With the availability of high quality artificial diamonds, we could stop diamond mining. Unfortunately, the diamond mining industries are trying to perpuate their expensive and destructive extraction business by trying to create a special mystique around "natural" diamonds.
So, be aware that the high price you pay for a "natural" diamond is a direct result of the rather unnatural destruction of the environment, together with monopolistic prices charged by the diamond cartels. There are better ways to say "I love you" to someone.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Pascal was a teaching language that accidentally found itself for production work. C was a language constrained by the limited memory of the platform its first compiler was developed for. Neither should really have caught on for general purpose programming...
I think this "quite a stir in the community" is wishfull thinking. The Java community at large doesn't care much about an open source Java. People want to or have to write code, not fighting holy OSS wars.
You are quite right: the people left in the Java community don't give a damn about licenses or even understanding licenses. They blissfully believe that Java is open because Sun tells them so.
You are wrong asserting that the people who care about that sort of thing are fighting a "holy war". By and large, they are people who have been burned by building on proprietary standards before. It's a question of dollars and cents and risk, and Java is too risky.
It's too bad you don't understand yet, but you probably will sooner or later.
Ok, let's try java.sun.com. The JVM, the libraries, JINI, JNI,... what exactly is missing?
Try downloading the specs and read the click-through licenses. They tell you that the information belongs to Sun and that you can't just go off and implement it in whatever way you like.
JCP is the Java Community Process, which isn't a spec.)
Yes, the JCP is the Java Community Process. The JCP produces specs. Those JCP specs are not freely implementable, they are proprietary to Sun.
Sun seems to have a clear strategy of trying to incorporate their proprietary version of Java into open source projects: Mozilla, OpenOffice, Gnome, Apache, etc. But a piece of software ceases to be free when it depends in an essential way on proprietary software.
Fortunately, open source developers are noticing this more and more and are starting to take countermeasures. Hopefully, in the long term, this will lead to unencumbered versions of Java becoming available and acceptable.
If you want a Pascal-derived language that's a little more up-to-date, consider SmartEiffel or Oberon (search on Google). Both have garbage collection, object-oriented features, and both can generate small, stand-alone executables. The SmartEiffel compiler is particularly neat, since it does global program optimization.
Anyone who HAS used the interface would realize its incredibly internally consistent, it is faster than just about anything out there at the moment,
It's not hard to be "internally consistent" if an OS has hardly any users and hardly any applications.
and that many of it's features are just now starting to be replicated by its competitors (i.e. I was using "spotlight" in 1999 on a BeBox.)
You make it sound as if BeOS actually innovated; it did not. Neither its file system, nor its interface, nor its architecture were in any way novel. BeOS was just another big C++ hack.
One day (in the hopefully near future) there will be a fully open source BeOS. Thats when it gets really interesting.
Just what we need: another C++-based GUI. Come on, don't these people have anything better to do than to write a clone of a poor copy of 25 year old technology?
A few hundred million dollars more in the pockets of open-source friendly people can't be bad. And the next half dozen distros to take up the slack are in the wings.
FYI, IBM has a cleanroom J2ME implementation, complete with JCL. IBM also has a cleanroom J2SE VM and JIT compiler.
IBM is a Java licensee, which permits them to do Java implementations. IBM is also a huge company and a key supporter of Java; it would be suicidal for Sun to sue them.
All the same, IBM has actually been trying to get a cleanroom Java implementation out, an implementation that would be unencumbered by Sun's intellectual property. Doing so has proved to be hard, and Sun has been putting up roadblocks.
My hope is that the combination of public pressure, of multiple attempts at open source implementations, and IBM will force Sun to back down. But there is nothing in principle to stop Sun from doing what SCO has been trying to do, and unlike SCO, Sun actually has a pretty good legal argument: their licenses are clear, their lawyers did a good job, and there is no question about who owns Java.
Utter nonsense. Let's count the number of distinct implementations of Perl, Tcl, Ruby, Visual Basic...
Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and Visual Basic are not standard programming languages, they are merely widely used.
The specs for Java have always been completely open. Anyone can reimplement it. The only restriction is that you can't call it Java unless it meets the spec
That's false, and repeating that lie often enough doesn't make it true; go and try downloading the Java specs. The official Java specs are proprietary to Sun Microsystems, as are most of the JCP specs. The contents of the specifications are covered by several patents. It is completely unclear at this point whether you can legally implement the Java specs, no matter what you call the result.
the GPL is written is that it is designed to leech from other opensource projects without the 'paying up' as you put it
The GPL was written when Open Source didn't even exist and there were no BSD and Apache licensed projects at all. The GPL was designed to enable equitable and sustained development of software by a group of people. It does that well. The fact that some BSD and Apache-licensed projects eventually get a GPL slapped on them may be annoying, but it is more a testament to the fact that the GPL is better designed than those licenses than anything else.
the GPL license forces people with more broader ideologies to create competitors to GPLed projects.
I see nothing "broader" about the BSD or Apache license, and your use of the term "ideology" is misapplied. Code is GPL'ed in order to ensure that all contributors benefit from subsequent contributions. The BSD or Apache license can't ensure that. The fact that the GPL happens to interfere with some commercial or proprietary uses of the software is not ideology, it is incidental.
"blessing" doesn't matter
on
Open source Java?
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Sun employees have said many things about Java in the past: how open it is, how anybody can supposedly implement it, etc.
In reality, in 10 years, nobody has managed to create an interoperable, independent implementation of it. All the Java implementations that exist either are highly incompatible (gcj, kaffe, classpath, etc.), or they use Sun-licensed code (Blackdown, IBM, Apple, etc.). Something clearly makes it hard to re-implement Java, and that's probably both technical and legal. Whatever the specific reasons, it's a failure of Java as a general-purpose, standard programming language.
Whether Sun employees "bless" such a project or not doesn't matter: their opinion or public statements aren't legally binding. They know that it will take years until Harmony delivers anything, and Sun's legal team can still shut it down then.
But the technology they are working on now will be used in the future by most people, on most platforms, to access protected web content.
Yeah, because it's so convenient if my on-line book store, my on-line porn site, and my work-related on-line services can exchange information about me with each other, right?
Dream on. People are not going to trust anybody, least of all Microsoft or Sun, to provide secure and private identity management via back-end servers. If companies are going to try to force people to use this, they are just going to get dozens of different identities.
If there is going to be a "single sign-on" solution at all, it's going to be in the form of a standard for USB keyrings/tokens.
The argument that Sys-Con should refuse to run O'Gara's argument is predicated upon the assumption that her articles are particularly egregious.
No, it is not predicated on that. It is my opinion, apparently shared by many others, that Sys-Con should refuse to run articles that violate journalistic ethics, period. If they don't, I hold them responsible for ethical violations, which means complaining about them and not buying their product anymore.
Your response suggests that you seem to think that if enough people do something, it's OK, and that if it's not illegal, then it must be OK. Thanks for showing us all so clearly what kind of person you are.
This threatens SSL keys on shared web hosting servers. Great, that's only a few million people....
Few people who have SSL keys that matter serve them from shared web hosting servers with shell accounts and the ability to upload and execute arbitrary binaries. And that's pretty much what you need to take advantage of this exploit.
You can get your own, dedicated host for little more than a shared web host with shell access; if your SSL key matters to you, go and do that.
Dude, it only lets you "take crypto keys" if you can execute arbitrary code. Yes, multiuser shell accounts are the most vulnerable, but they are not very secure to begin with.
Jobs comes and goes, but life, and health and don't.
Well, maybe to you, your job is just a job. To other people, it's a passion.
It's very unhealthy for both IT person and company to rely on single person for carrying out the firm's IT needs, especially when customers are paying.
Or maybe the company delivers such a specialized product or service that the customers are coming specifically to it because of that person.
Maybe there are small businesses in which people are interchangeable like cogs. But there are many that aren't: they stand and fall with each individual. If those people want to get away once in a while, a satellite pager is still a better choice than being tied to the server 24/7.
Of course, if he starts up a small business, he'd like to be in control: it's his money and his idea to start the business. If it fails, the employees just move on to another job, but he is out hundreds of thousands or millions of his own money. Of course, his way is the right way because he has to live with the consequences of his decisions.
And, of course, he hates to have employees, because they are a risk, require a payroll, administration, management, and all sorts of other things that have little to do with getting an idea to market. Just because you fill in an application and get hired doesn't make you someone whose technical skill or integrity he can trust. That's something you still have to prove, and a lot of whining isn't going to do it.
But they are giving you exactly this ability; they are simply advising you against doing it in practice, because they won't offer you any support if you muck things up.
Saying "replacing any shipping code with your own will void your warranty" would OK. But that's not what they are saying.
They are saying "Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will [...] cause the unit to fail." No "might" or "may", but "will", implying that there is some checksumming going on there that explicitly makes the unit fail if you attempt to hack it in any way.
And it doesn't matter whether their threat is empty or not--risking several hundred dollars is too much to find out.
If Daryl McBride's personal information had been published (and it seems like at some point it was, although I can't find the story now), everyone would be cheering the public's "right to know."
If someone published McBride's home address in an article, that would be unethical. If it was a journalist who did it, that journalist would deserve to lose their job and be banished from the profession. The public does not have the right to know someone's home address as part of a published article. (The public does have a right to know someone's home address as part of public records, if it is available in that way, which you can go and look up for yourself.)
And what people actually feel about McBride has nothing to do with it. I wouldn't mind having his new home address be known as a shared cell in the state penitentiary. But what I or anybody else feels about McBride is irrelevant to what crosses the line of journalistic ethics.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there,
Most people learn in kindergarden that "But Johnny did it, too" is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. The ones that don't learn it are sociopaths.
If you choose to put yourself in the spotlight, you can expect to have the press breathing down your neck. You don't have to like it but you might as well get used to it.
By the same token, should we accept celebrity stalking? Celebrity murders? Celebrity kidnapping? Hey, it happens when you put yourself in the spotlight, right? It's your own fault for speaking up and poking your head out.
The law and journalism actually recognize a difference between privacy rights of famous people and the rest of us. O'Gara crossed that line and should pay for it.
Would you really prefer to live in a place where the press is constrained?
You haven't been paying attention: we live in such a place and we always have. You couldn't have a free press without some constraints on it, because otherwise the journalists themselves would be subject to the same kind of abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
With the availability of high quality artificial diamonds, we could stop diamond mining. Unfortunately, the diamond mining industries are trying to perpuate their expensive and destructive extraction business by trying to create a special mystique around "natural" diamonds.
So, be aware that the high price you pay for a "natural" diamond is a direct result of the rather unnatural destruction of the environment, together with monopolistic prices charged by the diamond cartels. There are better ways to say "I love you" to someone.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Pascal was a teaching language that accidentally found itself for production work. C was a language constrained by the limited memory of the platform its first compiler was developed for. Neither should really have caught on for general purpose programming...
OK, so you develop throwaway programs and it doesn't bother you that Sun can do with the platform whatever they like.
But other people develop software that needs to be supported for decades, and for them the current situation is not acceptable.
I think this "quite a stir in the community" is wishfull thinking. The Java community at large doesn't care much about an open source Java. People want to or have to write code, not fighting holy OSS wars.
You are quite right: the people left in the Java community don't give a damn about licenses or even understanding licenses. They blissfully believe that Java is open because Sun tells them so.
You are wrong asserting that the people who care about that sort of thing are fighting a "holy war". By and large, they are people who have been burned by building on proprietary standards before. It's a question of dollars and cents and risk, and Java is too risky.
It's too bad you don't understand yet, but you probably will sooner or later.
Ok, let's try java.sun.com. The JVM, the libraries, JINI, JNI, ... what exactly is missing?
Try downloading the specs and read the click-through licenses. They tell you that the information belongs to Sun and that you can't just go off and implement it in whatever way you like.
JCP is the Java Community Process, which isn't a spec.)
Yes, the JCP is the Java Community Process. The JCP produces specs. Those JCP specs are not freely implementable, they are proprietary to Sun.
Sun seems to have a clear strategy of trying to incorporate their proprietary version of Java into open source projects: Mozilla, OpenOffice, Gnome, Apache, etc. But a piece of software ceases to be free when it depends in an essential way on proprietary software.
Fortunately, open source developers are noticing this more and more and are starting to take countermeasures. Hopefully, in the long term, this will lead to unencumbered versions of Java becoming available and acceptable.
If you want a Pascal-derived language that's a little more up-to-date, consider SmartEiffel or Oberon (search on Google). Both have garbage collection, object-oriented features, and both can generate small, stand-alone executables. The SmartEiffel compiler is particularly neat, since it does global program optimization.
Anyone who HAS used the interface would realize its incredibly internally consistent, it is faster than just about anything out there at the moment,
It's not hard to be "internally consistent" if an OS has hardly any users and hardly any applications.
and that many of it's features are just now starting to be replicated by its competitors (i.e. I was using "spotlight" in 1999 on a BeBox.)
You make it sound as if BeOS actually innovated; it did not. Neither its file system, nor its interface, nor its architecture were in any way novel. BeOS was just another big C++ hack.
One day (in the hopefully near future) there will be a fully open source BeOS. Thats when it gets really interesting.
Just what we need: another C++-based GUI. Come on, don't these people have anything better to do than to write a clone of a poor copy of 25 year old technology?
A few hundred million dollars more in the pockets of open-source friendly people can't be bad. And the next half dozen distros to take up the slack are in the wings.
FYI, IBM has a cleanroom J2ME implementation, complete with JCL. IBM also has a cleanroom J2SE VM and JIT compiler.
IBM is a Java licensee, which permits them to do Java implementations. IBM is also a huge company and a key supporter of Java; it would be suicidal for Sun to sue them.
All the same, IBM has actually been trying to get a cleanroom Java implementation out, an implementation that would be unencumbered by Sun's intellectual property. Doing so has proved to be hard, and Sun has been putting up roadblocks.
My hope is that the combination of public pressure, of multiple attempts at open source implementations, and IBM will force Sun to back down. But there is nothing in principle to stop Sun from doing what SCO has been trying to do, and unlike SCO, Sun actually has a pretty good legal argument: their licenses are clear, their lawyers did a good job, and there is no question about who owns Java.
Utter nonsense. Let's count the number of distinct implementations of Perl, Tcl, Ruby, Visual Basic...
Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and Visual Basic are not standard programming languages, they are merely widely used.
The specs for Java have always been completely open. Anyone can reimplement it. The only restriction is that you can't call it Java unless it meets the spec
That's false, and repeating that lie often enough doesn't make it true; go and try downloading the Java specs. The official Java specs are proprietary to Sun Microsystems, as are most of the JCP specs. The contents of the specifications are covered by several patents. It is completely unclear at this point whether you can legally implement the Java specs, no matter what you call the result.
the GPL is written is that it is designed to leech from other opensource projects without the 'paying up' as you put it
The GPL was written when Open Source didn't even exist and there were no BSD and Apache licensed projects at all. The GPL was designed to enable equitable and sustained development of software by a group of people. It does that well. The fact that some BSD and Apache-licensed projects eventually get a GPL slapped on them may be annoying, but it is more a testament to the fact that the GPL is better designed than those licenses than anything else.
the GPL license forces people with more broader ideologies to create competitors to GPLed projects.
I see nothing "broader" about the BSD or Apache license, and your use of the term "ideology" is misapplied. Code is GPL'ed in order to ensure that all contributors benefit from subsequent contributions. The BSD or Apache license can't ensure that. The fact that the GPL happens to interfere with some commercial or proprietary uses of the software is not ideology, it is incidental.
Sun employees have said many things about Java in the past: how open it is, how anybody can supposedly implement it, etc.
In reality, in 10 years, nobody has managed to create an interoperable, independent implementation of it. All the Java implementations that exist either are highly incompatible (gcj, kaffe, classpath, etc.), or they use Sun-licensed code (Blackdown, IBM, Apple, etc.). Something clearly makes it hard to re-implement Java, and that's probably both technical and legal. Whatever the specific reasons, it's a failure of Java as a general-purpose, standard programming language.
Whether Sun employees "bless" such a project or not doesn't matter: their opinion or public statements aren't legally binding. They know that it will take years until Harmony delivers anything, and Sun's legal team can still shut it down then.
But the technology they are working on now will be used in the future by most people, on most platforms, to access protected web content.
Yeah, because it's so convenient if my on-line book store, my on-line porn site, and my work-related on-line services can exchange information about me with each other, right?
Dream on. People are not going to trust anybody, least of all Microsoft or Sun, to provide secure and private identity management via back-end servers. If companies are going to try to force people to use this, they are just going to get dozens of different identities.
If there is going to be a "single sign-on" solution at all, it's going to be in the form of a standard for USB keyrings/tokens.
The argument that Sys-Con should refuse to run O'Gara's argument is predicated upon the assumption that her articles are particularly egregious.
No, it is not predicated on that. It is my opinion, apparently shared by many others, that Sys-Con should refuse to run articles that violate journalistic ethics, period. If they don't, I hold them responsible for ethical violations, which means complaining about them and not buying their product anymore.
Your response suggests that you seem to think that if enough people do something, it's OK, and that if it's not illegal, then it must be OK. Thanks for showing us all so clearly what kind of person you are.
Can the Strogg invasion be far?
but in a more reserved, 70's, quiet manner.
You must have been born after the 70's if you apply terms such as "reserved" and "quiet" to its manner.
This threatens SSL keys on shared web hosting servers. Great, that's only a few million people....
Few people who have SSL keys that matter serve them from shared web hosting servers with shell accounts and the ability to upload and execute arbitrary binaries. And that's pretty much what you need to take advantage of this exploit.
You can get your own, dedicated host for little more than a shared web host with shell access; if your SSL key matters to you, go and do that.
Dude, it only lets you "take crypto keys" if you can execute arbitrary code. Yes, multiuser shell accounts are the most vulnerable, but they are not very secure to begin with.
Jobs comes and goes, but life, and health and don't.
Well, maybe to you, your job is just a job. To other people, it's a passion.
It's very unhealthy for both IT person and company to rely on single person for carrying out the firm's IT needs, especially when customers are paying.
Or maybe the company delivers such a specialized product or service that the customers are coming specifically to it because of that person.
Maybe there are small businesses in which people are interchangeable like cogs. But there are many that aren't: they stand and fall with each individual. If those people want to get away once in a while, a satellite pager is still a better choice than being tied to the server 24/7.
Geez, sounds like YOU have issues.
Of course, if he starts up a small business, he'd like to be in control: it's his money and his idea to start the business. If it fails, the employees just move on to another job, but he is out hundreds of thousands or millions of his own money. Of course, his way is the right way because he has to live with the consequences of his decisions.
And, of course, he hates to have employees, because they are a risk, require a payroll, administration, management, and all sorts of other things that have little to do with getting an idea to market. Just because you fill in an application and get hired doesn't make you someone whose technical skill or integrity he can trust. That's something you still have to prove, and a lot of whining isn't going to do it.
But they are giving you exactly this ability; they are simply advising you against doing it in practice, because they won't offer you any support if you muck things up.
Saying "replacing any shipping code with your own will void your warranty" would OK. But that's not what they are saying.
They are saying "Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will [...] cause the unit to fail." No "might" or "may", but "will", implying that there is some checksumming going on there that explicitly makes the unit fail if you attempt to hack it in any way.
And it doesn't matter whether their threat is empty or not--risking several hundred dollars is too much to find out.
If Daryl McBride's personal information had been published (and it seems like at some point it was, although I can't find the story now), everyone would be cheering the public's "right to know."
If someone published McBride's home address in an article, that would be unethical. If it was a journalist who did it, that journalist would deserve to lose their job and be banished from the profession. The public does not have the right to know someone's home address as part of a published article. (The public does have a right to know someone's home address as part of public records, if it is available in that way, which you can go and look up for yourself.)
And what people actually feel about McBride has nothing to do with it. I wouldn't mind having his new home address be known as a shared cell in the state penitentiary. But what I or anybody else feels about McBride is irrelevant to what crosses the line of journalistic ethics.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there,
Most people learn in kindergarden that "But Johnny did it, too" is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. The ones that don't learn it are sociopaths.
If you choose to put yourself in the spotlight, you can expect to have the press breathing down your neck. You don't have to like it but you might as well get used to it.
By the same token, should we accept celebrity stalking? Celebrity murders? Celebrity kidnapping? Hey, it happens when you put yourself in the spotlight, right? It's your own fault for speaking up and poking your head out.
The law and journalism actually recognize a difference between privacy rights of famous people and the rest of us. O'Gara crossed that line and should pay for it.
Would you really prefer to live in a place where the press is constrained?
You haven't been paying attention: we live in such a place and we always have. You couldn't have a free press without some constraints on it, because otherwise the journalists themselves would be subject to the same kind of abuse.