I am a comp. sci. student doing a summer internship at a company that has completely outsourced the development of their next generation product (they needed to do a complete rewrite from scratch). I think most people would think that this would mean job losses for developers, but instead the development team is moving across from supporting the old product, to designing the new product using UML. The development team is actually growing, despite the fact that they are writing less code.
As a comp. sci. student, I study software engineering, and I have to say that they are actually doing a perfect textbook job engineering their new product. We design exact specs for what the code should do. They had this over to another company (actually, overseas), and we demand fully documented and tested code.
We are a little behind schedule, but we are in total control, and we have a perfect measurement of what stage of completion we are at, as we hand them the problem task by task. And this is a Good Thing. It is much better to be a little behind schedule, than to have management force you to rush delevelopment, and produce shoddy code.
Management's hands are tied. They know that we just have to wait for the code to be delivered. The comany we use know that we do all the design and can easily switch development elsewhere, if they do not get the work done in a reasonable amount of time. Yup, our experience with outsourcing devepolment seems to be entirely posative so far.
Don't we need a lot of people stomping around and fuming about VMWare being patented software? Shouldn't there be a boycott of it?
No.
yerricde is a troll. On VMware's website, they talk about 'patent-pending technologies', but they are not acually stupid enough to try to patent VMs. Unfortunately, Flash VOS Inc.are that damn stupid. VOS have patented IBM's VM technology from, uh, like the 60s. (great stuff, and still in great use; plus, this is what was used to run 40,000 copies of Linux on a [recursively VM'd:-) ] partition of a IBM S/390)
Flash VOS: can you guys not spell prior art? Or are you just so atracted to your patent lawyers, you like giving them money for the fun of it?
Okay, I'll step up and give this one a go. Here is a pretty complete summary of what VMs are all about, and a guess at how Win4Lin works differenly (based on their white paper):
Most modern processors offer 2(+) modes of operation, which break down to Kernel mode and User mode. In kernel mode you have all the instructions that you have in user mode, plus a few more (sensative stuff, e.g. setting up virtual memory tables). An OS expects to start running in kernel mode, as it expects to run directly on the hardware.
A VM runs the enite OS in user mode. This means that whenever the OS tries to do any real work, it will try to execute a kernel mode instruction, and as it is running in user mode it is not permitted to execute it, and an exeption occurs. The VM should trap this, produce the appropriate behaviour, (eg, if the OS tried to read a byte in from the keyboard buffer it sould be passed a character from the VM applications event queue), and return to the OS code as if the instruction had be executed in hardware as normal. Clear?:-)
Also, in real machines there is often memory mapped IO, so if I write to a particular memory address I expect graphics/text to appear on the screen. The VM should produce appropriate behaviour for that.
So what VMware does:
It provides software such that programs that are designed to run in x86 kernel mode (ie, an OS) can be run in x86 user mode, and whenever a kernel mode instruction turns up in the code it kindof 'virtually executes' it.
It provides low level emulation of memory mapped IO, such that standard Windows VGA graphics drivers will work, as it is actually emulating the graphics hardware.
Right. Now how Win4Lin works.
In windows, put simply you have three things:
A system call interface
A set of APIs that run on this
The hardware drivers
The VMware approach to running window is: to emulate the x86, and the standard hardware devices, e.g. VGA graphics card, then run the stanard windows kernel and device drivers on to of this VM, and to run the Win32 API on top of them as usual.
With Win4Lin, they provide their own implementation of the Windows system call interface (equivalent in function to the Windows kernel) to run within Linux (I think this is done in the Linux kernel, as it it a replacement interupt handler), and they provide their own drivers for windows to use, eg graphics cards drivers to make calls to X, rather than to try to write directly to a VGA graphics card. They then run the Win32 API code directly onto of their 'kernel', not on the standard windows one. It cuts out a couple of layers, a lot of unnecassary exceptions, and some inefficient device emulation out of the picture, that VMware uses.
It seems like Win4Lin is more a competitor for WINE than VMWare
VMware are Win4Lin are competing for your hard earned cash, they are commercial products, not OSS, and are designed to offer maximum support for running Windows apps under Linux, by actually running the M$ Win32 libraries, one way or another. Wine has an agenda. It is as much about freedom (as in OSS) as it is about running solitaire - for the Wine project requiring a copy of Windows would be akin to selling its soul, and being free of M$ code is worth compatability being sub 100%.
I know what you mean, but I think that while it is accurate to say that Win4Lin is in many ways technically closer to Wine, the two projects have sufficiently different goals not be real competitors.
For instance, the line:..... gives the impression that it preprocesses the running software to allow it to run.
Uh no, I don't agree. [no flame; jus' an opinion]
Put simply, you have 3 things in Windows:
A syscall interface
A set of API's running on top of this
Drivers to access the hardware.
If Trelos provide a new traphandler to emulate the windows syscall interface (#1), and the set of drivers to emulate the hardware from within Linux (#3), then the APIs are the only M$ code they are using, and this should run fine on the traphandler that Trelos has provided, no need to modify the code.
As long as the code remains under the original licence, and is not simply relicenced under the GPL. That is the intention.
No. Just because we have declared that you can distribute where you could under the GPL, this doens't mean that if what you want to do is outside of the scope of the GPL
Right, lets get this straight:
Your code is effectively dual licenced: I can modify and distribute the code freely as if it was a GPL program. The GPL is kindof a sub-license under the NASM license, just so people cannot dump the NASM license at any point.
The NASM license is basicly just saying, that you are prepared to come to an arrangement to let me redistribute without the source in a commercial product (allowing people to chose to close the source is okay folks - e.g. BSD & MacOS X) - provided that I supply you with a big bag of cash.
The only effect on a programmer thinking of maintaining NASM, is that you could make money of their hard work. Well, big deal. Other people, e.g. Red Hat, will be making money out of the code the contribute. Why shouldn't you, in the situation that someone ever wanted to release a closed source assembler based on NASM.
Well what the FSCK is everyone complaining about? NASM can be distributed every bit as freely as any GPL program - the only catch is that julesh may make a bit of cash out of your work. So what? Shut up whining.
cheers, G
BTW. So you're (the guy | one of the guys) who wrote NASM? Sweeeeeeet. Nice piece of work - I play around hacking kernels. The fact that that the linux kernel has the jump to 32 bits in embedded machine code is a joke. Congrats, nice work.
So, you posted this story, and know a bit of the background, right?
Is, in your opinion, Nasm dual liciesed, or free to distribute under the GPL? If not, why not?(if so why the fsck did you post this, isn't it a non-story?)
That maintainer did succeed in convincing them to put the clause in the licence about being compatible with the GPL though.
Is this not, in effect, the same as it being GPL'd?
The Nasm licence now clearly states, "the Software may be distributed in such a way as to be compliant with the GNU General Public Licence". That is quite clear. I can download Nasm, and sell a comercial version based on it, so long as I stay compliant to the GPL, right?
The Nasm license also states, "We may well allow you to incorporate it into commercial software too, but we'll probably demand some money for it". IANAL, but I would say that this is now unenforcable, as they have declared that I may redistribute under the terms of the GPL, right? "Should any part of this agreement be deemed unenforcable, it is intended that the remainder of the agreement be held in force" - so if any parts of the Nasm licence that are incompatible with the GPL are deemed unenforcable, the only parts of the license that remain are those parts that are GPL compatible - no problemmo:-)
Please point out where this logic fails, but it would seem to me that I can redistribute under the GPL if I choose to, with no restrictions. Otherwise, where was the success in the maintainer having that GPL clause added?
Warning: I am a Java hacker, and I like it a hell of a lot.
Not trolling here: you are blinkering yourself it you don't see any validity in bringing Java into a conversation about C/C++.
People are using C++.
Java skills are now in higher demand than C/C++ skills in the UK - taken from a recent survey of the job adverts in the IT sector over the previous year.
The advantage of C++ is that it's a hell of a toolbox. You've got hammers, screwdrivers, chisels and even a fully-functioning wood lathe (watch me turn this chunk of hoary code into a table leg!). Good programmers use the right tool for the job.
As a Java programmer, I preffer the C toolbox to the C++ toolbox. The C toolbox contains all your hammers, screwdrivers, chisels, etc. The C++ toolbox contains this lot and also sticks of dynamite, nooses of rope and gattling guns. Useful, I expect, but everything ends up as the same machine code at the end of the day, and the C++ toolbox is a bit risky for some people's liking [subjective opinion].
Eh, I feel you're missing the point of his question.
but they apply just as much to all the kernel hackers
Yup - but remember: there is a demend for the Linux kernel to be hacked -> Alan Cox hacks the Linux kernel [because he wants to] -> Red Hat pay him [so he can eat]. This book needs updating to 2.4 -> These guys want to do it -> who will pay them?
There is nothing wrong with looking for a 'Red Hat' to fund your project.
the issue isn't "how do we fund documentation writers" but "how do we find documentation writers who don't need/want to be funded"?
Is "how do we find kernel hackers that don't need to be funded?" an ideal goal, too?
If you love to document the Linux TCP/IP stack then do it. Period.
If Red Hat hadn't hired Alan Cox, then there is a danger that Linux would have lost one of it's most valuable contributors. The man needs to eat.
People writing OS code as a job - good.
People writing OS code in their spare time for the love of it - better.
Hackers who love writing OS code being paid to do it so they don't have to get a day job and can hack 24/7 on a mad caffeine high:-P - need I say?
It is not inheirantly wrong to hope to be paid for hacking Linux.
The did succeed. The result of this is that DVD players can not be included in Linix distros.
So? Windows doesn't come with a DVD player, why should Linux? The point is, we can still get it, just as easily. They can fuck around with US sites who host it, and US sites who link to it. Google still works fine for me.
DeCSS can't be used as the basis for alternative DVD players.
May make things difficult in the US, but the DMCA isn't law in Europe. And we have a different electronics market over here anyway. As for the US, it is easy for the MPAA to attack 2600, and call them a bunch of pirates. But if someone starts selling an unlicenced DVD player, that can only be used to watch DVDs, this may be a tougher case to win. Copyright law was never intended to award content manufacturers a monopoly over building the devices used to playback the material they generate.
(And you can get aroung the GPL.....
Lost me. Why do you want to get around the GPL? (or rather, yes, clean room from the specs and you can write your own proprietry piece of code, for all the good this would do you, but so what? What relevance does that have to the DeCSS case? You could do a clean room closed source emacs clone if you so wished!)
.....by writing a specification from it and clean room rewriting it)
I don't think that clean-rooming makes much difference in this case. As I understand it, in the California case, the 72 defendants are not all linking to the same piece of code, and MPAA are attacking all code that cracks CSS.
The MPAA case would ostensibly seem to be about preventing people from getting a copy of DeCSS, but surely they can't be stupid enough to think they can actually succeed?
Here is something a lot of suits seem to have difficulty grasping: the Internet is more powerful than even the US government. Why did the US government loosen controls on strong-crypto exports? Because it realized that it was playing King Knut against the tide of opensource, and its feet were getting wet.
So if we assume that the MPAA aren't trying to prevent people from getting DeCSS, then what are they trying to do? All the court documents seem devoted to casting the OSS movement in a bad light, but I presume the case is about more than that.
And what do we gain by fighting these cases? When we fight, we are made to look bad. We stand up for ourselves, and people fling mud at us. And the mud sticks - the public are being told by respectable men in suits that we are a bunch of hippy anarchists with no respect at all for copyright laws (hint to lawyers: Stallman, Torsvalds, et. al. wrote their own OS, they didn't just start pirating Windows).
The story about the smart-warship is true. IIRC, it was a divide-by-zero error in a spreadsheet/database app that was being used for some navigational/targeting system that crashed the ship.
I don't want to know how an OS can let a div-by-0 error in an application take down the whole OS. It hurts my head.
How suits are allowed to make decisions like this just scares me.
'Since drivers for the display are so modular, why do I need to reboot my entire machine each time? Why couldn't I do the equivalent of just killing and restarting X?'
X is just an application. Killing & restarting X is like quiting Word then launching it again. Linux can be so much smarter than that.
Nice little story: a while back I was working with a small network with a mix of Win & Linux boxen on it. We made some changes to the stuff shared over Samba, but for some reason (memory fails me) these changes were not available on the client machines. So on the linux boxen, we stopped and started Samba (a kernel service). The Windoze boxen... naturally a reboot. Linux providing better support for an MS service:-)
Why did microsoft (and other OSs for that matter) make the GUI totally integrated with the OS? There must have been a reason. They could have still kept the modules (kernel, GUI, etc) proprietary binaries and not released the source, so control can't be the reason. What is it then?
Why did MS do it? Probably because the suits wanted to exorcise the spectre of DOS that was hanging over the marketing department.
But there are valid arguements that the GUI is part of the OS. The OS should provide a useful abstraction of the underlying hardware - e.g. you want a hard disk that stores files rather than blocks of data. Equally, a CLI is a very weak abstraction of the capabilities of a TNT2.
Somehow, I can't even read this without screaming.
No, Microsoft has not yet been force to make concessions. All of the ramifications of the trial have been put on hold until the appeals are done.
Is everything on hold? I haven't been paying close attention since the verdict, but I thought that only the split was held up. I just thought that the other measures didn't come into force until 90 days after they were announced.
Microsoft charges computer manufatures based on the number of units sold for a given time frame. The OEM is charged just as much for a computer with Windows as without.
Seems to go against the very principles that America is founded on. Taxation without representation, anyone?
This does not cover Office though. You should be able to order your computer without Office for a reduced savings. Check out their different models for different pricing structures.
Yup. I've bought some Dell machines lately. Office is optional, don't but it and you do save your money.
Maybe I'm nit-picking, but you seem to contradict yourself a little here:
Having Windows on the computer allows the tech staff to test something under known standards.
vs.
If I understand correctly Dell farms their Linux support out to Red Hat.
If the guys at Red Hat are taking the Linux support calls, then how does supporting Linux make life any easier for folk on the Dell support desk?:-)
The Dell tech support system requires you enter a service tag, a unique serial number for every machine that they ship. They should be able to filter people who bought Linux boxen in seconds (if they did call the wrong number), and pass them on to Red Hat.
You make a good point here, but let's play a few more word games.:-)
I certainly know that if someone talked to me about piracy of CDs, I would think they meant the people who sell dodgy copies on market stalls, not one kid copying a some tracks onto a tape for a friend.
It may be word games, but piracy involved theft with view to make a profit, and to me piracy of music means copyright theft with a view to making a profit.
Napster isn't about sharing. Sharing is when you have something and give it to someone else. Napster is about distributing.
Are you a Lawyer? Your word games confuse me. Who cares if it is sharing or distributing? What is the difference? Okay, try this:
There are musicians who want to distripute their music to as wide an audience as possible, who encourage people to trade their music on Napster. (e.g., there is a musician called Chris who posts in most Napster debates on/.)
This is legal.
The Judge should have followed the Betamax precedant, i.e. there are legitimate uses for the video recorder: it is legal; there are legitimate uses for Napster: it is legal.
Please explain how you distributing/sharing word games demonstrate that there anything illegal about Napster.
Because prior to napster, no one had created a free means of simultaneously distributing many copies of the original.
Uh... duh! Throughout the first half of your post, you carefully explain that Napster is a very efficient method to distribute mp3s. It is not illegal to be good at what you do.
the Walmarts and Targets of the world were eating the Mom and Pop stores for breakfast, hence the RIAA implented a minimum price in order to save the smaller stores
Aw, how sweet! The RIAA are ripping me off to keep small business alive, aw god bless 'em - aren't they kind.
But I'm not saying Napster is in the right. It's just (1) that there is this little thing called the law, and even the RIAA have to live by it (2) it is a matter of liberty. I want the right to write file sharing programs. File sharing programs do have legitimate uses and a case like this could create dangerous legal precedants.
But how do you detect what is legitimate behaviour? E.g., a Word document macro may request images be downloaded via http to be displayed in the document. There may be valid reason for this: the.doc file will download faster, allowing you to start reading the text while the images are still loading.
But what if the macro encodes some data that it wishes to pass back to the server in the names of the image files it requests? E.g. instead of requesting grits.jpeg it requests grits_87.jpeg, passing a byte of data back to the server.
Packet sniff all you like - at an IP level you will see packets flying back and forth, at a TCP level you will see a a port 80 connection, at a http level you will see a valid and justified GET command (how do you know that grits_87.jpeg is not the real name of the file?).
The only way that you could determine that the macro was evil was by looking at the source. Now, I have never looked at Word macro coding (I do my best to avoid looking at Word), but presumably like any scripting language you have the source there, you can check out what it is doing.
But this thread is broarder than Word macros, check the subject - 'net access during install'. How can you truely determine what any piece of software is doing with the socket comunications it makes without checking the source?
Packet sniffers are not enough - they tell you what is going on, but not why.
The EFF or some such group should probably have a project to uncover and track such nasties.
Not easy without the source.
Now, what would be a good idea, would be to write a new, open source, OS, web browser, and office suite. If these were open source, it would be quite transparant when people tried to sneak this kind of crap into their products.
what he *said* does not in any way imply any-thing bad.
Well, yeah, but it depends on what context you read it in. In the closed context of 'we just lost an anti-trust trial', then yeah, in such a litigeous environment, it is not surprising that a class action law suit occurs.
But in a broarder context, the fact that a commpany is openly unsurprised about the fact that millions of their customers feel that they are being ripped off is a very sorry state of affairs.
given the FoF by Jackson, which MS officially doesn't agree with
Microsoft:
You have a monopoly.
You abuse monopoly power to destroy competition.
You rip off your customers.
Sue me, bitches.
What is my point in that last rant?
Judge Jackson has heard all the evidence and submitted a FoF. This is the findings of a US federal court, and is fact in the eyes of US law. The appeals court is not meant to hold a retrial: the appeal is only against his application of the law. The facts stand. The only circumstance in which the appeals courts can overturn his FoF is to label them as conclusions that no-one of sound mind could reach. I.e., they have to declare that Judge Jackson is actually totally insane.:-) Unlikely.
Who gives a damn if MS 'agree' with the FoF or not? Fuck 'em - it is now fact.
its alleged monopolistic practices
In a similar vein, this is taken from the headline of the story. Surely, MSNBC, that should read "its monopolistic practices". Innocent until proven guilty. Once found guilty by a court of law, guilty untill proven innocent. MS has a monopoly, and has abused it. It is now up to them to demonstrate otherwise.
In the early stages of the computer industry, someone was going to get a monopoly. But the market would have opened up, if M$ hadn't used illegal means to maintain monopoly power. Anti-trust law is designed to end the monopoly, and level back out the playing field, when people abuse this kind of power.
Microsoft are no worse than any other, but if Apple or Sun had gained a monopoly, and used illegal means to maintain it, we should be buggering them up the ass with a broomstick right now.
"GIVEN CALIFORNIA law, this ruling was not unexpected," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan told Reuters.
He covers up so much by just saying "this ruling".
Let's expand it for him, from the headline of the story:
"GIVEN CALIFORNIA law, charges that [we] harmed consumers through [our] monopolistic practices was not unexpected," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan told Reuters.
When a company's business model means that this kind of thing is expected, there is something very wrong with the way that company opperates.
Yeah I don't get the two letter system myself.
The.co seems strange to me anyway.
I'm English, and we have.org.uk, and.net.uk, but.co.uk rather that.com.uk.
I prefer.com.uk - I know Australia uses.com.au.
I think 'co' may be an existing abreviation for company. Anyone know why we use 'co' not 'com'?
Slashdot Mirror
As a comp. sci. student, I study software engineering, and I have to say that they are actually doing a perfect textbook job engineering their new product. We design exact specs for what the code should do. They had this over to another company (actually, overseas), and we demand fully documented and tested code.
We are a little behind schedule, but we are in total control, and we have a perfect measurement of what stage of completion we are at, as we hand them the problem task by task. And this is a Good Thing. It is much better to be a little behind schedule, than to have management force you to rush delevelopment, and produce shoddy code.
Management's hands are tied. They know that we just have to wait for the code to be delivered. The comany we use know that we do all the design and can easily switch development elsewhere, if they do not get the work done in a reasonable amount of time. Yup, our experience with outsourcing devepolment seems to be entirely posative so far.
cheers,
G
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Don't we need a lot of people stomping around and fuming about VMWare being patented software? Shouldn't there be a boycott of it?
No.yerricde is a troll. On VMware's website, they talk about 'patent-pending technologies', but they are not acually stupid enough to try to patent VMs. Unfortunately, Flash VOS Inc. are that damn stupid. VOS have patented IBM's VM technology from, uh, like the 60s. (great stuff, and still in great use; plus, this is what was used to run 40,000 copies of Linux on a [recursively VM'd :-) ] partition of a IBM S/390)
Flash VOS: can you guys not spell prior art?
Or are you just so atracted to your patent lawyers, you like giving them money for the fun of it?
Nothing to worry about here.
cheers,
G
Most modern processors offer 2(+) modes of operation, which break down to Kernel mode and User mode. In kernel mode you have all the instructions that you have in user mode, plus a few more (sensative stuff, e.g. setting up virtual memory tables). An OS expects to start running in kernel mode, as it expects to run directly on the hardware.
A VM runs the enite OS in user mode. This means that whenever the OS tries to do any real work, it will try to execute a kernel mode instruction, and as it is running in user mode it is not permitted to execute it, and an exeption occurs. The VM should trap this, produce the appropriate behaviour, (eg, if the OS tried to read a byte in from the keyboard buffer it sould be passed a character from the VM applications event queue), and return to the OS code as if the instruction had be executed in hardware as normal. Clear? :-)
Also, in real machines there is often memory mapped IO, so if I write to a particular memory address I expect graphics/text to appear on the screen. The VM should produce appropriate behaviour for that.
So what VMware does:
- It provides software such that programs that are designed to run in x86 kernel mode (ie, an OS) can be run in x86 user mode, and whenever a kernel mode instruction turns up in the code it kindof 'virtually executes' it.
- It provides low level emulation of memory mapped IO, such that standard Windows VGA graphics drivers will work, as it is actually emulating the graphics hardware.
Right. Now how Win4Lin works.In windows, put simply you have three things:
- A system call interface
- A set of APIs that run on this
- The hardware drivers
The VMware approach to running window is: to emulate the x86, and the standard hardware devices, e.g. VGA graphics card, then run the stanard windows kernel and device drivers on to of this VM, and to run the Win32 API on top of them as usual.With Win4Lin, they provide their own implementation of the Windows system call interface (equivalent in function to the Windows kernel) to run within Linux (I think this is done in the Linux kernel, as it it a replacement interupt handler), and they provide their own drivers for windows to use, eg graphics cards drivers to make calls to X, rather than to try to write directly to a VGA graphics card. They then run the Win32 API code directly onto of their 'kernel', not on the standard windows one. It cuts out a couple of layers, a lot of unnecassary exceptions, and some inefficient device emulation out of the picture, that VMware uses.
Hope this helps.
cheers,
G
- It seems like Win4Lin is more a competitor for WINE than VMWare
VMware are Win4Lin are competing for your hard earned cash, they are commercial products, not OSS, and are designed to offer maximum support for running Windows apps under Linux, by actually running the M$ Win32 libraries, one way or another. Wine has an agenda. It is as much about freedom (as in OSS) as it is about running solitaire - for the Wine project requiring a copy of Windows would be akin to selling its soul, and being free of M$ code is worth compatability being sub 100%.I know what you mean, but I think that while it is accurate to say that Win4Lin is in many ways technically closer to Wine, the two projects have sufficiently different goals not be real competitors.
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For instance, the line:
..... gives the impression that it preprocesses the running software to allow it to run.
Uh no, I don't agree. [no flame; jus' an opinion]Put simply, you have 3 things in Windows:
- A syscall interface
- A set of API's running on top of this
- Drivers to access the hardware.
If Trelos provide a new traphandler to emulate the windows syscall interface (#1), and the set of drivers to emulate the hardware from within Linux (#3), then the APIs are the only M$ code they are using, and this should run fine on the traphandler that Trelos has provided, no need to modify the code.cheers,
G
- As long as the code remains under the original licence, and is not simply relicenced under the GPL. That is the intention.
Right, lets get this straight:No. Just because we have declared that you can distribute where you could under the GPL, this doens't mean that if what you want to do is outside of the scope of the GPL
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Your code is effectively dual licenced: I can modify and distribute the code freely as if it was a GPL program. The GPL is kindof a sub-license under the NASM license, just so people cannot dump the NASM license at any point.
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The NASM license is basicly just saying, that you are prepared to come to an arrangement to let me redistribute without the source in a commercial product (allowing people to chose to close the source is okay folks - e.g. BSD & MacOS X) - provided that I supply you with a big bag of cash.
The only effect on a programmer thinking of maintaining NASM, is that you could make money of their hard work. Well, big deal. Other people, e.g. Red Hat, will be making money out of the code the contribute. Why shouldn't you, in the situation that someone ever wanted to release a closed source assembler based on NASM.Well what the FSCK is everyone complaining about? NASM can be distributed every bit as freely as any GPL program - the only catch is that julesh may make a bit of cash out of your work. So what? Shut up whining.
cheers,
G
BTW. So you're (the guy | one of the guys) who wrote NASM? Sweeeeeeet. Nice piece of work - I play around hacking kernels. The fact that that the linux kernel has the jump to 32 bits in embedded machine code is a joke. Congrats, nice work.
So, you posted this story, and know a bit of the background, right?
Is, in your opinion, Nasm dual liciesed, or free to distribute under the GPL? If not, why not? (if so why the fsck did you post this, isn't it a non-story?)
- That maintainer did succeed in convincing them to put the clause in the licence about being compatible with the GPL though.
Is this not, in effect, the same as it being GPL'd?The Nasm licence now clearly states, "the Software may be distributed in such a way as to be compliant with the GNU General Public Licence". That is quite clear. I can download Nasm, and sell a comercial version based on it, so long as I stay compliant to the GPL, right?
The Nasm license also states, "We may well allow you to incorporate it into commercial software too, but we'll probably demand some money for it". IANAL, but I would say that this is now unenforcable, as they have declared that I may redistribute under the terms of the GPL, right? "Should any part of this agreement be deemed unenforcable, it is intended that the remainder of the agreement be held in force" - so if any parts of the Nasm licence that are incompatible with the GPL are deemed unenforcable, the only parts of the license that remain are those parts that are GPL compatible - no problemmo:-)
Please point out where this logic fails, but it would seem to me that I can redistribute under the GPL if I choose to, with no restrictions. Otherwise, where was the success in the maintainer having that GPL clause added?
cheers,
G
Not trolling here: you are blinkering yourself it you don't see any validity in bringing Java into a conversation about C/C++.
Java skills are now in higher demand than C/C++ skills in the UK - taken from a recent survey of the job adverts in the IT sector over the previous year.
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The advantage of C++ is that it's a hell of a toolbox. You've got hammers, screwdrivers, chisels and even a fully-functioning wood lathe (watch me turn this chunk of hoary code into a table leg!). Good programmers use the right tool for the job.
As a Java programmer, I preffer the C toolbox to the C++ toolbox. The C toolbox contains all your hammers, screwdrivers, chisels, etc. The C++ toolbox contains this lot and also sticks of dynamite, nooses of rope and gattling guns. Useful, I expect, but everything ends up as the same machine code at the end of the day, and the C++ toolbox is a bit risky for some people's liking [subjective opinion].cheers,
G
My experience: install Realplayer.
That takes down Win2k server 75% of the times I run it. I don't know what Win2k pro makes of it.
The fact that it is even possible to take down an OS that is meant to be a serious server OS is beyond me.
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but they apply just as much to all the kernel hackers
Yup - but remember: there is a demend for the Linux kernel to be hacked -> Alan Cox hacks the Linux kernel [because he wants to] -> Red Hat pay him [so he can eat]. This book needs updating to 2.4 -> These guys want to do it -> who will pay them?There is nothing wrong with looking for a 'Red Hat' to fund your project.
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the issue isn't "how do we fund documentation writers" but "how do we find documentation writers who don't need/want to be funded"?
Is "how do we find kernel hackers that don't need to be funded?" an ideal goal, too?-
If you love to document the Linux TCP/IP stack then do it. Period.
If Red Hat hadn't hired Alan Cox, then there is a danger that Linux would have lost one of it's most valuable contributors. The man needs to eat.It is not inheirantly wrong to hope to be paid for hacking Linux.
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The did succeed. The result of this is that DVD players can not be included in Linix distros.
So? Windows doesn't come with a DVD player, why should Linux? The point is, we can still get it, just as easily. They can fuck around with US sites who host it, and US sites who link to it. Google still works fine for me.-
DeCSS can't be used as the basis for alternative DVD players.
May make things difficult in the US, but the DMCA isn't law in Europe. And we have a different electronics market over here anyway. As for the US, it is easy for the MPAA to attack 2600, and call them a bunch of pirates. But if someone starts selling an unlicenced DVD player, that can only be used to watch DVDs, this may be a tougher case to win. Copyright law was never intended to award content manufacturers a monopoly over building the devices used to playback the material they generate.-
(And you can get aroung the GPL.....
Lost me. Why do you want to get around the GPL? (or rather, yes, clean room from the specs and you can write your own proprietry piece of code, for all the good this would do you, but so what? What relevance does that have to the DeCSS case? You could do a clean room closed source emacs clone if you so wished!) .....by writing a specification from it and clean room rewriting it)
I don't think that clean-rooming makes much difference in this case. As I understand it, in the California case, the 72 defendants are not all linking to the same piece of code, and MPAA are attacking all code that cracks CSS.-
Bolted, horse, gate, closing.
Does seem to be the case, doesn't it?The MPAA case would ostensibly seem to be about preventing people from getting a copy of DeCSS, but surely they can't be stupid enough to think they can actually succeed?
Here is something a lot of suits seem to have difficulty grasping: the Internet is more powerful than even the US government. Why did the US government loosen controls on strong-crypto exports? Because it realized that it was playing King Knut against the tide of opensource, and its feet were getting wet.
So if we assume that the MPAA aren't trying to prevent people from getting DeCSS, then what are they trying to do? All the court documents seem devoted to casting the OSS movement in a bad light, but I presume the case is about more than that.
And what do we gain by fighting these cases? When we fight, we are made to look bad. We stand up for ourselves, and people fling mud at us. And the mud sticks - the public are being told by respectable men in suits that we are a bunch of hippy anarchists with no respect at all for copyright laws (hint to lawyers: Stallman, Torsvalds, et. al. wrote their own OS, they didn't just start pirating Windows).
Why fight? We win even if we don't.
BTW, for more CSS/DVD info check out:
www.cssfaq.org
www.opendvd.org
G
The story about the smart-warship is true. IIRC, it was a divide-by-zero error in a spreadsheet/database app that was being used for some navigational/targeting system that crashed the ship.
I don't want to know how an OS can let a div-by-0 error in an application take down the whole OS. It hurts my head.
How suits are allowed to make decisions like this just scares me.
- 'Since drivers for the display are so modular, why do I need to reboot my entire machine each time? Why couldn't I do the equivalent of just killing and restarting X?'
X is just an application. Killing & restarting X is like quiting Word then launching it again. Linux can be so much smarter than that.Nice little story: a while back I was working with a small network with a mix of Win & Linux boxen on it. We made some changes to the stuff shared over Samba, but for some reason (memory fails me) these changes were not available on the client machines. So on the linux boxen, we stopped and started Samba (a kernel service). The Windoze boxen... naturally a reboot. Linux providing better support for an MS service :-)
- Why did microsoft (and other OSs for that matter) make the GUI totally integrated with the OS? There must have been a reason. They could have still kept the modules (kernel, GUI, etc) proprietary binaries and not released the source, so control can't be the reason. What is it then?
Why did MS do it? Probably because the suits wanted to exorcise the spectre of DOS that was hanging over the marketing department.But there are valid arguements that the GUI is part of the OS. The OS should provide a useful abstraction of the underlying hardware - e.g. you want a hard disk that stores files rather than blocks of data. Equally, a CLI is a very weak abstraction of the capabilities of a TNT2.
G
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Dell pays per CPU sold
Somehow, I can't even read this without screaming.-
No, Microsoft has not yet been force to make concessions. All of the ramifications of the trial have been put on hold until the appeals are done.
Is everything on hold? I haven't been paying close attention since the verdict, but I thought that only the split was held up. I just thought that the other measures didn't come into force until 90 days after they were announced.G
- Microsoft charges computer manufatures based on the number of units sold for a given time frame. The OEM is charged just as much for a computer with Windows as without.
Seems to go against the very principles that America is founded on. Taxation without representation, anyone?- This does not cover Office though. You should be able to order your computer without Office for a reduced savings. Check out their different models for different pricing structures.
Yup. I've bought some Dell machines lately. Office is optional, don't but it and you do save your money.Maybe I'm nit-picking, but you seem to contradict yourself a little here:
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Having Windows on the computer allows the tech staff to test something under known standards.
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If I understand correctly Dell farms their Linux support out to Red Hat.
If the guys at Red Hat are taking the Linux support calls, then how does supporting Linux make life any easier for folk on the Dell support desk?The Dell tech support system requires you enter a service tag, a unique serial number for every machine that they ship. They should be able to filter people who bought Linux boxen in seconds (if they did call the wrong number), and pass them on to Red Hat.
cheers,
G
Well, BIOS is just a piece of software, so if you have a jumperless MOBO, you overclock that in software.
;-)
G
You make a good point here, but let's play a few more word games. :-)
I certainly know that if someone talked to me about piracy of CDs, I would think they meant the people who sell dodgy copies on market stalls, not one kid copying a some tracks onto a tape for a friend.
It may be word games, but piracy involved theft with view to make a profit, and to me piracy of music means copyright theft with a view to making a profit.
G
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Napster isn't about sharing. Sharing is when you have something and give it to someone else. Napster is about distributing.
Are you a Lawyer? Your word games confuse me. Who cares if it is sharing or distributing? What is the difference? Okay, try this:- There are musicians who want to distripute their music to as wide an audience as possible, who encourage people to trade their music on Napster. (e.g., there is a musician called Chris who posts in most Napster debates on
/.) - This is legal.
- The Judge should have followed the Betamax precedant, i.e. there are legitimate uses for the video recorder: it is legal; there are legitimate uses for Napster: it is legal.
Please explain how you distributing/sharing word games demonstrate that there anything illegal about Napster.- Because prior to napster, no one had created a free means of simultaneously distributing many copies of the original.
Uh... duh!Throughout the first half of your post, you carefully explain that Napster is a very efficient method to distribute mp3s. It is not illegal to be good at what you do.
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the Walmarts and Targets of the world were eating the Mom and Pop stores for breakfast, hence the RIAA implented a minimum price in order to save the smaller stores
Aw, how sweet! The RIAA are ripping me off to keep small business alive, aw god bless 'em - aren't they kind.But I'm not saying Napster is in the right. It's just (1) that there is this little thing called the law, and even the RIAA have to live by it (2) it is a matter of liberty. I want the right to write file sharing programs. File sharing programs do have legitimate uses and a case like this could create dangerous legal precedants.
smiles.
G
But how do you detect what is legitimate behaviour? E.g., a Word document macro may request images be downloaded via http to be displayed in the document. There may be valid reason for this: the .doc file will download faster, allowing you to start reading the text while the images are still loading.
But what if the macro encodes some data that it wishes to pass back to the server in the names of the image files it requests? E.g. instead of requesting grits.jpeg it requests grits_87.jpeg, passing a byte of data back to the server.
Packet sniff all you like - at an IP level you will see packets flying back and forth, at a TCP level you will see a a port 80 connection, at a http level you will see a valid and justified GET command (how do you know that grits_87.jpeg is not the real name of the file?).
The only way that you could determine that the macro was evil was by looking at the source. Now, I have never looked at Word macro coding (I do my best to avoid looking at Word), but presumably like any scripting language you have the source there, you can check out what it is doing.
But this thread is broarder than Word macros, check the subject - 'net access during install'. How can you truely determine what any piece of software is doing with the socket comunications it makes without checking the source?
Packet sniffers are not enough - they tell you what is going on, but not why.
cheers,
G
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The EFF or some such group should probably have a project to uncover and track such nasties.
Not easy without the source.Now, what would be a good idea, would be to write a new, open source, OS, web browser, and office suite. If these were open source, it would be quite transparant when people tried to sneak this kind of crap into their products.
G
- what he *said* does not in any way imply any-thing bad.
Well, yeah, but it depends on what context you read it in. In the closed context of 'we just lost an anti-trust trial', then yeah, in such a litigeous environment, it is not surprising that a class action law suit occurs.But in a broarder context, the fact that a commpany is openly unsurprised about the fact that millions of their customers feel that they are being ripped off is a very sorry state of affairs.
- given the FoF by Jackson, which MS officially doesn't agree with
Microsoft:You have a monopoly.
You abuse monopoly power to destroy competition.
You rip off your customers.
Sue me, bitches.
What is my point in that last rant? Judge Jackson has heard all the evidence and submitted a FoF. This is the findings of a US federal court, and is fact in the eyes of US law. The appeals court is not meant to hold a retrial: the appeal is only against his application of the law. The facts stand. The only circumstance in which the appeals courts can overturn his FoF is to label them as conclusions that no-one of sound mind could reach. I.e., they have to declare that Judge Jackson is actually totally insane. :-) Unlikely.
Who gives a damn if MS 'agree' with the FoF or not? Fuck 'em - it is now fact.
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its alleged monopolistic practices
In a similar vein, this is taken from the headline of the story. Surely, MSNBC, that should read "its monopolistic practices". Innocent until proven guilty. Once found guilty by a court of law, guilty untill proven innocent. MS has a monopoly, and has abused it. It is now up to them to demonstrate otherwise.G
True, true, true.
In the early stages of the computer industry, someone was going to get a monopoly. But the market would have opened up, if M$ hadn't used illegal means to maintain monopoly power. Anti-trust law is designed to end the monopoly, and level back out the playing field, when people abuse this kind of power.
Microsoft are no worse than any other, but if Apple or Sun had gained a monopoly, and used illegal means to maintain it, we should be buggering them up the ass with a broomstick right now.
G
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"GIVEN CALIFORNIA law, this ruling was not unexpected," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan told Reuters.
He covers up so much by just saying "this ruling".Let's expand it for him, from the headline of the story:
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"GIVEN CALIFORNIA law, charges that [we] harmed consumers through [our] monopolistic practices was not unexpected," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan told Reuters.
When a company's business model means that this kind of thing is expected, there is something very wrong with the way that company opperates.My $0.02
G
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Methinks OS X/x86 will happen only when Apple has some reason to think it won't instigate the cancellation of MS Office for Macintosh.
Should we be reading this as saying:Methinks OS X/x86 will happen only when Microsoft get split.
G
Oops.
.com.us.
.co seems strange to me anyway.
.org.uk, and .net.uk, but .co.uk rather that .com.uk.
.com.uk - I know Australia uses .com.au.
Sorry, my bad. Sorry Colorado.
Yeah - like zorba says - just use
Yeah I don't get the two letter system myself.
The
I'm English, and we have
I prefer
I think 'co' may be an existing abreviation for company. Anyone know why we use 'co' not 'com'?
cya,
G