Application-based firewalls give a false sense of security. This is because apps can simply ask IE to send their data through the firewall for them.
Things like ZoneAlarm and Norton's firewall only catch the previous generation of spyware, those apps that directly access the network.
But the whole point of the paper is the opposite of what you're saying. If the security interface is hard to use, people will misuse it, leaving gaping holes in their systems.
In some areas, such as Alaska, global warming
is
already a significant problem.
Even anti-environmentalists like Alaska's Republican senator Ted Stevens are saying so.
In Germany, the scenario you describe is the law: manufacturers are responsible not only for the cost of recycling waste from their products (all products, not just PCs), but assuring that it is actually done, either by taking back one's own
waste, or by paying someone else to do it.
Most companies, especially small ones, comply by joining the
Grüne Punkt (Green Dot) program, which takes
care of the waste for the company.
It doesn't really create a barrier to entry, because the fees are based on weight of packaging material and don't cost a small company any more than a big one.
Of course there need to be differences. For example, current US copyright law explicitly gives permission for a legitimate owner of a copyrighted program to create a backup copy. There is no such permission for books.
However, you do have a point, in that we need to firmly (re-)establish the "first sale" doctrine for programs and electronic files. If I buy a book, I can't copy it without permission, but I can sell my copy without getting permission from the copyright holder. The "content industry" would dearly like to get rid of that concept.
Consider a high-volume mailing list with 10,000
subscribers, who get their mail on 8000 different
servers. If the machine decides to "throttle" and connect to only one host per second, it takes over two hours per message. Now what happens if there are 20 messages per day? The queue will grow and grow.
Ah, you say, but these hosts will all be on the "recently accessed" list. But what if you bring it down and start up a new host? Well, perhaps the OS could contain a command to turn throttling off. Hmm... what's the first operation the virus will attempt to perform?
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K.
Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
Wow. tps12 thinks that Finland and Europe have lower taxes?
The fact is that government has played a huge role in technology creation, and you're using a lot of that technology right now: the Internet, of course.
As you say, it takes time, energy, and a bunch of smart people, and money, but in many cases it's been government programs that provide all that. Government-designed TCP/IP beat all the proprietary network approaches (SNA, DecNet, Novell, etc) because it was technically better, and it got better because of a lot of visionary bureaucrats at DARPA.
But, of course, the zealots who believe that government is inherently bad, stupid, and inefficient will ignore evidence to the contrary.
To be usable for algorithm testing, the spam database would need to be divided into a "training" set and a "testing" set. Algorithms would need to be tuned based only on the training set, and tested on the testing set. Otherwise any stats obtained will be over-optimistic, as the algorithm might be deliberately or accidentally tuned to work really well only with the particular messages in teh training set.
As anyone can see by following the link, California does not yet have funding for the bullet train system. What's been approved is to put a bond measure on the Nov. 2004 ballot.
Fair use gives the conditions under which someone can make use of copyrighted material. But facts can't be copyrighted. Copyright law can't stop me from telling you that BigBox.com is selling whatzits for $39.95, no matter how much BigBox.com wants to stop me from doing so, unless I somehow violated some legal agreement in disclosing the fact.
If Sun bought Red Hat one half of the company would implode. It would be like Compaq/DEC. The culture is just too different: if the surviving corporate culture were Sun's, the whole free software world would be in trouble, because we all rely hugely on free software developers that are on Red Hat's payroll, and I can't imagine McNealy keeping that investment going. He wants to kill competitors, not subsidize them, and it would gall him too much to see UnitedLinux, Mandrake etc. essentially repackage Red Hat stuff.
It would do about as well as Caldera trying to bring together SCO and Linux, that is, it wouldn't.
Completely free distros do not disappear, but those that require pay-per-seat because they have proprietary components are at much greater risk of disappearing. If the company loses interest, the distro goes away, as distributing it without their permission is not legal.
This is one of the things that puts Lindows at risk.
... of using IBM's db? Other, very large Bugzilla archives are running fine with free databases; the advantages of the proprietary db's don't start showing up until the problems get much larger.
Organizations that gratuitously use proprietary software when free software is completely adequate should consider dropping the "OS" from their names.
Re:And you ask the /. community..
on
Just One Page a Day
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Since Project Gutenburg can only publish books whose copyright has expired, it's quite likely that a spelling "error" may instead reflect language evolution, that is, a change in the way words are spelled over time.
As Eben Moglen has said, the GPL has been enforced dozens of times. Potential violators have always backed down and settled before going to court, but that in itself is enforcement.
The fact that no corporate lawyer has yet dared to challenge the FSF in court should tell you something. In many cases, the FSF obtains settlements that require senior managers to report
to the FSF regularly on their use of GPL software
and their efforts to comply with licenses.
Until recently I had a Red Hat 6.2 box at work -- the old version was needed for a compatibility issue and testing. I used Ximian's Red Carpet to keep the box up to date, and Ximian provided (and still provides) reasonably up-to-date Mozilla versions, even for Red Hat 6.2, with a simple GUI to install updates.
Ximian provides all Red Hat security updates, other than kernel updates, since it appears Red Carpet doesn't know how to update the kernel properly.
You claim that it's a requirement that this system would have at least a ten-year lifetime. Did you get commitments from the software vendors that they would support their product for ten years, or help you transition to a replacement product? Companies regularly terminate unprofitable products, and in some cases they withdraw timed license keys, with the effect of causing deployed systems in the field to cease to work.
If not, then the only option for you that you can be certain of maintaining over a ten-year life is the open source option.
This message is outdated, possibly reflecting experience with older GCC versions. GCC 3.x is in many ways closer to ISO C++ conformance than MSVC, and it has a new x86 backend that is a big improvement over what we had before.
Sun's C++ compiler generates faster code than GCC for some cases, but slower for other cases. Sun tuned their compiler for the standard benchmarks, you will not see the gains they advertise for other platforms. In the recent pase, Sun regularly has broken binary compatibility in patch releases, leading to no end of problems for us in supporting customers.
If you need Fortran, gcc's Fortran is not great.
Also, the ia64 support is immature, you will not get fast code out of gcc for that platform.
Sun, HP, and MSVC are all riddled with compiler bugs of various types; GCC's bugginess is now somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Finally, differences between compilers can often be greatly reduced by simplifying the coding of inner loops. With code that has been given this treatment, we find that Intel's compiler is only about 5% better than gcc on our large codes.
But if you do cross-platform C++, GCC can be a very good choice, as you have one set of front-end compiler bugs to work around instead of five or six.
While IANAL, I've been dealing with GPL issues for a dozen years now, most recently as a member of the GCC steering committee.
This (dividing the work into pieces) could be legitimate if the GPL portion's interfaces are generally useful. For example,
this is the origin of XEmacs, which was originally Lucid Emacs. Lucid, the company, designed Lucid Emacs to be the front end to a proprietary software development system, but the editor was useful as a standalone tool so this was legit.
When Lucid went broke, Lucid Emacs became XEmacs.
But if the GPL module is only useful as an interface to the secret, proprietary code,
and does a lot of secret, mysterious things
that no one knows how to use,
courts would probably treat the whole thing as one work. At least Eben Moglen has argued this in the past, to people who tried similar tricks to get around the GPL (successfully enough to get them to back down, though such cases haven't been to court yet).
An example of something that's clearly legit is a kernel module that is itself under the GPL, that loads a program into a processor (say, a DSP) that sits on some peripheral card. It might come with only the object code that is to be loaded on the card. But the DSP program and the kernel are two completely separate programs, and in principle you could load a different program instead.
I suppose the kernel module could talk to a userspace program, and if the interfaces between
the two were clearly documented one could argue
that they are independent enough to pass GPL muster. Of course the lines are fuzzy. But it isn't just the law that matters, for the fuzzy cases it suffices if the copyright holder thinks it's ok, because the copyright holder is the only one with standing to sue you.
This is why it's a problem that Linus doesn't ask for copyright assignment, because no single individual has the power to assure you that something is OK and have it stick. For FSF software, it suffices if RMS says it's OK.
The FSF will tell you, if you ask, that they believe that the GPL applies to all code that is designed to be linked into the same executable as GPL code, and that kernel modules appear to be linked into the same executable. But they will also tell you that they don't hold the copyright to the Linux kernel and that the copyright holders are the only people with the power to come after violators, or to grant exceptions.
Since Linus does not require others to assign copyright to him, he does not have the power to grant an exception to the GPL on behalf of the other kernel authors.
Also, in more recent messages Linus has backed off of his earlier statements; he's now saying that a binary-only driver might well be a GPL violation, depending on a number of rather fuzzy criteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Could the prosecutors claim the judge was biased and interfered, and demand a retrial?
Not in a criminal case: once the defendant is acquitted, the prosecution cannot appeal.
Application-based firewalls give a false sense of security. This is because apps can simply ask IE to send their data through the firewall for them. Things like ZoneAlarm and Norton's firewall only catch the previous generation of spyware, those apps that directly access the network.
But the whole point of the paper is the opposite of what you're saying. If the security interface is hard to use, people will misuse it, leaving gaping holes in their systems.
In some areas, such as Alaska, global warming is already a significant problem. Even anti-environmentalists like Alaska's Republican senator Ted Stevens are saying so.
In Germany, the scenario you describe is the law: manufacturers are responsible not only for the cost of recycling waste from their products (all products, not just PCs), but assuring that it is actually done, either by taking back one's own waste, or by paying someone else to do it.
Most companies, especially small ones, comply by joining the Grüne Punkt (Green Dot) program, which takes care of the waste for the company. It doesn't really create a barrier to entry, because the fees are based on weight of packaging material and don't cost a small company any more than a big one.
Of course there need to be differences. For example, current US copyright law explicitly gives permission for a legitimate owner of a copyrighted program to create a backup copy. There is no such permission for books.
However, you do have a point, in that we need to firmly (re-)establish the "first sale" doctrine for programs and electronic files. If I buy a book, I can't copy it without permission, but I can sell my copy without getting permission from the copyright holder. The "content industry" would dearly like to get rid of that concept.
Consider a high-volume mailing list with 10,000 subscribers, who get their mail on 8000 different servers. If the machine decides to "throttle" and connect to only one host per second, it takes over two hours per message. Now what happens if there are 20 messages per day? The queue will grow and grow.
Ah, you say, but these hosts will all be on the "recently accessed" list. But what if you bring it down and start up a new host? Well, perhaps the OS could contain a command to turn throttling off. Hmm ... what's the first operation the virus will attempt to perform?
Because XML is highly compressible, use of XML does not necessarily increase file size. The Gnome apps that use XML data formats store it compressed as gzip; I just took a typical small Excel spreadsheet, which takes 20.5 kbytes in Excel format, and saved it in the Gnumeric XML-based format: it's 3K. Uncompressed, it's 37K, but that doesn't matter, as the uncompressed format is never kept either in disk or in memory all at one time.
Wow. tps12 thinks that Finland and Europe have lower taxes?
The fact is that government has played a huge role in technology creation, and you're using a lot of that technology right now: the Internet, of course. As you say, it takes time, energy, and a bunch of smart people, and money, but in many cases it's been government programs that provide all that. Government-designed TCP/IP beat all the proprietary network approaches (SNA, DecNet, Novell, etc) because it was technically better, and it got better because of a lot of visionary bureaucrats at DARPA.
But, of course, the zealots who believe that government is inherently bad, stupid, and inefficient will ignore evidence to the contrary.
To be usable for algorithm testing, the spam database would need to be divided into a "training" set and a "testing" set. Algorithms would need to be tuned based only on the training set, and tested on the testing set. Otherwise any stats obtained will be over-optimistic, as the algorithm might be deliberately or accidentally tuned to work really well only with the particular messages in teh training set.
As anyone can see by following the link, California does not yet have funding for the bullet train system. What's been approved is to put a bond measure on the Nov. 2004 ballot.
Fair use gives the conditions under which someone can make use of copyrighted material. But facts can't be copyrighted. Copyright law can't stop me from telling you that BigBox.com is selling whatzits for $39.95, no matter how much BigBox.com wants to stop me from doing so, unless I somehow violated some legal agreement in disclosing the fact.
If Sun bought Red Hat one half of the company would implode. It would be like Compaq/DEC. The culture is just too different: if the surviving corporate culture were Sun's, the whole free software world would be in trouble, because we all rely hugely on free software developers that are on Red Hat's payroll, and I can't imagine McNealy keeping that investment going. He wants to kill competitors, not subsidize them, and it would gall him too much to see UnitedLinux, Mandrake etc. essentially repackage Red Hat stuff.
It would do about as well as Caldera trying to bring together SCO and Linux, that is, it wouldn't.
Completely free distros do not disappear, but those that require pay-per-seat because they have proprietary components are at much greater risk of disappearing. If the company loses interest, the distro goes away, as distributing it without their permission is not legal.
This is one of the things that puts Lindows at risk.
Organizations that gratuitously use proprietary software when free software is completely adequate should consider dropping the "OS" from their names.
Since Project Gutenburg can only publish books whose copyright has expired, it's quite likely that a spelling "error" may instead reflect language evolution, that is, a change in the way words are spelled over time.
As Eben Moglen has said, the GPL has been enforced dozens of times. Potential violators have always backed down and settled before going to court, but that in itself is enforcement.
The fact that no corporate lawyer has yet dared to challenge the FSF in court should tell you something. In many cases, the FSF obtains settlements that require senior managers to report to the FSF regularly on their use of GPL software and their efforts to comply with licenses.
Until recently I had a Red Hat 6.2 box at work -- the old version was needed for a compatibility issue and testing. I used Ximian's Red Carpet to keep the box up to date, and Ximian provided (and still provides) reasonably up-to-date Mozilla versions, even for Red Hat 6.2, with a simple GUI to install updates.
Ximian provides all Red Hat security updates, other than kernel updates, since it appears Red Carpet doesn't know how to update the kernel properly.
You claim that it's a requirement that this system would have at least a ten-year lifetime. Did you get commitments from the software vendors that they would support their product for ten years, or help you transition to a replacement product? Companies regularly terminate unprofitable products, and in some cases they withdraw timed license keys, with the effect of causing deployed systems in the field to cease to work.
If not, then the only option for you that you can be certain of maintaining over a ten-year life is the open source option.
This message is outdated, possibly reflecting experience with older GCC versions. GCC 3.x is in many ways closer to ISO C++ conformance than MSVC, and it has a new x86 backend that is a big improvement over what we had before.
Sun's C++ compiler generates faster code than GCC for some cases, but slower for other cases. Sun tuned their compiler for the standard benchmarks, you will not see the gains they advertise for other platforms. In the recent pase, Sun regularly has broken binary compatibility in patch releases, leading to no end of problems for us in supporting customers.
If you need Fortran, gcc's Fortran is not great. Also, the ia64 support is immature, you will not get fast code out of gcc for that platform.
Sun, HP, and MSVC are all riddled with compiler bugs of various types; GCC's bugginess is now somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Finally, differences between compilers can often be greatly reduced by simplifying the coding of inner loops. With code that has been given this treatment, we find that Intel's compiler is only about 5% better than gcc on our large codes.
But if you do cross-platform C++, GCC can be a very good choice, as you have one set of front-end compiler bugs to work around instead of five or six.
While IANAL, I've been dealing with GPL issues for a dozen years now, most recently as a member of the GCC steering committee.
This (dividing the work into pieces) could be legitimate if the GPL portion's interfaces are generally useful. For example, this is the origin of XEmacs, which was originally Lucid Emacs. Lucid, the company, designed Lucid Emacs to be the front end to a proprietary software development system, but the editor was useful as a standalone tool so this was legit. When Lucid went broke, Lucid Emacs became XEmacs.
But if the GPL module is only useful as an interface to the secret, proprietary code, and does a lot of secret, mysterious things that no one knows how to use, courts would probably treat the whole thing as one work. At least Eben Moglen has argued this in the past, to people who tried similar tricks to get around the GPL (successfully enough to get them to back down, though such cases haven't been to court yet).
An example of something that's clearly legit is a kernel module that is itself under the GPL, that loads a program into a processor (say, a DSP) that sits on some peripheral card. It might come with only the object code that is to be loaded on the card. But the DSP program and the kernel are two completely separate programs, and in principle you could load a different program instead.
I suppose the kernel module could talk to a userspace program, and if the interfaces between the two were clearly documented one could argue that they are independent enough to pass GPL muster. Of course the lines are fuzzy. But it isn't just the law that matters, for the fuzzy cases it suffices if the copyright holder thinks it's ok, because the copyright holder is the only one with standing to sue you.
This is why it's a problem that Linus doesn't ask for copyright assignment, because no single individual has the power to assure you that something is OK and have it stick. For FSF software, it suffices if RMS says it's OK.
The FSF will tell you, if you ask, that they believe that the GPL applies to all code that is designed to be linked into the same executable as GPL code, and that kernel modules appear to be linked into the same executable. But they will also tell you that they don't hold the copyright to the Linux kernel and that the copyright holders are the only people with the power to come after violators, or to grant exceptions.
Since Linus does not require others to assign copyright to him, he does not have the power to grant an exception to the GPL on behalf of the other kernel authors.
Also, in more recent messages Linus has backed off of his earlier statements; he's now saying that a binary-only driver might well be a GPL violation, depending on a number of rather fuzzy criteria.
Bad analogy. The proper analogy would be if your Mustang came with the hood locked shut, so that only Ford dealers could service your car.
What you're missing is that a coastal landowner does not own the beach, so if he damages the beach, he is damaging someone else's property.