Can't remember any details now: it was a long time ago. But Sun's specs for things like jdbc keep on changing, so anyone who wanted to maintain a unified set of source code would need some sort of preprocessor because you need different code for jdk1.3 and 1.4 and 1.5 and so on.
No, the point of the diatribe really boils down to this:
Java is supposed to be a free download, but Sun do not allow Linux distributions to package the download. Everyone who wants to use the JDK must download it themselves.
Linux distributions employ experts to sort out all the sort of mess that the original poster described, so that when you install the distribution, it "just works". But Sun won't allow these experts to distribute their code. Each individual user must sort out the mess for themselves.
Many distributions try to get around this by packaging a "clone" version of Java, such as Gnu GCJ, but these clones often have missing features, and just make the mess worse when the hapless users tries to install a different version of Java themselves, and end up with multiple copies.
Why do Sun do this? I've no idea. The best I can come up with is that Sun are a bunch of anal retentives, and don't want to "lose control" by allowing anyone else to touch their precious shit.
The last time I looked at Sun's source code for Java (the real source code, not the cut-down version you get in the JDK download), I noticed that Sun had written a preprocessor so that they could use a #ifdef-style syntax to work around the annoying differences between the various java versions.
Of course they never made it public, because it would conflict with their religion. But I can't see how you could cope with maintaining code compatible with all the different java versions in any other way.
The logging in JDK 1.5 is totally brain-dead. Sun waited until everyone was using a third-party product (log4j), and then produced their own logging which is incompatible with it, and lacks most of its useful features.
As you say, the license grants a right to "... reproduce the software... solely for academic purposes"
Since this is the *only* copyright right granted by the license, and it is *only* granted for "academic purposes", and "academic purposes" is explicitly defined as "... while attending or employed by an accredited educational institution", I can't see how I can "reproduce the software" unless I am an academic.
And the RIAA and their friends have established that downloading a file onto my hard drive is "copying" the file, within the meaning of the copyright law, and "reproduce the software" would seem to be the same thing.
So I don't think I can download this, unless I am an academic.
Lots of people have found out to their cost that you have to be very careful, when dealing with copyright matters, to stay within the letter of the law. And unless a copyright lawyer tells me otherwise, my reading of the license is that I can't use this software.
For what it's worth: I'm in the UK, so I'm not covered by US copyright law, and UK law definitely does not allow me to make copies for "personal use".
Also, the license doesn't seem to allow you to use it at all, unless you happen to be attending a school or university. For example, you can't use it if you are just a hobbyist.
David Carruthers is a U.S. citizen.
On reflection that is irrelevant. Most laws that make things illegal, make them illegal regardless of the citizenship of the person who did them.
The point is that he seems to have been arrested for something that was done outside the US, and that was completely legal in the place where he did it. It's not the first time that I've heard of this sort of thing happening.
I supposed there were, so that you people could visit your friends and relatives in Guantanamo Bay. I had heard there were a lot of US citizens working there as prison guards.
Well, Coca-Cola was around before cocaine was prohibited, and has continued to make a living by simply removing the active ingredient from their patent medicine. I suppose they will go back to their original formula one it is legal again: it will surely be better than the stuff they make now.
Unlike in most other countries, you can't change planes in the US without going through US immigration.
So, for example, if I happen to want to go to Cuba (which is perfectly legal for me to do), I have to first get a US visa so that I can change planes in Miami.
It is a legitimate business. At least, it is here in the UK, and in most other countries.
The US makes laws that criminalize activities by non-US citizens that take place entirely outside the US. How else could David Carruthers have been arrested, when his business is based in Costa Rica?
Looks like they're assuming about 3600-4000 lines of code per man-year, but it varies from one project to another: perhaps they apply a random fudge-factor to disguise the simplicity of their estimating process. It doesn't say whether they are counting blank lines and comments: if so, we'll have to start padding out our code to push its value up.
Of course, the whole purpose of this will be to point to the "high cost" of free software, when justifying the "lower cost" of Microsoft products.
The descriptions of the projects seem to have been copied from Freshmeat, so this site certainly does not add any useful information about them for first-time users.
It's very slow, but I have managed to look at a couple of pages on the site.
There's a line or so of information about each project (e.g. for Apache Ant it says "Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool", which is not very helpful). And then there's an estimate of the total cost of the project, based on an estimate of the number of man-years that have gone into the code, costed at $55k per man-year.
WTF is that all about? Are these people perhaps trying to suggest that open-source software is valuable, and that its developers should charge for it?
Given the current state of the law, it is really dangerous to contact a site owner and tell him that his site is insecure. It is quite likely that you will be prosecuted for "unauthorised access" to the site.
Much better to just add the site to your personal list of things to avoid, and then forget about it.
Encrypted packets, even those sent over the default torrent ports, can't be recognized as BT traffic so they pass through at full speed.
That will only work if your ISP is sniffing every packet and trying to decide whether or not it is a bittorrent packet. Many ISPs simply throttle any traffic on any port that is a commonly-used setting for some file-sharing program. Less effective, but cheaper.
They've tried that, but found out that "suing your customers" brings them a great deal of very bad publicity. So they want someone else to do the dirty work for them.
If the ISPs have got any sense they will just ignore this, but the BPI will have generated some more publicity that will worry the downloaders, without having put themselves into the position of creating martyrs.
On the contrary, the UK government is pressuring ISPs to introduce "voluntary" censorship of a (secret) list of alleged child-porn sites. Most of the big ISPs have already complied. Of course the unspoken threat is that this will be made compulsory unless they all "volunteer".
At the moment this is to confined to blocking porn, but once all the ISPs have caved in, the infrastructure for more general censorship will be in place. And the list of sites to be censored is supplied to the ISPs in an encrypted form, so even they do not know what they are blocking.
Bubble memory had huge access times, because you had to wait for the bubbles to come past the read/write device before you could read them. In that respect, it was like a conventional hard drive.
This seems to be more like a flash memory chip, which gives you random access to all the memory cells on the chip, at least when it is in read mode.
It's certainly not core memory. That used to get delivered (in one-megabyte quantities) by fork-lift truck.
Just now they've got just over 1000 access points in the UK. Hardly enough for a mesh, by many orders of magnitude.
The trouble with this sort of scheme is that it hardly works at all until you reach some critical density of access points where people find it worth joining the scheme. For example, I have no incentive now to let other people use my access point, because there are so few others that I could then use. I would only want to join if hundreds of thousands of other people had joined already. Those hundreds of thousands of people will mostly all feel the same way.
But they're (almost) giving away hardware. Smells to me more like Cuecat than Skype. I still think it won't last. Google will drop them when they make a loss.
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Can't remember any details now: it was a long time ago. But Sun's specs for things like jdbc keep on changing, so anyone who wanted to maintain a unified set of source code would need some sort of preprocessor because you need different code for jdk1.3 and 1.4 and 1.5 and so on.
No, the point of the diatribe really boils down to this:
Java is supposed to be a free download, but Sun do not allow Linux distributions to package the download. Everyone who wants to use the JDK must download it themselves.
Linux distributions employ experts to sort out all the sort of mess that the original poster described, so that when you install the distribution, it "just works". But Sun won't allow these experts to distribute their code. Each individual user must sort out the mess for themselves.
Many distributions try to get around this by packaging a "clone" version of Java, such as Gnu GCJ, but these clones often have missing features, and just make the mess worse when the hapless users tries to install a different version of Java themselves, and end up with multiple copies.
Why do Sun do this? I've no idea. The best I can come up with is that Sun are a bunch of anal retentives, and don't want to "lose control" by allowing anyone else to touch their precious shit.
The last time I looked at Sun's source code for Java (the real source code, not the cut-down version you get in the JDK download), I noticed that Sun had written a preprocessor so that they could use a #ifdef-style syntax to work around the annoying differences between the various java versions.
Of course they never made it public, because it would conflict with their religion. But I can't see how you could cope with maintaining code compatible with all the different java versions in any other way.
The logging in JDK 1.5 is totally brain-dead. Sun waited until everyone was using a third-party product (log4j), and then produced their own logging which is incompatible with it, and lacks most of its useful features.
As you say, the license grants a right to "... reproduce the software ... solely for academic purposes"
Since this is the *only* copyright right granted by the license, and it is *only* granted for "academic purposes", and "academic purposes" is explicitly defined as "... while attending or employed by an accredited educational institution", I can't see how I can "reproduce the software" unless I am an academic.
And the RIAA and their friends have established that downloading a file onto my hard drive is "copying" the file, within the meaning of the copyright law, and "reproduce the software" would seem to be the same thing.
So I don't think I can download this, unless I am an academic.
Lots of people have found out to their cost that you have to be very careful, when dealing with copyright matters, to stay within the letter of the law. And unless a copyright lawyer tells me otherwise, my reading of the license is that I can't use this software.
For what it's worth: I'm in the UK, so I'm not covered by US copyright law, and UK law definitely does not allow me to make copies for "personal use".
Also, the license doesn't seem to allow you to use it at all, unless you happen to be attending a school or university. For example, you can't use it if you are just a hobbyist.
Of course this fits in with Bill Gates' known views that hobbyists should pay for commercial software
The strategy is to get them hooked at school, and then make them pay for the rest of their lives.
The point is that he seems to have been arrested for something that was done outside the US, and that was completely legal in the place where he did it. It's not the first time that I've heard of this sort of thing happening.
I supposed there were, so that you people could visit your friends and relatives in Guantanamo Bay. I had heard there were a lot of US citizens working there as prison guards.
Well, Coca-Cola was around before cocaine was prohibited, and has continued to make a living by simply removing the active ingredient from their patent medicine. I suppose they will go back to their original formula one it is legal again: it will surely be better than the stuff they make now.
Unlike in most other countries, you can't change planes in the US without going through US immigration.
So, for example, if I happen to want to go to Cuba (which is perfectly legal for me to do), I have to first get a US visa so that I can change planes in Miami.
It is a legitimate business. At least, it is here in the UK, and in most other countries.
The US makes laws that criminalize activities by non-US citizens that take place entirely outside the US. How else could David Carruthers have been arrested, when his business is based in Costa Rica?
So was repealing prohibition a bad idea because everone still goes to speakeasies and drinks hooch? Or are you perhaps mistaken?
Looks like they're assuming about 3600-4000 lines of code per man-year, but it varies from one project to another: perhaps they apply a random fudge-factor to disguise the simplicity of their estimating process. It doesn't say whether they are counting blank lines and comments: if so, we'll have to start padding out our code to push its value up.
Of course, the whole purpose of this will be to point to the "high cost" of free software, when justifying the "lower cost" of Microsoft products.
The descriptions of the projects seem to have been copied from Freshmeat, so this site certainly does not add any useful information about them for first-time users.
There's a line or so of information about each project (e.g. for Apache Ant it says "Apache Ant is a Java-based build tool", which is not very helpful). And then there's an estimate of the total cost of the project, based on an estimate of the number of man-years that have gone into the code, costed at $55k per man-year.
WTF is that all about? Are these people perhaps trying to suggest that open-source software is valuable, and that its developers should charge for it?
You should just hope that no-one takes the same robust attitute to you, the next time you experience a problem.
What's worse: everyone knew what "Novell" was, and didn't want it.
Passion also ensures that you will work long hours for little reward, while the CEO takes home all the company profits.
Much better to just add the site to your personal list of things to avoid, and then forget about it.
This is starting to make a comeback, at least here in the UK. I suppose most people think it is a new innovation.
That will only work if your ISP is sniffing every packet and trying to decide whether or not it is a bittorrent packet. Many ISPs simply throttle any traffic on any port that is a commonly-used setting for some file-sharing program. Less effective, but cheaper.
If the ISPs have got any sense they will just ignore this, but the BPI will have generated some more publicity that will worry the downloaders, without having put themselves into the position of creating martyrs.
At the moment this is to confined to blocking porn, but once all the ISPs have caved in, the infrastructure for more general censorship will be in place. And the list of sites to be censored is supplied to the ISPs in an encrypted form, so even they do not know what they are blocking.
This seems to be more like a flash memory chip, which gives you random access to all the memory cells on the chip, at least when it is in read mode.
It's certainly not core memory. That used to get delivered (in one-megabyte quantities) by fork-lift truck.
Yes, that sounds about right. It's what I'd expect to happen to a spaceship run by the same company that runs Virgin trains.
The trouble with this sort of scheme is that it hardly works at all until you reach some critical density of access points where people find it worth joining the scheme. For example, I have no incentive now to let other people use my access point, because there are so few others that I could then use. I would only want to join if hundreds of thousands of other people had joined already. Those hundreds of thousands of people will mostly all feel the same way.
But they're (almost) giving away hardware. Smells to me more like Cuecat than Skype. I still think it won't last. Google will drop them when they make a loss.
I've still got my Cuecat scanner, though.