You have a point. In addition, we should ask ourselves: "Do we really need XML if it doesn't fit in our established technology framework?"
Often, the answer is a plain "No", from a technical standpoint. However, you have to market your product somehow, and this means that you need Java, Linux, LDAP, XML, and SOAP. (As time passes, some entries will drop off the beginning of this list, and others will show up at the end.)
I tried to lern Lisp using XLISP (despite having an old book on Lisp for reference), but I failed. Somehow, nothing worked as I expected. Probably I didn't know that XLISP was, despite its name, a Scheme dialect.
Instead I learnt FORTH (using the great F-PC system for PCs), and returned to Lisp later when I encountered Emacs 19.
Ada supports garbage collection, but doesn't mandate it in the language standard.
The genericity model (which uses explicit instantiation) makes it a bit easier to write good generics than other approaches (for example, implicit instantiation used by C++). In addition, non of the other languages you cited support generics at all.
The module system is rather unique in its facilities to ensure that all modules are initialized in the correct oder. Most programming languages do not address the problem of initialization at all.
When Ada was designed, there where machines in frequent use which were not able to deal with the "[]" characters (and there are still such machines, most of them embedded devices using ISO 646-IRV, though), so other characters would have to be used. However, I don't know why the designers decided to unify function calls and array indexing. The Ada 83 Rationale refers to research papers on this issue, but I haven't read them.
Of course, using "[]" or "()" doesn't make writing an Ada compiler much harder. Of course, it adds an interesting twist to the name resolution rules, but even without this unification, they would still be rather complex.
By the way, the correct spelling is "Ada", it's not an abbreviation, but a woman's name.
The problem is that many software, libraries, and hand-made filters validate domain names based on simple rules like "only 0-9, a-z, dots, and it should end by two characters or com/net/org/edu" .
This also explains why MILNET hosts are hidden in the dark.
Common implementations of DNS and even the protocol itself have quite a number of flaws which make DNS spoofing rather easy. DNS spoofing is targeted at the clients, and the root servers have nothing to do with it, so you can't solve this problem at the root servers. DNSSEC won't solve it completely either because no one expects clients to move to DNSSEC anytime soon (you don't install full resolvers on clients, either).
In additions, occasionally, DNS database entries are wrong (although the servers are operating correctly), due to maintenance errors or social engineering attacks. Security on the root servers or even DNSSEC does not address this problem at all.
So the best solution is not to base any authentication on DNS names at all. (Then there's hardly any need for DNSSEC either.) Of course, quite a few Internet users rely heavily on the non-existent DNS security. They fetch mail using unencrypted POP3, use HTTP-based mail solutions, and so on, and if someone is able to redirect their connections as a consequence of DNS spoofing, he can obtain their passwords pretty easily. But reasonable secure solutions (e.g. TLS and server certificates) already exist.
Some vendor-contributed parts of Linux drivers were released under a BSD-like license (without the advertising clause). And Be could have used all the FreeBSD drivers without restriction.
Gee, and how many vendors out there were producing non-Windows drivers? This is where I would have focused.
When BeOS/x86 was released, there were at least two source code repositories with drivers for a wide range of hardware, I think much wider than what BeOS finally supported. It's a shame that BeOS didn't reuse this source code (they did this only for the boot loader, and even committed copyright infringement). Failing to recognize the potential of the existing free operating system is probably the big mistake of the Be management. Be is probably the second company (after Coherent) which was killed by the free operating system community. Consider the following: In the 90s, when you didn't want to run Windows on your PC and you were willing to take the trouble to run one of the alternative operating systems, which system did you choose? Probably not BeOS, and perhaps GNU/Linux or BSD.
And I doubt that nowadays, most Linux drivers are reverse engineered. At least for the hardware I use, vendors provided specs. This might be a conincidence, but I doubt it.
On what basis should they sue Microsoft? Just because there's a successful company and you are unsuccessful, this doesn't mean that your competitor has broken the law. Maybe the competitor is just better at, say, marketing its products.
IIRC, the first release of BeOS was announced when Microsoft didn't have a grip on the desktop market yet. The first version didn't run on PCs, either, and it took ages before Be was able to provide the necessary drivers for the PC version of BeOS. I don't think they can blame Microsoft for that.
In addition, quite a significant part of the Be community (if a community ever existed) believed that BeOS was a multimedia operating system, for doing professional audio and video stuff, even long after Be had announced that they weretargeting the Internet appliances market. I don't think that the Be community ever recovered from this switch.
I'm not forced to run XP or WMA, and as long as the general purpose computer exists, copy-prevention schemes such as DRMv2 will be broken over and over again.
Of course, you can't use your computer to play WMA data files if you don't run one of the newer Windows versions on it, but that's the 1995 situation I was referring to: back then, you couldn't do it either, perhaps due to lack of computing power, perhaps due to lack of hardware drivers. And for most people's daily work, this isn't such a severe restriction.
It seems that this is quite close to a Free Software PDA. Of course, there is that huge junk of proprietary Java stuff on it, but perhaps it's usable even without it. The hardware specs are not too overwhelming, though, it seems Sharp is a bit behind Compaq in this area.
JB Were's web site is partly dysfunctional, so not much information on this one.
The City of Largo has just succesfully migrated to KDE desktops at the end of August. It's a bit hard to believe that they switch again after such a short time, and that his wasn't addressed in Valentine's memo at all (maybe it's about the servers, who knows, but then things would be really, really bizarre).
Ameritrade has already been a Microsoft customer.
So, if this one is faked, it was faked in a much more credible manner than the previous NTs.
If you are referring to the Linux phenomenon/hype, I don't know.
But if we look at Free Software in the broader sense, the answer is that even Microsoft is not powerful enough to crush the Free Software community. It might be harder than before to use Free Software (because you cannot access some content on the Web, or you cannot use certain hardware), but this would only result in a return to the level of, say 1995.
Of course, there are threats to the Free Software community. The most dangerous one is abolishing the general purpose computer, i.e. a computer on which you decide which software you run and install. Abolishing the general purpose computer is certainly on the agenda of the copyright industry (look at all these copy prevention schemes), but it is not something Microsoft can do alone.
Am I totally missing something? If you really want to know what was changed (if not why), can't you just diff the code of the two versions?
Yes, but that's beyond the capabilities of the average Slashdot poster. Even if you know the vulnerability type and the affected component, it is not immediately obvious if these -/+ lines you are staring at fix a security bug or a simple performance optimization.
On the other hand, most people couldn't care less which has been changed in the kernel. When did kernel ChangeLogs show up? In 1999? Or in 2000? It was pretty late anyway, and I remember that Felix von Leitner was flamed for suggesting them a few years ago, so that you could follow changes to internal interfaces more easily. Of course, ChangeLogs are a nearly a must-have documentation tool, but Linux kernel development is possible without them. (In fact, Linux kernel development deliberately doesn't use a few tools many people consider essential for (operating system development).
This is unacceptable. I could understand a project admin not disclosing trivial changes that didn't go into a release of a product/system, but failing to
disclose non-trivial changes that did go in is inexcusable.
The changes are documented, the patch is available. Non-U.S. citizens can even read the unabridged ChangeLog on the net. So what? If your local legislation doesn't permit you to access some pieces information, and you want to have this information, it's definitely your problem. This isn't something free software developers can deal with. They can warn you and your representatives before passing harmful legislation (if word about it spreads in time), but if such warnings are ignored and annoying laws are pased in some country, it's better to move on and let those who are affected by the mess fight against it.
In any case, pushing people towards breaking the DMCA is no solution at all.
Does this mean that Linux devs and Microsoft agree that full disclosure is bad?
No, Alan's decision simply reflects that full disclosure is already illegal in the U.S. under some circumstances. That's why I think it's very unfair to call Alan's behavior "self-censorship". In fact, it's censorship by the government. I find it hard to believe that publishing ChangeLogs of your own software can conflict with DMCA requirements, but apparently, Alan consulted a lawyer and he told him that it did.
Whether full disclosure is good or bad in general is a completely different question and not much related to the question whether it is legal or illegal in the U.S. now.
reiserfsck is said to reset file systems to a clean state sometimes. Very clean states indead: All files are gone. Of course, this matches the specification (we have metadata consistency after such an operation), but that's not what the user expects.
If the kernel crashes, it is not reasonable to assume that the journaling code worked correctly after the bug occured somewhere in the kernel. After all, random kernel memory could have been overwritten. If the kernel data structures are no longer intact, the kernel (including file system journaling) can no longer work reliably.
It seems that the unit itself is not running PalmOS or Windows CE, you can just transfer data from a PDA to it. And the 190K of RAM are miniscule. IIRC, Microsoft promoted such a gadget a few years ago. It even didn't need infrared data transfer, you could use your PC monitor.
(BTW, the browser check on the Fossil web site fails for me. Sigh.)
ext3fs is really just ext2fs with a journal. This is an advantage in some situations (backwards compatibility, for example). However, other journaling file systems (in particular XFS and ReiserFS) use more advanced data structures than ext2fs/ext3fs for storing metadata. For example, this means that performance of these filesystems is sometimes much, much better when you have got a huge number of files in a single directory.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point. In addition, we should ask ourselves: "Do we really need XML if it doesn't fit in our established technology framework?"
Often, the answer is a plain "No", from a technical standpoint. However, you have to market your product somehow, and this means that you need Java, Linux, LDAP, XML, and SOAP. (As time passes, some entries will drop off the beginning of this list, and others will show up at the end.)
I tried to lern Lisp using XLISP (despite having an old book on Lisp for reference), but I failed. Somehow, nothing worked as I expected. Probably I didn't know that XLISP was, despite its name, a Scheme dialect.
Instead I learnt FORTH (using the great F-PC system for PCs), and returned to Lisp later when I encountered Emacs 19.
SPITBOL 360 (written by Robert Dewar and Kenneth Belcher) has just been released under the GPL.
However, I prefer to use the results of Robert's more recent programming language activities.
Ada supports garbage collection, but doesn't mandate it in the language standard.
The genericity model (which uses explicit instantiation) makes it a bit easier to write good generics than other approaches (for example, implicit instantiation used by C++). In addition, non of the other languages you cited support generics at all.
The module system is rather unique in its facilities to ensure that all modules are initialized in the correct oder. Most programming languages do not address the problem of initialization at all.
When Ada was designed, there where machines in frequent use which were not able to deal with the "[]" characters (and there are still such machines, most of them embedded devices using ISO 646-IRV, though), so other characters would have to be used. However, I don't know why the designers decided to unify function calls and array indexing. The Ada 83 Rationale refers to research papers on this issue, but I haven't read them.
Of course, using "[]" or "()" doesn't make writing an Ada compiler much harder. Of course, it adds an interesting twist to the name resolution rules, but even without this unification, they would still be rather complex.
By the way, the correct spelling is "Ada", it's not an abbreviation, but a woman's name.
It is often said that Ada favors the reader over the writer. Most programmers don't like this because most programmers hate to write.
Ada lacks pattern matching, but it supports garbage collection.
Common implementations of DNS and even the protocol itself have quite a number of flaws which make DNS spoofing rather easy. DNS spoofing is targeted at the clients, and the root servers have nothing to do with it, so you can't solve this problem at the root servers. DNSSEC won't solve it completely either because no one expects clients to move to DNSSEC anytime soon (you don't install full resolvers on clients, either).
In additions, occasionally, DNS database entries are wrong (although the servers are operating correctly), due to maintenance errors or social engineering attacks. Security on the root servers or even DNSSEC does not address this problem at all.
So the best solution is not to base any authentication on DNS names at all. (Then there's hardly any need for DNSSEC either.) Of course, quite a few Internet users rely heavily on the non-existent DNS security. They fetch mail using unencrypted POP3, use HTTP-based mail solutions, and so on, and if someone is able to redirect their connections as a consequence of DNS spoofing, he can obtain their passwords pretty easily. But reasonable secure solutions (e.g. TLS and server certificates) already exist.
Some vendor-contributed parts of Linux drivers were released under a BSD-like license (without the advertising clause). And Be could have used all the FreeBSD drivers without restriction.
And I doubt that nowadays, most Linux drivers are reverse engineered. At least for the hardware I use, vendors provided specs. This might be a conincidence, but I doubt it.
On what basis should they sue Microsoft? Just because there's a successful company and you are unsuccessful, this doesn't mean that your competitor has broken the law. Maybe the competitor is just better at, say, marketing its products.
IIRC, the first release of BeOS was announced when Microsoft didn't have a grip on the desktop market yet. The first version didn't run on PCs, either, and it took ages before Be was able to provide the necessary drivers for the PC version of BeOS. I don't think they can blame Microsoft for that.
In addition, quite a significant part of the Be community (if a community ever existed) believed that BeOS was a multimedia operating system, for doing professional audio and video stuff, even long after Be had announced that they weretargeting the Internet appliances market. I don't think that the Be community ever recovered from this switch.
I'm not forced to run XP or WMA, and as long as the general purpose computer exists, copy-prevention schemes such as DRMv2 will be broken over and over again.
Of course, you can't use your computer to play WMA data files if you don't run one of the newer Windows versions on it, but that's the 1995 situation I was referring to: back then, you couldn't do it either, perhaps due to lack of computing power, perhaps due to lack of hardware drivers. And for most people's daily work, this isn't such a severe restriction.
(There's also the Trolltech announcement, if you are interested in some pictures.)
Brian Valentine exists at Microsoft, he's the Senior Vice President of the Windows Devision. Would he address his colleagues in such a way? Why not.
JB Were's web site is partly dysfunctional, so not much information on this one. The City of Largo has just succesfully migrated to KDE desktops at the end of August. It's a bit hard to believe that they switch again after such a short time, and that his wasn't addressed in Valentine's memo at all (maybe it's about the servers, who knows, but then things would be really, really bizarre). Ameritrade has already been a Microsoft customer.
So, if this one is faked, it was faked in a much more credible manner than the previous NTs.
If you are referring to the Linux phenomenon/hype, I don't know.
But if we look at Free Software in the broader sense, the answer is that even Microsoft is not powerful enough to crush the Free Software community. It might be harder than before to use Free Software (because you cannot access some content on the Web, or you cannot use certain hardware), but this would only result in a return to the level of, say 1995.
Of course, there are threats to the Free Software community. The most dangerous one is abolishing the general purpose computer, i.e. a computer on which you decide which software you run and install. Abolishing the general purpose computer is certainly on the agenda of the copyright industry (look at all these copy prevention schemes), but it is not something Microsoft can do alone.
On the other hand, most people couldn't care less which has been changed in the kernel. When did kernel ChangeLogs show up? In 1999? Or in 2000? It was pretty late anyway, and I remember that Felix von Leitner was flamed for suggesting them a few years ago, so that you could follow changes to internal interfaces more easily. Of course, ChangeLogs are a nearly a must-have documentation tool, but Linux kernel development is possible without them. (In fact, Linux kernel development deliberately doesn't use a few tools many people consider essential for (operating system development).
In any case, pushing people towards breaking the DMCA is no solution at all.
Whether full disclosure is good or bad in general is a completely different question and not much related to the question whether it is legal or illegal in the U.S. now.
reiserfsck is said to reset file systems to a clean state sometimes. Very clean states indead: All files are gone. Of course, this matches the specification (we have metadata consistency after such an operation), but that's not what the user expects.
If the kernel crashes, it is not reasonable to assume that the journaling code worked correctly after the bug occured somewhere in the kernel. After all, random kernel memory could have been overwritten. If the kernel data structures are no longer intact, the kernel (including file system journaling) can no longer work reliably.
It seems that the unit itself is not running PalmOS or Windows CE, you can just transfer data from a PDA to it. And the 190K of RAM are miniscule. IIRC, Microsoft promoted such a gadget a few years ago. It even didn't need infrared data transfer, you could use your PC monitor.
(BTW, the browser check on the Fossil web site fails for me. Sigh.)
ext3fs is really just ext2fs with a journal. This is an advantage in some situations (backwards compatibility, for example). However, other journaling file systems (in particular XFS and ReiserFS) use more advanced data structures than ext2fs/ext3fs for storing metadata. For example, this means that performance of these filesystems is sometimes much, much better when you have got a huge number of files in a single directory.