This supposedly linux, open-source focused site seems awfully preoccupied with Microsoft for some reason
Because Microsoft declared Linux to be their
number #1 threat. When a company with a history
of destroying competitors declares war
then you should probably pay attention.
and it's not good.
It can get old, especialy the uninformed bashing,
but stories about Microsoft are legitimate and
often interesting.
Capitalism is a zero sum game. A GAME, not a way of life. We live in a real world, and we need to control gamers so that they do not own everything worth owning, including our futures.
Not exactly. An individual competition between
two companies for a specific market might be
a zero-sum game, but capitalism and economics in
general are nonzero-sum games.
Also, attempts by companies to cooperate based on
game theory is illegal, it is called price
fixing.:)
Actually, I'd advocate no building permits. If you own land, you should be allowed to do anything you like with it, as long as you don't endanger lives or harm the property of others (and perhaps a handful of other things).
But are you qualified to judge 'harm' to
someone elses property? Leaving resolution of such
disputes to the property owners involved would
probably not provide an optimal solution.
Government regulations sometimes suck, but they
suck less than anarchy of any variety.
It really detracts from a joke if you have to explain it, but I'm getting hate mail so I guess I'll have to spell this one out.
You should have expressed the joke in terms/.
understands.
In Soviet Russia gun-toting monkey elects
YOU! All your terrorist Indian OSS
developer base are belong to US.
Then followed it up with a Apu Quik-E mart
joke. If you are realy looking to change those
-1 flame to +5 funny then make a step 1..N joke
out of the Simpsons quote.
It seems to be too late though, you have some
asshat coward bombing you with overrated now.
But VoIP also makes it a simplier task for the end users to install encryption.
But probably not in this case. To "leverage
existing infrastructure" this will not be a user
visible voip application. One or more endpoints
and transport networks involved will use existing
circuits for quite some time.
Standards can easily become a
tool of the ignorant or uncaring. Crap gets
published as a
standard and is assumed to be good, because it has
been blessed by a standards body.
Microsoft wanted credit for
creating standards and being innovative, so they
launched an assault of crappy standards at the
IETF. In most cases they wound up publishing an
informational RFC (as should have happened), but
in several instances they published experimental
or standards track RFCs. Some of these were good
(as MS has some very smart people working for
them), but many were bad, showed serious lack of
understanding in their design space, duplicated
the functions of one or more exisiting protocols,
and ignored standard conventions in field
placement.
Documents like those mentioned above lead to the
complaints I get fairly regularly from marketing
in my current job, the complaints are all
along the lines of: "you don't support RFC xyz"
(where RFC xyz is informational describing a
vendor specific extension, or experimental).
My reply is that we studied the document,
determined the cost of supporting the feature, and
decided not to.
This sets off a little firestorm every time. "But
it's an RFC and customer blah blah blah is
demanding it", not understanding or caring about
the diffence in RFC types or the fact that most
of our equipment cannot support the extension in
question. It has that magic title and we have to
support it, despite the fact that there is often
another way within existing, proven, and
implemented standards to accomplish the task.
I'd be very curious to know how running Linux on an Xbox is cheating.
The statement "If someone finds a way to cheat, we
close it down and do an update so people can't
anymore." could be meant in two different ways.
In the first sense, it could refer simply to
online games. People could cheat to win a game.
Going further than that people could cheat by
knocking someone else off-line, steal an account,
increase their own standing in a league, use the
service without paying, and so on.
In the second sense it could refer to the econmics
of the XBox in the context of game theory. MS
tries to price the XBox in such a way that it is
affordable, with the assumption that each unit
sold will lead to other purchases, build brand
loyalty among consumers, and so on. Cheating
here is invalidating the "rules" that MS set up
for price and use. MS also tries to release
information to developers to increase the
attractiveness of the system to licensees.
Cheating in this sense might cause MS to be more
restrictive in releasing information to
developers.
Hell, I'd be happy if the people working for me could consistently compile their c/c++.
Just hope you don't get what you ask for. Otherwise
you'll wind up in a pissing match with QA cause
your developers are tossing code over the wall every
time it compiles.
I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it.
Why? Spam is assault, not speach. Would I
protect the right of skinheads to scream racial
epithets at people? No. Would I protect those
skinheads right to hold their views on white
racial superiority? Yes, although their beliefs
are digusting and offensive they have the right to
hold them and even communicate them to others.
So spammers can send their messages to people who
are willing to receive them. No restriction on the
message, just the means used to deliver it.
Too late for iTunes and whatever Microsoft winds
up releasing. I've got at least 500 CDs of music and
I'm tired of reading about the latest RIAA atrocity
with the feeling that I'm funding it.
Artists and labels that give money to RIAA get
no more of my business.
... is that there are many companies that live in a permanent state of crisis....
I agree, but I've worked for tiny companies and for
fortune 500 companies, and I've been able to make
time later to fix a system I've kludged into being.
In a tiny company every employee can exert a fair
amount of power. Use your power for good and get
the time to do what you need.
In a large company organizational problems will
often create pockets of time where you have no
deliverables. You could take a three hour lunch
every day, or you could use the time to fix the
horrible hacks you created in crisis mode.
If you work at a company in true permanent crisis
of the "just make it work by COB tommorow" variety
then I'm not sure what to say to you. I'd look
for another job.
Since programming has always been easy for them, they assume that they are gifted programmers, never stopping to notice that they aren't attempting anything particularly difficult.
I really wish more people understood this.
My employer has purchased several companies
in the last couple years, and in every case
I've run into at least one
system put together by a self-taught
guru. In every case they "solve" their problem
with hard-coding, kludges, or brute-force. The
crappier the system the more defensiveness and
ego from the creator.
We all do crap work sometimes when working under
extreme time constraints, but professionals will
go back and spend the time to do it right when
the crisis is past. The willingness to spend the
time to do it right (as well as the recognition
for the the need to do so) is more common amongst
college grads.
Access control had nothing really to do with, it was primarily put into place to prevent some idiot from overwriting a crucial function or changing the type of data (IE static array to double linked list) and causing your program to crash.
Actually it is not even designed to protect
against stupid inheritance tricks. 'private' is a
hint to the class user that the data or method
is an implementation detail that should be
ignored.
'protected' is hint that it is an implementation
detail that may need to be changed in derived
classes. The fact that the compiler enforces those
keywords is just gravy.
...blamed P2P networks for spreading illegal forms of pornography, while another fingered universities as hotbeds of widespread--and felonious--copyright infringement.
Men engaging in perversion with architecture are
hardly qualified to complain about internet
pornography.
people who buy xboxes for hacking are infinitely more likely to buy games (or xbox live) than someone who never bought an xbox at all.
Just barely. Mod users are kicked from the Live
service when discovered, so mod users likely to
use a free service other than Live. Mod users
can purchase or make bootleg games instead of
paying $40+/each.
If XBox hacking
became common MS could not promise consumers
cheat-free games, and could not promise licensees
a piracy free platform (both of which are things
they have started making noise about in press
releases and industry rags).
They may not be in the best interests of the company, but the notion of taking the same kind of IP restrictions that everyone has swallowed over software and porting them to hardware is absurd. What's next? They going to try and sue me for loading the dishwasher wrong?
Of course laws giving the manufacturer the
ability to restrict how you use hardware are
ridiculous. I just think it is dangerous to
attempt to justify our control over our own
hardware according to the rules of the business
world.
Whether customer modification of purchased
hardware is a benefit to the manufacturer or not
is immaterial to the question of whether to allow
IP restrictions for hardware. Making a provably
false statement about financial benefit to the
manufacturer diverts lawmakers attention away from
the real issue and makes it easy to justify bad
laws like the DMCA.
"We're very committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others" said J. Allard from Microsoft.
This guy must be a new hire who skipped employee orientation or something. Did anyone else feel the need to laugh when they read that?
Standard corporate doublespeak.
Translated it means:
"Abortions for some, miniature American flags for
others" or maybe "Mod an XBox and the terrorists
win". I'm not quite sure which, as I'm only a 3rd
level corporate drone.
Did ya get the memo?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If Microsoft doesn't interfere with any of this alleged "illegal hacking" projects, they could sell those Xboxes like hot cakes.
Why would they want that? They make money from
Live subscriptions and game sales. People who
mod their XBox are unlikely to purchase either.
I agree that anyone who purchases an XBox should
be free to do with it what they want, but to claim
that mods are in Microsoft's best interest is
wrong.
MS will continue to support legislation that
makes modifying these units illegal.
However, the article perpetuates another myth: "Synchronization should be easy. The more things you synchronize, the better off you are."
Exactly. This article and the resources articles
make the point that sync and cache consistency
cost are not themselves the problems in real code
that benchmarks might make them appear.
While I agree that the real
clock cycle cost of synchronization belongs at the
micro-optimization level, there is a great danger
of creating a series of chokepoints that turns
your mt-program into a single threaded program
plus context switch thrashing.
You can avoid a lot of these problems in many cases if you use a function like "select()" in a single-threaded program (which, IIRC, Java unfortunately doesn't support). Even though it looks harder to program, it ends up being easier to debug.
The largest problem with a 'select' based state
machine is that creating a cooperative
multitasking environment can be very hard to do
correctly and has to be done anew for each
program. I have hope for framework libraries like
st-threads, but most of the projects
that are at a usable point are very focused on
a single type of task and don't work well with
other libraries or frameworks.
Overuse and abuse of threading is like balanced
binary trees, looks good on paper, works well in
your prototype, and sometimes leads to abysmal
performance for reasons that can be
counter-intuitive (and could lead you to learn
more about memory paging, cache hits, and the like
than you ever wanted to know).
Slashdot Mirror
Because Microsoft declared Linux to be their number #1 threat. When a company with a history of destroying competitors declares war then you should probably pay attention.
and it's not good.
It can get old, especialy the uninformed bashing, but stories about Microsoft are legitimate and often interesting.
Not exactly. An individual competition between two companies for a specific market might be a zero-sum game, but capitalism and economics in general are nonzero-sum games.
Also, attempts by companies to cooperate based on game theory is illegal, it is called price fixing. :)
But are you qualified to judge 'harm' to someone elses property? Leaving resolution of such disputes to the property owners involved would probably not provide an optimal solution.
Government regulations sometimes suck, but they suck less than anarchy of any variety.
You should have expressed the joke in terms /.
understands.
Then followed it up with a Apu Quik-E mart joke. If you are realy looking to change those -1 flame to +5 funny then make a step 1..N joke out of the Simpsons quote.It seems to be too late though, you have some asshat coward bombing you with overrated now.
But can your company go without the newest update to Microsoft Barn Raiser for that long?
But probably not in this case. To "leverage existing infrastructure" this will not be a user visible voip application. One or more endpoints and transport networks involved will use existing circuits for quite some time.
That is sort of the point of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act .
That particular battle was fought and lost 9 years ago.
No need. E.164 number and DNS
Microsoft wanted credit for creating standards and being innovative, so they launched an assault of crappy standards at the IETF. In most cases they wound up publishing an informational RFC (as should have happened), but in several instances they published experimental or standards track RFCs. Some of these were good (as MS has some very smart people working for them), but many were bad, showed serious lack of understanding in their design space, duplicated the functions of one or more exisiting protocols, and ignored standard conventions in field placement.
Documents like those mentioned above lead to the complaints I get fairly regularly from marketing in my current job, the complaints are all along the lines of: "you don't support RFC xyz" (where RFC xyz is informational describing a vendor specific extension, or experimental). My reply is that we studied the document, determined the cost of supporting the feature, and decided not to.
This sets off a little firestorm every time. "But it's an RFC and customer blah blah blah is demanding it", not understanding or caring about the diffence in RFC types or the fact that most of our equipment cannot support the extension in question. It has that magic title and we have to support it, despite the fact that there is often another way within existing, proven, and implemented standards to accomplish the task.
The statement "If someone finds a way to cheat, we close it down and do an update so people can't anymore." could be meant in two different ways.
In the first sense, it could refer simply to online games. People could cheat to win a game. Going further than that people could cheat by knocking someone else off-line, steal an account, increase their own standing in a league, use the service without paying, and so on.
In the second sense it could refer to the econmics of the XBox in the context of game theory. MS tries to price the XBox in such a way that it is affordable, with the assumption that each unit sold will lead to other purchases, build brand loyalty among consumers, and so on. Cheating here is invalidating the "rules" that MS set up for price and use. MS also tries to release information to developers to increase the attractiveness of the system to licensees. Cheating in this sense might cause MS to be more restrictive in releasing information to developers.
Just hope you don't get what you ask for. Otherwise you'll wind up in a pissing match with QA cause your developers are tossing code over the wall every time it compiles.
Why? Spam is assault, not speach. Would I protect the right of skinheads to scream racial epithets at people? No. Would I protect those skinheads right to hold their views on white racial superiority? Yes, although their beliefs are digusting and offensive they have the right to hold them and even communicate them to others.
So spammers can send their messages to people who are willing to receive them. No restriction on the message, just the means used to deliver it.
Too late for iTunes and whatever Microsoft winds up releasing. I've got at least 500 CDs of music and I'm tired of reading about the latest RIAA atrocity with the feeling that I'm funding it. Artists and labels that give money to RIAA get no more of my business.
I agree, but I've worked for tiny companies and for fortune 500 companies, and I've been able to make time later to fix a system I've kludged into being.
In a tiny company every employee can exert a fair amount of power. Use your power for good and get the time to do what you need.
In a large company organizational problems will often create pockets of time where you have no deliverables. You could take a three hour lunch every day, or you could use the time to fix the horrible hacks you created in crisis mode.
If you work at a company in true permanent crisis of the "just make it work by COB tommorow" variety then I'm not sure what to say to you. I'd look for another job.
I really wish more people understood this.
My employer has purchased several companies in the last couple years, and in every case I've run into at least one system put together by a self-taught guru. In every case they "solve" their problem with hard-coding, kludges, or brute-force. The crappier the system the more defensiveness and ego from the creator.
We all do crap work sometimes when working under extreme time constraints, but professionals will go back and spend the time to do it right when the crisis is past. The willingness to spend the time to do it right (as well as the recognition for the the need to do so) is more common amongst college grads.
No!!! IP laws are evil! They are outdated and wrong! There is no purpose to them other than giving the man a tool to keep his jackboot on my neck!
Actually it is not even designed to protect against stupid inheritance tricks. 'private' is a hint to the class user that the data or method is an implementation detail that should be ignored. 'protected' is hint that it is an implementation detail that may need to be changed in derived classes. The fact that the compiler enforces those keywords is just gravy.
Men engaging in perversion with architecture are hardly qualified to complain about internet pornography.
Just barely. Mod users are kicked from the Live service when discovered, so mod users likely to use a free service other than Live. Mod users can purchase or make bootleg games instead of paying $40+/each.
If XBox hacking became common MS could not promise consumers cheat-free games, and could not promise licensees a piracy free platform (both of which are things they have started making noise about in press releases and industry rags).
Of course laws giving the manufacturer the ability to restrict how you use hardware are ridiculous. I just think it is dangerous to attempt to justify our control over our own hardware according to the rules of the business world.
Whether customer modification of purchased hardware is a benefit to the manufacturer or not is immaterial to the question of whether to allow IP restrictions for hardware. Making a provably false statement about financial benefit to the manufacturer diverts lawmakers attention away from the real issue and makes it easy to justify bad laws like the DMCA.
This guy must be a new hire who skipped employee orientation or something. Did anyone else feel the need to laugh when they read that?
Standard corporate doublespeak.
Translated it means: "Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others" or maybe "Mod an XBox and the terrorists win". I'm not quite sure which, as I'm only a 3rd level corporate drone.
Why would they want that? They make money from Live subscriptions and game sales. People who mod their XBox are unlikely to purchase either.
I agree that anyone who purchases an XBox should be free to do with it what they want, but to claim that mods are in Microsoft's best interest is wrong. MS will continue to support legislation that makes modifying these units illegal.
by Anonymous Coward
Best troll ever. Irony has a new champion.
These are all trolls from the infamous Jim Fleming (resident of killfiles round the world).
Exactly. This article and the resources articles make the point that sync and cache consistency cost are not themselves the problems in real code that benchmarks might make them appear. While I agree that the real clock cycle cost of synchronization belongs at the micro-optimization level, there is a great danger of creating a series of chokepoints that turns your mt-program into a single threaded program plus context switch thrashing.
You can avoid a lot of these problems in many cases if you use a function like "select()" in a single-threaded program (which, IIRC, Java unfortunately doesn't support). Even though it looks harder to program, it ends up being easier to debug.
The largest problem with a 'select' based state machine is that creating a cooperative multitasking environment can be very hard to do correctly and has to be done anew for each program. I have hope for framework libraries like st-threads, but most of the projects that are at a usable point are very focused on a single type of task and don't work well with other libraries or frameworks.
Overuse and abuse of threading is like balanced binary trees, looks good on paper, works well in your prototype, and sometimes leads to abysmal performance for reasons that can be counter-intuitive (and could lead you to learn more about memory paging, cache hits, and the like than you ever wanted to know).