Well, the list of theorems for which informal proofs have been presented is finite. The goal of this project is to formalize those proofs so they can be verified by proof checkers rather than to prove random facts.
Actually even if we just limit the Central Theorems to "a mathematical statement that has been claimed to be true", then we still have a finite list. (and there is little need to prove a statement true if nobody cares whether it is true or not)
I needed to get foreign languages installed on it.
Unfortunately "Linux" doesn't mean much more than "IBM BIOS". The OS that the ASUS installed isn't really compatible with any other Linux OS on the planet. It really isn't designed it install new software on. In Ubuntu there is System -> Administration -> Language Support.
My previous most recent attempt had involved installing Ubuntu (GG I think) on an older computer. I wanted to create a silent system, so I bought a 2GB flash drive. Ubuntu said it needed 2GB to install. It lied, it needed 2.001 GB to install, and kept dying without a good explanation of what was going on. Another few hours lost.
This bit me as well. FYI, I think you can install if you use reiserfs. I've had problems with other installers, e.g. XP claimed (incorrectly) that one of my harddisks had bad sectors (it actually had a unusual partition table). Vista took some hours to get to the point where it incorrectly claimed that I had. Overall I think Ubuntu has the nicest installer I have come across.
There are many things that piss me off about Ubuntu, but it is still my favourite (least hated operating system). I was fortunate to have poured a few hundred hours into it while I had a few hundred hours to spare.
There is a principle that the longer a mistake goes undetected the more expensive it is to fix. Code that correctly implements an incorrect design still does do what you actually *want*, so you have to redo both the design and coding phases. E.g.
good designer and a bad coder: `This so called code is just "KILL ALL HUNAMS!" cut and pasted 60 million times. We'll have to redo the entire coding phase!"
bad designer and average coder: print "Kill all humans!"
bad designer and a truly excellent coder: SkyNet.
Take your pick. (Who am I kidding, SkyNet is way cool!)
Under ubuntu it is recommended that you do a "sudo update-manager -c -d" rather than try to do a dist-upgrade. As I understand doing a dist-upgrade without "reading the readme" has always been risky on Debian based systems.
Does Plash also prevent Firefox from moving your mouse and clicking "open" in that dialog? Or simulating an "enter" keypress?
No. X is still broken. However I understand there is a seperate project Nitpicker (part of TUD-OS)to solve that.
But it doesn't seem like it's on as deep a level as I'd like. It's better, but it still means that once I send a document to Firefox, I have no idea what Firefox will do with it. Still, that is a lot better.
I am not sure what you mean. It was the goal of the EROS-OS project to break software into tiny chunks and apply least priviledge to each. One could get even finer grain protection if writing with a safe language. Even so, if Firefox as a whole is malicious there is no way of stoping it misusing whatever rights you give it.
BTW, Plash and Systrace do exactly that. In fact Plash lets you allow Firefox to open Documents (e.g. on ~/Desktop) if and only if you have selected that file from the (trusted) standard file open dialog box, in principle giving firefox the very least priviledge with no inconvienience.
>>Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind".
...We'll have to do away with women's tees in golf, let men cheerlead and women play professional football.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football. Certainly I and many others would oppose these laws as I don't see it as being the governments job to enforce gender norms... however my point was not that thesis A was correct, but rather simply that many people that hold it, whereas virtually nobody believes that a woman is in any sense equivalent to a right hand... and thus your post committed the Slippery Slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is where one incorrectly implies that "if you accept X you must also accept Y". I considered your post to have commited this fallacy because you said "I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant", a proposition we agree is ridiculous. However a homosexual life partner has a lot more in common than a heterosexual life partner than a right hand. Indeed it costs as much to support a homosexual dependant as a hetero dependant, so a homosexual provider is just as much "in need" of the deduction as a heterosexual provider. Thus it is entirely possible to support "homosexual marriage" without having to support marriage to sex toys.
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job - Agreed. Many people would say that you should "hire the best man for the job", but obeying the spirit of that statement requires abandoning the letter. Likewise "supporting marriage" by passing laws that discouraging life partnerships that do not meet the dictionary definition of marriage is likewise missing the point.
Your entire post is just silly.
That is not constructive. Obviously we disagree and this would tend to make us think the others post is silly, certainly I think that *your* post is silly because it appears to contain fallacious reasoning. However, I attempted to pointed out why and where your reasoning was incorrect. Simply saying that your post was silly could not lead to any kind of discussion where we could learn from each other, but rather just lead to an infantile "you silly!" "No me smart! you silly!" "No No, me smart *you* silly!" thread.
(Assuming that Slashdot wouldn't eat my p tags, now that *was* silly. I'll go and write "I will always click preview, even when on dialup that takes 1min+ for each mouse click" 100 times on the blackboard.)
>>Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind"....We'll have to do away with women's tees in golf, let men cheerlead and women play professional football.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football. Certainly I and many others would oppose these laws as I don't see it as being the governments job to enforce gender norms... however my point was not that thesis A was correct, but rather simply that many people that hold it, whereas virtually nobody believes that a woman is in any sense equivalent to a right hand... and thus your post committed the Slippery Slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is where one incorrectly implies that "if you accept X you must also accept Y". I considered your post to have commited this fallacy because you said "I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant", a proposition we agree is ridiculous. However a homosexual life partner has a lot more in common than a heterosexual life partner than a right hand. Indeed it costs as much to support a homosexual dependant as a hetero dependant, so a homosexual provider is just as much "in need" of the deduction as a heterosexual provider. Thus it is entirely possible to support "homosexual marriage" without having to support marriage to sex toys.
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job - Agreed. Many people would say that you should "hire the best man for the job", but obeying the spirit of that statement requires abandoning the letter. Likewise "supporting marriage" by passing laws that discouraging life partnerships that do not meet the dictionary definition of marriage is likewise missing the point.
Your entire post is just silly.
That is not constructive. Obviously we disagree and this would tend to make us think the others post is silly, certainly I think that *your* post is silly because it appears to contain fallacious reasoning. However, I attempted to pointed out why and where your reasoning was incorrect. Simply saying that your post was silly could not lead to any kind of discussion where we could learn from each other, but rather just lead to an infantile "you silly!" "No me smart! you silly!" "No No, me smart *you* silly!" thread.
Maybe he meant gay, maybe he didn't. What did this have to do with the topic?
These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage", again to their own ends and to my detriment - I can't find a woman either, although I'm hetero. I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant. I'm deeply in love with my hand, we're very happy together.These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage"
Well marriage is a legal term and also a legal concept (apart from anything else). There are three seperate questions
a) should we broaden the set of rights and obligations that embody the legal concept M of marriage to include committed relationships between members of the same sex (i.e. have legal equality between Civil Unions and Marriage).
b) Is this union called marriage?
b) If not, should we call this union "marriage".
Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind". If we accept A, then the law must be able to answer the question "are we to recognize this couple as being legally M?" knowing only that the couple is consenting (and of age etc.). Libertarians would say no, the government should keep out of M entirely, however this position does not seem to have any popular support. Thus supporters of thesis A would have to support the extension of the concept of M to homosexual couples as well.
What should we call M? Well since 90% or more of M will still be what we call marriage it makes some sense to change the legal meaning of the term of marriage to include our new version of M for convenience sake - much as the Turkish government redefined the Lira to mean 1000,000 (old) Lira - or we could start calling the concept M civil unions or whatever.
Now you may disagree with thesis A, however A is an example of a commonly held thesis that would support the extension of the legal concept of marriage.
Despite what you may have heard from feminists, nobody is arguing that women should be legally equivalent to anything else men can uses as a sex toy, and so your ridicule of this line of argument does not undermine anyone's actual position on this matter.
To undermine the position that homosexual unions should be treated the same as heterosexual unions you would have to undermine support for thesis A and various other arguments such as "if homosexual unions get reduced social welfare benefits when they are down on their luck, why shouldn't they get reduced taxes when they are well off?".
IMHO, the people playing syntactic games are the people who argue that we shouldn't treat homosexual unions the same as marriage because "marriage is defined as between a man and a woman". That is like saying "we shouldn't hire Jane because the dictionary says you have to have a willy to be the best *man* for the job".
With gentoo if you have an ebuild version 1.0.0 of a piece of software and you want version 1.0.1, then most of the time you can get a valid ebuild for v1.0.1 with the single command "mv foobar-1.0.{0,1}.ebuild". If the dependances have changed this might not work, even then you can just open the ebuild with a text editor and fix it. (see e.g. http://linuxreviews.org/gentoo/ebuilds/)
I use Ubuntu, but I find the flexibility of ebuild really tempting.
One of the problems with reviewing OSS is that so many people interpret "Application X doen't do Y properly" to mean "... and the developers should fix this for free". The CVS Copout seems to be just an extenstion of this. If the developer works for free and and has even already fixed the bug in CVS this means that the developers are great guys, it does not mean that the project is already perfect in every way and nobody should warn users that it may not yet satisfy their needs.
I imagine that the low-income Asians that these are aimed at would find these fancypants expensive DVDs hard to use because they won't "just play" on their dvd-players. I doubt many low-income asian people appreciate that to play DVDs you are "meant" fiddle with your DVD player's region encoding first, given that buying DVDs that supported this "feature" used to cost over a weeks pay.
"It is ancient doctrine that at common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe. But that doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea." -- Justice Douglas
Also as I understand, Land can reclaimed it the by the government if it is not used for a period of 70 years. If this were not the case the each time the true owner was permanently lost the amount of usable land would decrease. Likewise, if an artwork hasn't been worked on for 100 years then it becomes public domian, otherwise the updated version remains copywrited and only the old version becomes public domain. If you weren't allowed to copy works that were over a hundred years old without tracking down the owner these works would be lost permanently.
Also no idea exists in a vacuum. Most ideas come from other ideas, e.g. all of Shakespeare's works were based upon other peoples play's and stories. Giving ideas permanent ownership would mean that all aspects of our culture would be owned by someone and there wouldn't be a body of work that new works could draw from.
I used to do ESRs 6 step process before filing a bug report. However I have come to believe that this is the reason that software can be so hard to use... because it isn't considered a bug if a workaround exists. Now if I find a bug I only check for duplicates before submitting it to the bug database, as I know that once I find a solution I will lose the energy to submit the bug to the database and the next user who hits the same bug will have to repeat the process.
Even the developers who want to help often seem to be confused as to why you are filing a bug report if you know of a work around. E.g. I file a bug report saying that their software fails with an apparently unrelated error if I run it with a relative path. They try to help me get the software to work, and I explain that once I figured out what the bug was, it was trivial to work around. Then they closed the bug report "as the reporter reports problem solved".
However I found the work around before I submitted the bug report (I actually find it much easier to find workarounds than write bug reports). I assumed that bugs should be logged so they can be fixed even if work arounds exists. I have over 1500 packages on my system. If I had to work around bugs in every single one of these packages then the 5 years I've spent using Linux would have been spent developing workarounds.
Hi could you give the links to the technology you are using. I am very interested in this field (giving applications less rights than the user). I have not heard of SAKs before.
Unfortunately I don't think that many Linux systems are set up the way you describe, though I intend to make it my personal quest to make sure they are.
Also, have you come across a way of stopping GUI applications taking over other GUI application via the X protocol?
I know that it is possible to run X applications in untrusted mode, but I understand that is still possible for untrusted applications to snoop on other untrusted applications via X, so we cannot simply run all applications in untrusted mode.
Since C/C++ more or less treat arrays as pointers, there is little point in treating C style arrays and pointers separately.
Since we assume that "Data" is 100 bytes it makes little difference whether we add an extra parameter to the function. If the calling function incorrectly believes that it has enough space for 100 bytes, then it makes little difference whether is (incorrectly) states explicitly that it has enough room for 100 bytes or just implicitly assumes it has enough room. Either way readdata cannot check sizeof(s)>100.
Yes you could disallow use of pointer arithmetic, and use bounded arrays, although C doesn't have primitives for this.
Note that C++ will have automatically freed the temporary object "a" by the third line, and so you will be messing with unallocated memory. This code will work 99% of the time, and thus will only fail at the most embarrassing possible moment.
Now you could get around this somehow, e.g. by garbage collection, but you will either be left with something like a Java reference or something obscure such as one of several different types of pointer supported by the Cyclone l language.
So basically, yes you could limit pointers to the extent that they cannot cause strange non-local and non-deterministic problems. But then they wouldn't really be pointers anymore.
It is "gets" not "fgets" that we are warned against.
void readdata(char* s) {gets(s);}
Is a no-no. "fgets" OTOH is about as good as you can get.
My original objections, that we cannot verify that the psuedo-array "s" is as large as we think it is, or even that "s" is allocated still apply if we do not use fgets or a null-terminated strings e.g. they still apply to the function:
The only additional failure of null-terminated strings is that they are mildly confusing because you need a n+1 sized buffer to store n characters. However a null-terminated string would be perfectly safe if it were stored in a Java-style array.
In C there is no way for a function to verify that it has been called correctly. Perhaps more seriously, if you call a function in a pointer language you cannot treat it as a blackbox. To be sure that it doesn't corrupt your memory you have to closely check their source code to verify that it uses pointers correctly.
The ideal case would be e.g. a functional language where you could call Osamas_pretty_icon_function() and be sure that the worst that could possibly happen is that Osama wrote the function to return a ugly icon instead.
Or for that matter, the people who decided to be born Jews before that kind of thing was ruled to be an illegal violation of the racially pure state.
Or when being an intellectual was banned because it was counter revolutionary
Or... well any way, I agree that I wouldn't want to rely on that. Particularly not if we ended up with some fucked up totalitarian government. Still use GMail though.
What about GMail and Pine?
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
I use a Pine (well mutt actually) and GMail. At home I download the mail using mutt. At uni I use the GMail interface. This allows me to access my mail without having to somehow set up a SSH server, when my ISP appears to be firewalling me.
Also, as each has their strengths, by using *both* I double by productivity. Well, not quite. but I do like both of them.:)
Personally I think they should be called the GNOME or KDE (or Emacs) operating systems. As I understand the KDE project (and Gnome and Emacs) has its own portable API, and also the choice of desktop environment is more important to the user.
IMHO, the outermost layer of the OS is the most important. If you rang up a help desk and told them you were running the "Intel-Microcode" operating system, this would really not help them much. Similarly telling them you are running an operating system that has a Linux kernel buried deep inside, won't help much, even if you further explain that most of the libraries are written by the FSF... unless you are willing to leave the KDE environment and switch to the GNU-Bash environment.
OTOH, telling them that you are running the KDE OS would help. Even better, if you say that you are using "Kubuntu" that tells them everything they need to know.
Sure you can run a KDE apps on a GNOME system, but it would not obey the Human Interface Guidelines (e.g. the file open dialog would look weird). Similarly you *could* run a KDE app on an MacOS-X system, but it wouldn't fit in with the rest of the desktop. It was also quite common to run Windows apps on MacOS via SoftPC
In case you hadn't guessed, I approve of the decision to brand Ubuntu differently from Kubuntu:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the list of theorems for which informal proofs have been presented is finite. The goal of this project is to formalize those proofs so they can be verified by proof checkers rather than to prove random facts.
Actually even if we just limit the Central Theorems to "a mathematical statement that has been claimed to be true", then we still have a finite list. (and there is little need to prove a statement true if nobody cares whether it is true or not)
I needed to get foreign languages installed on it.
Unfortunately "Linux" doesn't mean much more than "IBM BIOS". The OS that the ASUS installed isn't really compatible with any other Linux OS on the planet. It really isn't designed it install new software on. In Ubuntu there is System -> Administration -> Language Support.
My previous most recent attempt had involved installing Ubuntu (GG I think) on an older computer. I wanted to create a silent system, so I bought a 2GB flash drive. Ubuntu said it needed 2GB to install. It lied, it needed 2.001 GB to install, and kept dying without a good explanation of what was going on. Another few hours lost.
This bit me as well. FYI, I think you can install if you use reiserfs. I've had problems with other installers, e.g. XP claimed (incorrectly) that one of my harddisks had bad sectors (it actually had a unusual partition table). Vista took some hours to get to the point where it incorrectly claimed that I had. Overall I think Ubuntu has the nicest installer I have come across.
There are many things that piss me off about Ubuntu, but it is still my favourite (least hated operating system). I was fortunate to have poured a few hundred hours into it while I had a few hundred hours to spare.
good designer and a bad coder: `This so called code is just "KILL ALL HUNAMS!" cut and pasted 60 million times. We'll have to redo the entire coding phase!"
bad designer and average coder: print "Kill all humans!"
bad designer and a truly excellent coder: SkyNet.
Take your pick. (Who am I kidding, SkyNet is way cool!)
Right. So you could spend a day chumming it up with "Business divisions" at Dell. Myself I'd just do a search on ebay. :)
(Although I also added the ?ui=1 trick in case she really had to use IE for some reason)
Under ubuntu it is recommended that you do a "sudo update-manager -c -d" rather than try to do a dist-upgrade. As I understand doing a dist-upgrade without "reading the readme" has always been risky on Debian based systems.
No. X is still broken. However I understand there is a seperate project Nitpicker (part of TUD-OS)to solve that.
But it doesn't seem like it's on as deep a level as I'd like. It's better, but it still means that once I send a document to Firefox, I have no idea what Firefox will do with it. Still, that is a lot better.
I am not sure what you mean. It was the goal of the EROS-OS project to break software into tiny chunks and apply least priviledge to each. One could get even finer grain protection if writing with a safe language. Even so, if Firefox as a whole is malicious there is no way of stoping it misusing whatever rights you give it.
BTW, Plash and Systrace do exactly that. In fact Plash lets you allow Firefox to open Documents (e.g. on ~/Desktop) if and only if you have selected that file from the (trusted) standard file open dialog box, in principle giving firefox the very least priviledge with no inconvienience.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football. Certainly I and many others would oppose these laws as I don't see it as being the governments job to enforce gender norms... however my point was not that thesis A was correct, but rather simply that many people that hold it, whereas virtually nobody believes that a woman is in any sense equivalent to a right hand... and thus your post committed the Slippery Slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is where one incorrectly implies that "if you accept X you must also accept Y". I considered your post to have commited this fallacy because you said "I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant", a proposition we agree is ridiculous. However a homosexual life partner has a lot more in common than a heterosexual life partner than a right hand. Indeed it costs as much to support a homosexual dependant as a hetero dependant, so a homosexual provider is just as much "in need" of the deduction as a heterosexual provider. Thus it is entirely possible to support "homosexual marriage" without having to support marriage to sex toys.
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job - Agreed. Many people would say that you should "hire the best man for the job", but obeying the spirit of that statement requires abandoning the letter. Likewise "supporting marriage" by passing laws that discouraging life partnerships that do not meet the dictionary definition of marriage is likewise missing the point.
Your entire post is just silly.
That is not constructive. Obviously we disagree and this would tend to make us think the others post is silly, certainly I think that *your* post is silly because it appears to contain fallacious reasoning. However, I attempted to pointed out why and where your reasoning was incorrect. Simply saying that your post was silly could not lead to any kind of discussion where we could learn from each other, but rather just lead to an infantile "you silly!" "No me smart! you silly!" "No No, me smart *you* silly!" thread.
(Assuming that Slashdot wouldn't eat my p tags, now that *was* silly. I'll go and write "I will always click preview, even when on dialup that takes 1min+ for each mouse click" 100 times on the blackboard.)
>>Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind". ...We'll have to do away with women's tees in golf, let men cheerlead and women play professional football.
The proposed thesis is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
This is the first I have heard of laws prohibiting men from cheerleading or women from playing professional football. Certainly I and many others would oppose these laws as I don't see it as being the governments job to enforce gender norms... however my point was not that thesis A was correct, but rather simply that many people that hold it, whereas virtually nobody believes that a woman is in any sense equivalent to a right hand... and thus your post committed the Slippery Slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is where one incorrectly implies that "if you accept X you must also accept Y". I considered your post to have commited this fallacy because you said "I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant", a proposition we agree is ridiculous. However a homosexual life partner has a lot more in common than a heterosexual life partner than a right hand. Indeed it costs as much to support a homosexual dependant as a hetero dependant, so a homosexual provider is just as much "in need" of the deduction as a heterosexual provider. Thus it is entirely possible to support "homosexual marriage" without having to support marriage to sex toys.
You shouldn't have to be a man for the job - Agreed. Many people would say that you should "hire the best man for the job", but obeying the spirit of that statement requires abandoning the letter. Likewise "supporting marriage" by passing laws that discouraging life partnerships that do not meet the dictionary definition of marriage is likewise missing the point.
Your entire post is just silly.
That is not constructive. Obviously we disagree and this would tend to make us think the others post is silly, certainly I think that *your* post is silly because it appears to contain fallacious reasoning. However, I attempted to pointed out why and where your reasoning was incorrect. Simply saying that your post was silly could not lead to any kind of discussion where we could learn from each other, but rather just lead to an infantile "you silly!" "No me smart! you silly!" "No No, me smart *you* silly!" thread.
Does that include the word "gay"?
Maybe he meant gay, maybe he didn't. What did this have to do with the topic?
These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage", again to their own ends and to my detriment - I can't find a woman either, although I'm hetero. I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant. I'm deeply in love with my hand, we're very happy together.These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage"
Well marriage is a legal term and also a legal concept (apart from anything else). There are three seperate questions
a) should we broaden the set of rights and obligations that embody the legal concept M of marriage to include committed relationships between members of the same sex (i.e. have legal equality between Civil Unions and Marriage).
b) Is this union called marriage?
b) If not, should we call this union "marriage".
Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind". If we accept A, then the law must be able to answer the question "are we to recognize this couple as being legally M?" knowing only that the couple is consenting (and of age etc.). Libertarians would say no, the government should keep out of M entirely, however this position does not seem to have any popular support. Thus supporters of thesis A would have to support the extension of the concept of M to homosexual couples as well.
What should we call M? Well since 90% or more of M will still be what we call marriage it makes some sense to change the legal meaning of the term of marriage to include our new version of M for convenience sake - much as the Turkish government redefined the Lira to mean 1000,000 (old) Lira - or we could start calling the concept M civil unions or whatever.
Now you may disagree with thesis A, however A is an example of a commonly held thesis that would support the extension of the legal concept of marriage.
Despite what you may have heard from feminists, nobody is arguing that women should be legally equivalent to anything else men can uses as a sex toy, and so your ridicule of this line of argument does not undermine anyone's actual position on this matter.
To undermine the position that homosexual unions should be treated the same as heterosexual unions you would have to undermine support for thesis A and various other arguments such as "if homosexual unions get reduced social welfare benefits when they are down on their luck, why shouldn't they get reduced taxes when they are well off?".
IMHO, the people playing syntactic games are the people who argue that we shouldn't treat homosexual unions the same as marriage because "marriage is defined as between a man and a woman". That is like saying "we shouldn't hire Jane because the dictionary says you have to have a willy to be the best *man* for the job".
Five bucks says these new nukes will have DRM. Doesn't everything these days?
Does anyone know the equivalent under Debian/Ubuntu?
With gentoo if you have an ebuild version 1.0.0 of a piece of software and you want version 1.0.1, then most of the time you can get a valid ebuild for v1.0.1 with the single command "mv foobar-1.0.{0,1}.ebuild". If the dependances have changed this might not work, even then you can just open the ebuild with a text editor and fix it. (see e.g. http://linuxreviews.org/gentoo/ebuilds/)
I use Ubuntu, but I find the flexibility of ebuild really tempting.
One of the problems with reviewing OSS is that so many people interpret "Application X doen't do Y properly" to mean "... and the developers should fix this for free". The CVS Copout seems to be just an extenstion of this. If the developer works for free and and has even already fixed the bug in CVS this means that the developers are great guys, it does not mean that the project is already perfect in every way and nobody should warn users that it may not yet satisfy their needs.
I imagine that the low-income Asians that these are aimed at would find these fancypants expensive DVDs hard to use because they won't "just play" on their dvd-players. I doubt many low-income asian people appreciate that to play DVDs you are "meant" fiddle with your DVD player's region encoding first, given that buying DVDs that supported this "feature" used to cost over a weeks pay.
Also as I understand, Land can reclaimed it the by the government if it is not used for a period of 70 years. If this were not the case the each time the true owner was permanently lost the amount of usable land would decrease. Likewise, if an artwork hasn't been worked on for 100 years then it becomes public domian, otherwise the updated version remains copywrited and only the old version becomes public domain. If you weren't allowed to copy works that were over a hundred years old without tracking down the owner these works would be lost permanently.
Also no idea exists in a vacuum. Most ideas come from other ideas, e.g. all of Shakespeare's works were based upon other peoples play's and stories. Giving ideas permanent ownership would mean that all aspects of our culture would be owned by someone and there wouldn't be a body of work that new works could draw from.
Even the developers who want to help often seem to be confused as to why you are filing a bug report if you know of a work around. E.g. I file a bug report saying that their software fails with an apparently unrelated error if I run it with a relative path. They try to help me get the software to work, and I explain that once I figured out what the bug was, it was trivial to work around. Then they closed the bug report "as the reporter reports problem solved".
However I found the work around before I submitted the bug report (I actually find it much easier to find workarounds than write bug reports). I assumed that bugs should be logged so they can be fixed even if work arounds exists. I have over 1500 packages on my system. If I had to work around bugs in every single one of these packages then the 5 years I've spent using Linux would have been spent developing workarounds.
You must be new here. Remember this is Slashdot. Microsoft Good! Kodak Bad! ;)
At least microsoft doesn't encrypt *my* documents and sue me for trying to convert them to ODF.
BTW, Have you heard of Plash or Systrace?
Unfortunately I don't think that many Linux systems are set up the way you describe, though I intend to make it my personal quest to make sure they are.
Also, have you come across a way of stopping GUI applications taking over other GUI application via the X protocol?
I know that it is possible to run X applications in untrusted mode, but I understand that is still possible for untrusted applications to snoop on other untrusted applications via X, so we cannot simply run all applications in untrusted mode.
Since we assume that "Data" is 100 bytes it makes little difference whether we add an extra parameter to the function. If the calling function incorrectly believes that it has enough space for 100 bytes, then it makes little difference whether is (incorrectly) states explicitly that it has enough room for 100 bytes or just implicitly assumes it has enough room. Either way readdata cannot check sizeof(s)>100.
Yes you could disallow use of pointer arithmetic, and use bounded arrays, although C doesn't have primitives for this.
Note that C++ will have automatically freed the temporary object "a" by the third line, and so you will be messing with unallocated memory. This code will work 99% of the time, and thus will only fail at the most embarrassing possible moment.You could still have code like this:
Now you could get around this somehow, e.g. by garbage collection, but you will either be left with something like a Java reference or something obscure such as one of several different types of pointer supported by the Cyclone l language.
So basically, yes you could limit pointers to the extent that they cannot cause strange non-local and non-deterministic problems. But then they wouldn't really be pointers anymore.
My original objections, that we cannot verify that the psuedo-array "s" is as large as we think it is, or even that "s" is allocated still apply if we do not use fgets or a null-terminated strings e.g. they still apply to the function:
The only additional failure of null-terminated strings is that they are mildly confusing because you need a n+1 sized buffer to store n characters. However a null-terminated string would be perfectly safe if it were stored in a Java-style array.
In C there is no way for a function to verify that it has been called correctly. Perhaps more seriously, if you call a function in a pointer language you cannot treat it as a blackbox. To be sure that it doesn't corrupt your memory you have to closely check their source code to verify that it uses pointers correctly.
The ideal case would be e.g. a functional language where you could call Osamas_pretty_icon_function() and be sure that the worst that could possibly happen is that Osama wrote the function to return a ugly icon instead.
Or when being an intellectual was banned because it was counter revolutionary
Or... well any way, I agree that I wouldn't want to rely on that. Particularly not if we ended up with some fucked up totalitarian government. Still use GMail though.
Also, as each has their strengths, by using *both* I double by productivity. Well, not quite. but I do like both of them. :)
IMHO, the outermost layer of the OS is the most important. If you rang up a help desk and told them you were running the "Intel-Microcode" operating system, this would really not help them much. Similarly telling them you are running an operating system that has a Linux kernel buried deep inside, won't help much, even if you further explain that most of the libraries are written by the FSF... unless you are willing to leave the KDE environment and switch to the GNU-Bash environment.
OTOH, telling them that you are running the KDE OS would help. Even better, if you say that you are using "Kubuntu" that tells them everything they need to know.
Sure you can run a KDE apps on a GNOME system, but it would not obey the Human Interface Guidelines (e.g. the file open dialog would look weird). Similarly you *could* run a KDE app on an MacOS-X system, but it wouldn't fit in with the rest of the desktop. It was also quite common to run Windows apps on MacOS via SoftPC
In case you hadn't guessed, I approve of the decision to brand Ubuntu differently from Kubuntu :)