 Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3 Neither the name of the ORGANIZATION nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED [ALL CAPS bla bla bla]
Notice clause #2 above? Redistributions must include the copyright notice. This is in fact equivalent to the third clause in the new X license - credit must be given when redistributing binary versions of the code.
Since this seems to be fine with RMS, I don't see how this new X license would be any less OK.
(I'm not sure if I'll be modded way down because of this, but for an example of how this clause is handled by commercial companies, take a look at the Microsoft Windows XP release notes.)
For those of you who don't have access to a Solaris system,/usr/bin/clear is a shell script that contains the following: (notice that there are only 2 lines of code, but 13 lines of copyright information...)
#!/usr/bin/sh # Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T # All Rights Reserved # THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T # The copyright notice above does not evidence any # actual or intended publication of such source code. #ident "@(#)clear.sh 1.8 96/10/14 SMI"/* SVr4.0 1.3 */ # Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation # All Rights Reserved # This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft # Corporation and should be treated as Confidential. # clear the screen with terminfo. # if an argument is given, print the clear string for that tty type
As far as I can tell, that could just as easily mean X the window manager.
X is not a window manager, it is a windowing system. A window manager is a special X windowing system program that is used to display nice window borders, and also so that the user can resize and move windows around.
Of course, you can substitute X in the statement above with any X-like windowing system (like X11 or X10).
The following code does the same, without using the "C considers NULL to be false"-hack. It is easier to read and maintain (less bug prone):
if( (fp = fopen("file","w")) != NULL ) { file opened correctly, so use the fp pointer. } else { error handling here }
First C64 LAN party
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Bah, Assembly'03 is nothing compared to what the real old-school people are up to: The world's first C64 LAN party! At the LCP2003 party arranged in Sweden this summer, Adam Dunkels showcased his Commodore 64 Contiki OS on a bunch of C64s connected in a LAN using specially built Ethernet cards. The three C64:s connected to a LAN made this event the world's first C64-only LAN party!
Ok, so putting a modern PC in an old computercase is cool and all, but running modern style software on the actual old computer is much cooler! Check out the Contiki operating system for such old computers (including the Atari 800): it is a multi-tasking graphical operating system with full Internet access (web browser, telnet client, web server!) that runs on a a bunch of different old computers. They even have a web server running on a real Commodore 64.
All of you who are interested in minimalistic systems should take a look at Contiki. It is an entire multitasking graphical operating system, window manager, GUI toolkit with themes, TCP/IP stack, web browser, web server, etc. in 50 kilobytes! It is written for 8-bit homecomputers such as the Commodore 64, Nintendo NES and the 8-bit Atari.
And, believe it or not, the window manager even has title bars and close buttons:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't eMule a peer-to-peer filesharing program? Do you actually believe that people developing programs for the sole purpose of distributing digital copies of copyrighted (+ proprietary) computer software, music and movies, are going to care much about copyright and the GPL? The strength of the GPL comes directly from copyright law, you know.
Yeah, eMule obviously can be used for distribution of legal GPL/open source/freeware software too, but - come on - that's not what it mainly is used for.
Not only are their legal precedents shaky (to say the least), they didn't even bother to check their facts very well. For one thing, they refer to the "ping" program as "Packet Internet Groper (ping)". This meaning of the program's name is a well-known backronym of the original meaning which the author of ping stated had to do with the similarity to submarines.
Maybe this is a hint as to how much actual investigative work they have put into this spectacle.
Given this company's track record, Skype is likely to be riddled with spyware. I'm not sure I would like to trust my personal communication to such a company.
I don't know what algorithm the original poster refer to, but I believe that implementations of heap algorithms become slightly different depending on arrays start at [0] or [1]. I've fallen into this trap myself a few times when implementing said algorithms in C since C arrays start at [0] whereas the algorithms book I used denoted the first array element with [1].
Exactly! And that's the hillarious part of the joke. A lot of people think that what she is running is not UNIX because it does not look like the UNIX they are used to (command line interface). But we geeks know that what she is running is not UNIX because IRIX was not UNIX certified until two or three years later. And that's what makes the joke so funny.
Furthermore, the fact that IRIX was BSD-derived, and not SysV-derived makes it even more funny, because we all know of the battle between the Berkeley folks and the AT&T/UNIX people.
IRIX didn't become a UNIX system until 1995 (with IRIX 5.3) and Jurassic park was released in 1993. So, no, it wasn't a UNIX system, it was an IRIX system.
Of course, we geeks know why the parent post is so funny: it wasn't a UNIX system in Jurassic Park, it was an IRIX system! (Running the fsn 3d filesystem naviagator.)
With that logic, you could also say that using an OS with 90% marketshare (i.e. MS Windows) kind of makes more sense than using one with 3% of the same (i.e. Linux).
The number of users is not a always good indicator of software quality or technical merits.
The VIC-I used in the VIC-20 actually did both the graphics and the sound, but it didn't sound nearly as good as the SID sound.
There is even a tracker for making music on the VIC-20 and the VIC-I.
Something very similar to this seems to have already been done. Back in 2000, the Swedish Interactive Insititute developed a game they called BrainBall. The game used the brain waves of the contestants to move a ball back and forth a table. The one with the least brain activity would win.
It was even covered on Slashdot.
As a previous poster said, if a GUI system "feels" slow, it is slow. If the system "gives the impression" of being fast, it is fast.
The only evaluation criteria of a GUI is user perception, not "number of widgets per second" or "number of window moves per second". User perception is notoriously hard to measure, however, so people tend to revert to the "number of X per second" style measurements. Such measurements are useless, unless they can be tied to user perception (such as "more widgets per second makes the system feel more responsive").
Linux probably would a bit too large to fit, but a port of Contiki might be worth waiting for, given their track record... Now if only someone would care to make a mechanical Ethernet NIC and we could build a fully mechanical webserver. You wouldn't be able to stand the noise a slashdotting of that would make!
One of the main points of the article is that the (earlier) Linux versions lack any kind of CVS logs. The situation has been remedied when Linus started using BitKeeper, but there are years of development that cannot be tracked using a single source revision control system. This makes things quite complicated as the developers must dig through mailing lists and other means of communication to find out who really wrote what. "[...] they will have to dig themselves out of the swamp [...]", as said by McKusick.
(Oh yes, and just so you know, Marshall Kirk McKusick isn't just some law-monkey, he is one of the leading BSD developers and has, among a lot of other stuff, written stuff such as the SoftUpdates FreeVSD filesystem extension which allows for running fsck as a background process during normal system operation.)
Have you ever heard that story about Columbus and the egg, where Columbus shows how you make an egg stand on end?
This TCP RST vulnerability seems to be another of those "it is obvious after I've shown you how" moments.
Everybody knew that TCP RST segments could be forged to kill connections. Everybody "knew" that you didn't have much chance to succeed if you couldn't sniff the TCP connection because you had a probability of 2^-32 to make a correct guess. But nobody had thought of the possibility to only try those TCP segment numbers that fell into appropriate sized TCP windows...
Yes, Microsoft is acknowledging the use of BSD licensed code. I don't know if they are doing it in the source code, but since they are putting copyright notices in the release notes for their software they probably have copyright notices in the source code too. Look at the copyright information on their page, they not only honor Berkeley but also a lot of other people that have been actively contributing to various BSD software such as Luigi Rizzo.
Notice clause #2 above? Redistributions must include the copyright notice. This is in fact equivalent to the third clause in the new X license - credit must be given when redistributing binary versions of the code.
Since this seems to be fine with RMS, I don't see how this new X license would be any less OK.
(I'm not sure if I'll be modded way down because of this, but for an example of how this clause is handled by commercial companies, take a look at the Microsoft Windows XP release notes.)
Perhaps they should be considering banning another violent game as well?
X is not a window manager, it is a windowing system. A window manager is a special X windowing system program that is used to display nice window borders, and also so that the user can resize and move windows around.
Of course, you can substitute X in the statement above with any X-like windowing system (like X11 or X10).
Bah, Assembly'03 is nothing compared to what the real old-school people are up to: The world's first C64 LAN party! At the LCP2003 party arranged in Sweden this summer, Adam Dunkels showcased his Commodore 64 Contiki OS on a bunch of C64s connected in a LAN using specially built Ethernet cards. The three C64:s connected to a LAN made this event the world's first C64-only LAN party!
Ok, so putting a modern PC in an old computercase is cool and all, but running modern style software on the actual old computer is much cooler! Check out the Contiki operating system for such old computers (including the Atari 800): it is a multi-tasking graphical operating system with full Internet access (web browser, telnet client, web server!) that runs on a a bunch of different old computers. They even have a web server running on a real Commodore 64.
All of you who are interested in minimalistic systems should take a look at Contiki. It is an entire multitasking graphical operating system, window manager, GUI toolkit with themes, TCP/IP stack, web browser, web server, etc. in 50 kilobytes! It is written for 8-bit homecomputers such as the Commodore 64, Nintendo NES and the 8-bit Atari.
:-)
And, believe it or not, the window manager even has title bars and close buttons