Why don't you check the website? BTW the pronunciation is indeed as lots of short words. There used to be a SparcStation called hock.doc.ic.ac.uk but, alas, it has retired.
Re:Apt IS great, now if we could USE it.
on
An RPM Port Of APT
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· Score: 2
Even if you do work out how to use dselect (I tried) it's still a complete pain. Just how many packages are there in Debian? Do you expect the user to read the description for each one and decide whether to install it? This problem would only get worse and worse since the number of packages tends to increase by 50% with each Debian release.
The Red Hat approach of 'install 900Mbyte of crap' is better. I don't want to become some expert Linuxologist knowing exactly what packages are on my system and what each one does. I just want the machine to set up a working system with a good selection of packages. If some disk space is wasted by installing crap I'll never use, that's not a problem - disk space is cheap. I'd rather waste disk space than waste time.
Debian 2.1 (which was the last version I used) did have an option to choose from preselected lists of packages for various 'tasks'. This is similar to Red Hat's installer which lets you choose sets of packages like 'NFS server' or 'GNOME'. Maybe for some purists it's important to have something like dselect available as well, so you get really fine-grained control over what is installed, but not for me.
What's the big deal? Why are they trying to keep the names secret anyway?
Surely it would be better to give each user a name (which is public) and a password (which is private). Then if users don't want to receive messages from people they don't know, a simple option in the AIM client would do it.
We're not really celebrating, just relieved that the situation has not gotten any worse for the time being. The European Patent Convention specifically excludes computer programs from patentability, but a few years ago the EPO decided to ignore this exclusion and start granting software patents anyway.
What they did was to argue that a computer program with a technical effect is not a 'computer program as such' and thus the exclusion does not apply. Of course, any important algorithm or technique can be said to have a 'technical effect'.
So we have the situation where patents are being granted, but possibly illegally. The enforceability of these patents is doubtful. The EPO would like to change the written law so that it matches the creative new interpretation, making software explicitly patentable (and making the patents already granted more likely to be enforceable). Any move to do this has been put on hold pending the European Commission's consultation.
The eventual aim is to reinstate the law as it is written, so that computer programs (whether 'as such' or 'not as such') are not affected by the patent system.
What you can do: reply to the consultation (download the consultation paper in PDF format, you might also want to point out flaws in the accompanying economic study), sign Eurolinux's petition, and contact your national representatives. In some countries (eg the UK) national patent offices are holding their own consultations.
The problem with being able to distinguish more frequency ranges than just R, G, B is that normal colour televisions are no longer adequate. Things wouldn't look quite the same on screen as in real life.
Red Hat's argument is that their 'gcc 2.96' patched snapshot is _more_ stable than the stable release. However, you could argue that even if 2.95 isn't as good, it's worth sticking with because of its officialness.
I think it will depend on whether the other distros pick up Red Hat's compiler or stick with 2.95. Given the amount of FUD which has surrounded RH 7.0, they'll probably be scared off and stick with the older release.
Use a development snapshot of gcc, so that C++ programs compiled on RH7 only work on RH7.
Boo hoo. So the C++ ABI has changed from one version of gcc to another - so what? It wasn't a fixed standard in the first place. If you are relying on implementation-defined details like this you will surely get bitten sooner or later.
Again change their RPM binary format (for the utterly stupid reason that it now supports bzip2 compression), so RH7 RPMs only work on RH7.
Just get RPM 3.0.5 which is forwards-compatible with 4.0.
Use a glibc2.2 development snapshot, so that again, their RPMs only work on RH7.
Red Hat have upgraded the C library in the past, what's so wrong with doing it this time? Surely you don't advocate that we should all still be on libc4 in order to keep binary compatibility?
The problem is not so much the EU as the European Patent Convention (EPC) and its patent office, the EPO. Most countries are members of both, but some non-EU members are part of the EPC. (And some EU members might leave the EPC - IIRC a German minister (Green party) said Germany would leave the EPC if software patents were allowed.)
Now the Convention specifically excludes computer programs from patentability, but the EPO has managed to bend the law by saying that many computer programs 'are not computer programs as such'. Hence the swpat horror gallery, full of patents on computer programs 'not as such'.
The EPO would like to change the law (the Convention) to remove this exclusion, letting the law 'catch up' with the EPO's bending of it. This would give real weight to the patents already granted, which at present are of dubious validity.
What has happened is that EPC members have voted to wait for the outcome of the European Commission's (ie the EU's) consultation before reaching a decision. This makes it even more important to send your comments on software patents to the Commission and possibly to your national political representatives.
The Commission have commissioned (!) a slightly biased but not totally stupid report on the economic impact of software patents, and are invit ing comments. What the Commission recommends will heavily influence the decision made by EPC members.
It is very important to note that these patents represent threats to European software developers in the future, rather than things which have already happened.
The European Patent Convention (EPC) specifically forbids patents on computer programs, but the European Patent Office (EPO) has tried to bend this rule by saying that a computer program with a 'technical effect' is not a computer program 'as such'. This has allowed them to start granting patents on software even though software is clearly excluded by the EPC. So all the computer programs described in this patent horror gallery are considered by the EPO as not being computer programs 'as such'.
However, not everyone agrees with this ingenious new definition. So 'software patents' as granted by the EPO are not necessarily enforceable. But what the EPO is now trying to do is to have the law changed so that they can happily grant software patents without the inconvenience of having to redefine terms used by existing laws. If software is made patentable, all the software patents granted will suddenly become enforceable and leave European companies open to attack.
So it's not too late to do something about this. The European Commission is holding a publi c consultation asking for comments on whether the law should be changed, and many national patent offices are doing the same. (The EPO and EPC are not part of the European Union, but there is an overlapping membership and many countries are waiting for the Commission to make a recommendation.)
Also sign EuroLinux's petition which gives some links for more information about what I wrote above.
Wouldn't the best way to do this be with an SSL certificate from the WHO? Provided browsers could present this certificate in a way that ordinary users understand.
(Hey, Rob sneaked in another reference to the WHO on Slashdot:-))
There is also an 'other' state-owned TV channel in Britain, Channel Four. It carries advertisements and apart from a vague commitment to 'minority' programming, looks like a commercial TV station. I think this is the analogue of Canada's CBC, rather than the BBC - although rather than being subsidised, Channel Four makes a profit.
Price isn't really an issue - at least not when competing against Microsoft in schools. Microsoft like to 'give away' many copies of Office, etc which would normally go on sale for thousands of dollars in total. Then they can claim this as a charitable donation to avoid paying tax. (As with figures for 'money lost' due to piracy, this is nonsense, because the school would never have bought the software at full price anyway.)
The European Patent Office lets you download patent documents in electronic form. But they are compressed using the LZW algorithm, which is patented by both Unisys and IBM. (The fact that the same algorithm was patented twice should illustrate the brokenness of the system.)
It's not clear whether Unisys's patent covers decompression as well as compression, apparently they won't commit themselves either way. But it is possible that you cannot view information on what software patents might be used to attack your business because they are available only in a patented format. This illustrates another good reason to oppose software patents - they block the free exchange of information by encumbering file formats.
How does this affect the USPTO? It may be an indicator of things to come. Given that they are using Word documents at least for some things, and given that Microsoft has started patenting its *file formats* (which the USPTO is happy to allow), it might not be too long before patent information is not viewable without a patent licence from Microsoft.
BTW: the UK Patent Office launched its own consulatation on software patents, parallelling the European Commision's consultation. Go to http://www.patent.gov.uk/snews/notices/softcons.ht ml .
I wouldn't use RAM with intermittent faults. But if it had a handful of known bad bits, with a guarantee that all the others were solid, I wouldn't have a problem with mapping out the bad 0.001% (with say 0.1% wasted space) and using the rest.
usually second rate parts will not even be allowed to feature the original manufactures name or part numbers, after all, they don't want to get stuck
supporting it.
That's the problem - the perception that RAM with any defects at all is 'second rate'. In the past this has certainly been true because it wasn't possible to map bits out. If RAM starts being seen more like hard disks (and until a few years ago, floppies and LCDs) - seen as something which may have known defects without being unreliable - then manufacturers will be only too keen to improve their yields by selling the chips that are only almost-perfect.
(I wonder - could you do this with other hardware? If one of the registers on your CPU is broken, could you sell it and tell the customer to use a compiler that won't use that register? That would be totally infeasible today, but in the future I can see it _could_ happen. For example, if the whole system were in bytecode with a small native-code bootstrap that finds out about the CPU's defects and sets up the JIT compiler appropriately. There have been cheaper chips which were rumoured to be defective versions of more expensive ones - eg the Intel 486SX may originally have been a use for 486DXes where the FPU turned out defective.)
The idea of defective hard disks has been around for years. Modern disks will map out defects automatically so they're hidden from you, but they're still there (a lot of the time). So if you don't have to throw a disk away because of one error, why do the same for memory? People didn't suddenly junk all their Pentiums when the F00F bug was discovered, they just worked around it in software.
Still, I can appreciate there is a psychological problem with knowing that your system is not 100% flawless - plus, if RAM has some bad bits, might it not have others you don't know about?
The only way BadRAM would take off, I believe, is if RAM manufacturers started shipping each DIMM with a list of known defects, as used to be done for disks. At present, a single defect means the RAM is not used, so the only defective memory modules are dodgy no-name ones you might not want to trust anyway. If, OTOH, the manufacturer guarantees that there are no flaws other than the handful given in the defect list, there'd be no reason not to use the memory provided you trust the manufacturer.
The processor's address space is 64Kbyte. On the BBC Micro ROMs could be paged in and out of the space 32-48Kbyte, with the OS ROM taking the top quarter of memory and the bottom 32Kbyte used for RAM. (Also some memory-mapped hardware somewhere or other within that 64Kbyte.)
Then you could get 'sideways RAM', 16K RAM chips to map into the space taken by paged ROMs. Then 'shadow RAM' where the video memory (which could take up to 20K of the 32K base RAM available) would live elsewhere and be mapped in as needed. Shadow RAM typically came with 12Kbyte of 'private RAM' which could be used for odds and ends. Despite all this, it was still simpler than DOS's memory management:-p
So what is the total amount possible? I think people sold 128Kbyte boards with eight 16K 'sideways RAMs', there may even have been almost-256Kbyte versions since the maximum number of paged ROMs and sideways RAMs was sixteen (I think). (You always need at least one paged ROM for the BASIC interpreter, and another for the disk filing system.) Include shadow RAM and the RAM the machine comes with, and you get to above a quarter of a megabyte.
(Then there is the second processor... but never mind that:-))
There was a user where I used to work who went mental when his machine was _pinged_. It's dangerous to give Windows users software like Zone Alarm or Norton Personal Firewall...
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you check the website? BTW the pronunciation is indeed as lots of short words. There used to be a SparcStation called hock.doc.ic.ac.uk but, alas, it has retired.
Why not call it a 'planette'?
Cool, no more need to do my own backups!
Even if you do work out how to use dselect (I tried) it's still a complete pain. Just how many packages are there in Debian? Do you expect the user to read the description for each one and decide whether to install it? This problem would only get worse and worse since the number of packages tends to increase by 50% with each Debian release.
The Red Hat approach of 'install 900Mbyte of crap' is better. I don't want to become some expert Linuxologist knowing exactly what packages are on my system and what each one does. I just want the machine to set up a working system with a good selection of packages. If some disk space is wasted by installing crap I'll never use, that's not a problem - disk space is cheap. I'd rather waste disk space than waste time.
Debian 2.1 (which was the last version I used) did have an option to choose from preselected lists of packages for various 'tasks'. This is similar to Red Hat's installer which lets you choose sets of packages like 'NFS server' or 'GNOME'. Maybe for some purists it's important to have something like dselect available as well, so you get really fine-grained control over what is installed, but not for me.
What's the big deal? Why are they trying to keep the names secret anyway?
Surely it would be better to give each user a name (which is public) and a password (which is private). Then if users don't want to receive messages from people they don't know, a simple option in the AIM client would do it.
Surely the adjective is 'vapid' not 'vaporous'? Although neither of them should be taken literally :-)
We're not really celebrating, just relieved that the situation has not gotten any worse for the time being. The European Patent Convention specifically excludes computer programs from patentability, but a few years ago the EPO decided to ignore this exclusion and start granting software patents anyway.
What they did was to argue that a computer program with a technical effect is not a 'computer program as such' and thus the exclusion does not apply. Of course, any important algorithm or technique can be said to have a 'technical effect'.
So we have the situation where patents are being granted, but possibly illegally. The enforceability of these patents is doubtful. The EPO would like to change the written law so that it matches the creative new interpretation, making software explicitly patentable (and making the patents already granted more likely to be enforceable). Any move to do this has been put on hold pending the European Commission's consultation.
The eventual aim is to reinstate the law as it is written, so that computer programs (whether 'as such' or 'not as such') are not affected by the patent system.
What you can do: reply to the consultation (download the consultation paper in PDF format, you might also want to point out flaws in the accompanying economic study), sign Eurolinux's petition, and contact your national representatives. In some countries (eg the UK) national patent offices are holding their own consultations.
The 'rc' designation (as in /etc/rc.d/) comes from an abbreviation of 'runcom'.
The problem with being able to distinguish more frequency ranges than just R, G, B is that normal colour televisions are no longer adequate. Things wouldn't look quite the same on screen as in real life.
(Well, they don't anyway, but it would be worse)
Red Hat's argument is that their 'gcc 2.96' patched snapshot is _more_ stable than the stable release. However, you could argue that even if 2.95 isn't as good, it's worth sticking with because of its officialness.
I think it will depend on whether the other distros pick up Red Hat's compiler or stick with 2.95. Given the amount of FUD which has surrounded RH 7.0, they'll probably be scared off and stick with the older release.
Boo hoo. So the C++ ABI has changed from one version of gcc to another - so what? It wasn't a fixed standard in the first place. If you are relying on implementation-defined details like this you will surely get bitten sooner or later.
Just get RPM 3.0.5 which is forwards-compatible with 4.0.
Red Hat have upgraded the C library in the past, what's so wrong with doing it this time? Surely you don't advocate that we should all still be on libc4 in order to keep binary compatibility?
PDF is the lesser of two evils... it could be a Word document.
The problem is not so much the EU as the European Patent Convention (EPC) and its patent office, the EPO. Most countries are members of both, but some non-EU members are part of the EPC. (And some EU members might leave the EPC - IIRC a German minister (Green party) said Germany would leave the EPC if software patents were allowed.)
Now the Convention specifically excludes computer programs from patentability, but the EPO has managed to bend the law by saying that many computer programs 'are not computer programs as such'. Hence the swpat horror gallery, full of patents on computer programs 'not as such'.
The EPO would like to change the law (the Convention) to remove this exclusion, letting the law 'catch up' with the EPO's bending of it. This would give real weight to the patents already granted, which at present are of dubious validity.
What has happened is that EPC members have voted to wait for the outcome of the European Commission's (ie the EU's) consultation before reaching a decision. This makes it even more important to send your comments on software patents to the Commission and possibly to your national political representatives.
The Commission have commissioned (!) a slightly biased but not totally stupid report on the economic impact of software patents, and are invit ing comments. What the Commission recommends will heavily influence the decision made by EPC members.
It is very important to note that these patents represent threats to European software developers in the future, rather than things which have already happened.
The European Patent Convention (EPC) specifically forbids patents on computer programs, but the European Patent Office (EPO) has tried to bend this rule by saying that a computer program with a 'technical effect' is not a computer program 'as such'. This has allowed them to start granting patents on software even though software is clearly excluded by the EPC. So all the computer programs described in this patent horror gallery are considered by the EPO as not being computer programs 'as such'.
However, not everyone agrees with this ingenious new definition. So 'software patents' as granted by the EPO are not necessarily enforceable. But what the EPO is now trying to do is to have the law changed so that they can happily grant software patents without the inconvenience of having to redefine terms used by existing laws. If software is made patentable, all the software patents granted will suddenly become enforceable and leave European companies open to attack.
So it's not too late to do something about this. The European Commission is holding a publi c consultation asking for comments on whether the law should be changed, and many national patent offices are doing the same. (The EPO and EPC are not part of the European Union, but there is an overlapping membership and many countries are waiting for the Commission to make a recommendation.)
Also sign EuroLinux's petition which gives some links for more information about what I wrote above.
What is the plural of 'Harkonnen'?
Wouldn't the best way to do this be with an SSL certificate from the WHO? Provided browsers could present this certificate in a way that ordinary users understand.
:-))
(Hey, Rob sneaked in another reference to the WHO on Slashdot
Anyone got an RPM for it?
Inprise renames itself to Borland, Silicon Graphics renames itself to SGI... all we need now is for Compaq to rename itself to DEC.
There is also an 'other' state-owned TV channel in Britain, Channel Four. It carries advertisements and apart from a vague commitment to 'minority' programming, looks like a commercial TV station. I think this is the analogue of Canada's CBC, rather than the BBC - although rather than being subsidised, Channel Four makes a profit.
Price isn't really an issue - at least not when competing against Microsoft in schools. Microsoft like to 'give away' many copies of Office, etc which would normally go on sale for thousands of dollars in total. Then they can claim this as a charitable donation to avoid paying tax. (As with figures for 'money lost' due to piracy, this is nonsense, because the school would never have bought the software at full price anyway.)
The European Patent Office lets you download patent documents in electronic form. But they are compressed using the LZW algorithm, which is patented by both Unisys and IBM. (The fact that the same algorithm was patented twice should illustrate the brokenness of the system.)
t ml .
It's not clear whether Unisys's patent covers decompression as well as compression, apparently they won't commit themselves either way. But it is possible that you cannot view information on what software patents might be used to attack your business because they are available only in a patented format. This illustrates another good reason to oppose software patents - they block the free exchange of information by encumbering file formats.
How does this affect the USPTO? It may be an indicator of things to come. Given that they are using Word documents at least for some things, and given that Microsoft has started patenting its *file formats* (which the USPTO is happy to allow), it might not be too long before patent information is not viewable without a patent licence from Microsoft.
BTW: the UK Patent Office launched its own consulatation on software patents, parallelling the European Commision's consultation. Go to http://www.patent.gov.uk/snews/notices/softcons.h
I wouldn't use RAM with intermittent faults. But if it had a handful of known bad bits, with a guarantee that all the others were solid, I wouldn't have a problem with mapping out the bad 0.001% (with say 0.1% wasted space) and using the rest.
That's the problem - the perception that RAM with any defects at all is 'second rate'. In the past this has certainly been true because it wasn't possible to map bits out. If RAM starts being seen more like hard disks (and until a few years ago, floppies and LCDs) - seen as something which may have known defects without being unreliable - then manufacturers will be only too keen to improve their yields by selling the chips that are only almost-perfect.
(I wonder - could you do this with other hardware? If one of the registers on your CPU is broken, could you sell it and tell the customer to use a compiler that won't use that register? That would be totally infeasible today, but in the future I can see it _could_ happen. For example, if the whole system were in bytecode with a small native-code bootstrap that finds out about the CPU's defects and sets up the JIT compiler appropriately. There have been cheaper chips which were rumoured to be defective versions of more expensive ones - eg the Intel 486SX may originally have been a use for 486DXes where the FPU turned out defective.)
The idea of defective hard disks has been around for years. Modern disks will map out defects automatically so they're hidden from you, but they're still there (a lot of the time). So if you don't have to throw a disk away because of one error, why do the same for memory? People didn't suddenly junk all their Pentiums when the F00F bug was discovered, they just worked around it in software.
Still, I can appreciate there is a psychological problem with knowing that your system is not 100% flawless - plus, if RAM has some bad bits, might it not have others you don't know about?
The only way BadRAM would take off, I believe, is if RAM manufacturers started shipping each DIMM with a list of known defects, as used to be done for disks. At present, a single defect means the RAM is not used, so the only defective memory modules are dodgy no-name ones you might not want to trust anyway. If, OTOH, the manufacturer guarantees that there are no flaws other than the handful given in the defect list, there'd be no reason not to use the memory provided you trust the manufacturer.
The processor's address space is 64Kbyte. On the BBC Micro ROMs could be paged in and out of the space 32-48Kbyte, with the OS ROM taking the top quarter of memory and the bottom 32Kbyte used for RAM. (Also some memory-mapped hardware somewhere or other within that 64Kbyte.)
:-p
:-))
Then you could get 'sideways RAM', 16K RAM chips to map into the space taken by paged ROMs. Then 'shadow RAM' where the video memory (which could take up to 20K of the 32K base RAM available) would live elsewhere and be mapped in as needed. Shadow RAM typically came with 12Kbyte of 'private RAM' which could be used for odds and ends. Despite all this, it was still simpler than DOS's memory management
So what is the total amount possible? I think people sold 128Kbyte boards with eight 16K 'sideways RAMs', there may even have been almost-256Kbyte versions since the maximum number of paged ROMs and sideways RAMs was sixteen (I think). (You always need at least one paged ROM for the BASIC interpreter, and another for the disk filing system.) Include shadow RAM and the RAM the machine comes with, and you get to above a quarter of a megabyte.
(Then there is the second processor... but never mind that
There was a user where I used to work who went mental when his machine was _pinged_. It's dangerous to give Windows users software like Zone Alarm or Norton Personal Firewall...