SCO are in this for publicity - to fuel the share scam. What better publicity that to sue one of the most famous internet success stories, and one that publicly uses Linux at that.
Google expect to be sued, so they stopped the "Litigeous Barstard" googlebomb. It never looks good in court to be being rude about your opponent.
Maybe the delayed IPO is because they wouldn't get as much being sued as they would with no court-case. Delay the IPO = more money.
From having fought to get Bugzilla installed for about 2 days, most of the time being spent using -MCPAN can say with feeling - everything.
No uninstall.
It is yet another package system to learn
I didn't work without quite a bit of hacking (but perhaps you can blame Solaris for this)
It isn't exactly a logical syntax, compare
perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Foo::Bar"'
with
apt-get install foo-bar
And I want the dependency system to work with my systems dependency system, and not in a parallel universe.
The Java-RPM system over at JPackage.org is good and useful, I hope this will be similarly useful.
Perl programmers can (and probably will) carry on using cpan, the rest of us can have an easier life when red-carpet or apt-get just does the right thing.
Microsoft has left IE virtually unchanged for quite a while, because they don't need put any effort into it anymore. They have a 70-80% market share that isn't going anywhere quickly so why bother?
IE does not has not moved an inch standards wise since IE 4, so "new" things like XHTML are not supported and only work because IE will support virtually any markup. Just try using a correct XHTML MIME type, or using XHTML DOM (which is read-only in XHTML) or CSS (changes to case rules in XHTML) in IE and it will fail. Mozilla and Opera (and no doubt Konq also) do all the above just fine.
Maybe they will do tabbed browsing to stop people saying it is behind for features, maybe they will gruddingly to pop-up blockers, or maybe they will just keep the ad revenue from MSN.
Until MS update IE the web stays looking just as it does now for 70-80% of users, however innovative the rest of the world gets.
I've worked on large systems where I've had a lot to do with many parts of the system, and not been able to hold the whole thing in my head all at the same time.
And as a someone that's had a lot to do with the building of these systems I have a better chance than most. New programmers would have no chance. We need black box systems to enable us to continue working.
The Real problem is that the black boxes we define don't have nice sharp edges, so when we put 2 boxes next to each other there are cracks. Cracks for the crackers to crawl through.
Joel Spolsky wrote about it and called it The Law of Leaky Abstractions
One of the W3C standard affected by this will be XPointer (http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr/). Sun holds a key patent to an implmentaion of XPointer, and the last time I looked had a discriminatory license on this patent.
The interesting bit about the licence this this patent is that it uses patent law to enforce openness in the same way that the GPL uses copyright law to enforce openness. Effectively the licence to the patent says something like:"if you use technology protected under this patent then enhancements must be handed over to W3C". Obviously many people see this as anti-microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish policy. (See http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=985) for more.
More interestingly I had a chance to ask RMS if he thought using patent law to enforce openness was a good thing, and his answer was words to the effect of - "well it might be but we've never had the money to patent the things we've invented"
So whilst we are all cheering this decision (and in general I think it is a good decision), there are implications of this that are not obvious.
Does anyone know if Sun's policy has/will change on this?
Mozilla has always had a greater percentage market share on MacOS compared with Windows, so it makes sense to start there when moving browser components.
But it's about protecting your userbase. No point in alienating your users too soon. It'll come but not in a rush.
Well there will be an easy way to see who is right. If Sun does do Java 3, and people switch to it then I guess you will be proved right. Until then I think the C# jump is close enough to keep Sun away from Java 3, and the re-write cost enough to keep the users from being happy, which will also keep Sun away.
Note Java 3 = "new version of Java that is not compatible with Java 2" for the purposes of this debate. This is NOT the way Sun names things though. Java 2 is fully backward compative with Java so the title is somewhat deceptive. Sun use major versions in the JDK to denote compatibility.
10. Delete all deprecated methods, fields, classes, and interfaces
They don't get in my way much, so removing them wouldnt help me at all. It would only force me to re-write old but working code. I disagree with this one.
9. Fix incorrect naming conventions
Is InetAddress really that confusing that I need to re-write everything? And where is the benefit to me in moving java.sql to javax.sql. None that I can see, and it will create more errors until I learn the new way. I disagree with this one too.
8. Eliminate primitive data types
I can see the benefit to this. I like C#'s compromise where it automatically casts from native type to Object. BUT I don't think it is a good idea to slow Java down. It already has a bad reputation for speed, lets not make things worse. And as for "The int/char/double/float/boolean objects would be immutable, so these objects would be thread-safe and could be interned to save memory" I don't think you've really though this through Eliotte. What about "i++"? So I disagree with this one too.
7. Extend chars to four bytes
May I dont spend enough time writing XML parsers, but I've never been bitten by this one. So to me it doesn't seem worth the cost of re-writing everything. So I disagree with this one too.
6. Fix threads
Yes Thread have had problems, but they are still very useful. I'm prepared to make use of Thread and wait for the JSR to come up with improvements. I am more in agreement here, but not to the point of shoulding applause
5. Convert file formats to XML
I can see the benefits, but not enough to re-write all my servlets etc. And I don't think this change requires Java 3, just some updates to the servlet spec etc. Reason for Java 3? Not from where I stand.
4. Ditch the AWT
I can hear people (IBM) wanting to drop Swing because it is too slow, but not so much wanting to drop AWT. The key thing is where does anyone benefit from removing AWT? Surely have a class call JButton is not that complex that we need to break all that code? I'm not agreeing with this one much either.
3. Rationalize the collections
Well there aren't that many problems. I suggest we just *gradually* deprecate Vector and Hashtable and carry on with the alternatives.
2. Redesign I/O
No not again! Please! I've taken 2 re-writes already. Perhaps File could be updated as some of Eliotte's suggestions, but that hardly requires Java3.
1. Redesign class loading from scratch, this time with human interface factors in mind
Accepted this is a problem. But while neither I nor Eliotte has a solution, perhaps we should make do with learning the idiosyncracies, or finding solutions rather than calling for Java 3.
Just add a line to your/etc/ssh/sshd_config like this:
CheckPasswords false
And then reboot your sshd.
Finally mail me, and I'll check that you really are safe. Oh and don't about slashdot users giving you bad advice you can be sure to only get accurate information here.
... is that on the 2 RedHat 7.3 boxen I have access to already have "ChallengeResponseAuthentication no" - so I guess this means I'm not vulnerable?
Assuming this is true for all RH7.3 boxen, there aren't hundreds of boxes waiting to be r00ted. It sounds from the comments like Debian is vulnerable - what about older RedHats, and other distros?
I get the feeling this was is a molehill made into a mountain.
Well I dont see any reason why this is not possible - the hardware for WiFi and Cellular would seem to be *fairly* similar technology (radio + CPU). So in theory if you could register on one network, and when signal strength goes down, just register on the other. The biggest technical problem from what I can see would be for IP addrs and routers.
But you can bet it will be a phreakers heaven. Bruce Schneier is always saying that holes occur when you try to force together 2 systems that were not designed to work with each other.
I'm willing to bet that stealing other users sessions will be common place for quite a while if they ever get the thing into full production...
Matrox have confirmed that there is something in the pipeline to be released in 3 days time. But all they are officially giving us is a flash screen here that shows that something is going on.
So a 15Tb file must exist on a 15+Tb filesystem = 15,000+Gb.
Now last time I looked the biggest common HD was a 180Gb Seagate Barracuda, so they would still need nearly 100 of these babies to get to 15Tb, costing well over $100,000, and that's before you get to the power/housing/cooling nightmare.
Or do they have some fancy way to store bits using thin air that the rest of us don't know of.
I'm using RedHat 7.2 right now, but it isn't very stable - Galeon occasionally locks everything up solid. So I need a way out.
I was hoping to wait for RH7.3, but perhaps this is a better option.
My real question is how hard will I have to work to move accross all my configs? There's samba/printers/sendmail/etc/etc. Anyone know of a good way of doing RH->Suse without any pain?
I was at the talk in Cambridge (in the William Gates building no less - where ext2 partitions mysteriously develop bad sectors and were something magically muffles the voice of anyone trying to say the words gnu or linux)
It is easy to get the impression that RMS is just a foaming-at-the-mouth ranter. But I have to say I was very impressed. He came across as a level headed pragmatic person - willing for example to admit that there *may* be areas where patents do work, he was just a software guy who knows they dont work for software.
Either he was on good behaviour or he is very misrepresented. I know which way I think it goes.
VMWare has a very different job to wine. "All" vmware has to do is to emulate the pc bios and associated hardware. There is a OSS project that has demonstrated the ability to do the same thing (although it is not up to wmware yet)
On the other had wine has to emulate the huge bloted windows API. Several orders of magnitude more complex than the pc bios.
I think where open source is better than closed source it is in finding developers that *care*. However if what you need is hundreds of developers to hack on an API - money talks. Hence wine struggles.
Theoretically interesting/Practically irrelevant
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
This obsesion with algorithms is theoretically interesting but practically irrelevant. When was the last time you needed to write a sort algorithm? (And by needed I mean qsort and friends and their source were of no use.)
In the real world 99.999% of people, smart and stupid, should use the algorythms that smart people like Knuth have invented. It would take a stupid person to think that in all but the 0.001% of cases there is any need for any more. And if you are wondering if you are in the 0.001% of cases - you're not.
The rest of the world learnt a long time ago to stop re-inventing the wheel why can't CS people learn the same lessons. Algorithms may keep your CS master happy, but they won't help you in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a CSRF attack. For more details see this blog post http://getahead.ltd.uk/blog/joe/2007/01/01/csrf_at tacks_or_how_to_avoid_exposing_your_gmail_contacts .html#preview
SCO are in this for publicity - to fuel the share scam. What better publicity that to sue one of the most famous internet success stories, and one that publicly uses Linux at that.
Google expect to be sued, so they stopped the "Litigeous Barstard" googlebomb. It never looks good in court to be being rude about your opponent.
Maybe the delayed IPO is because they wouldn't get as much being sued as they would with no court-case. Delay the IPO = more money.
No uninstall.
It is yet another package system to learn
I didn't work without quite a bit of hacking (but perhaps you can blame Solaris for this)
It isn't exactly a logical syntax, compare perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Foo::Bar"' with apt-get install foo-bar
And I want the dependency system to work with my systems dependency system, and not in a parallel universe.
The Java-RPM system over at JPackage.org is good and useful, I hope this will be similarly useful.
Perl programmers can (and probably will) carry on using cpan, the rest of us can have an easier life when red-carpet or apt-get just does the right thing.
Microsoft has left IE virtually unchanged for quite a while, because they don't need put any effort into it anymore. They have a 70-80% market share that isn't going anywhere quickly so why bother?
IE does not has not moved an inch standards wise since IE 4, so "new" things like XHTML are not supported and only work because IE will support virtually any markup. Just try using a correct XHTML MIME type, or using XHTML DOM (which is read-only in XHTML) or CSS (changes to case rules in XHTML) in IE and it will fail. Mozilla and Opera (and no doubt Konq also) do all the above just fine.
Maybe they will do tabbed browsing to stop people saying it is behind for features, maybe they will gruddingly to pop-up blockers, or maybe they will just keep the ad revenue from MSN.
Until MS update IE the web stays looking just as it does now for 70-80% of users, however innovative the rest of the world gets.
I've worked on large systems where I've had a lot to do with many parts of the system, and not been able to hold the whole thing in my head all at the same time.
And as a someone that's had a lot to do with the building of these systems I have a better chance than most. New programmers would have no chance. We need black box systems to enable us to continue working.
The Real problem is that the black boxes we define don't have nice sharp edges, so when we put 2 boxes next to each other there are cracks. Cracks for the crackers to crawl through.
Joel Spolsky wrote about it and called it The Law of Leaky Abstractions
The interesting bit about the licence this this patent is that it uses patent law to enforce openness in the same way that the GPL uses copyright law to enforce openness. Effectively the licence to the patent says something like:"if you use technology protected under this patent then enhancements must be handed over to W3C". Obviously many people see this as anti-microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish policy. (See http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=985) for more.
More interestingly I had a chance to ask RMS if he thought using patent law to enforce openness was a good thing, and his answer was words to the effect of - "well it might be but we've never had the money to patent the things we've invented"
So whilst we are all cheering this decision (and in general I think it is a good decision), there are implications of this that are not obvious.
Does anyone know if Sun's policy has/will change on this?
But it's about protecting your userbase. No point in alienating your users too soon. It'll come but not in a rush.
Note Java 3 = "new version of Java that is not compatible with Java 2" for the purposes of this debate. This is NOT the way Sun names things though. Java 2 is fully backward compative with Java so the title is somewhat deceptive. Sun use major versions in the JDK to denote compatibility.
Not wanting to start again and re-write everything from scratch is not lazyness. It is common sense.
Working Now has always and will always be better than Perfect Tomorrow.
10. Delete all deprecated methods, fields, classes, and interfaces
They don't get in my way much, so removing them wouldnt help me at all. It would only force me to re-write old but working code. I disagree with this one.
9. Fix incorrect naming conventions
Is InetAddress really that confusing that I need to re-write everything? And where is the benefit to me in moving java.sql to javax.sql. None that I can see, and it will create more errors until I learn the new way. I disagree with this one too.
8. Eliminate primitive data types
I can see the benefit to this. I like C#'s compromise where it automatically casts from native type to Object. BUT I don't think it is a good idea to slow Java down. It already has a bad reputation for speed, lets not make things worse. And as for "The int/char/double/float/boolean objects would be immutable, so these objects would be thread-safe and could be interned to save memory" I don't think you've really though this through Eliotte. What about "i++"? So I disagree with this one too.
7. Extend chars to four bytes
May I dont spend enough time writing XML parsers, but I've never been bitten by this one. So to me it doesn't seem worth the cost of re-writing everything. So I disagree with this one too.
6. Fix threads
Yes Thread have had problems, but they are still very useful. I'm prepared to make use of Thread and wait for the JSR to come up with improvements. I am more in agreement here, but not to the point of shoulding applause
5. Convert file formats to XML
I can see the benefits, but not enough to re-write all my servlets etc. And I don't think this change requires Java 3, just some updates to the servlet spec etc. Reason for Java 3? Not from where I stand.
4. Ditch the AWT
I can hear people (IBM) wanting to drop Swing because it is too slow, but not so much wanting to drop AWT. The key thing is where does anyone benefit from removing AWT? Surely have a class call JButton is not that complex that we need to break all that code? I'm not agreeing with this one much either.
3. Rationalize the collections
Well there aren't that many problems. I suggest we just *gradually* deprecate Vector and Hashtable and carry on with the alternatives.
2. Redesign I/O
No not again! Please! I've taken 2 re-writes already. Perhaps File could be updated as some of Eliotte's suggestions, but that hardly requires Java3.
1. Redesign class loading from scratch, this time with human interface factors in mind
Accepted this is a problem. But while neither I nor Eliotte has a solution, perhaps we should make do with learning the idiosyncracies, or finding solutions rather than calling for Java 3.
Not the users. IN GENERAL the cost the rework would be greater than the cost of the benefits of additional clarity.
I think the only real beneficiaries would be the Book authors, who would make a killing from killing trees to feed the poor confused users.
Now I wonder which camp ERH comes into...
This is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
3 out of 4 so far...
CheckPasswords false
And then reboot your sshd.
Finally mail me, and I'll check that you really are safe. Oh and don't about slashdot users giving you bad advice you can be sure to only get accurate information here.
Assuming this is true for all RH7.3 boxen, there aren't hundreds of boxes waiting to be r00ted. It sounds from the comments like Debian is vulnerable - what about older RedHats, and other distros?
I get the feeling this was is a molehill made into a mountain.
But you can bet it will be a phreakers heaven. Bruce Schneier is always saying that holes occur when you try to force together 2 systems that were not designed to work with each other.
I'm willing to bet that stealing other users sessions will be common place for quite a while if they ever get the thing into full production ...
Matrox have confirmed that there is something in the pipeline to be released in 3 days time. But all they are officially giving us is a flash screen here that shows that something is going on.
The register has more details (and isn't dead):l
Go http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/25238.htm
512bit GPU
tripple head
20GB/s memory bandwidth
256bit DDR(?) memory
bump mapped surfaces
Now last time I looked the biggest common HD was a 180Gb Seagate Barracuda, so they would still need nearly 100 of these babies to get to 15Tb, costing well over $100,000, and that's before you get to the power/housing/cooling nightmare.
Or do they have some fancy way to store bits using thin air that the rest of us don't know of.
I was hoping to wait for RH7.3, but perhaps this is a better option.
My real question is how hard will I have to work to move accross all my configs? There's samba/printers/sendmail/etc/etc. Anyone know of a good way of doing RH->Suse without any pain?
I just saw Satan haggling over the price of some ice skates.
It is easy to get the impression that RMS is just a foaming-at-the-mouth ranter. But I have to say I was very impressed. He came across as a level headed pragmatic person - willing for example to admit that there *may* be areas where patents do work, he was just a software guy who knows they dont work for software.
Either he was on good behaviour or he is very misrepresented. I know which way I think it goes.
On the other had wine has to emulate the huge bloted windows API. Several orders of magnitude more complex than the pc bios.
I think where open source is better than closed source it is in finding developers that *care*. However if what you need is hundreds of developers to hack on an API - money talks. Hence wine struggles.
In the real world 99.999% of people, smart and stupid, should use the algorythms that smart people like Knuth have invented. It would take a stupid person to think that in all but the 0.001% of cases there is any need for any more. And if you are wondering if you are in the 0.001% of cases - you're not.
James Gosling said the same thing recently.
The rest of the world learnt a long time ago to stop re-inventing the wheel why can't CS people learn the same lessons. Algorithms may keep your CS master happy, but they won't help you in the real world.