IANA programmer, but java seems to have a horrible leak in it
Obviously not. Because if you were a programmer, you'd know Java has garbage collection, which means you have to screw things up pretty badly to leak memory.
That is far, FAR more likely to be a bug in Freenet.
What? I hope you're not a programmer either, because while your conclusion is right, your reasoning sure isn't.
The fact that the Java language has garbage collection doesn't mean that any particular VM - which are usually implemented in a different language, like C/C++ - uses garbage collection for its own memory management as well.
Your argument that garbage collection makes it hard to get a memory leak actually suggests that the bug more likely lies with Freenet (which is implemented in Java) than with Sun's VM (which IIRC is implemented in C++).
By the way, I do believe the bug lies with Freenet, but I do so because Sun's VM is very thoroughly tested and used in countless production systems while the same can't be said of Freenet.
Spyware Program [installed by] Spyware Installer [executed by]] KaZaA Installer [trusted by] User [trusted by] Root User
or
Spyware Program [executed by] ActiveX component [executed by] Internet Explorer [trusted by] Windows [trusted by] Root User
Which is exactly what's already happening.
While it would certainly be nice to have this kind of info so you can trace back where files and processes came from, it wouldn't stop malicious programs in the slightest.
More.NET integration, piping objects instead of text only and improved tab-completion are some of the things I'm hearing. Basically giving you the option to spend less time in your favorite script editor and more in the shell.
Actually, if you're using WSH and not batch files (and there's no reason why you shouldn't on win2000 and up), the scripting really isn't that bad. In fact, it's much nicer than scripting in bash with its awful syntax and near-inability to cope with data containing spaces. Damn powerful too as long as your apps expose meaningful DCOM objects. (Most MS apps do nowadays.)
I still script quite a bit in bash, since it's simply more portable, but scripting in Windows really isn't all that painful anymore.
I know. It also means that google is well aware of map24 can do. Since that is something that they want to do themselves and they happen to have a lot of money... See where I'm going?
Of course it's all speculation, but if I had any shares in map24, I know I'd be quite excited right now.
Jeez, even the mainstream newschannels have been reporting this since at least 9am local time (6 hours ago) and creditcards are hardly even used over here.
Seriously, news like this is important and should be spread as quickly as possible. It's a sad day when major international tech-related sites of slashdot's size take this long to report these things.
If you're using a public machine, you shouldn't do any financial activities like banking, paypal etc., at all.
Try and find a bank that requires one-time passwords. I don't know how common such systems are internationally, but over here in the Netherlands, it's pretty much standard.
My own bank provides its users with a small calculator that, when unlocked with your PIN, will also generate one-time login numbers. For extra security every transaction requires an extra one-time number keyed to that particular transaction (so highjacking the connection after the login is provided is mostly harmless).
I'm sure it's still not 100% safe, but crackers will definitely have to work for their money.
Actually, Dell preinstalls WordPerfect on every machine they sell and they charge you for MS Office.
I was about to declare you a crackpot (my sincere apologies; too many years of slashdot), but a quick check proves us both partially right. Dell US indeed preinstalls WordPerfect. In other countries, including the Netherlands, they preinstall MS-Works.
Which is obviously why WordPerfect is taking over the universe. Or maybe not.
The essential difference is that Works maintains the status quo, while WordPerfect, well, doesn't. It's easy to give people a reason to keep doing things the way they always have, but quite hard to get them to try something new.
However, the benefit is that OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs. The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use it, since it is free.
I suggest you ask 100 randomly chosen people if they know Word/MS-Office. Then ask them if they know Writer/OpenOffice. I think you'll be surprised.
OpenOffice is a great piece of software (I am especially impressed with the new 2.0 beta; truly a great leap forward compared to 1.1), but hardly anyone who's not using linux/bsd/solaris/etc. even knows of its existance. Nor will they even care when somebody mentions it to them as long as places like Dell preinstall copies of Word on every consumer pc they sell.
So what will Microsoft be offering in IE7 that is new, and not just a take on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera?
It seems to me that Microsoft is only playing catch up, has invention died over in Redmond?
To be fair, Firefox has taken many (most?) of its features from other browsers as well.
Let MS copy what they want. If IE improves, so much the better. Firefox et al will have a reason to find new ways to improve and I'll have a better browser when I'm stuck on a Windows box at work/school/whatever.
They are distributing the program themselves without offering source code. They are claiming that the GPL gives them this right, but they aren't offering source as required by the GPL. Yes, this is a technicality, but it seems like a violation.
Huh? The source is exactly what they're distributing.
If he doesn't understand why people don't like software patents, then maybe he should have paid more attention to his (ex-)boss.
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." -- Bill Gates in a 1991 internal memo (Source: http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/quotes/index.en.html#b gates91)
The amount of electricity needed for the process is less than the amount required to power a standard cell phone.
And what does that say? Nothing. I'm pretty sure I can create a couple of hydrogen molecules with that amount of electricity too and I won't even need any bacteria in the process.
Here's a more useful bit from the article, though it would be even more useful if they would just say what fraction of energy this process requires:
The voltage is just one-tenth needed for electrolysis - the process that uses electricity to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.
If you follow the link in the blurb, you'll see that this project did not port ssh to "normal" java (J2SE), which had been done before, but instead ported an existing java implementation of ssh2 to J2ME, which is the java platform for mobile devices. So now you can enjoy ssh2 on any mobile device you have that supports Java/MIDP2.0 (most recent cellphones and PDAs seem to do so).
I agree it would be only logical to assume that it does. At the very least we'll have something to throw in their face if they don't make it firefox compatible.
With a bit of luck this'll also mean that Launchcast will become useable from non-windows machines (if they stay away from writing plugins that require WMP or other such nonsense).
Launchcast is one of the very few sites that I want to visit badly enough to occasionally start IE for. (The only other one being my online banking site.)
If Microsoft don't come up with a solution that the EU finds acceptable, then they can be fined $5m a day.
I have no illusions that Microsoft would actually pay that - it's an exorbitant amount.
The worst punishment the EU can mete out is to bar Microsoft from doing business in participating countries.
If/when that happens, what will European Average Joe consumer reaction be?
Why do so many people think that multinationals can get away with anything? (Please don't take this as a personal attack. I'm genuinely amazed.)
Assets can be seized, managers who willfully make a company dodge the law can be held personally accountable, government money can be spend differenly, government advisories can recommend against using their products, etc., etc. None of these things prevent MS from doing business in the EU.
Sure, hypothetically MS might decide to withdraw from the EU at all, but I bet their investors would be none too happy about that. And it would be even worse for their reputation. Who would ever want to do business with a company that can just decide to effectively disappear? Who's to say they wouldn't pull the same stunt in other regions? Doing such a thing is guaranteed to make to world pay serious attention to open source and that's the very last thing MS wants.
If the EU is genuinely pissed, MS had better pay attention. They've simply got too much to lose. Sure, they can stall and try to get a better deal and they might even get away with it, but the one thing they can't do is pretend they're untouchable, because they're not.
Bandwidth isn't the only problem. Before they can be published, the journals will first have to be produced, which involves things like peer reviews, editing, formatting, proofreading etc. I have no idea what the associated costs are, but I bet these things aren't free.
That being said though, I do feel that the cost to get certain "public" material is very high. My own experience is mostly with ISO. I occassionally need some information from their standards and the only way to get it is to buy the entire standard which often costs hundreds of CHF (1 CHF = 0.63 Euro = 0.84 USD). This is fine if you actually want to implement the standard in a commercial product, but it's not so nice if you just need a few details from the appendix for a small utility program for personal use.
That's (of course) a matter of opinion. I actually quite liked Privateer 2. It had a lot of atmosphere and was just a lot of fun to play in a simple point and shoot way.
Perhaps you're mostly disappointed that it wasn't more like the original Privateer?
Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.
Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.
I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.
From the documentation:
Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.
Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.
I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.
Slashdot Mirror
What? I hope you're not a programmer either, because while your conclusion is right, your reasoning sure isn't.
The fact that the Java language has garbage collection doesn't mean that any particular VM - which are usually implemented in a different language, like C/C++ - uses garbage collection for its own memory management as well.
Your argument that garbage collection makes it hard to get a memory leak actually suggests that the bug more likely lies with Freenet (which is implemented in Java) than with Sun's VM (which IIRC is implemented in C++).
By the way, I do believe the bug lies with Freenet, but I do so because Sun's VM is very thoroughly tested and used in countless production systems while the same can't be said of Freenet.
Unfortunately, this would just lead to:
Spyware Program [installed by] Spyware Installer [executed by]] KaZaA Installer [trusted by] User [trusted by] Root User
or
Spyware Program [executed by] ActiveX component [executed by] Internet Explorer [trusted by] Windows [trusted by] Root User
Which is exactly what's already happening.
While it would certainly be nice to have this kind of info so you can trace back where files and processes came from, it wouldn't stop malicious programs in the slightest.
More .NET integration, piping objects instead of text only and improved tab-completion are some of the things I'm hearing. Basically giving you the option to spend less time in your favorite script editor and more in the shell.
:-)
Sounds spiffy to me
Actually, if you're using WSH and not batch files (and there's no reason why you shouldn't on win2000 and up), the scripting really isn't that bad. In fact, it's much nicer than scripting in bash with its awful syntax and near-inability to cope with data containing spaces. Damn powerful too as long as your apps expose meaningful DCOM objects. (Most MS apps do nowadays.)
I still script quite a bit in bash, since it's simply more portable, but scripting in Windows really isn't all that painful anymore.
True, true. It's just that for a site that claims to report news, slashdot increasingly rarely actually has something new to say.
I know. It also means that google is well aware of map24 can do. Since that is something that they want to do themselves and they happen to have a lot of money... See where I'm going? Of course it's all speculation, but if I had any shares in map24, I know I'd be quite excited right now.
I suspect that google may license their data/technology, if not buy them up altogether.
According to their website, map24 are already cooperating with google.
/. is for the discussion
Why? The slogan is "News for Nerds," not "Discussion by Nerds." I would posit that the latter doesn't qualify as "Stuff that matters," either.
Jeez, even the mainstream newschannels have been reporting this since at least 9am local time (6 hours ago) and creditcards are hardly even used over here.
Seriously, news like this is important and should be spread as quickly as possible. It's a sad day when major international tech-related sites of slashdot's size take this long to report these things.
If you're using a public machine, you shouldn't do any financial activities like banking, paypal etc., at all.
Try and find a bank that requires one-time passwords. I don't know how common such systems are internationally, but over here in the Netherlands, it's pretty much standard.
My own bank provides its users with a small calculator that, when unlocked with your PIN, will also generate one-time login numbers. For extra security every transaction requires an extra one-time number keyed to that particular transaction (so highjacking the connection after the login is provided is mostly harmless).
I'm sure it's still not 100% safe, but crackers will definitely have to work for their money.
Actually, Dell preinstalls WordPerfect on every machine they sell and they charge you for MS Office.
I was about to declare you a crackpot (my sincere apologies; too many years of slashdot), but a quick check proves us both partially right. Dell US indeed preinstalls WordPerfect. In other countries, including the Netherlands, they preinstall MS-Works.
Which is obviously why WordPerfect is taking over the universe. Or maybe not.
The essential difference is that Works maintains the status quo, while WordPerfect, well, doesn't. It's easy to give people a reason to keep doing things the way they always have, but quite hard to get them to try something new.
However, the benefit is that OpenOffice runs faster and has fewer bugs. The "fewer bugs" part is due to the fact that more people use it, since it is free.
I suggest you ask 100 randomly chosen people if they know Word/MS-Office. Then ask them if they know Writer/OpenOffice. I think you'll be surprised.
OpenOffice is a great piece of software (I am especially impressed with the new 2.0 beta; truly a great leap forward compared to 1.1), but hardly anyone who's not using linux/bsd/solaris/etc. even knows of its existance. Nor will they even care when somebody mentions it to them as long as places like Dell preinstall copies of Word on every consumer pc they sell.
So what will Microsoft be offering in IE7 that is new, and not just a take on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera?
It seems to me that Microsoft is only playing catch up, has invention died over in Redmond?
To be fair, Firefox has taken many (most?) of its features from other browsers as well.
Let MS copy what they want. If IE improves, so much the better. Firefox et al will have a reason to find new ways to improve and I'll have a better browser when I'm stuck on a Windows box at work/school/whatever.
Ah. Well, that is certainly true. Still, the only ones who can sue him for that are more likely to praise him instead.
They are distributing the program themselves without offering source code. They are claiming that the GPL gives them this right, but they aren't offering source as required by the GPL. Yes, this is a technicality, but it seems like a violation.
Huh? The source is exactly what they're distributing.
I'm not of a legal profession or anything, but couldn't distributing "unclassified" classified information be illegal? Just a thought.
Not if the document is classified by the US government and you're in Italy (and don't plan to go to the US).
If he doesn't understand why people don't like software patents, then maybe he should have paid more attention to his (ex-)boss.
... The solution is patenting as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors." b gates91)
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.
-- Bill Gates in a 1991 internal memo (Source: http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/quotes/index.en.html#
And what does that say? Nothing. I'm pretty sure I can create a couple of hydrogen molecules with that amount of electricity too and I won't even need any bacteria in the process.
Here's a more useful bit from the article, though it would be even more useful if they would just say what fraction of energy this process requires:
If you follow the link in the blurb, you'll see that this project did not port ssh to "normal" java (J2SE), which had been done before, but instead ported an existing java implementation of ssh2 to J2ME, which is the java platform for mobile devices. So now you can enjoy ssh2 on any mobile device you have that supports Java/MIDP2.0 (most recent cellphones and PDAs seem to do so).
I agree it would be only logical to assume that it does. At the very least we'll have something to throw in their face if they don't make it firefox compatible. With a bit of luck this'll also mean that Launchcast will become useable from non-windows machines (if they stay away from writing plugins that require WMP or other such nonsense). Launchcast is one of the very few sites that I want to visit badly enough to occasionally start IE for. (The only other one being my online banking site.)
Why do so many people think that multinationals can get away with anything? (Please don't take this as a personal attack. I'm genuinely amazed.)
Assets can be seized, managers who willfully make a company dodge the law can be held personally accountable, government money can be spend differenly, government advisories can recommend against using their products, etc., etc. None of these things prevent MS from doing business in the EU.
Sure, hypothetically MS might decide to withdraw from the EU at all, but I bet their investors would be none too happy about that. And it would be even worse for their reputation. Who would ever want to do business with a company that can just decide to effectively disappear? Who's to say they wouldn't pull the same stunt in other regions? Doing such a thing is guaranteed to make to world pay serious attention to open source and that's the very last thing MS wants.
If the EU is genuinely pissed, MS had better pay attention. They've simply got too much to lose. Sure, they can stall and try to get a better deal and they might even get away with it, but the one thing they can't do is pretend they're untouchable, because they're not.
Bandwidth isn't the only problem. Before they can be published, the journals will first have to be produced, which involves things like peer reviews, editing, formatting, proofreading etc. I have no idea what the associated costs are, but I bet these things aren't free.
That being said though, I do feel that the cost to get certain "public" material is very high. My own experience is mostly with ISO. I occassionally need some information from their standards and the only way to get it is to buy the entire standard which often costs hundreds of CHF (1 CHF = 0.63 Euro = 0.84 USD). This is fine if you actually want to implement the standard in a commercial product, but it's not so nice if you just need a few details from the appendix for a small utility program for personal use.
That's (of course) a matter of opinion. I actually quite liked Privateer 2. It had a lot of atmosphere and was just a lot of fun to play in a simple point and shoot way.
Perhaps you're mostly disappointed that it wasn't more like the original Privateer?
From the documentation:
Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.
Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.
I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.
From the documentation: Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides. Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written. I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.