That means you have no legal right to distribute. What it comes down to is you don't own what you thought you paid for.
In my example, I paid for the rights to distribute binaries, which is all I wanted. The GPL says I need to distribute source code, but I (as head of the company) never chose to use GPL code, one of my developers did, and without my consent.
In many ways, the GPL in this example functions like the EULA from hell. It's something which I never agreed to, but it could destroy my business. It's actually worse than a patent lawsuit of copyright violation, since in either of those I could pay a fee to the IP owner and they would let me continue to distribute the infringing code.
In terms of Mathematica, the situations are identical in that you stipulated a UI on top of GPLed kernel and stack.
No, they aren't. Mathematica is a chunk of non GPL code distributed as a binary. It calls into the GPL Linux kernel code via software traps or glibc. Doing either of these things is ok for non GPL code, so Mathematica is safe.
Whereas in my example I end up linking some GPL code with some code which I can only distribute as a binary. Imagine an embedded system where everything ends up as one big, statically linked, executable. There is no kernel here, in the sense of code which I need to trap to get into, it all ends up in the same address space. Also in my example, the kernel and stack are NOT GPL code, not are they licensable as such, it's the plagiarised GPL UI code which is. So they aren't at all the same. Saying "No one came after Mathematica, therefore you're safe is completely bogus". Mathematica are not in violation of the GPL, the company in my example is.
To summarise
Mathematica - Non GPL application. Uses traps or glibc to call into a GPL kernel. Not a GPL violation My example - GPL and non GPL code mixed together in one big binary. Is a GPL violation.
Look I can see you're in favor of the GPL, but don't you think in my example, the company would have been better off banning any use of GPL code in it's product?
I think every Linux user who operates more than just a headless server needs support for more than vanilla SVGA.
Actually, you could get higher resolution modes by setting them up with the VESA Bios at boot time or when you need to change mode. XP can do this with it's vanilla SVGA driver. The kernel supports calls to the video Bios, at least on x86.
But the thing that kills you is that then you can't use any hardware acceleration, and unaccelerated BitBlts are really slow. You can see this if you disable the custom driver for your graphics card and get the vanilla SVGA one as a default. But I know of at least one highly customised Windows 2000 system which has an extra 256 grayscale display driven by an FPGA. The driver uses hardware to do BitBlt (easy cases), line drawing (ditto) and has a hardware cursor. That's pretty much enough to get a decent 2D desktop performance.
Another example would be those f***ng moronic films where someone breaks "128-bit encryption" in 60 seconds because he has a gun to his head (or whatever).
I always thought it was ironic that any encryption Hollywood depends on like CSS or AACS seems to get broken so quickly. Maybe they think that it's supposed to be like that.
I'll save my boycotts for issues that involve life or death situations/consequences
But if you're playing some FPS game and your frame rate is 1/10th the other guy what keeps happening to you? Yeah, that's right BOOM HEADSHOT! Mouse button 12! Mouse Button 12! BOOM HEADSHOT! Fucking pwned by a noob! Take a swig of Mountain Dew and it tastes like FAIL!
The temperature a processor can handle greatly varies, while CPU's usually stop working around 80-90C die temperature, videocards can take at least 20 degrees above that.
That's cuz GPUs kick ass and CPUs suck. If you had a video card processor as your main CPU, your PC would be at least 9000 times faster. It's all a conspiracy by the CPU people and incompetent C++ 'programmers' that makes people believe that you need to have branches to execute general purpose code. That's not true though, my friend wrote a game in Visual Basic.NET that didn't use a single branch.
Yes, it's like terrorism in that respect. Also in the respect that thate volume of spam could be reduced if suspected spammers were shipped off to be unwilling participants in a ethically questionable CIA psychological experiment in Gitmo.
Internet surveillance was one of the reasons these guys got caught. Doing anything to sabbotage MI5 catching people like this is grossly irresponsible.
Why would you want to do that though? The police are trying to catch terrorists and you're making the job harder. And they'll probably find some way to screw you if you do it, and it will end up making everyone less free.
Seriously, it's the high tech equivalent of yelling fire falsely in a crowded theatre. And these days, the government will overreact in some insane way like banning theatres.
Obviously you can't distribute all the source code, which means that you can't distribute the whole package. It really means you never could legally distribute the whole package. Right? The request for source code is a way of pointing out to you that you are in violation, not a real request, because you don't have the rights to GPL the code which would need to be GPLed to distribute. Sounds like you'd have to stop distributing, and you could maybe open all the code you do own rights to...
Stopping distributing is a bit hard. It's a device, OEMed for some company who badge it and sell it in the shops all of the world to end users. Stopping distributing is pretty much certain to invite a lawsuit from someone. And why should I open rights to my code because some developer plagiarised?
Look the situation is this, the developer is in the wrong, but the company that hired him is fucked. Whereas if he'd plagiarised BSD licensed code, they wouldn't be.
Back to the way you initially asserted your problem, though: I have a license for Mathematica for Linux. It runs on a GPLed kernel and a GPLed stack and in fact in a GPLed windowing system on a GPLed window manager using GPLed GUI kits. Yet Wolfram would surely laugh (as they should) if I asked for the code to their UI. It doesn't work that way.
That's not the same thing, since Mathematica is a big chunk of presumably non GPL code. It's not statically linked to GPL code so my case doesn't apply.
After he dies the guy that invented Abort, Retry, Fail will have some explaining to do.
Unless the angel on duty at the Pearly Gates has read Undocumented MSDOS, 2nd Edition by Schulman et al, which explains the history behind it pretty well, IIRC.
So you've worked 10- to 12-hour days for the past two years, trying to make your latest game the best ever. You even added copy protection to try to stop the pirates, but within a few days of release there are already crack patches flying around the Internet. Now anyone can help themselves to your hard work, without so much as a "please" or "thank you."
This is what happened to Insomniac's 1999 Playstation release, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. Even though it had good copy protection, it was cracked in a little over a week. So when we moved on to Spyro: Year of the Dragon (YOTD), we decided that something more had to be done to try to reduce piracy. The effort was largely successful. Though a cracked version of YOTD has become available, it took over two months for the working patch to appear, after numerous false starts on the part of the pirates (the patch for the European version took another month on top of that). The release of patches that didn't work caused a great deal of confusion among casual pirates and plenty of wasted time and disks among the commercial ones.
Two months may not seem like a long time, but between 30 and 50 percent of most games' total sales occur in that time. Approximately 50 percent of the total sales of Spyro 2, up to December 2000, were in the first two months. Even games released in the middle of the year rather than the holiday season, such as Eidetic's Syphon Filter, make 30 percent of their total sales in the first two months. If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy. On top of this, since YOTD was released in Europe one month after the U.S., those two months protected early European sales from pirated copies of the U.S. version.
The picture of the fairy telling the player he has a cracked version and he may experience problems he would not see on a legal version is excellent. And she's not kidding either:
The copy protection stopped the game very early. When this was removed, the game appeared to work for some time. We assumed that the crackers generally don't play the games they crack very much, they just play until the point where the protection they know about kicks in. Then they release a crack, believing it to be complete.
To play on this, we designed the game to break in ways that weren't immediately obvious. Most of the protection is "off-camera," affecting levels other than the one currently being played. In YOTD the object of the game is to collect eggs and gems, which are then used to open later parts of the game. The protection removed eggs and gems, so that the player could not make progress. We tried to make the game unplayable for any length of time, while at the same time making it difficult to determine exactly where things had gone wrong. If errors accumulated slowly until the game broke, the cracker would not notice such behavior so easily.
Other, more obvious protection was done less frequently. Callbacks were corrupted, which made the game crash in odd ways. The European version changed languages randomly. Some of these actions break the game and others are just an annoyance to the player, but if the game is difficult or frustrating to play because of the failed crack, this can be more effective than breaking completely.
By making the game behave in as many odd ways as possible, we hoped to cause a lot of confusion. The pirates wouldn't know if the crack didn't work, whether they had just failed to apply the crack correctly, or if the disk had failed to burn correctly. The people who didn't play a lot of the game wouldn't notice that anything was wrong and claim that the crack worked. This
I'm sick of international people who use the word "American" to typify a country and cultural without considering that in fact they just characterized an entire geographic area with flame.
I'm sure anti Americans regret any collateral damage they cause.
The OS/2 which was advertised as "A better Windows than Windows" was based on a different kernel to Windows NT. Seriously, I've written drivers for both and I'd be surprised if they shared any code at all. Actually, the Vista device driver API is pretty different from the original NT one these days, even though it's a direct descendant.
Solaris grep in particular is horrible. vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX. Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.
Somewhere in Redmond, a demon just snorted gasoline and battery acid onto it's keyboard.
Somehow I get the feeling that successful people would probably read to the end of comment they were replying to. Or not bother read the site, one of the other.
It's amazing how easy it is to live within that restriction so long as you keep your eyes open and aren't a sheeple who always needs the most recent releases.
If you're going to affect H L Mencken style sophistication, I think you should structure your comment so you can use the plural form sheeple i.e. "if you aren't one of the sheeple" or come up with a grating new single form, analogous to people who make a point of using questionable plural forms like virii to spur debate on their correctness. Sheeperson perhaps?
Mind you of course, perhaps you believe that sheeple, like sheep is the same word for both singular and plural forms, in which case you have already done this. Touché good sir, I look forward to matching wits with you again. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to whip my intern for gluttony.
Articles to slashdot have to be fact checked, and tested on a focus group to make sure that they don't cause emotional distress. After a two months of this, the editors will submit a form P41B with a write up, which is circulated to have it's facts, grammar and spelling checked. The legal department need to process a form P09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0B for the story to make sure there are no legal implications as to publishing it, due to trade secrets, the DMCA or libel. Then it's pretty much a quiet month of tuning the write up and testing it on focus groups before publication. Seems like cramming all this activity into three months is remarkable to me.
Your whole argument seems to hinge around the idea that success hinges on intelligence (Genius as you put it).
No it doesn't. At least not in the sense of IQ. I guess you could call it social intelligence, but I think even that misrepresents it. It's about having a clear strategy and working hard to implement it by negotiating effectively with people. I actually don't think this requires a high IQ at all, and it certainly doesn't require that you have any special talent other than social intelligence.
My point is that people like us that grew up thinking intelligence is solely measured by math test scores tend to underestimate this because we don't understand it.
I'll agree that it is sometimes the case. However, do you really think that it's the case with Britney Spears? And even if it were, she's a product, not the mastermind. She had managers and handlers who planed her career and marketed her. She was just the pretty face that they cast for the role. I honestly think that it could have been any of thousands of girls who could be Spears now.
How do you know? I saw a video clip of her telling off an interviewer for "being the worst prepared interview that she'd ever done" that was hilarious and a tad scary. And if there were thousands of other girls who were pretty, Britney must have had something besides a pretty face to climb over them on the slippery slope to success.
It could all be luck of course, but I bet you'd find that most of the losers lost because they made mistakes at some point that Britney never did. I think it's like any game - your chance of winning is mostly determined by the skill level you have. If you're really skilled you can even turn bad luck to your advantage.
Yeah, the some of the audience cheered when Yoda did his athletic light saber fight in one of the prequels, but they still looked tired as they left the cinema.
I like to think that watching the same dire movie in the private cinema in his bunker, George Lucas got a little younger and thinner when that happened, as he sucked the life force out of them through the screen.
"Undocumented MSDOS" once described MSDOS as being the most leveraged piece of code ever written because it was small (<100K) and licensed for a huge sum of money. So in terms of leveraging, if you had one talented person who earned a modest salary and one talentless one making millions, the talentless one is actually a genius at leveraging.
I'm sure all the slashdot elitists will whine about luck and marketing and so on, but consider the fact that there were lots of potential competitors to both DOS and Britney that sunk without trace. By all accounts, both Microsoft and Britney worked hard to succeed and make sure that they were contractually in control once they did. I think that's probably the lesson I'll tell my kids - raw talent counts for nothing, success is about hard work, negotiation and planning while they listen to what ever the current version of Britney is on Windows 2020.
The calculations for a nonspherical primary are apparently orders of magnitude harder than for a spherical primary (a spherically symmetric simulation is one dimensional, while an axially symmetric simulation is two dimensional), which would likely be the reason they would be desirable for a country like the People's Republic of China (which already developed its own nuclear and thermonuclear weapons), especially since they were no longer conducting nuclear testing which would provide valuable design information.
This information wasn't in the public domain, and it requires both nuclear testing and computer simulations design warheads like this. It's worth pointing out that many other countries have spent a fortune not producing any viable warheads in sixty years. See for example North Korea's recent test. And I've read that other information about nuclear warheads have never been published openly.
But the idea of keeping this stuff secret is not that it's impossible for the bad guys to reverse engineer, it's that they need to spend time and money doing so. Actually, I suspect that the sort of disfunctional tyrannies that would be most dangerous with nuclear weapons would find any sort of large scale engineering project like this hard to run because they don't have a culture where subordinates can argue with their bosses without being punished. They tend to be very bad at engineering, and so it's possible that the current level of secrecy will delay them developing a viable nuclear weapons system until the US is able to shoot down ICBMs, or until their regimes change into something more democratic.
Even the USSR, which seems to have a had a far more healthy engineering culture than North Korea was essentially bankrupted trying to build weapons systems. And this was made much harder by COCOM regulations which stopped them buying crucial components from the West. I've actually met engineers from former East Germany who've confirmed how effective COCOM was.
Slashdot Mirror
That means you have no legal right to distribute. What it comes down to is you don't own what you thought you paid for.
In my example, I paid for the rights to distribute binaries, which is all I wanted. The GPL says I need to distribute source code, but I (as head of the company) never chose to use GPL code, one of my developers did, and without my consent.
In many ways, the GPL in this example functions like the EULA from hell. It's something which I never agreed to, but it could destroy my business. It's actually worse than a patent lawsuit of copyright violation, since in either of those I could pay a fee to the IP owner and they would let me continue to distribute the infringing code.
In terms of Mathematica, the situations are identical in that you stipulated a UI on top of GPLed kernel and stack.
No, they aren't. Mathematica is a chunk of non GPL code distributed as a binary. It calls into the GPL Linux kernel code via software traps or glibc. Doing either of these things is ok for non GPL code, so Mathematica is safe.
Whereas in my example I end up linking some GPL code with some code which I can only distribute as a binary. Imagine an embedded system where everything ends up as one big, statically linked, executable. There is no kernel here, in the sense of code which I need to trap to get into, it all ends up in the same address space. Also in my example, the kernel and stack are NOT GPL code, not are they licensable as such, it's the plagiarised GPL UI code which is. So they aren't at all the same. Saying "No one came after Mathematica, therefore you're safe is completely bogus". Mathematica are not in violation of the GPL, the company in my example is.
To summarise
Mathematica - Non GPL application. Uses traps or glibc to call into a GPL kernel. Not a GPL violation
My example - GPL and non GPL code mixed together in one big binary. Is a GPL violation.
Look I can see you're in favor of the GPL, but don't you think in my example, the company would have been better off banning any use of GPL code in it's product?
Vanilla SVGA is 800x600 at 4-bit colour.
I think every Linux user who operates more than just a headless server needs support for more than vanilla SVGA.
Actually, you could get higher resolution modes by setting them up with the VESA Bios at boot time or when you need to change mode. XP can do this with it's vanilla SVGA driver. The kernel supports calls to the video Bios, at least on x86.
But the thing that kills you is that then you can't use any hardware acceleration, and unaccelerated BitBlts are really slow. You can see this if you disable the custom driver for your graphics card and get the vanilla SVGA one as a default. But I know of at least one highly customised Windows 2000 system which has an extra 256 grayscale display driven by an FPGA. The driver uses hardware to do BitBlt (easy cases), line drawing (ditto) and has a hardware cursor. That's pretty much enough to get a decent 2D desktop performance.
Another example would be those f***ng moronic films where someone breaks "128-bit encryption" in 60 seconds because he has a gun to his head (or whatever).
I always thought it was ironic that any encryption Hollywood depends on like CSS or AACS seems to get broken so quickly. Maybe they think that it's supposed to be like that.
I'll save my boycotts for issues that involve life or death situations/consequences
But if you're playing some FPS game and your frame rate is 1/10th the other guy what keeps happening to you? Yeah, that's right BOOM HEADSHOT! Mouse button 12! Mouse Button 12! BOOM HEADSHOT! Fucking pwned by a noob! Take a swig of Mountain Dew and it tastes like FAIL!
The temperature a processor can handle greatly varies, while CPU's usually stop working around 80-90C die temperature, videocards can take at least 20 degrees above that.
That's cuz GPUs kick ass and CPUs suck. If you had a video card processor as your main CPU, your PC would be at least 9000 times faster. It's all a conspiracy by the CPU people and incompetent C++ 'programmers' that makes people believe that you need to have branches to execute general purpose code. That's not true though, my friend wrote a game in Visual Basic.NET that didn't use a single branch.
Yes, it's like terrorism in that respect. Also in the respect that thate volume of spam could be reduced if suspected spammers were shipped off to be unwilling participants in a ethically questionable CIA psychological experiment in Gitmo.
Pirated HDDVDs won't blow me to bits.
"you're making the job harder" - the same could be said when you close the door on a cop sans search warrant.
7 6207.stmo l/newsid_6610000/newsid_6610700?redirect=6610737.s tm&news=1&nbram=1&nbwm=1&bbram=1&bbwm=1
Actually, I wouldn't necessarily let a cop into my house if they didn't have a search warrant
But look at this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/64
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/n
Internet surveillance was one of the reasons these guys got caught. Doing anything to sabbotage MI5 catching people like this is grossly irresponsible.
What is the ROFL emoticon? I'm British so I feel I ought to know it now.
:-) or sometimes they use >:3 but JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION! GET IN THE CAR!
Sometimes people use
Why would you want to do that though? The police are trying to catch terrorists and you're making the job harder. And they'll probably find some way to screw you if you do it, and it will end up making everyone less free.
Seriously, it's the high tech equivalent of yelling fire falsely in a crowded theatre. And these days, the government will overreact in some insane way like banning theatres.
Obviously you can't distribute all the source code, which means that you can't distribute the whole package. It really means you never could legally distribute the whole package. Right? The request for source code is a way of pointing out to you that you are in violation, not a real request, because you don't have the rights to GPL the code which would need to be GPLed to distribute. Sounds like you'd have to stop distributing, and you could maybe open all the code you do own rights to...
Stopping distributing is a bit hard. It's a device, OEMed for some company who badge it and sell it in the shops all of the world to end users. Stopping distributing is pretty much certain to invite a lawsuit from someone. And why should I open rights to my code because some developer plagiarised?
Look the situation is this, the developer is in the wrong, but the company that hired him is fucked. Whereas if he'd plagiarised BSD licensed code, they wouldn't be.
Back to the way you initially asserted your problem, though: I have a license for Mathematica for Linux. It runs on a GPLed kernel and a GPLed stack and in fact in a GPLed windowing system on a GPLed window manager using GPLed GUI kits. Yet Wolfram would surely laugh (as they should) if I asked for the code to their UI. It doesn't work that way.
That's not the same thing, since Mathematica is a big chunk of presumably non GPL code. It's not statically linked to GPL code so my case doesn't apply.
After he dies the guy that invented Abort, Retry, Fail will have some explaining to do.
Unless the angel on duty at the Pearly Gates has read Undocumented MSDOS, 2nd Edition by Schulman et al, which explains the history behind it pretty well, IIRC.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_pf v.htm
The picture of the fairy telling the player he has a cracked version and he may experience problems he would not see on a legal version is excellent. And she's not kidding either:
I'm sick of international people who use the word "American" to typify a country and cultural without considering that in fact they just characterized an entire geographic area with flame.
I'm sure anti Americans regret any collateral damage they cause.
How do we feel about Microsoft's decision to exclude open source drivers by requiring signatures on everything in XP/Vista?
e d-drivers.html
Admins can install unsigned drivers on XP and Vista. Even on Vista x64 it's possible to use them, if you're developing them for example -
http://www.vista64.net/forums/drivers/9351-unsign
Possibly. But they should put Predators and Predaliens and Batman and Batmanterminatorpredalien in just to make sure.
The OS/2 which was advertised as "A better Windows than Windows" was based on a different kernel to Windows NT. Seriously, I've written drivers for both and I'd be surprised if they shared any code at all. Actually, the Vista device driver API is pretty different from the original NT one these days, even though it's a direct descendant.
Solaris grep in particular is horrible.
vi breaks every time you expand your console beyond 132 characters, and quite a few of the tools on the default PATH don't conform to any modern standard - including POSIX.
Windows with SFU provides a more compatible UNIX environment than what you get out of the box with Solaris.
Somewhere in Redmond, a demon just snorted gasoline and battery acid onto it's keyboard.
Somehow I get the feeling that successful people would probably read to the end of comment they were replying to. Or not bother read the site, one of the other.
It's amazing how easy it is to live within that restriction so long as you keep your eyes open and aren't a sheeple who always needs the most recent releases.
Sheeple is plural. It's a portmanteau of sheep and people
If you're going to affect H L Mencken style sophistication, I think you should structure your comment so you can use the plural form sheeple i.e. "if you aren't one of the sheeple" or come up with a grating new single form, analogous to people who make a point of using questionable plural forms like virii to spur debate on their correctness. Sheeperson perhaps?
Mind you of course, perhaps you believe that sheeple, like sheep is the same word for both singular and plural forms, in which case you have already done this. Touché good sir, I look forward to matching wits with you again. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to whip my intern for gluttony.
Articles to slashdot have to be fact checked, and tested on a focus group to make sure that they don't cause emotional distress. After a two months of this, the editors will submit a form P41B with a write up, which is circulated to have it's facts, grammar and spelling checked. The legal department need to process a form P09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0B for the story to make sure there are no legal implications as to publishing it, due to trade secrets, the DMCA or libel. Then it's pretty much a quiet month of tuning the write up and testing it on focus groups before publication. Seems like cramming all this activity into three months is remarkable to me.
Your whole argument seems to hinge around the idea that success hinges on intelligence (Genius as you put it).
No it doesn't. At least not in the sense of IQ. I guess you could call it social intelligence, but I think even that misrepresents it. It's about having a clear strategy and working hard to implement it by negotiating effectively with people. I actually don't think this requires a high IQ at all, and it certainly doesn't require that you have any special talent other than social intelligence.
My point is that people like us that grew up thinking intelligence is solely measured by math test scores tend to underestimate this because we don't understand it.
I'll agree that it is sometimes the case. However, do you really think that it's the case with Britney Spears? And even if it were, she's a product, not the mastermind. She had managers and handlers who planed her career and marketed her. She was just the pretty face that they cast for the role. I honestly think that it could have been any of thousands of girls who could be Spears now.
How do you know? I saw a video clip of her telling off an interviewer for "being the worst prepared interview that she'd ever done" that was hilarious and a tad scary. And if there were thousands of other girls who were pretty, Britney must have had something besides a pretty face to climb over them on the slippery slope to success.
It could all be luck of course, but I bet you'd find that most of the losers lost because they made mistakes at some point that Britney never did. I think it's like any game - your chance of winning is mostly determined by the skill level you have. If you're really skilled you can even turn bad luck to your advantage.
Yeah, the some of the audience cheered when Yoda did his athletic light saber fight in one of the prequels, but they still looked tired as they left the cinema.
I like to think that watching the same dire movie in the private cinema in his bunker, George Lucas got a little younger and thinner when that happened, as he sucked the life force out of them through the screen.
"Undocumented MSDOS" once described MSDOS as being the most leveraged piece of code ever written because it was small (<100K) and licensed for a huge sum of money. So in terms of leveraging, if you had one talented person who earned a modest salary and one talentless one making millions, the talentless one is actually a genius at leveraging.
I'm sure all the slashdot elitists will whine about luck and marketing and so on, but consider the fact that there were lots of potential competitors to both DOS and Britney that sunk without trace. By all accounts, both Microsoft and Britney worked hard to succeed and make sure that they were contractually in control once they did. I think that's probably the lesson I'll tell my kids - raw talent counts for nothing, success is about hard work, negotiation and planning while they listen to what ever the current version of Britney is on Windows 2020.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88
This information wasn't in the public domain, and it requires both nuclear testing and computer simulations design warheads like this. It's worth pointing out that many other countries have spent a fortune not producing any viable warheads in sixty years. See for example North Korea's recent test. And I've read that other information about nuclear warheads have never been published openly.
But the idea of keeping this stuff secret is not that it's impossible for the bad guys to reverse engineer, it's that they need to spend time and money doing so. Actually, I suspect that the sort of disfunctional tyrannies that would be most dangerous with nuclear weapons would find any sort of large scale engineering project like this hard to run because they don't have a culture where subordinates can argue with their bosses without being punished. They tend to be very bad at engineering, and so it's possible that the current level of secrecy will delay them developing a viable nuclear weapons system until the US is able to shoot down ICBMs, or until their regimes change into something more democratic.
Even the USSR, which seems to have a had a far more healthy engineering culture than North Korea was essentially bankrupted trying to build weapons systems. And this was made much harder by COCOM regulations which stopped them buying crucial components from the West. I've actually met engineers from former East Germany who've confirmed how effective COCOM was.