If no one is going to create a competive product, then what's the point? What use would it be?
It would be very nice to have "old" operating systems lying around in a form that enables them to be ported to different platforms, or used to keep some ancient piece of software alive.
At some point Microsoft is going to stop shipping operating systems that are compatible with old software that runs on Windows 95. There are people out there who don't want to upgrade, or can't upgrade because there's nowhere to upgrade to because the application they know and love doesn't work past Windows XXX.
This is a major issue people trying to preserve computer history. If old OSes are released under the GPL then the code can be examined and appropriate emulators written. For example, imagine that we have an old device that has a Windows 95 driver. It will be nice in 50 years time to turn on that device, see if it works and then decide to try to interface it. If we can get the appropriate electronic connection then a driver is going to be handy. If there are no OSes around that can load the Windows 95 driver then a GPL driver will enable us to build a new one.
This discussion was interesting but it ends very unconvincingly. Tim argues that Quark shouldn't have been closed source without much justification but then says that it's ok for iChat and Aqua to be closed.
One alternative is that a company that's developing code could decide to release their old code after some time has elapsed. For example, surely it wouldn't hurt Microsoft if they GPLed Windows 95. No one's going to create a competitive product from it, and if they removed their trademarks from it, they could free it and allow others to maintain it.
Perhaps Quark could have waited until competitors caught up and then released the special code under the GPL. They could even use the GPL to undermine a competitor. e.g. once feature X is no longer their big advantage, release it, let an open source solution implement it and then they can bash their competitors by saying: we've got feature Y which no one else has and feature X, that's just a freebee, what you need is Y.
Me, but then I'm the sort of person who likes to use semicolons when writing English; I find that the semicolon is a fun way to join two related sentences without using a period.
Perhaps we should club together and buy the author of this little article a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
The answer is "that depends". There's an excellent Wikipedia entry on this subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_ English_differences
"... -ise / -ize
Commonwealth colonise, harmonise, realise; American colonize, harmonize, realize (and derivatives and inflexions therefrom: colonisation - colonization). Although the most authoritative British sources, the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler's Modern English Usage, prefer -ize, British editors tend to enforce the use of -ise as the standard orthographical practice.
Endings in -yze are possible only in American English. Thus, Commonwealth analyse, catalyse, hydrolyse, paralyse; American analyze, catalyze, hydrolyze, paralyze.
Mind that not all spellings are interchangeable; some verbs take the -z- form exclusively, for instance capsize, seize (except in the legal phrase to be seised of/to stand seised to), size and prize (to value: but prize "to lever open" is in the Commonwealth often prise), whereas others take only -s-: advertise, advise, apprise, arise, chastise, circumcise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, devise, disguise, excise, exercise, (en)franchise, improvise, incise, merchandise, premise, promise, previse, poise, praise, raise, reprise, revise, rise, supervise, surmise, surprise, televise and uprise."
You'll note that they say that most British editors prefer -ise, while the Oxford English Dictionary prefers -ize. So, in short, us Brits are mighty conflicted about this.
> > People are discovering that when you buy any > > product that is subject to "activation", you > > haven't really bought anything. > > OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on/. > in a long time; > > No, actually what you wrote is the stupidest > thing you've read on/. in a long time. > > The vast majority of the population have no clue > about how digital restriction management can be > used to take away something that they think they > own. Whether they "stole" it or not does not > matter here.
Yes, it does. If they stole it then they shouldn't be able to use it. If they didn't steal it then Valve isn't stopping them from using it; what's the problem with that?
> Should Valve go under and their steam network be > turned off, all legit purchasers of half-life2 > will be in the exact same situation that these > suspected pirates are today. People who paid for > divx dvds are in the same boat already, they > just weren't widespread enough for the lesson to > make an impact.
If Valve goes out of business there's nothing to stop you using the single player HL2 once it has been activated. Once activated it's yours to play with offline.
The only loss you'll have if Valve disappears is Steam, and Steam is on a subscription basis, so you'll have to argue with their creditors about how to get back part of your subscription.
Just don't post crappy editorial comments like this:
> People are discovering that when you buy any > product that is subject to "activation", you > haven't really bought anything.
OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on/. in a long time; so Valve decided that to attempt to crack down on piracy (and it's not as if we haven't seen lots of leaked games) they would force "activation" of the product, even for single player use. Boo hoo, and now some people got caught trying to stiff Valve. Cry me a river. Valve is a for-profit business selling a piece of closed-source software.
In other news, michael buys car and is shocked to discover must buy gas for it continue working.
Given the state of natural language on/. this isn't going to work:-)
John.
This is good primer material for newbs
on
Intro to Encryption
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That's some clever way of saying "crap", right? This article is horrible, and if I was an encryption newbie all I'd be able to do after reading this article is spout acronyms.
Here's part of what the article says about RSA:
"Unfortunately, nothing in life is free, and so it is with asymmetric cryptosystems. Since d can be computed from e given p and q, and p and q are the factors of N, they must be chosen so large that N cannot be factorised in any reasonable time"
THE ARTICLE NEVER STATES WHAT d, p, q, e OR N ARE. Sorry for the shouting but this piece o'crap is worthy of a/. front page?
If you read the long boring document that fingers this Russian guy you'll see the following "evidence":
1. Send-Safe and SoBig had same release dates. Where the margin on same is up to 10 days, and there are strange inaccuracies, for example the document states that on 5/23/2003 there was a SoBig release compiled on June 24, 2003. Other evidence hinges on the actions of SSSG without considering the possibilities that they were using a hacked version of Send-Safe.
2. Document contains unfounded statements like "As SSSG appears to be a sizable organization, it would seem unlikely that any individual within the group would actually know the Sobig author(s)."
3. The skills section is particularly funny since it lists skills like "Newsgroups" and states the the Russian has been posting on Newsgroups since 1998. Woo hoo!
4. The use of %s section made me want to LOL. The authors see significance in the fact that neither piece of software uses %s to concatenate strings,
sprintf( together, "%s%s", s1, s2 );
would be unusual for any C programmer, yet
sprintf( command, "RCPT TO:<%s>", rcpt );
looks like something any C programmer would do.
5. The note on string ordering with an example of SoBig vs Send Safe appears to me to show the opposite of what the authors intended. The two blocks look very different.
6. A large part of the document is dedicated to showing how the two exectuables are "similar" at the opcode level. There is no actual evidence here, e.g. how about a disassembly of two identical blocks of code? The comparison is interesting, but doesn't tell us much without being able to see the actual code.
Overall I though the PDF file was poorly written, lacking in rigor and provided no real evidence for the naming of this individual.
Yes, he helps people spam, and that's very, very annoying, but "innocent until proven guilty" people? Or at least "innocent until you actually show some convincing evidence".
What I need is "How to Crack the Infant Code?" for parents.
Not sure what the hell "la la da ta bwa bwa" means.
John/
Re:Not gonna work if encumbered
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 1
> MySQL works quite nicely under a dual license.
Sure does, but that's not a fair comparison. TCP is a fundamental protocol and to gain really widespread adoption a replacement needs to be unencumbered. MySQL is doing well because FOSS can use it under and appropriate license and a company can license it for non-FOSS use (as my company does).
But for a protocol to be encumbered creates a roadblock to its use. It will find use in interesting niches, but not as a _the_ replacement for TCP.
John.
Re:Not gonna work if encumbered
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 1
> Why spend money researching something for 3 years when you cannot profit from it?
I never said that they shouldn't be allowed to profit from it. Far from it.
What I said was that this wont be a widespread replacement for TCP specifically because of the fact that it looks to me like they'll try to license it for $$$ to commercial entities. There's no good reason why Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, etc. should want to license that particular technology.
Sure it solves a problem and improves TCP throughput on long links. But the major hardware vendors, not to mention OS people, are not going to pay a license fee for that; they'll just get together as a consortium and decide on their own TCP replacement protocol, make it available for free and all their boats will rise.
John.
Re:Has anyone considered Decnet?
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It was quite a complicated set of protocols and IIRC the final versions were using TCP/IP as their transport layer and below. The versions before that were using OSI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet
John.
Not gonna work if encumbered
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
1. This is coming from a company who are surely going to want to make money out of it somehow. Part of the reason TCP succeeded is there was no one to pay.
2. They don't seem to understand the GPL:
"We are planning to release Rateless Codes for free, non-commercial use, in open source under the GNU Public License."
The GPL doesn't restrict commercial use, and hence the only way that they can do this is either they try to add some conditions to the GPL, or they use another mechanism to restrict commercial use: e.g. patents.
No matter how good this technology is it's not going to get wide adoption is an alternative to TCP unless it's unencumbered.
> Win2k saw the machine as a quad processor and forced you to install advanced server to get the full performance.
Don't use Hyperthreading under Win2K, it doesn't work. See this Intel article that indicates that Hyperthreading should be disabled if you are using:
* Microsoft Windows 2000 (all versions)
* Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
* Microsoft Windows Me
* Microsoft Windows 98
* Microsoft Windows 98 SE
But will work fine if you are using:
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition
* Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
* Red Hat Linux 9 (Professional and Personal versions)
* SuSE Linux 8.2 (Professional and Personal versions)
* Red Flag Linux Desktop 4.0
* COSIX Linux 4.0
Why does DSPAM get front page treatment when the latest POPFile release (which now handles POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP filtering) and has an XML-RPC external interface, supports different databases, etc. etc. gets rejected as a story?
Perhaps it's because I don't tend to make super-wild claims about POPFile's accuracy? Or come up with cool marketing names for the internal technology?
POPFile's the only Bayesian filter that can:
1. Do more than spam vs. anti-spam and 2. Filter POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP (that's right Usenet news)
Do I have an axe to grind with Jonathan and DSPAM? No, it's a cool project. Does it annoy me that/. has recently turned into some combination of Freshmeat and PC Magazine? Yes.
Here's my problem with Yelp! from a local search perspective. Most of the "friends" that I email with are nowhere near me, the people who are I actually talk to in person or on the phone.
Emailing my circle of friends in the UK, Japan, Germany, etc. isn't going to get me a good recommendation on a New York dry cleaners.
It's quite surprising to me that there's no mention here of unit testing, or any sort of automated testing where the engineers who wrote the code actually write tests.
It should, by now, be clear that "code that doesn't have tests, doesn't work", and that if XP has done anything for us, it's to focus on writing tests. I've seen this in action and it works.
> Also - the BBC is funded by the British > government. When did they get a mandate to spend > money developing video codecs. I don't have a > problem with government-funded "arts" but this > seems a bit beyond the normal scope of things
Really? The BBC needs to stay up to date with technology in order to do the best job possible under its mandate. So that means that they are going to start out doing radio, spend money making television work the way they like it, then start promoting teletext (in the form of Ceefax), brand their own computer, and now they want to do the Internet their way (through an open codec).
It's worth reading their own history for a perspective on just how much technical work the BBC has done since 1920. See also here.
Slashdot Mirror
If no one is going to create a competive product, then what's the point? What use would it be?
It would be very nice to have "old" operating systems lying around in a form that enables them to be ported to different platforms, or used to keep some ancient piece of software alive.
At some point Microsoft is going to stop shipping operating systems that are compatible with old software that runs on Windows 95. There are people out there who don't want to upgrade, or can't upgrade because there's nowhere to upgrade to because the application they know and love doesn't work past Windows XXX.
This is a major issue people trying to preserve computer history. If old OSes are released under the GPL then the code can be examined and appropriate emulators written. For example, imagine that we have an old device that has a Windows 95 driver. It will be nice in 50 years time to turn on that device, see if it works and then decide to try to interface it. If we can get the appropriate electronic connection then a driver is going to be handy. If there are no OSes around that can load the Windows 95 driver then a GPL driver will enable us to build a new one.
John.
This discussion was interesting but it ends very unconvincingly. Tim argues that Quark shouldn't have been closed source without much justification but then says that it's ok for iChat and Aqua to be closed.
One alternative is that a company that's developing code could decide to release their old code after some time has elapsed. For example, surely it wouldn't hurt Microsoft if they GPLed Windows 95. No one's going to create a competitive product from it, and if they removed their trademarks from it, they could free it and allow others to maintain it.
Perhaps Quark could have waited until competitors caught up and then released the special code under the GPL. They could even use the GPL to undermine a competitor. e.g. once feature X is no longer their big advantage, release it, let an open source solution implement it and then they can bash their competitors by saying: we've got feature Y which no one else has and feature X, that's just a freebee, what you need is Y.
John.
I surely hope so... then my 6 digit /. ID will look so cool to all those 48 digit l4mers who just signed up.
/. member so bite me.
That's right script kiddie: I'm a top 1,000,000
John.
He should just try asking a Japanese person, they are not obliged to put spaces between words and frequently don't.
John.
Me, but then I'm the sort of person who likes to use semicolons when writing English; I find that the semicolon is a fun way to join two related sentences without using a period.
Perhaps we should club together and buy the author of this little article a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
John.
The answer is "that depends". There's an excellent Wikipedia entry on this subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_ English_differences
"... -ise / -ize
Commonwealth colonise, harmonise, realise; American colonize, harmonize, realize (and derivatives and inflexions therefrom: colonisation - colonization). Although the most authoritative British sources, the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler's Modern English Usage, prefer -ize, British editors tend to enforce the use of -ise as the standard orthographical practice.
Endings in -yze are possible only in American English. Thus, Commonwealth analyse, catalyse, hydrolyse, paralyse; American analyze, catalyze, hydrolyze, paralyze.
Mind that not all spellings are interchangeable; some verbs take the -z- form exclusively, for instance capsize, seize (except in the legal phrase to be seised of/to stand seised to), size and prize (to value: but prize "to lever open" is in the Commonwealth often prise), whereas others take only -s-: advertise, advise, apprise, arise, chastise, circumcise, comprise, compromise, demise, despise, devise, disguise, excise, exercise, (en)franchise, improvise, incise, merchandise, premise, promise, previse, poise, praise, raise, reprise, revise, rise, supervise, surmise, surprise, televise and uprise."
You'll note that they say that most British editors prefer -ise, while the Oxford English Dictionary prefers -ize. So, in short, us Brits are mighty conflicted about this.
John.
> > People are discovering that when you buy any /. /. in a long time.
> > product that is subject to "activation", you
> > haven't really bought anything.
>
> OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on
> in a long time;
>
> No, actually what you wrote is the stupidest
> thing you've read on
>
> The vast majority of the population have no clue
> about how digital restriction management can be
> used to take away something that they think they
> own. Whether they "stole" it or not does not
> matter here.
Yes, it does. If they stole it then they shouldn't be able to use it. If they didn't steal it then Valve isn't stopping them from using it; what's the problem with that?
> Should Valve go under and their steam network be
> turned off, all legit purchasers of half-life2
> will be in the exact same situation that these
> suspected pirates are today. People who paid for
> divx dvds are in the same boat already, they
> just weren't widespread enough for the lesson to
> make an impact.
If Valve goes out of business there's nothing to stop you using the single player HL2 once it has been activated. Once activated it's yours to play with offline.
The only loss you'll have if Valve disappears is Steam, and Steam is on a subscription basis, so you'll have to argue with their creditors about how to get back part of your subscription.
John.
Just don't post crappy editorial comments like this:
/. in a long time; so Valve decided that to attempt to crack down on piracy (and it's not as if we haven't seen lots of leaked games) they would force "activation" of the product, even for single player use. Boo hoo, and now some people got caught trying to stiff Valve. Cry me a river. Valve is a for-profit business selling a piece of closed-source software.
> People are discovering that when you buy any
> product that is subject to "activation", you
> haven't really bought anything.
OK? That's the stupidest thing I've read on
In other news, michael buys car and is shocked to discover must buy gas for it continue working.
John.
And I know I speak for many people when I say: "Whatever".
John.
> Circumference of Earth at equator = 24,900 miles = 3 hours 33min 26 seconds
Please, if you get a scramjet of your own, take the extra time to go around the earth and fly above sea level! You'll enjoy the trip a whole lot more.
John.
Given the state of natural language on /. this isn't going to work :-)
John.
That's some clever way of saying "crap", right? This article is horrible, and if I was an encryption newbie all I'd be able to do after reading this article is spout acronyms.
/. front page?
Here's part of what the article says about RSA:
"Unfortunately, nothing in life is free, and so it is with asymmetric cryptosystems. Since d can be computed from e given p and q, and p and q are the factors of N, they must be chosen so large that N cannot be factorised in any reasonable time"
THE ARTICLE NEVER STATES WHAT d, p, q, e OR N ARE. Sorry for the shouting but this piece o'crap is worthy of a
John.
> despite what many researchers believe was a years-long period of darkness and frigid temperatures
Please don't make me relive my teenage years...
1. Send-Safe and SoBig had same release dates. Where the margin on same is up to 10 days, and there are strange inaccuracies, for example the document states that on 5/23/2003 there was a SoBig release compiled on June 24, 2003. Other evidence hinges on the actions of SSSG without considering the possibilities that they were using a hacked version of Send-Safe.
2. Document contains unfounded statements like "As SSSG appears to be a sizable organization, it would seem unlikely that any individual within the group would actually know the Sobig author(s)."
3. The skills section is particularly funny since it lists skills like "Newsgroups" and states the the Russian has been posting on Newsgroups since 1998. Woo hoo!
4. The use of %s section made me want to LOL. The authors see significance in the fact that neither piece of software uses %s to concatenate strings, would be unusual for any C programmer, yet looks like something any C programmer would do.
5. The note on string ordering with an example of SoBig vs Send Safe appears to me to show the opposite of what the authors intended. The two blocks look very different.
6. A large part of the document is dedicated to showing how the two exectuables are "similar" at the opcode level. There is no actual evidence here, e.g. how about a disassembly of two identical blocks of code? The comparison is interesting, but doesn't tell us much without being able to see the actual code.
Overall I though the PDF file was poorly written, lacking in rigor and provided no real evidence for the naming of this individual.
Yes, he helps people spam, and that's very, very annoying, but "innocent until proven guilty" people? Or at least "innocent until you actually show some convincing evidence".
John.
What I need is "How to Crack the Infant Code?" for parents.
Not sure what the hell "la la da ta bwa bwa" means.
John/
> MySQL works quite nicely under a dual license.
Sure does, but that's not a fair comparison. TCP is a fundamental protocol and to gain really widespread adoption a replacement needs to be unencumbered. MySQL is doing well because FOSS can use it under and appropriate license and a company can license it for non-FOSS use (as my company does).
But for a protocol to be encumbered creates a roadblock to its use. It will find use in interesting niches, but not as a _the_ replacement for TCP.
John.
> Why spend money researching something for 3 years when you cannot profit from it?
I never said that they shouldn't be allowed to profit from it. Far from it.
What I said was that this wont be a widespread replacement for TCP specifically because of the fact that it looks to me like they'll try to license it for $$$ to commercial entities. There's no good reason why Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, etc. should want to license that particular technology.
Sure it solves a problem and improves TCP throughput on long links. But the major hardware vendors, not to mention OS people, are not going to pay a license fee for that; they'll just get together as a consortium and decide on their own TCP replacement protocol, make it available for free and all their boats will rise.
John.
It was quite a complicated set of protocols and IIRC the final versions were using TCP/IP as their transport layer and below. The versions before that were using OSI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet
John.
1. This is coming from a company who are surely going to want to make money out of it somehow. Part of the reason TCP succeeded is there was no one to pay.
2. They don't seem to understand the GPL:
"We are planning to release Rateless Codes for free, non-commercial use, in open source under the GNU Public License."
The GPL doesn't restrict commercial use, and hence the only way that they can do this is either they try to add some conditions to the GPL, or they use another mechanism to restrict commercial use: e.g. patents.
No matter how good this technology is it's not going to get wide adoption is an alternative to TCP unless it's unencumbered.
John.
> Win2k saw the machine as a quad processor and forced you to install advanced server to get the full performance.
Don't use Hyperthreading under Win2K, it doesn't work. See this Intel article that indicates that Hyperthreading should be disabled if you are using:
* Microsoft Windows 2000 (all versions)
* Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
* Microsoft Windows Me
* Microsoft Windows 98
* Microsoft Windows 98 SE
But will work fine if you are using:
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition
* Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
* Red Hat Linux 9 (Professional and Personal versions)
* SuSE Linux 8.2 (Professional and Personal versions)
* Red Flag Linux Desktop 4.0
* COSIX Linux 4.0
John.
Why does DSPAM get front page treatment when the latest POPFile release (which now handles POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP filtering) and has an XML-RPC external interface, supports different databases, etc. etc. gets rejected as a story?
/. has recently turned into some combination of Freshmeat and PC Magazine? Yes.
Perhaps it's because I don't tend to make super-wild claims about POPFile's accuracy? Or come up with cool marketing names for the internal technology?
POPFile's the only Bayesian filter that can:
1. Do more than spam vs. anti-spam and
2. Filter POP3, IMAP, SMTP and NNTP (that's right Usenet news)
Do I have an axe to grind with Jonathan and DSPAM? No, it's a cool project. Does it annoy me that
John.
I tested Yelp! out with my own email address and POPFile classified each Yelp! message as spam.
:-)
I don't see any reason to change POPFile's thinking on the subject
John.
Here's my problem with Yelp! from a local search perspective. Most of the "friends" that I email with are nowhere near me, the people who are I actually talk to in person or on the phone.
Emailing my circle of friends in the UK, Japan, Germany, etc. isn't going to get me a good recommendation on a New York dry cleaners.
John.
It's quite surprising to me that there's no mention here of unit testing, or any sort of automated testing where the engineers who wrote the code actually write tests.
It should, by now, be clear that "code that doesn't have tests, doesn't work", and that if XP has done anything for us, it's to focus on writing tests. I've seen this in action and it works.
John.
> Also - the BBC is funded by the British
> government. When did they get a mandate to spend
> money developing video codecs. I don't have a
> problem with government-funded "arts" but this
> seems a bit beyond the normal scope of things
Really? The BBC needs to stay up to date with technology in order to do the best job possible under its mandate. So that means that they are going to start out doing radio, spend money making television work the way they like it, then start promoting teletext (in the form of Ceefax), brand their own computer, and now they want to do the Internet their way (through an open codec).
It's worth reading their own history
for a perspective on just how much technical work the BBC has done since 1920. See also here.
John.