There's a compile option in Visual C++ that allows automatic buffer overflow protection
Is there? I haven't seen it. Even if there is (and I'm inclined to trust you), the reason that no one uses it is because it slows programs down so much. The pointer semantics of languages like C and C++ are fundamentally dangerous and the only way you can make them safe (checking every dereference individually) is painfully slow. I think a factor of three or four was the general consensus on/. last time this debate came up.
I guess it's about time for the Slashdot trolls to start calling for the end of C and C++. Strangely, I think I'm starting to agree with them, at least above the kernel level. Is speed really so critical in zlib?
Exactly, theorizing about time travel is about as scientific as "Intelligent Design."
Stephen Hawking has an ongoing bet regarding the so-called Chronology Protection Hypothesis, i.e. that the laws of nature conspire to prevent time travel on a macroscopic scale. Just because it leads to some problems that our brains find difficult to comprehend doesn't mean it's somehow unscientific.
This seems to me more like a desperate cry for attention in which Zawinski says he is switching platform in the hope that the Linux mob will cry "Don't leave us Jamie!" and he can then return in a blaze of glory. I really appreciate everything that he has done for OSS, and I hope others do too, but I can't condone something like this. Mod me troll you like, but he seems frighteningly cynical.
There are some comments already saying "if the program could be written in three days, couldn't they write a new one from scratch in one day?" The answer is that a very fast programmer probably could. But what would the point be? The object of this exercise is to show off just how generic a program written in a functional language can be. It really is possible to abstract everything, leading perhaps to the famous paradox "Everything can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction, except having too many layers of abstraction."
Putting that aside, I think this is a great idea for a competition. I hadn't heard of it before this one, and have only recently got into functional programming myself. I'm a new-found convert to ML, and find it interesting to be forced to think about a problem in a completely new, and usually recursive, way. ML also has some imperative elements but I prefer to avoid them as far as possible. I'll attempt to make an entry to this contest, although I doubt I'm at the relevant level of expertise yet.
I'd be interested to hear what languages other Slashdotters think would be most appropriate to a contest like this. Lisp gurus, start your engines!
In the scientific sense, obviously nothing can be proved about open vs closed source; we can only form hypotheses that fit the known data, etc. Given that the whole post would be meaningless if I were using it in the scientific sense, I assumed it would be obvious that I was not. Not obvious enough for everyone, apparently.
As the version number suggests, this is a pretty minor update. That's not to say that these security fixes aren't important; they are, and they proove once again that open source software can react far faster to new threats than any closed source development model. Nevertheless, it means that the Mozilla Foundation aren't expecting a major download rush. Of course, with Slashdot's intervention, maybe we can take them by surprise.
Now, how long to the first "Firefox 1.02 ate my boot sector" post?
The article makes an interesting read (although the server is getting slow already), but it seems a bit short on commentary. I'm no expert on the low-level systems of Linux, so the bare facts are quite interesting, but I would have been more interested to read a comparison of the merits of the different systems.
My impression, from the article, is that x86 versions of Linux are carrying quite a lot of legacy (from DOS et al). Does this mean that Linux on other architectures is "better" in any sense? I don't know, but I'd be interested if someone can inform.
I can't see that this is going to blow major holes in Kazaa's legal defense, although I do think they'll lose anyway.
I don't think Kazaa's argument was ever that they "didn't know" about all the illegal P2P traffic they were generating. Surely their argument is the old "Common Carrier" one, where they aren't responsible for anything Kazaa transports and responsibility is shifted to the software user? Maybe I've misunderstood, feel free to correct me.
Now, this is clearly embarrassing for the company, and the CTO especially, but I can't see that it's of much legal importance. Everyone knows about Kazaa and spyware by now, don't they/
It was in The Times a couple of months ago, so I'm pretty sure it was legit. I don't know how far the suggestion got, or whether it's still going to happen. Can't find any trace of it on the BBC website though, sorry.
This will be making some people very happy. Why make censorship laws when people are happy to censor themselves?
Here in the UK, there was recently a story that flag burning was indeed to be made illegal, because it was are common expression of anti-British sentiment. What better way to resolve dislike of Britain than to make any expression of it illegal! Of course, Britain has no First Amendment.
Yes, they are mainly doing this to get government contracts.
Yes, they are probably doing this to get good PR among geeks.
But hell, they're still doing it!
Let's try not to be too cynical, Slashdotters. Microsoft is doing a good thing here. This doesn't forgive them for all the other naughty things they do, not by a long shot, but it's still a big deal and a big step forward.
Forgive me for being cynical, but how can we be sure that this final piece is actually crackable? I mean, it would be a cruel joke by Jim Sanborn (the structure's creator) to just include a load of junk, but who's to say he didn't? The fact that the other parts have been deciphered suggests that this last part will give way eventually, but maybe that's just to make the final joke even crueler?
I hope I'm wrong because that would make this story a lot less interesting, but I just thought it should be mentioned.
I've always been a bit unsure how Picasa fits into Google's philosophy. I mean, they're all about searching, locating relevant things, organisation of data etc, right? Now I think Picasa is a decent piece of software - although the first version was a tad slow and occasionally unstable, I'm willing to give it a second try. But in terms of organisation of data, it doesn't really offer much. You can't put pictures into more than one group, for example.
Surely the best thing would be actual image search. In other words, I give the program a picture of my face and say 'find all the other pictures with this face'. That's an extreme example and would be incredibly complex, of course, but some kind of actual picture searching capability would be amazingly useful.
Like I say, this isn't an anti-Picasa troll because it's a decent piece of software, but it doesn't seem to be offering anything amazingly new.
What exactly is this click fraud thing? I can't really see how it can be exactly defined. Maybe the owners of the website occasionally want to click on their own adverts because (*shock*) the product is actually relevant to their site, and thus to them. In fact, relevance is supposed to be the whole idea of Google's TextAds, isn't it?
Obviously someone genuinely wanting to click their own ads ten thousand times is rather unlikely, but where do you draw the line? Is this written in a contract anywhere? What about getting other people to click the ads for you?
This seems to be a very fuzzy legal matter. I'm as pro-Google as the next Slashdotter but I can't see how they have a water-tight case here. That said, I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone can correct me.
To me, it simply seems to impossible to think that the universe and all that's in it, including us, is the result of some random roll of the cosmic dice.
You know if the dice had turned up some other way, we wouldn't be here to wonder how it happened?
This case isn't really that interesting, since it was rejected before an issue of privacy became involved. Someone sued for defamation; the judge said no defamation had taken place; end of case. It would be a lot more interesting if the judge had considered the case worthy of being heard, and had to decide whether the unmasking of an anonymous emailer was appropriate. Is there any precident for this?
The tone of the Slashdot article summary makes these people sound like rather romantic pirates (in the original sense), having exciting adventures with clandestine societies and having a strict code of secrecy.
The truth of the matter, as the article reveals, is that it's people like these that caused so many problems for our friends at Valve and are responsible for most of the other irritating leaks of software. While I'm for P2P, fair use, BitTorrent et al as much as the next Slashdotter, I don't think these people are really up to any good. They are not much more than Internet criminals.
I don't mean to be too cynical, but I'm sure even the Venezualan people would admit that they are not the foremost force in world IT. Quite right, this is a victory for Open Source, but could we save the dancing in the streets for when a slightly more major player joins our side?
This reminds me of Bush's hilarious "You forgot Poland!" in the first presidential debate.
You might wonder why these devices need to be so complex when Braille is just a series of dots. The thing is that Braille is a lot more complex than people think. (I think this is interesting but apologies if it's a little off-topic.)
Type I Braille is basically a 1:1 mapping of letter onto 2x3 arrays of dots. It's not much more than a font, but this is what people tend to think of as Braille.
Type II Braille uses a lot of abbreviations, and is rather more complex to read. For example, certain punctuation marks coincide with word abbrevations, and only the context serves to differentiate the too.
Type III Braille is still more complex and is almost like a whole other language. I don't know much more about it than that, but anyone who does can add to this.
So you see that the increasing complexity of these devices actually makes life a lot easier for blind computer users. I wonder how many blind people read Slashdot?
These FCC people are pretty persuasive. This guy clearly talks a good "uncensored airwaves" talk, but their actions are clearly not in line with this. While I applaud his apparently more liberal stance, we need to be careful not to get totally suckered by his rhetoric. I'll believe the FCC are being more open-minded when the TV, radio et al start reflecting it.
I guess this proves that BitTorrent is the perfect vector for the largest files, be they Linux distros or movies (public-domain movies, of course). As the article says, BitTorrent is not perfect and will probably be surpassed in the future. But the fact that 35% of all 'net traffic is being carried by one program is simple awesome, and a great credit to BitTorrent's creators.
Also, with such a volume of traffic, surely it would be impossible for an **AA sniffer to track it all? Or at least, your chances of being caught and sued are pathetic small.
All of this is great news for BitTorrent. Long may it continue!
Isn't it strange how Canada seems to have such a different attitude to copyright enforcement to America, when Europe seems to want to follow in the footsteps of American law? Canada is culturally more similar to America than Europe is, besides the obvious geographical proximity. Is this the Canadian government deliberately being contrary? I'd be interested to hear from some Canadians on the matter.
I think it's great to see video game music finally getting the (fairly) widespread critical acclaim it has so long deserved. RPGs have had awesome music for year (Secret of Mana springs to my mind), but now it seems people are really starting to appreciate the music for its own sake.
Maybe the consoles of the future will offer as much scope for awesome sound as they currently do for the visuals.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there? I haven't seen it. Even if there is (and I'm inclined to trust you), the reason that no one uses it is because it slows programs down so much. The pointer semantics of languages like C and C++ are fundamentally dangerous and the only way you can make them safe (checking every dereference individually) is painfully slow. I think a factor of three or four was the general consensus on /. last time this debate came up.
I guess it's about time for the Slashdot trolls to start calling for the end of C and C++. Strangely, I think I'm starting to agree with them, at least above the kernel level. Is speed really so critical in zlib?
Stephen Hawking has an ongoing bet regarding the so-called Chronology Protection Hypothesis, i.e. that the laws of nature conspire to prevent time travel on a macroscopic scale. Just because it leads to some problems that our brains find difficult to comprehend doesn't mean it's somehow unscientific.
This seems to me more like a desperate cry for attention in which Zawinski says he is switching platform in the hope that the Linux mob will cry "Don't leave us Jamie!" and he can then return in a blaze of glory. I really appreciate everything that he has done for OSS, and I hope others do too, but I can't condone something like this. Mod me troll you like, but he seems frighteningly cynical.
Either this is a wider phenomenon than you realise, or you were a teacher at my school...
There are some comments already saying "if the program could be written in three days, couldn't they write a new one from scratch in one day?" The answer is that a very fast programmer probably could. But what would the point be? The object of this exercise is to show off just how generic a program written in a functional language can be. It really is possible to abstract everything, leading perhaps to the famous paradox "Everything can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction, except having too many layers of abstraction."
Putting that aside, I think this is a great idea for a competition. I hadn't heard of it before this one, and have only recently got into functional programming myself. I'm a new-found convert to ML, and find it interesting to be forced to think about a problem in a completely new, and usually recursive, way. ML also has some imperative elements but I prefer to avoid them as far as possible. I'll attempt to make an entry to this contest, although I doubt I'm at the relevant level of expertise yet.
I'd be interested to hear what languages other Slashdotters think would be most appropriate to a contest like this. Lisp gurus, start your engines!
In the scientific sense, obviously nothing can be proved about open vs closed source; we can only form hypotheses that fit the known data, etc. Given that the whole post would be meaningless if I were using it in the scientific sense, I assumed it would be obvious that I was not. Not obvious enough for everyone, apparently.
As the version number suggests, this is a pretty minor update. That's not to say that these security fixes aren't important; they are, and they proove once again that open source software can react far faster to new threats than any closed source development model. Nevertheless, it means that the Mozilla Foundation aren't expecting a major download rush. Of course, with Slashdot's intervention, maybe we can take them by surprise.
Now, how long to the first "Firefox 1.02 ate my boot sector" post?
The article makes an interesting read (although the server is getting slow already), but it seems a bit short on commentary. I'm no expert on the low-level systems of Linux, so the bare facts are quite interesting, but I would have been more interested to read a comparison of the merits of the different systems.
My impression, from the article, is that x86 versions of Linux are carrying quite a lot of legacy (from DOS et al). Does this mean that Linux on other architectures is "better" in any sense? I don't know, but I'd be interested if someone can inform.
I can't see that this is going to blow major holes in Kazaa's legal defense, although I do think they'll lose anyway.
I don't think Kazaa's argument was ever that they "didn't know" about all the illegal P2P traffic they were generating. Surely their argument is the old "Common Carrier" one, where they aren't responsible for anything Kazaa transports and responsibility is shifted to the software user? Maybe I've misunderstood, feel free to correct me.
Now, this is clearly embarrassing for the company, and the CTO especially, but I can't see that it's of much legal importance. Everyone knows about Kazaa and spyware by now, don't they/
It was in The Times a couple of months ago, so I'm pretty sure it was legit. I don't know how far the suggestion got, or whether it's still going to happen. Can't find any trace of it on the BBC website though, sorry.
This will be making some people very happy. Why make censorship laws when people are happy to censor themselves?
Here in the UK, there was recently a story that flag burning was indeed to be made illegal, because it was are common expression of anti-British sentiment. What better way to resolve dislike of Britain than to make any expression of it illegal! Of course, Britain has no First Amendment.
Yes, they are mainly doing this to get government contracts.
Yes, they are probably doing this to get good PR among geeks.
But hell, they're still doing it!
Let's try not to be too cynical, Slashdotters. Microsoft is doing a good thing here. This doesn't forgive them for all the other naughty things they do, not by a long shot, but it's still a big deal and a big step forward.
Hip hip hooray!
Forgive me for being cynical, but how can we be sure that this final piece is actually crackable? I mean, it would be a cruel joke by Jim Sanborn (the structure's creator) to just include a load of junk, but who's to say he didn't? The fact that the other parts have been deciphered suggests that this last part will give way eventually, but maybe that's just to make the final joke even crueler?
I hope I'm wrong because that would make this story a lot less interesting, but I just thought it should be mentioned.
I've always been a bit unsure how Picasa fits into Google's philosophy. I mean, they're all about searching, locating relevant things, organisation of data etc, right? Now I think Picasa is a decent piece of software - although the first version was a tad slow and occasionally unstable, I'm willing to give it a second try. But in terms of organisation of data, it doesn't really offer much. You can't put pictures into more than one group, for example.
Surely the best thing would be actual image search. In other words, I give the program a picture of my face and say 'find all the other pictures with this face'. That's an extreme example and would be incredibly complex, of course, but some kind of actual picture searching capability would be amazingly useful.
Like I say, this isn't an anti-Picasa troll because it's a decent piece of software, but it doesn't seem to be offering anything amazingly new.
What exactly is this click fraud thing? I can't really see how it can be exactly defined. Maybe the owners of the website occasionally want to click on their own adverts because (*shock*) the product is actually relevant to their site, and thus to them. In fact, relevance is supposed to be the whole idea of Google's TextAds, isn't it?
Obviously someone genuinely wanting to click their own ads ten thousand times is rather unlikely, but where do you draw the line? Is this written in a contract anywhere? What about getting other people to click the ads for you?
This seems to be a very fuzzy legal matter. I'm as pro-Google as the next Slashdotter but I can't see how they have a water-tight case here. That said, I'm not an expert, so perhaps someone can correct me.
This case isn't really that interesting, since it was rejected before an issue of privacy became involved. Someone sued for defamation; the judge said no defamation had taken place; end of case. It would be a lot more interesting if the judge had considered the case worthy of being heard, and had to decide whether the unmasking of an anonymous emailer was appropriate. Is there any precident for this?
The tone of the Slashdot article summary makes these people sound like rather romantic pirates (in the original sense), having exciting adventures with clandestine societies and having a strict code of secrecy.
The truth of the matter, as the article reveals, is that it's people like these that caused so many problems for our friends at Valve and are responsible for most of the other irritating leaks of software. While I'm for P2P, fair use, BitTorrent et al as much as the next Slashdotter, I don't think these people are really up to any good. They are not much more than Internet criminals.
I'm English.
I don't mean to be too cynical, but I'm sure even the Venezualan people would admit that they are not the foremost force in world IT. Quite right, this is a victory for Open Source, but could we save the dancing in the streets for when a slightly more major player joins our side?
This reminds me of Bush's hilarious "You forgot Poland!" in the first presidential debate.
You might wonder why these devices need to be so complex when Braille is just a series of dots. The thing is that Braille is a lot more complex than people think. (I think this is interesting but apologies if it's a little off-topic.)
Type I Braille is basically a 1:1 mapping of letter onto 2x3 arrays of dots. It's not much more than a font, but this is what people tend to think of as Braille.
Type II Braille uses a lot of abbreviations, and is rather more complex to read. For example, certain punctuation marks coincide with word abbrevations, and only the context serves to differentiate the too.
Type III Braille is still more complex and is almost like a whole other language. I don't know much more about it than that, but anyone who does can add to this.
So you see that the increasing complexity of these devices actually makes life a lot easier for blind computer users. I wonder how many blind people read Slashdot?
These FCC people are pretty persuasive. This guy clearly talks a good "uncensored airwaves" talk, but their actions are clearly not in line with this. While I applaud his apparently more liberal stance, we need to be careful not to get totally suckered by his rhetoric. I'll believe the FCC are being more open-minded when the TV, radio et al start reflecting it.
Isn't it strange how Canada seems to have such a different attitude to copyright enforcement to America, when Europe seems to want to follow in the footsteps of American law? Canada is culturally more similar to America than Europe is, besides the obvious geographical proximity. Is this the Canadian government deliberately being contrary? I'd be interested to hear from some Canadians on the matter.
I think it's great to see video game music finally getting the (fairly) widespread critical acclaim it has so long deserved. RPGs have had awesome music for year (Secret of Mana springs to my mind), but now it seems people are really starting to appreciate the music for its own sake.
Maybe the consoles of the future will offer as much scope for awesome sound as they currently do for the visuals.