A prime example of this would be Zondervan's control over the NIV bible translation. Sure. the Bible is PD but the NIV translation (Which is one of the most popular here in the northeast US) is copyrighted and costs $$$...(whereas I can download older translations like that of King James( from Project Gutenberg or something (being that it's a few hundred years old)...
Of course this would arguably be a public exhibition of the material and therefore illegal under laws outside of the DMCA umbrella...so if they couldn't get you on DeCSS they'd surely get you for the other involved violations...then you'd not only fail to make your point, but end up incarcerated for other offenses...
"In 25 minutes, only three people walked by the plant at Broadway and Mortimer Street. One was pushing all his belongings in a shopping cart."
I wonder if the DMCA says anything about royalties on inventions from dying cities? I'm sure it could be made to say this with enough corporate interest.
I did some experimenting with peltier junctions...essentially they're difficult to manage. Many of them will destroy themselves if just turned on and left to die. One made for processor cooling may be different, but as I remember from my work with them, you had to have one helluva heat sink to draw heat away from them in order to keep them from getting hot on both sides and blowing up...In practice for cooling a cpu they may behave differently, but i remember them being very easy to kill (And having to build a special power supply to convert 120VAC to 16VDC@12 amps (to run four of them at capacity)...)
I know this. I only mentioned it because the teacher at my high school liked to make everyone think that they were capable of it (and that she was teaching a very large part of computer science)....
In reality most of the time is spent in environment specific things. When I look at the code for a real project, it rarely calls any standard library function more than once as they are abstracted in a layer within the piece of software. Most of the time by the time a developer joins the project that layer has been written and isn't being touched. The skill that's neccesary is adaptability...the ability to learn how to work with that layer be it an in house library, Qt, SDL, the Palm SDK, or whatever. Being known as versatile opens up opportunities (knowing more than one language opens up opportunities to be involved in multilanguage projects and is a must today. Knowing libs helps too).
The AP Computer science test is the most worthless exam I have ever taken. For the record, I challenged the AB and got a five with about forty minutes of preparation the night before (a practice exam).
It doesn't test real computer science. In the real world theres a lot more to it than coding in c++. At work (I work for a small company that does embedded linux based realtime control. I designed and implemented a complete control system in six months with one other person). If I were at my liberties to I'd let y'all in on the details but I'm not. Lets just say that it is not a simple system.
The first thing I had to do was not write code, but come up with a mini linux distribution custom to our task, get it into solid state storage and get it running *reliably*...Then figure out the realtime issue and make the computer embedded. Was I writing c++ code most of the time? Though that would be my official position, I'd say I spent more time messing with hardware issues than coding and definitely more time dealing with sysadmin issues in the embedded system (making it maintainable, etc.) than coding. I realize it is an intro course...but the real job of a computer scientist is to be versatile. Why is it that when the printer breaks in a room full of cs people, the only ones who know enough to fix it are me and an electrical engineer who happens to have a knack for it (furthermore, it's invariably a softare probem)....heck the APCS teacher at my school couldn't even deal with a printer offline on her own...IT ISN'T REAL COMPUTER SCIENCE....setting up a linux box (not Mandrake), maintaining it, developing for it, and learning how to use it (bonus if you can set up a network at home) will be much better prep for cs than anything else.....
If you can do all that then the AP exam will be no problem for you....if you find yourself needing to study (and the exam being anything but common sense) then it isn't ingrained enough for actual practice yet...
I hate it how the teachers pump the kids up as if they can actually get work coding...makes me laugh
The APCS doesn't measure anything more than your ability to learn and regurgitate...CS is a problem solving field...they should be sitting you down in front of a broken computer and making you fix it..writing code as neccesary, not asking you to regurgitate a linked list function you've seen a thousand times in your sleep...
I find it amusing that we have this whole discussion to determine that lockpicks are only illegal if intent is there to use them illegaly....this is a moot point...breaking and entering into your professor's offices is illegal therefore sending someone lockpicks to use for this purpose is as well:)
Their idea was at it's heart a good one with a bad marketing department on top if it. Look at it this way: If there were a plugin that let people fairly and freely hook up text names to their computer(s) that were hooked to the internet and a central registry or something handled this pseudo DNS through another protocol name other than http maybe althttp:// or something, I don't know, then this could be a huge step towards openness compared to the current system...They just tried to commercialize it too much and it failed....If the words were not so much designed to be easy to remember as they were designed to provide an alternative identification mechanism to ICANN then the system would have been less defeatable (also would have helped if they natively supported as many browsers as possible)
Generally an MS certification type is not going to have the technical background and depth to understand soft vs. hard links and the concept of inodes. It takes a little bit of filesystem theory to understand how that works, and it even helps to understand ext[23] a little bit as well. Try explaining this to people who only know of different filesystems as FAT32 FAT16 FAT12 and NTFS, all of which are mostly the same on the surface...these are known by their limitations, not their capabilities...you're gonna get a lot of 'oh so that's just like an lnk file, right?' from these people if you tell them that.
it hurt our economy. Working in the embedded systems industry I saw orders cancelled and employees laid off. But this is true in al industries. People stopped spending money as much after that, it was a period of uncertainty and our fourth quarter last year was the worst one that company has ever had. Sure music sales went down 10% but guess what many other things (from industry to cable subscriptions) went down even more than that. It was a shock to our economy and the music industry should wake up and stop scapegoating the internet for their problems. Furthermore, I'd bet that the growth of MP3 swapping slowd during that period because people were buying less broadband. It doesn't make sense for them to blame something so clearly not the cause...when the economy goes to hell music sales will too, deal with it.
You can't tell the company not to make 'addicting' games. You'd be asking them to destroy their products to make them less appealing. Sony is just creating a compelling, appealing game here. They have the right to make it as good and/or realistic or analogous to life as they see fit and if someone does something stupid as a result then that's their problem. Scapegoating Sony doesn't get anyone anywhere. This type of argument has held up in court (think MSIE and how it can't be removed from windows because that would destroy the product). Besides, It could be equally argued that the compelling nature of the game is not due to the game engine , but to other participants. Sony would have nothing from everquest if it weren't for the 400,000 users out there. Also arguable is how could Sony have reasonably prevented this. A warning label certainly wouldn't help. If people are connecting to eachother then so be it. If I call Joe and Joe kills himself for some unknown reason, is it the telephone company's fault?
Why is this news? Yay. a new howto came out. That happens all the time. This would be a significant article on a high availability/high performance website, but on/.? Must be a slow news day.
In what court would the GPL cause classified materials to be released? That's what I thought. If something is classified, the government will not release it, regardless (the courts never would). Sorry. In this country, what's illegal is determined by the government. If a classified project were using GPL code in a way that violated the GPL, noone on the outside would know anyways because it's classified (in theory, at least). This issue is really more of a moral one than a legal one. Would you violate the GPL in a classified situation in order to promote national security? rms would say no. I think I would say yes.
The problems mount as the source files get longer. On the project I'm currently working on, we have an average of 80-100 lines per file. Are some files abnormally huge? Yeah, but for the most part the files are small. Some times a file has to be a little bigger than that to perform its function. Of course with only a few lines of code per file, it will be very rare that more than one developer will have to touch it at a time, and furthermore, there's only room for so many bugs in 80-100 lines before it becomes more worthwhile to rewrite it. If the code is really that buggy, then the small source files will make it easier to gradually reimplement sections and make the task seem less daunting to the developers. Also, If the interfaces are intelligently designed and well documented in advance, then you have the ability to reimplement files without causing troubles. When I open up a piece of someone else's code and find a 7000 line source file (I've seen 20000 line source files in some projects...one piece of control software had an entire user interface implemented in xlib and network communication layer in one 20,000 line file), It becomes a formidable task to understand it well enough to fix or improve it. If the source files are small and their purposes well defined, then everything gets along better.
The NYS thruway system has speedpass for tolls. It works very well and theft isn't so much of a problem since the charges are fairly small and unless you're using the thruway to get all over the state, stealing it has little or no point (I think albanybuffalo is about $12 or so). By targetting such technologies very specifically, theft is not so much of a problem.
No Flaw. He is saying put the solar cell up to a light/led/whatever that is running on AC and the output of the solar cell will reflect the 120Hz that comes from the cycle time. To understand this doubling effect. Look at a sine/cosine wave and how in each cycle it passes zero twice. yup.
Many MANY MANY bugs in released software are not neccisarily completely due to faulty design in one particular program. Often many programs in tandem are liable. Misconfiguration on the part of the user can also be a problem. If I misconfigure ssh and sudo and someone 'rm -Rf's my machine, who'se liable? A Law like this argued by the right lawyer could easily find the ssh people, the sudo people or even the rm people liable for letting this happen.
Also, how about the fraud possibilities. People injure themselves all the times to collect premiums. How many people do you know that would wipe their box to collect on 'lost IP' or another similar claim. Freely redistributed software would get killed because free software developers knowingly distribute software with bugs, expecting the wide audience to help debug. If suddenly there were no way to protect themselves from liability for a stupid person running bets software who hurts something, thep rocess would get choked out of existence. People sue for everything these days, lets not give them another reason...
The person who has written a virus has obviously commited a crime. The discussion here regards neglegence on the part of the software manufacturer in allowing the security loophole that made that virus possible. In fact, this loophole could in fact be a feature of the product. To remove it would be to destroy the marketability of the product, and to leave it allows an inconvenient virus. These sorts of problems bring up too many gray areas for effective lawmaking. Furthermore, these laws could be easily twisted in a manner directly proportional to the cost of the lawyers involved. That someone can take that knife of yours and stab you with it doesn't make it the knifemaker's fault.
This corporate need for what works now is leaving linux in many ways behind. In developing a real time motion controller for linux, I've found that the real time support sucks. I've tried three different APIs and the result I've arrived at isn't pretty. One of the more promising APIs (KURT) reliably and repeatably dropped interrupts. A 5ms interupt would become a 10ms interrupt would become a 15ms interrupt and so on. Is this "what works" I'm sure I wouldn't be having this problem with QNX. Fortunately the company I work for is small enough that software cost per license is an issue. I ended up writing a mediocre solution using no realtime API because with deadlines there was no time to fix up an existing RT API for linux to fit our needs. Linux has been the source of oh so many headaches as we've tried to push this product out the door. Will it work? yes, but I can tell you that a well tested, well debugged, stable system would not have so many issues when it comes to getting work done. If we had gone with QNX and sucked up the cost, our development time would undoubtably be faster, and the product more reliable. Sorry, Linux isn't ready yet.
I've found that when one language doesn't fit the bill alone, that more than one creatively hooked together can do better. I don't know the specs of your project, but perl/python/tcl-c/c++ hooks together well, and besides, partitioning sections of the project into languages can help the codebase organization later on as well. The biggest issue would be getting an IDE to do all of this, but the portability is there and any IDE for which plugins could be written (Kdevelop or MSVC or anything else really), could be made to support multilanguage development.
Something else to look into is the Qt library for C++. It is a portable library that gives you more than GUI, but does include a RAD tool. It is portable across Mac/Win/Linux and is free on Linux. It gives you lots of basic stuff like Data Structures, as well as sockets, files and other OS abstractions all the way up to portable threads support. It is incredibly clean and the event handling architecture is one of the best I've run across. Development time is also fairly quick. My experiences with it are good, but that's just a thought. Possibly Qt with some runtime scripting in Python or Scheme (Scheme is for when you really want to make the other developers feel inadequate). That would definitely be my choice for a large project were I starting one.
Is it just me or does this article seem like a shameless plug for IBM's JRE? It seems to wil all but two of the tests (and those are regarding memory usage, not so much performance). I'm betting they picked the tests that the IBM JRE would score well on to push their own product, while letting native compilation come in second a lot of the time so it could still be somewhat of a winner. I wouldn't make decisions by these numbers in any case.
I'm wondering since you can kill a program with sigabrt or sigsegv and get a core dump, would the core dump be enough to restart it again? I know gdb can do this for debugging purposes (although running real code inside gdb to accomplish this end would be quite the inefficient solution). I'm going to play around with options a little bit and see if i can cook something up...
Slashdot Mirror
so long as we're using car seats hows about this
A prime example of this would be Zondervan's control over the NIV bible translation. Sure. the Bible is PD but the NIV translation (Which is one of the most popular here in the northeast US) is copyrighted and costs $$$...(whereas I can download older translations like that of King James( from Project Gutenberg or something (being that it's a few hundred years old)...
Brian
Of course this would arguably be a public exhibition of the material and therefore illegal under laws outside of the DMCA umbrella...so if they couldn't get you on DeCSS they'd surely get you for the other involved violations...then you'd not only fail to make your point, but end up incarcerated for other offenses...
not a good idea
Brian
"In 25 minutes, only three people walked by the plant at Broadway and Mortimer Street. One was pushing all his belongings in a shopping cart."
I wonder if the DMCA says anything about royalties on inventions from dying cities? I'm sure it could be made to say this with enough corporate interest.
Anyone here have enough corporate interest?
Brian
I did some experimenting with peltier junctions...essentially they're difficult to manage. Many of them will destroy themselves if just turned on and left to die. One made for processor cooling may be different, but as I remember from my work with them, you had to have one helluva heat sink to draw heat away from them in order to keep them from getting hot on both sides and blowing up...In practice for cooling a cpu they may behave differently, but i remember them being very easy to kill (And having to build a special power supply to convert 120VAC to 16VDC@12 amps (to run four of them at capacity)...)
Brian
I know this. I only mentioned it because the teacher at my high school liked to make everyone think that they were capable of it (and that she was teaching a very large part of computer science)....
In reality most of the time is spent in environment specific things. When I look at the code for a real project, it rarely calls any standard library function more than once as they are abstracted in a layer within the piece of software. Most of the time by the time a developer joins the project that layer has been written and isn't being touched. The skill that's neccesary is adaptability...the ability to learn how to work with that layer be it an in house library, Qt, SDL, the Palm SDK, or whatever. Being known as versatile opens up opportunities (knowing more than one language opens up opportunities to be involved in multilanguage projects and is a must today. Knowing libs helps too).
Brian
The AP Computer science test is the most worthless exam I have ever taken. For the record, I challenged the AB and got a five with about forty minutes of preparation the night before (a practice exam).
It doesn't test real computer science. In the real world theres a lot more to it than coding in c++. At work (I work for a small company that does embedded linux based realtime control. I designed and implemented a complete control system in six months with one other person). If I were at my liberties to I'd let y'all in on the details but I'm not. Lets just say that it is not a simple system.
The first thing I had to do was not write code, but come up with a mini linux distribution custom to our task, get it into solid state storage and get it running *reliably*...Then figure out the realtime issue and make the computer embedded. Was I writing c++ code most of the time? Though that would be my official position, I'd say I spent more time messing with hardware issues than coding and definitely more time dealing with sysadmin issues in the embedded system (making it maintainable, etc.) than coding. I realize it is an intro course...but the real job of a computer scientist is to be versatile. Why is it that when the printer breaks in a room full of cs people, the only ones who know enough to fix it are me and an electrical engineer who happens to have a knack for it (furthermore, it's invariably a softare probem)....heck the APCS teacher at my school couldn't even deal with a printer offline on her own...IT ISN'T REAL COMPUTER SCIENCE....setting up a linux box (not Mandrake), maintaining it, developing for it, and learning how to use it (bonus if you can set up a network at home) will be much better prep for cs than anything else.....
If you can do all that then the AP exam will be no problem for you....if you find yourself needing to study (and the exam being anything but common sense) then it isn't ingrained enough for actual practice yet...
I hate it how the teachers pump the kids up as if they can actually get work coding...makes me laugh
The APCS doesn't measure anything more than your ability to learn and regurgitate...CS is a problem solving field...they should be sitting you down in front of a broken computer and making you fix it..writing code as neccesary, not asking you to regurgitate a linked list function you've seen a thousand times in your sleep...
Brian
I find it amusing that we have this whole discussion to determine that lockpicks are only illegal if intent is there to use them illegaly....this is a moot point...breaking and entering into your professor's offices is illegal therefore sending someone lockpicks to use for this purpose is as well :)
Brian
ouch. you're making my brain hurt.
are you really that stupid or are you being sarcastic?
Their idea was at it's heart a good one with a bad marketing department on top if it. Look at it this way: If there were a plugin that let people fairly and freely hook up text names to their computer(s) that were hooked to the internet and a central registry or something handled this pseudo DNS through another protocol name other than http maybe althttp:// or something, I don't know, then this could be a huge step towards openness compared to the current system...They just tried to commercialize it too much and it failed....If the words were not so much designed to be easy to remember as they were designed to provide an alternative identification mechanism to ICANN then the system would have been less defeatable (also would have helped if they natively supported as many browsers as possible)
Brian
Keyword OSS in case you didn't know that's Open Source Software. Read the post before refuting it next time.
Brian
Generally an MS certification type is not going to have the technical background and depth to understand soft vs. hard links and the concept of inodes. It takes a little bit of filesystem theory to understand how that works, and it even helps to understand ext[23] a little bit as well. Try explaining this to people who only know of different filesystems as FAT32 FAT16 FAT12 and NTFS, all of which are mostly the same on the surface...these are known by their limitations, not their capabilities...you're gonna get a lot of 'oh so that's just like an lnk file, right?' from these people if you tell them that.
Brian
it hurt our economy. Working in the embedded systems industry I saw orders cancelled and employees laid off. But this is true in al industries. People stopped spending money as much after that, it was a period of uncertainty and our fourth quarter last year was the worst one that company has ever had. Sure music sales went down 10% but guess what many other things (from industry to cable subscriptions) went down even more than that. It was a shock to our economy and the music industry should wake up and stop scapegoating the internet for their problems. Furthermore, I'd bet that the growth of MP3 swapping slowd during that period because people were buying less broadband. It doesn't make sense for them to blame something so clearly not the cause...when the economy goes to hell music sales will too, deal with it.
Brian
You can't tell the company not to make 'addicting' games. You'd be asking them to destroy their products to make them less appealing. Sony is just creating a compelling, appealing game here. They have the right to make it as good and/or realistic or analogous to life as they see fit and if someone does something stupid as a result then that's their problem. Scapegoating Sony doesn't get anyone anywhere. This type of argument has held up in court (think MSIE and how it can't be removed from windows because that would destroy the product). Besides, It could be equally argued that the compelling nature of the game is not due to the game engine , but to other participants. Sony would have nothing from everquest if it weren't for the 400,000 users out there. Also arguable is how could Sony have reasonably prevented this. A warning label certainly wouldn't help. If people are connecting to eachother then so be it. If I call Joe and Joe kills himself for some unknown reason, is it the telephone company's fault?
Brian
Why is this news? Yay. a new howto came out. That happens all the time. This would be a significant article on a high availability/high performance website, but on /.? Must be a slow news day.
Brian
In what court would the GPL cause classified materials to be released? That's what I thought. If something is classified, the government will not release it, regardless (the courts never would). Sorry. In this country, what's illegal is determined by the government. If a classified project were using GPL code in a way that violated the GPL, noone on the outside would know anyways because it's classified (in theory, at least). This issue is really more of a moral one than a legal one. Would you violate the GPL in a classified situation in order to promote national security? rms would say no. I think I would say yes.
Brian
The problems mount as the source files get longer. On the project I'm currently working on, we have an average of 80-100 lines per file. Are some files abnormally huge? Yeah, but for the most part the files are small. Some times a file has to be a little bigger than that to perform its function. Of course with only a few lines of code per file, it will be very rare that more than one developer will have to touch it at a time, and furthermore, there's only room for so many bugs in 80-100 lines before it becomes more worthwhile to rewrite it. If the code is really that buggy, then the small source files will make it easier to gradually reimplement sections and make the task seem less daunting to the developers. Also, If the interfaces are intelligently designed and well documented in advance, then you have the ability to reimplement files without causing troubles. When I open up a piece of someone else's code and find a 7000 line source file (I've seen 20000 line source files in some projects...one piece of control software had an entire user interface implemented in xlib and network communication layer in one 20,000 line file), It becomes a formidable task to understand it well enough to fix or improve it. If the source files are small and their purposes well defined, then everything gets along better.
Brian
The NYS thruway system has speedpass for tolls. It works very well and theft isn't so much of a problem since the charges are fairly small and unless you're using the thruway to get all over the state, stealing it has little or no point (I think albanybuffalo is about $12 or so). By targetting such technologies very specifically, theft is not so much of a problem.
Brian
No Flaw. He is saying put the solar cell up to a light/led/whatever that is running on AC and the output of the solar cell will reflect the 120Hz that comes from the cycle time. To understand this doubling effect. Look at a sine/cosine wave and how in each cycle it passes zero twice. yup.
Brian
Many MANY MANY bugs in released software are not neccisarily completely due to faulty design in one particular program. Often many programs in tandem are liable. Misconfiguration on the part of the user can also be a problem. If I misconfigure ssh and sudo and someone 'rm -Rf's my machine, who'se liable? A Law like this argued by the right lawyer could easily find the ssh people, the sudo people or even the rm people liable for letting this happen.
Also, how about the fraud possibilities. People injure themselves all the times to collect premiums. How many people do you know that would wipe their box to collect on 'lost IP' or another similar claim. Freely redistributed software would get killed because free software developers knowingly distribute software with bugs, expecting the wide audience to help debug. If suddenly there were no way to protect themselves from liability for a stupid person running bets software who hurts something, thep rocess would get choked out of existence. People sue for everything these days, lets not give them another reason...
Brian
The person who has written a virus has obviously commited a crime. The discussion here regards neglegence on the part of the software manufacturer in allowing the security loophole that made that virus possible. In fact, this loophole could in fact be a feature of the product. To remove it would be to destroy the marketability of the product, and to leave it allows an inconvenient virus. These sorts of problems bring up too many gray areas for effective lawmaking. Furthermore, these laws could be easily twisted in a manner directly proportional to the cost of the lawyers involved. That someone can take that knife of yours and stab you with it doesn't make it the knifemaker's fault.
Brian
This corporate need for what works now is leaving linux in many ways behind. In developing a real time motion controller for linux, I've found that the real time support sucks. I've tried three different APIs and the result I've arrived at isn't pretty. One of the more promising APIs (KURT) reliably and repeatably dropped interrupts. A 5ms interupt would become a 10ms interrupt would become a 15ms interrupt and so on. Is this "what works" I'm sure I wouldn't be having this problem with QNX. Fortunately the company I work for is small enough that software cost per license is an issue. I ended up writing a mediocre solution using no realtime API because with deadlines there was no time to fix up an existing RT API for linux to fit our needs. Linux has been the source of oh so many headaches as we've tried to push this product out the door. Will it work? yes, but I can tell you that a well tested, well debugged, stable system would not have so many issues when it comes to getting work done. If we had gone with QNX and sucked up the cost, our development time would undoubtably be faster, and the product more reliable. Sorry, Linux isn't ready yet.
Brian
I've found that when one language doesn't fit the bill alone, that more than one creatively hooked together can do better. I don't know the specs of your project, but perl/python/tcl-c/c++ hooks together well, and besides, partitioning sections of the project into languages can help the codebase organization later on as well. The biggest issue would be getting an IDE to do all of this, but the portability is there and any IDE for which plugins could be written (Kdevelop or MSVC or anything else really), could be made to support multilanguage development.
Something else to look into is the Qt library for C++. It is a portable library that gives you more than GUI, but does include a RAD tool. It is portable across Mac/Win/Linux and is free on Linux. It gives you lots of basic stuff like Data Structures, as well as sockets, files and other OS abstractions all the way up to portable threads support. It is incredibly clean and the event handling architecture is one of the best I've run across. Development time is also fairly quick. My experiences with it are good, but that's just a thought. Possibly Qt with some runtime scripting in Python or Scheme (Scheme is for when you really want to make the other developers feel inadequate). That would definitely be my choice for a large project were I starting one.
Good Luck,
Brian
Is it just me or does this article seem like a shameless plug for IBM's JRE? It seems to wil all but two of the tests (and those are regarding memory usage, not so much performance). I'm betting they picked the tests that the IBM JRE would score well on to push their own product, while letting native compilation come in second a lot of the time so it could still be somewhat of a winner. I wouldn't make decisions by these numbers in any case.
Brian
I'm wondering since you can kill a program with sigabrt or sigsegv and get a core dump, would the core dump be enough to restart it again? I know gdb can do this for debugging purposes (although running real code inside gdb to accomplish this end would be quite the inefficient solution). I'm going to play around with options a little bit and see if i can cook something up...
Brian