I'm interested in talking about getting a license for my own project, but I seem to have completely missed out on where the email address or website is that explains who I talk to at Microsoft.
The MSN Messenger protocol tried to get opened a long, long, time ago, when Microsoft was trying to make it the big standardised open standard (i.e. around the time AOL was being reamed in court for being proprietary about this sort of thing)
Of course it lapsed and the spec for the current protocol additions is hidden, but then it's a fairly plaintext protocol, uses XML & HTTP for auxiliary functions, so it's nothing you can't find out with Ethereal.
One thing I am wondering, though, is MSNP9 SSL for logins only, or is it SSL for the entire protocol? It will definitely be nice not to have some bastard snooping on my Messenger traffic if the latter is true, and it certainly doesn't stop people from snooping the traffic on a legitimate connection (i.e. Gaim connects, logs in, dumps all protocol traffic to a file so people can look at it..)
> It's unherently unsound doing research on a > captive, interbread population. You wouldn't > trust it in humans - so why is it OK in animals > and cultures?
Being captive and interbred means you can control and predict certain factors of the research, which is pretty essential in research.
If you had 100 randomly born mice and tried to test a cancer drug on them, probably a very small number of them would get cancer before they died at the end of their very, very short lives.
If you engineer 100 mice to be prone to nasty, guaranteed tumours, you waste less time, and more importantly, waste less mice:)
Really winners of this kind of stuff know in advance anyway, but it usually isn't a great deal of time before. Oscar winner rumours hit about a fortnight before. We all knew Miyazaki was supposed to go pick up his award for Spirited Away. He sure knew in advance. The only people who don't know in advance are the people who only have 5 minutes drive to go to the ceremony.
So if they knew about the award at least maybe a week in advance, they could pull it off easily.
In the olden days, back when we really did still have Elves and Dragons, rendering time was the enemy, but if you've seen them working at ILM these days, the stuff they pull out of the preview window in their software is about 90% of what you get on movie screen, minus a few smoke and radiosity layers.
Features like Toy Story would be a 'nightmare' only because of the story! Stuff like Monsters Inc. was only a 'nightmare' because of the relative newness of the animated fur software.
And then every McDonalds, Coke, the VHS/DVD release, had some pretty good renditions, new jokes.. you think they spent 6 months making a Coke advert?
Once you've done it once, I think the problem is finding time to take your animators off of paid work, and getting the voice actor out of bed for a reasonable sum of money:)
Harking back to the thread a day or two ago about Intel's new software x86 emulator, and how "AMD64 is better anyway", I have to say that AMD64 doesn't have this, which makes it incredibly uncool in comparison. If you go Itanium with your server, you also ditch the old BIOS, and the nasty MBR too (Intel/MS have a new disk partitioning system, GPMmmsomething, which rocks in some ways but sucks in others.. but it's not numbered backwards and there is no daft primary/extension/logical distinction)
I wonder how EFI handles stuff like firmware updates. Intel supply an EFI example (it loads OS from FAT etc.) - maybe there's room for a special part of it somewhere that updates firmware on reboots..?
Still not quite as good as OpenFirmware IMO (having Forth there is something.. umm.. nice..?)
1.> List all files a#? since yesterday to "DH0:foo"
.. to get all the files (i.e. not directories as well) named a-something (#? is like *) created since yesterday (umm.. self explanatory;)
I don't see what the big deal is about. Natural language CLI's just need programs that take natural language input - AmigaOS's ReadArgs() templating system makes this very very easy to do.
It couldn't be too hard to make a linux app that takes input in a semi-natural way. See if you can't get the source for 'ls' and just change all the -l and -s and -G into real words.
And SQL as well, natural enough for me, try this in mysql or something:
SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE somefield = 'bobby' ORDER BY somevalue;
Having *REALLY* natural language CLI's would be a pain in the ass, to be honest. Even on Star Trek, they rarely use the computer to do that much voice input, and most people I know can type the above lines faster than they can speak them.
There has to be a middle ground: I still can't remember what the commands to ls are for. But I can remember them for "list", 'cos they're natural. But not overly natural that I spend all day typing them;)
I'm wondering whether Amiga really are telling the outside world what they are doing well enough.
It seems only the "die hards" and the people who hang round them ever know really what's going on.
I seriously doubt that it's down to anything like laziness on the majority of Slashdot readers parts - although you can all prove me wrong if you like!
Sick? No, it's just unfortunate. Besides, it's only the launch of the developer box. I bet someone has some hideous trick up their sleeves, but it ain't gonna be to do with the launch. If you look, you'll see that the "launch" is happening at the St. Louis Amiga Show. Would YOU launch a fake product amongst a few thousand rabid Amigans?:) I doubt Fleecy and Bill would, either:)
Well done Neko, you've gone from talking about the Amiga to talking about Neutrino in one breath. --- Neutrino, the OS which some people think is going to be the new "Amiga" OS simply because they've organised a developer organisation and got a few e-mails from QSSL.
Heh, someone who knows me from elsewhere;)
I did mention Tao's intent system there, remember. I'm just curious as to what John Carmack (gasp! Another JC!:) makes of the Neutrino port.
I'd be glad to develop for either, it's just my interests are currently with the Neutrino platform at the moment, because I don't know dick about the Tao one (by virtue of them not saying much about it)
And with regards to the setting up a developer org and "getting a few mails from QSSL" - it's more than I can see that YOU'VE done, yer lazy bastard..
I think what John's trying to get at with regards to the "evolving with the consoles" remark is that it was programmed too closely to the metal to ever move on to other, better things.
Looking at the Amiga market from the Commodore Banckruptcy onwards, you can see the prevelance of applications which supported the ageing ECS chipset specs, when the more advanced AGA chipset was available. Why? No published specs for AGA!
It's taken years for the Amiga Community to realise that, and unfortunately killed the platform. I think it's only been for about 2 or 3 years where people have been seriously programming for hardware-independant interfaces like WarpUP and Warp3D, like OpenGL, actually using the OS to do tricks rather than banging the ancient custom hardware.
Then again, it's only been in the past 2 or 3 years that we've had machines hit mainstream that have been powerful enough to facilitate that..
I'll be glad when we get a new set of machines either by Amiga via Tao and their intent product, or from the QNX Neutrino movement. At least a fresh start (and with Quake 3 Arena already ported*;) would encourage people to program independantly of hardware in environments that really are "processorm agnostic".
And a question for John Carmack - have you seen the QNX Neutrino port of Quake 3 at all?
The point isn't that
nobody can have it, it's that everyone can't have it, which recreates the sort of helpless technological underclass Free Software is here to eliminate.
I suppose you're right about that, but all the USB forum is saying is that they want someone to pay for the specs. I'm sure RedHat could afford it - so they have a neat team of engineers work on the thing, integrate it into the Kernel.
I had someone mail me and tell me that the spec is merely a peice of paper.
If that's so, if it seems to me that if it's translated into driver code then you could redistribute it without fear of the USB people jumping on Linux's preverbial back. And if people "reverse engineer" the implemented code? Well that's perfectly legal, isn't it?
It seems to me that the backlash is another one of those Free(Beer)/Free(Dom) misunderstandings: you are still free to get the specs from the USB forum, it doesn't really matter if you have to pay for them.
It's not unheard of in this day and age to actually pay for PRODUCTS and SERVICES. So you want USB support for Linux? If every Linux user contributes $1 to the cause, you'd have enough to get the USB specs into the next millennium.
What's that? Can't afford $1? Well I wonder how you managed to afford that kick-ass PC you're surfing the 'net on? And the copy of RedHat you're brandishing?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in talking about getting a license for my own project, but I seem to have completely missed out on where the email address or website is that explains who I talk to at Microsoft.
Anyone got this info?
The MSN Messenger protocol tried to get opened a long, long, time ago, when Microsoft was trying to make it the big standardised open standard (i.e. around the time AOL was being reamed in court for being proprietary about this sort of thing)
r -protocol-00.txt
m l
http://www.abraxis.co.uk/draft-movva-msn-messenge
This was because of involvement with these guys:
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/impp-charter.ht
But they took a slightly different direction.
Of course it lapsed and the spec for the current protocol additions is hidden, but then it's a fairly plaintext protocol, uses XML & HTTP for auxiliary functions, so it's nothing you can't find out with Ethereal.
One thing I am wondering, though, is MSNP9 SSL for logins only, or is it SSL for the entire protocol? It will definitely be nice not to have some bastard snooping on my Messenger traffic if the latter is true, and it certainly doesn't stop people from snooping the traffic on a legitimate connection (i.e. Gaim connects, logs in, dumps all protocol traffic to a file so people can look at it..)
Ah well.
> It's unherently unsound doing research on a
:)
> captive, interbread population. You wouldn't
> trust it in humans - so why is it OK in animals
> and cultures?
Being captive and interbred means you can control
and predict certain factors of the research, which
is pretty essential in research.
If you had 100 randomly born mice and tried to
test a cancer drug on them, probably a very small
number of them would get cancer before they died
at the end of their very, very short lives.
If you engineer 100 mice to be prone to nasty,
guaranteed tumours, you waste less time, and more
importantly, waste less mice
1) Hamster has no 'p'.
2) Real velociraptors (or whatever dinosaur they based the movie on) didn't live in cages.
(GRAMMAR NAZI IN TRAINING)
Really winners of this kind of stuff know in advance anyway, but it usually isn't a great deal of time before. Oscar winner rumours hit about a fortnight before. We all knew Miyazaki was supposed to go pick up his award for Spirited Away. He sure knew in advance. The only people who don't know in advance are the people who only have 5 minutes drive to go to the ceremony.
:)
So if they knew about the award at least maybe a week in advance, they could pull it off easily.
In the olden days, back when we really did still have Elves and Dragons, rendering time was the enemy, but if you've seen them working at ILM these days, the stuff they pull out of the preview window in their software is about 90% of what you get on movie screen, minus a few smoke and radiosity layers.
Features like Toy Story would be a 'nightmare' only because of the story! Stuff like Monsters Inc. was only a 'nightmare' because of the relative newness of the animated fur software.
And then every McDonalds, Coke, the VHS/DVD release, had some pretty good renditions, new jokes.. you think they spent 6 months making a Coke advert?
Once you've done it once, I think the problem is finding time to take your animators off of paid work, and getting the voice actor out of bed for a reasonable sum of money
http://www.intel.com/technology/efi/
E FI/default.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/firmware/
Best thing to come out of Itanium, IMO.
Harking back to the thread a day or two ago about Intel's new software x86 emulator, and how "AMD64 is better anyway", I have to say that AMD64 doesn't have this, which makes it incredibly uncool in comparison. If you go Itanium with your server, you also ditch the old BIOS, and the nasty MBR too (Intel/MS have a new disk partitioning system, GPMmmsomething, which rocks in some ways but sucks in others.. but it's not numbered backwards and there is no daft primary/extension/logical distinction)
I wonder how EFI handles stuff like firmware updates. Intel supply an EFI example (it loads OS from FAT etc.) - maybe there's room for a special part of it somewhere that updates firmware on reboots..?
Still not quite as good as OpenFirmware IMO (having Forth there is something.. umm.. nice..?)
Polyhead, don't believe anything John tells you, ever.
:)
I can't believe I explained the exact nature of MorphOS to both of you and neither of you remembered it
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft90&s1='4698672'.WKU.&OS=PN /4698672&RS=PN/4698672
:)
They can easily come in at a late date with a patent when they've had the patent for 15 years
On my Amiga, I regularly type:
;)
;)
1.> List all files a#? since yesterday to "DH0:foo"
.. to get all the files (i.e. not directories as
well) named a-something (#? is like *) created
since yesterday (umm.. self explanatory
I don't see what the big deal is about. Natural
language CLI's just need programs that take natural
language input - AmigaOS's ReadArgs() templating
system makes this very very easy to do.
It couldn't be too hard to make a linux app that
takes input in a semi-natural way. See if you can't
get the source for 'ls' and just change all the -l
and -s and -G into real words.
And SQL as well, natural enough for me, try this in
mysql or something:
SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE somefield = 'bobby'
ORDER BY somevalue;
Having *REALLY* natural language CLI's would be a
pain in the ass, to be honest. Even on Star Trek,
they rarely use the computer to do that much voice
input, and most people I know can type the above
lines faster than they can speak them.
There has to be a middle ground: I still can't
remember what the commands to ls are for. But I
can remember them for "list", 'cos they're natural.
But not overly natural that I spend all day
typing them
Matt
Now now, Squidders, we'll have less of that!
I'm wondering whether Amiga really are telling
the outside world what they are doing well enough.
It seems only the "die hards" and the people who
hang round them ever know really what's going on.
I seriously doubt that it's down to anything like
laziness on the majority of Slashdot readers parts
- although you can all prove me wrong if you like!
Sick? No, it's just unfortunate. Besides, it's only the launch of the developer box. I bet someone has some hideous trick up their sleeves, but it ain't gonna be to do with the launch. :) I doubt Fleecy and Bill would, either :)
If you look, you'll see that the "launch" is happening at the St. Louis Amiga Show. Would YOU launch a fake product amongst a few thousand rabid Amigans?
Heh, someone who knows me from elsewhere
I did mention Tao's intent system there, remember. I'm just curious as to what
John Carmack (gasp! Another JC!
I'd be glad to develop for either, it's just my interests are currently with
the Neutrino platform at the moment, because I don't know dick about the Tao
one (by virtue of them not saying much about it)
And with regards to the setting up a developer org and "getting a few mails
from QSSL" - it's more than I can see that YOU'VE done, yer lazy bastard..
Looking at the Amiga market from the Commodore Banckruptcy onwards, you can see the prevelance of applications which supported the ageing ECS chipset specs, when the more advanced AGA chipset was available. Why? No published specs for AGA!
It's taken years for the Amiga Community to realise that, and unfortunately killed the platform. I think it's only been for about 2 or 3 years where people have been seriously programming for hardware-independant interfaces like WarpUP and Warp3D, like OpenGL, actually using the OS to do tricks rather than banging the ancient custom hardware.
Then again, it's only been in the past 2 or 3 years that we've had machines hit mainstream that have been powerful enough to facilitate that..
I'll be glad when we get a new set of machines either by Amiga via Tao and their intent product, or from the QNX Neutrino movement. At least a fresh start (and with Quake 3 Arena already ported* ;) would encourage people to program independantly of hardware in environments that really are "processorm agnostic".
And a question for John Carmack - have you seen the QNX Neutrino port of Quake 3 at all?
I had someone mail me and tell me that the spec is merely a peice of paper.
If that's so, if it seems to me that if it's translated into driver code then you could redistribute it without fear of the USB people jumping on Linux's preverbial back. And if people "reverse engineer" the implemented code? Well that's perfectly legal, isn't it?
It seems to me that the backlash is another one of those Free(Beer)/Free(Dom) misunderstandings: you are still free to get the specs from the USB forum, it doesn't really matter if you have to pay for them.
What's wrong with PAYING for the damned thing?
It's not unheard of in this day and age to actually pay for PRODUCTS and SERVICES. So you want USB support for Linux? If every Linux user contributes $1 to the cause, you'd have enough to
get the USB specs into the next millennium.
What's that? Can't afford $1? Well I wonder how
you managed to afford that kick-ass PC you're
surfing the 'net on? And the copy of RedHat you're
brandishing?
Sheesh. Some people, eh?
Neko