C++ is pretty much a kitchen sink language, so I'm not terribly surprised to see that Stroustrop wants to add introspection, which is one of several features that Java has and C++ does not.
Maybe he'll also standardize a garbage collector, a window toolkit, etc.
Sigh. Most C++ compilers still don't handle Templates correctly which is only okay because
most C++ programmers (myself included) don't use them correctly
either.
I was just about to submit this as a news article, but since my submissions never get accepted anyway...
Fanfilms.com has several very good amateur short films set in the starwars universe. The one that really caught my eye though is the six and a half minute long film Duality about the final test of a new apprentice Lord of the Sith. The film makers put up some very good information about amateur film-making at their site, including modelling hints, costuming, storyboards, and script notes.
I'm really impressed with the quality of this amateur film; and if there are any more out there like this, I'd like to see them.
As corporate culture successively inhibits creation of new works around original ideas under their control, the work of the open source communities becomes richer both in comparison and in its synergism. Restricting the flow of ideas never really restricts ideas, it just moves them around, and eventually the less restricted, more freely evolving ground will outcompete the more restrictive.
I like Linus' comment on the Microsoft anti-trust trial -- that antitrust just tries to
eliminate some of the harm that a monopoly can exert on a market now. Monopolies are inherently unstable and will be outcompeted eventually as they become mired in their own hubris.
Whether government or the people step in to help with this specific copyright problem or not, I'm quite optimistic about the long term future.
After spouting off this morning about how simple it should be to do the same thing with core IP, I did eventually go back and reread RFC 760 & 761. And I agree that it wouldn't be nearly as simple as I thought to use client packet routing.
Among other things it looks like client routed IP packets were never completely specified. The packet route is destroyed as the packet is being routed (each hop specified in the route gets pulled off when as the gateway is reached, and the only way of building a reverse route is by setting the packet tracing option which would require knowing in advance how many hops the packet will go through.
In addition there doesn't seem to be any supported way (at least in Linux) of using that packet as the basis for a response. Instead the
user-mode program manually copies the sockaddr_in from source to destination, and that structure only uses the basic IP address.
Actually I think that NAT is quite a nice solution for most of the problems of non-routable IP addresses (even servers can be handled with
a bit of tinkering at the gateway.)
IIRC IPv4 has had client routed protocol packets for forever though. I don't get why you
couldn't just add a loose-route optional protocol header to the IP packet to route traffic past gateways rather than add layers upon layers
to the IP stack (which invariably seems to result
in protocol stack inversion.)
BTW: this laptop was reviewed in the last Computer Gaming World, and the staff there had a very high opinion of it as a gaming machine. The first gaming laptop worthy of a gamers notice was how I think they put it.
So grab a copy of last months CGW if you can still find it.
About three years ago (or so) Redhat stopped selling any proprietary software after having
previously acted as a channel for a variety
of vendors including Metro-X, X/Open Motif, and
(IIRC) Applixware. In doing so you made your
company center its attention fully on open source,
but at the same time you closed one of the then
best available sales channels for companies
interested in selling commercial software for
Linux.
Retrospectively, do you think this was a net
benefit to the open source community, and how
do you think that Redhat and the community's
view of Redhat would have been altered if it had
continued to funnel commercial software into the
market?
Well, apart from question 8 the answers were mostly consistent. But did anyone else notice that Q8 (and the immediately preceeding statements
in Q7) were inconsistent?
I think he should have answered Q7 as "We like to think of ourselves as customer focused, and indeed we are where that doesn't interfere with our first priority which is profitability (or the ability to offer software for profit.)"
Or generously, perhaps his answer to Q7 was
intended to include software developers as the
customers on which Microsoft focuses, in which case the two statements become consistent again.
It certainly isn't driven as a first priority by end-customer needs though...
Notwithstanding the earlier comments about the feature having been corrected after lots of people complained...
Software is just a set of instructions that controls hardware, so it seems logical that the
software would do what you want it to do. What is it going to do; complain?
But that isn't really true. Software serves the purposes of the people who write it, but only indirectly serves the needs of the consumer who
buys it. A company writes useful software because they can trade that software for money, and writing good software lets them collect more money for more
software. But the software is written by the company and for the company.
That is really the reason that I love Linux. It is written for my needs by other people with the same needs. Compare the advertising screens in AIM and GAIM for example, the ad filtering tools of Netscape 6 (or IE for that matter) versus Mozilla, or the spam filtering
of procmail and mutt compared with Outlook.
Advertising pressure is all around us. Eventually your VR-spec's will no doubt advertise
nearby pizza parlours in flashing green and red trying to attract your attention away from the
sidewalk ahead of you.
He who has the code controls his own future; I want to be in control of the data I see, I don't want the machines that serve me to make their own decisions about what I should see based on the
interests and focus groups of the corporations that
supply them.
I'd add that the end of the world is upon you all, but then I really would be needlessly raving. But truly -- all of you who cut down open source or Linux every chance you get. Have you really thought through what you will be getting instead?
That isn't actually true. The GPL is a license (in other words an implicit contract), but it rests on the right of distribution (a copyright) without which agreement you would be unable to
distribute GPL'd software.
Use of GPL'd software doesn't come into it. First of all using a product isn't a copyright, so you don't need to agree to anything in order to do it (with the exception of public performances). Secondly, prohibiting specific uses would be inimical to the free software community.
FWIW, I doubt that use clauses of a standard
shrinkwrap license would be enforcable if you made
it clear that you didn't intend to be bound by them, and were using the software without a license under the general use provisions of copyright law.
Oh, I quite agree. Copying an MD5Sum of a
part of a program is no more deserving of
copyright than say copying the file length - that
would be absurd on the face of it:
I own the length 329466; the length of my
new game program -- so if you use that number
in any way, I'll sue.
My statement about storing md5 sums being
improbable was simply a recognition of the
factorial problem... there are simply too many
possible MD5sums that could be generated.
The other point, about storing transforms of
the original which could be turned into valid
md5 sums, but which was not itself the original
program was the one I thought would have copyright
problems.
You've probably hit the only really viable solution. An md5sum server (or several) could
be set up so that you wouldn't even have to
download the.exe unless you want to skip
the sum request.
I can't see how you could precalculate the
sums unless there are only a limited number of
possible requests, and other approaches like
including a derivative transform of the original
(say reversing every byte in the original file)
wouldn't really make it any more legal IIRC.
Here in the SF Bay Area at least, DSL is basically an indirect connection to the ATM
backbone, so your quoted transfer rate is
also the QoS level of your ATM channel. My
quoted rate is 384/128, but in fact I typically
get 1.5Mbps downlink (never more than 128 up
though, probably to keep businesses from
hosting their web sites on consumer oriented
DSL.)
I don't know about IE, but Netscape most certainly does allow the user direct control over what root CA's he or she trusts. The default is
set up for you to trust all of the normal ones,
but go to:
A better analogy than the M&M's would be the
airplane passenger who jokingly mentions that he plans to hijack an airplane.
Hundreds of people are delayed while the
airplane is searched for explosives, plus there
is the cost of security guards to hold the
person in custody, and the staff to complete
the search.
That is easily $20k worth of damage, especially when multiplied by the number of of people who
visit a busy web site (as opposed to the ~200 that
might be delayed at the airport.)
Check your X server; I'm sure that you are already running with the X shared memory extension. The faster game libraries already
use shared memory instead of network traffic to directly update the display.
I've been reading about Berlin for years. But to tell the truth, I wouldn't be interested in it even if the project does eventually start to go
somewhere. I like X; I like its network
transparency; I like the layered approach to its
APIs; I like its seperation of policy from mechanics.
GNOME could never be ported to Windows, and virtual window managers on Windows are a horrible kludge.
It seems to me that fixing the problems in X
around color management and font support is a much
better approach than taking away all of the advantages of X and replacing them with just a
clone of Windows.
I think that the official explanation is unreasonable because it implies that the NSA
was unaware of the security impact of having
two keys, one of which is effectively never
used. (Namely that the latter can be replaced
with another key in the binary, thus bypassing
the foreign DLL prevention.)
Personally I don't think the NSA would be that
blind unless the key was inserted at the last
minute just for their use (which would have a
psychological blinding effect.) But it could be
as you say; the NSA might have simply f--cked up.
Even if you count the NSA key as belonging to
the NSA, it really isn't likely to be a back door.
The way that Microsoft managed to get their software exported despite potentially strong crypto was that they could inhibit companies
from loading arbitrary strength crypto by
requiring the library to be signed.
As a result it isn't possible for a foreign
windows user to load e.g. an open source
crypto library, since it won't have the
appropriate signature.
Now it stands to reason that the NSA wouldn't
want to get their internal test crypto libraries
signed by microsoft every time they want to test a new algorithm, so MS might well have added an
extra load key so that the NSA could load their
own libraries.
But being able to load a new library doesn't make it a back door. Normally you would prefer it if you could load any library as a crypto service provider. Adding the extra key only allows an
additional set of libraries to be loaded, it doesn't of itself insert anything untoward in your
operating system.
What you didn't notice was that OT-III was
registered with the copyright office as 170
odd individual creative works, one work per
paragraph, each paragraph three lines long.
Which letter of which word would you like
to excerpt so as not to quote more than is
permissible by fair use?
If it were me, I'd probably start it off just in data collection mode. Examine how many times
a machine is upgraded without the same ether card,
etc. then when you've collected data for a while
you can target the +2 sigma abusers.
Say most users reinstall windows every 6 months, and 98% install no more than once every two months. Disallow reinstalls more frequently than that and it only pisses off 2% of the users,
and those were probably pirates anyway.
In other words, I think the reason they haven't said what constitutes new hardware is because they haven't decided yet, and won't decide until they see the initial set of data.
Unless it is classified it is supposedly public
data, so you should be able to get a copy of the
source code through a Freedom of Inforfmation
Act request.
Anyone got a couple of spare lawyers looking for
a fun afternoon or twenty?
Re:Someone slap Carly Fiorenta with a clue stick
on
HP Ending OpenMail
·
· Score: 1
Optimistically Carly is trying to gather more
effort around a new strategic direction for HP's
software, and Openmail didn't match that strategy.
Pessimistically Openmail was strategically
valuable but was under intense competition by
other companies who understand better than HP how
valuable it is and forced it into unprofitability.
HP as a corporation is definitely moving in the
first direction, but historically
we've been more in the second (especially wrt.
software.) Whether the
internal friction of reinventing the corporation
places this more in the first camp or more in
the second I can't guess, but I sure hope it isn't
as the previous poster said; simply a matter of
projected profit. The implication would be that
HP is incapable of forming and executing on a
strategy, which is something I don't believe.
Slashdot Mirror
C++ is pretty much a kitchen sink language, so I'm not terribly surprised to see that Stroustrop wants to add introspection, which is one of several features that Java has and C++ does not.
Maybe he'll also standardize a garbage collector, a window toolkit, etc.
Sigh. Most C++ compilers still don't handle Templates correctly which is only okay because most C++ programmers (myself included) don't use them correctly either.
I was just about to submit this as a news article, but since my submissions never get accepted anyway...
Fanfilms.com has several very good amateur short films set in the starwars universe. The one that really caught my eye though is the six and a half minute long film Duality about the final test of a new apprentice Lord of the Sith. The film makers put up some very good information about amateur film-making at their site, including modelling hints, costuming, storyboards, and script notes.
I'm really impressed with the quality of this amateur film; and if there are any more out there like this, I'd like to see them.
As corporate culture successively inhibits creation of new works around original ideas under their control, the work of the open source communities becomes richer both in comparison and in its synergism. Restricting the flow of ideas never really restricts ideas, it just moves them around, and eventually the less restricted, more freely evolving ground will outcompete the more restrictive.
I like Linus' comment on the Microsoft anti-trust trial -- that antitrust just tries to eliminate some of the harm that a monopoly can exert on a market now. Monopolies are inherently unstable and will be outcompeted eventually as they become mired in their own hubris.
Whether government or the people step in to help with this specific copyright problem or not, I'm quite optimistic about the long term future.
After spouting off this morning about how simple it should be to do the same thing with core IP, I did eventually go back and reread RFC 760 & 761. And I agree that it wouldn't be nearly as simple as I thought to use client packet routing.
Among other things it looks like client routed IP packets were never completely specified. The packet route is destroyed as the packet is being routed (each hop specified in the route gets pulled off when as the gateway is reached, and the only way of building a reverse route is by setting the packet tracing option which would require knowing in advance how many hops the packet will go through.
In addition there doesn't seem to be any supported way (at least in Linux) of using that packet as the basis for a response. Instead the user-mode program manually copies the sockaddr_in from source to destination, and that structure only uses the basic IP address.
Ick!
Actually I think that NAT is quite a nice solution for most of the problems of non-routable IP addresses (even servers can be handled with a bit of tinkering at the gateway.)
IIRC IPv4 has had client routed protocol packets for forever though. I don't get why you couldn't just add a loose-route optional protocol header to the IP packet to route traffic past gateways rather than add layers upon layers to the IP stack (which invariably seems to result in protocol stack inversion.)
BTW: this laptop was reviewed in the last Computer Gaming World, and the staff there had a very high opinion of it as a gaming machine. The first gaming laptop worthy of a gamers notice was how I think they put it.
So grab a copy of last months CGW if you can still find it.
Hi Bob,
About three years ago (or so) Redhat stopped selling any proprietary software after having previously acted as a channel for a variety of vendors including Metro-X, X/Open Motif, and (IIRC) Applixware. In doing so you made your company center its attention fully on open source, but at the same time you closed one of the then best available sales channels for companies interested in selling commercial software for Linux.
Retrospectively, do you think this was a net benefit to the open source community, and how do you think that Redhat and the community's view of Redhat would have been altered if it had continued to funnel commercial software into the market?
Well, apart from question 8 the answers were mostly consistent. But did anyone else notice that Q8 (and the immediately preceeding statements in Q7) were inconsistent?
I think he should have answered Q7 as "We like to think of ourselves as customer focused, and indeed we are where that doesn't interfere with our first priority which is profitability (or the ability to offer software for profit.)" Or generously, perhaps his answer to Q7 was intended to include software developers as the customers on which Microsoft focuses, in which case the two statements become consistent again.
It certainly isn't driven as a first priority by end-customer needs though...
Notwithstanding the earlier comments about the feature having been corrected after lots of people complained...
Software is just a set of instructions that controls hardware, so it seems logical that the software would do what you want it to do. What is it going to do; complain?
But that isn't really true. Software serves the purposes of the people who write it, but only indirectly serves the needs of the consumer who buys it. A company writes useful software because they can trade that software for money, and writing good software lets them collect more money for more software. But the software is written by the company and for the company.
That is really the reason that I love Linux. It is written for my needs by other people with the same needs. Compare the advertising screens in AIM and GAIM for example, the ad filtering tools of Netscape 6 (or IE for that matter) versus Mozilla, or the spam filtering of procmail and mutt compared with Outlook.
Advertising pressure is all around us. Eventually your VR-spec's will no doubt advertise nearby pizza parlours in flashing green and red trying to attract your attention away from the sidewalk ahead of you.
He who has the code controls his own future; I want to be in control of the data I see, I don't want the machines that serve me to make their own decisions about what I should see based on the interests and focus groups of the corporations that supply them.
I'd add that the end of the world is upon you all, but then I really would be needlessly raving. But truly -- all of you who cut down open source or Linux every chance you get. Have you really thought through what you will be getting instead?
In this case it looks like the owner of the domain has set up his name server to return 10.0.0.1 for the relevant host.
That is a pretty novel way of avoiding slashdot effect... just take your domain offline.
That isn't actually true. The GPL is a license (in other words an implicit contract), but it rests on the right of distribution (a copyright) without which agreement you would be unable to distribute GPL'd software.
Use of GPL'd software doesn't come into it. First of all using a product isn't a copyright, so you don't need to agree to anything in order to do it (with the exception of public performances). Secondly, prohibiting specific uses would be inimical to the free software community.
FWIW, I doubt that use clauses of a standard shrinkwrap license would be enforcable if you made it clear that you didn't intend to be bound by them, and were using the software without a license under the general use provisions of copyright law.
Oh, I quite agree. Copying an MD5Sum of a part of a program is no more deserving of copyright than say copying the file length - that would be absurd on the face of it: I own the length 329466; the length of my new game program -- so if you use that number in any way, I'll sue.
My statement about storing md5 sums being improbable was simply a recognition of the factorial problem... there are simply too many possible MD5sums that could be generated.
The other point, about storing transforms of the original which could be turned into valid md5 sums, but which was not itself the original program was the one I thought would have copyright problems.
You've probably hit the only really viable solution. An md5sum server (or several) could be set up so that you wouldn't even have to download the .exe unless you want to skip
the sum request.
I can't see how you could precalculate the sums unless there are only a limited number of possible requests, and other approaches like including a derivative transform of the original (say reversing every byte in the original file) wouldn't really make it any more legal IIRC.
Here in the SF Bay Area at least, DSL is basically an indirect connection to the ATM backbone, so your quoted transfer rate is also the QoS level of your ATM channel. My quoted rate is 384/128, but in fact I typically get 1.5Mbps downlink (never more than 128 up though, probably to keep businesses from hosting their web sites on consumer oriented DSL.)
I don't know about IE, but Netscape most certainly does allow the user direct control over what root CA's he or she trusts. The default is set up for you to trust all of the normal ones, but go to:
That is all there is to it...
GTK has been ported to Windows, but that is a far cry from GNOME which is not a toolkit, but a desktop environment.
A better analogy than the M&M's would be the airplane passenger who jokingly mentions that he plans to hijack an airplane.
Hundreds of people are delayed while the airplane is searched for explosives, plus there is the cost of security guards to hold the person in custody, and the staff to complete the search.
That is easily $20k worth of damage, especially when multiplied by the number of of people who visit a busy web site (as opposed to the ~200 that might be delayed at the airport.)
MIT-SHM
Check your X server; I'm sure that you are already running with the X shared memory extension. The faster game libraries already use shared memory instead of network traffic to directly update the display.
I've been reading about Berlin for years. But to tell the truth, I wouldn't be interested in it even if the project does eventually start to go somewhere. I like X; I like its network transparency; I like the layered approach to its APIs; I like its seperation of policy from mechanics.
GNOME could never be ported to Windows, and virtual window managers on Windows are a horrible kludge.
It seems to me that fixing the problems in X around color management and font support is a much better approach than taking away all of the advantages of X and replacing them with just a clone of Windows.
I think that the official explanation is unreasonable because it implies that the NSA was unaware of the security impact of having two keys, one of which is effectively never used. (Namely that the latter can be replaced with another key in the binary, thus bypassing the foreign DLL prevention.)
Personally I don't think the NSA would be that blind unless the key was inserted at the last minute just for their use (which would have a psychological blinding effect.) But it could be as you say; the NSA might have simply f--cked up.
Even if you count the NSA key as belonging to the NSA, it really isn't likely to be a back door.
The way that Microsoft managed to get their software exported despite potentially strong crypto was that they could inhibit companies from loading arbitrary strength crypto by requiring the library to be signed.
As a result it isn't possible for a foreign windows user to load e.g. an open source crypto library, since it won't have the appropriate signature.
Now it stands to reason that the NSA wouldn't want to get their internal test crypto libraries signed by microsoft every time they want to test a new algorithm, so MS might well have added an extra load key so that the NSA could load their own libraries.
But being able to load a new library doesn't make it a back door. Normally you would prefer it if you could load any library as a crypto service provider. Adding the extra key only allows an additional set of libraries to be loaded, it doesn't of itself insert anything untoward in your operating system.
What you didn't notice was that OT-III was registered with the copyright office as 170 odd individual creative works, one work per paragraph, each paragraph three lines long.
Which letter of which word would you like to excerpt so as not to quote more than is permissible by fair use?
If it were me, I'd probably start it off just in data collection mode. Examine how many times a machine is upgraded without the same ether card, etc. then when you've collected data for a while you can target the +2 sigma abusers.
Say most users reinstall windows every 6 months, and 98% install no more than once every two months. Disallow reinstalls more frequently than that and it only pisses off 2% of the users, and those were probably pirates anyway.
In other words, I think the reason they haven't said what constitutes new hardware is because they haven't decided yet, and won't decide until they see the initial set of data.
Anyone got a couple of spare lawyers looking for a fun afternoon or twenty?
Optimistically Carly is trying to gather more effort around a new strategic direction for HP's software, and Openmail didn't match that strategy.
Pessimistically Openmail was strategically valuable but was under intense competition by other companies who understand better than HP how valuable it is and forced it into unprofitability.
HP as a corporation is definitely moving in the first direction, but historically we've been more in the second (especially wrt. software.) Whether the internal friction of reinventing the corporation places this more in the first camp or more in the second I can't guess, but I sure hope it isn't as the previous poster said; simply a matter of projected profit. The implication would be that HP is incapable of forming and executing on a strategy, which is something I don't believe.