If I may paraphrase your argument, you're saying it is unethical to contribute to free/open source software, because it benefits everybody, including people who work for the TIA.
I think that's silly.
What other products, other than operating system software, does the TIA use? Are the makers of all those other products also committing an ethical breach?
I believe that contributing to free/open source software is ethically good. Making the world a better place is a good thing. Generosity is a good thing. If your main concern in distributing free software that you write is: how can I manipulate the licence terms to hurt those people that I don't like, then your ethical system is in serious need of debugging.
There is a good pragmatic reason why the Free Software and Open Source rules forbid us to put restrictions into our licences forbidding our enemies from using our software. If we did that, then a software distribution containing software from thousands of different authors (like Red Hat) would have a combined enemies list that would probably prohibit just about everybody from using the software. But beyond that, I also think such restrictions are unethical.
This technique was discovered by a grad student at a certain Canadian university back in the late seventies. As a result, when I was a student in the eighties, I and several of my friends had a master key that opened pretty near every door on campus. We had a lot of fun exploring the steam tunnels and dodging security guards.
The funny thing is, the lock system was not designed to have a single master key. Instead, there was supposed to be a different master key for each building. The campus wide master key was an "emergent property" of the similarities between the various building master keys.
Only students possessed this master key:-)
I still have the key, but it's not so useful any more, as they've changed many of the locks.
Doug Moen
Here are the numbers: 5th best ST movie ever!
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
·
· Score: 2, Troll
Here are the IMDB ratings for all 10 movies.
It's the worst even-numbered movie ever released, but it still beats all of the odd-numbered movies. Note that the even/odd rule still applies.
#10 Nemesis: 6.5 (based on 52 votes)
#9 Insurrection 6.3
#8 First Contact 7.2
#7 Generations 6.1
#6 Undiscovered Country 6.8
#5 The Final Frontier 4.7
#4 The Voyage Home 7.0
#3 Search for Spock 6.1
#2 Wrath of Khan 7.5
#1 The Motionless Picture 5.7
The article says:
The trial this week has been dominated by the prosecution's painstaking attempts to argue that Johansen deliberately contributed to the removal of copy protection of DVD films leading to their free distribution on the Internet.
But as far as I know, you don't need to decrypt a DVD in order to pirate it.
You can just copy the encrypted data,
optionally post it on the internet for your friends to copy, then burn the encrypted data onto a blank DVD.
Isn't that right?
If that's true, then the prosecution case
is considerably weakened.
You only need deCSS if you want to convert the video to another, more convenient format.
If a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios.
The GPL requires that you distribute *all* of the sources used to generate an executable. In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key.
(note: IANAL)
And Perforce offers an Open Source license to any project that develops Open Source.
I followed the link, and no they don't.
Perforce offers a binary only licence that terminates after 1 year to individuals working on Open Source projects.
The license can be renewed at Perforce's discretion.
Perforce doesn't give you an Open Source licence to their product, because there is no source, and there is a termination clause.
Although I like Perforce,
I wouldn't base an Open Source project on it
based on this kind of licence.
No source, so you can't customize it.
If Perforce goes away, or the management team changes their strategy, then you are screwed.
As soon as an iPod with Ogg Vorbis is released, you can bet the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers will be scrambling
That sounds about right.
Although it would be much cooler if
the hacker community were to put Ogg Vorbis
on the iPod first.
I'd be happier to buy an iPod if I knew
I could run open source software on it,
including my choice of transcoder.
It would be nice if FLAC were also available
(Ogg Vorbis is lossy, FLAC isn't).
So what I really want is for Apple to publish
the APIs for programming the iPod.
>> How does putting an interop chip in your PS1, writing a program on your PC, compiling it with GCC, burning it to a CD, and putting it in the PS1's drive violate Sony's copyright?
> Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware). According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission - at least, they say linking against other code requires that code's author's permission. (That's how the GPL bans non-GPL code calling GPLed libraries, unlike the LGPL...)
That's not right. The FSF says that distributing a combined work consisting of copyrighted code plus your code requires the permission of the copyright owner. But there is no distribution of a combined work when you run your own software on a modded PS1.
Anyway, we already know that the copyright violation in this case was selling pirated games.
The reviewer said: Blunden makes sure to cover every topic related to virtual machines in extreme depth....
Released in March 2002, this book is extremely up to date.
I couldn't agree less. I flipped through the book in the bookstore, and I wasn't impressed. Blunden is a C/Assembly language programmer with little understanding of the requirements that a modern programming language places on a virtual machine.
So his virtual machine is single threaded and runs in a fixed block of address space, with a fixed size code and data section, a growable stack, and a growable explicitly managed heap. This is fine if the target language is C or assembly language, but not so fine if you want garbage collection, threads, closures, first class continuations, or any of those other language features that were considered cutting edge back in the 1970s. How does his system link to external code, like the system calls in libc? Well, there are 11 "interrupts" called int0 through int10, sort of like the DOS system call interface.
His explanation of why he doesn't support garbage collection is pretty muddled: basically, he's not comfortable with the idea, and doesn't think its practical.
Although I think that a register machine probably is better than a stack machine for this kind of system, he gives none of the arguments I was expecting to see to support this design decision. Instead, we get vague handwaving: apparently, he's more comfortable with register machines, because that's what he's used to.
Sarah is a security researcher for Symantec.
She doesn't need to rely on public sources to get information about the latest exploits, because Symantec has a huge market share and lots of customers: Symantec can get this information directly from their customers and other contacts.
Security researchers who don't work for dominant companies like Symantec aren't in such a sweet position, and rely on public forums to learn about exploits.
And it's not enough to be told "there is a new virus that attacks X", with the details held secret (eg, known only by Microsoft, Symantec and a few other giants).
Security researchers need precise details of how the exploit works, and they need to see the virus code itself in order to write code for detecting that virus signature, or to protect against certain aspects of its behaviour.
Sarah's proposal is just a way to shut down the competition by criminalizing the only way that independent researchers have for getting information.
Back in the 60's, non-volatile magnetic core memory was used instead of RAM. So the idea of non-volatile memory is actually very old.
With virtual memory hardware, you can write an operating system that simulates non-volatile main memory, using hard disk as a backing store.
What you get is a
Persistent Operating System.
You don't need a file system.
Instead, you store data structures in main memory,
and they persist forever, surviving reboots.
Besides, Darwin won't run on anything else *but* their hardware
Darwin runs on x86 as well.
The interesting thing about Apple is that MacOS X is *not* open source, although the Darwin kernel component is.
The Quartz graphics engine, the Aqua gui layer, and all of the traditional MacOS apis, are not open source.
Microsoft has a product called Interix,
which consists of a Unix subsystem that plugs into the Windows 2000/XP kernel,
plus a large set of Unix utilities.
Microsoft has open sourced their versions of gcc, gdb, etc, because they have to, but they haven't open sourced the BSD based utilities that come with Interix, even though they'd lose little by doing so.
If Microsoft open sourced the entire Interix product (utilities and subsystem), then their operating system would be like Apple's, with an open source Unix component, and a larger proprietary component containing all of the APIs that are special to Windows.
A GPL product can always get away with it, because any addition to the product is a derived work, and all derived works belong to the author of the original work
Nope.
The GPL cannot and does not take legal precedence over copyright law itself. The definition of derived work, and the definition of who owns a work, is the same, regardless of whether the GPL or the BSD licence is used.
If I write a patch to the Linux kernel, then I own the copyright to that patch, unless I explicitly relinquish the copyright. By default, nobody can do anything with my patch without my permission (subject to "fair use" exemptions). Linus cannot put my patch into the Linux kernel unless I give permission. One way for me to do this is to release the patch under the GPL.
The GPL cannot take away my ownership rights to my patch. What the GPL does is to prohibit me from distributing a copy of the Linux kernel with my modifications, unless I release those modifications under a licence compatible with the GPL, or place them in the public domain, or sign over the copyright to my patch to Linus.
This is not a lead up to the release of Windows as open source code.
As I read the article, the only thing the states will be able to do with the source is verify whether or not it is possible to unbundle Internet Explorer from the rest of the operating system. Microsoft says this is impossible; everybody else knows they're lying, but the proof is in the source code.
This is very cool technology. So cool that the photodetector array must be cooled to "well below 1 degree Kelvin" in order to operate. This requires a liquid helium cryostat. So don't expect this to appear in pocket sized cameras any time soon. But it sounds great for astronomy.
Looks good, but I also want a microphone, a speech recognition based interface, an integrated cell phone (eg: "computer phone home"), wireless internet access (now that GSM is generally available everywhere except the U.S.) and a separate full size bluetooth connected keyboard that I can put on my lap or a table and start typing on for tasks that aren't suitable for the voice recognition interface.
BTW, this machine sounds a bit underpowered for decent voice recognition, although I'd like to be proved wrong.
If you want a co-op ISP in your neighbourhood, then just go ahead and set one up. You don't need government handouts or new laws. Just do it.
There are lots of co-ops where I live (Waterloo Ontario). We have a co-op bank, a co-op grocery store, a co-op bike repair shop, etc. We used to have an internet co-op which offered fast 24x7 internet access to its members, but it fell apart when cheap broadband came to town a few years ago. There are quite a few 802.11 co-ops in existence (although not here, that I've heard). The point is, if you want it, then get together with some friends and organize it.
Interesting. I think that a software process can be "strong" (tedious, bureaucratic) without necessary being "good" (ie, effective). Does Microsoft's current process actually deal with the problem of not being able to refactor your code without losing all of your bug fixes? Keeping all of your design history in labrynthine documentation that is difficult to find anything in is expensive, but doesn't solve this particular problem.
Your tangled mass of spaghetti code paths are probably full of almost incomprehensible little design decisions and seemingly out of place declarations and functions, but most of those were probably added as specific fixes for bugs encountered under real-world use.
If you need to make big changes to the code, then you are already hosed. If you have no record of what bugs you fixed, and no way of testing if those bug fixes are still working after you make code changes, then keeping all of your spagetti in place is no guarantee that you won't re-introduce bugs later on.
The Code Nazi approach is to write a unit test for each bug you fix. And you have an easy way to re-run all of your unit tests. After you make a big change, you can test if all of your bug fixes are still working. And now you have the flexibility to refactor your code whenever you want. Which means you can keep your code base clean and elegant, and you'll never reach the crisis point that this group has reached.
This is the approach advocated by Extreme Programming, as well as by other software disciplines.
This advice makes sense if you are embedded in a culture like Microsoft, where you have a huge quantity of legacy code, and a really shitty software process. Microsoft has no record of what design decisions were responsible for making their code the way it is; they just have the code itself. They can't change it because they don't know what they might break by doing this.
If you enforce a good software process for every line of code that is written, then you have more flexibility. For example, suppose that you use Extreme Programming. Then you will have a unit tests for every bug that was fixed. Each time you re-run the unit tests, you find out if any of your previous bug fixes have become undone. This gives you the freedom to refactor your code whenever it needs to be refactored.
A few weeks ago, I encountered "spam" on google. 8 of the top 10 links had been captured by a spammer using "cloaking" technology:
One method, called "cloaking," sets up a dummy page including lots of relevant information for keywords hidden through a special link. The cloaked page is fed to the search engine to boost a site's search ranking for specific terms such as "games," "sports" or "books." When surfers go to that link, however, they see a page that is different from the one indexed by the crawler.
I can't show you what it looks like, since Google has already fixed the problem.
What I wanted then was a "moderate" button I could click beside the link to indicate that it was spam. With a voting system like this, Google could locate and remove spam a lot quicker. Maybe that's what this is all about.
Doug Moen.
Ternary Floating Point may be better
on
Ternary Computing
·
· Score: 1
What Goldberg shows is that base 2 is more efficient than base 10 or 16 on a binary machine.
He does not show that base 2 floating point on a binary machine is superior to base 3 floating point on a ternary machine.
Because of the wonderful properties of balanced ternary representation, I suspect the opposite. Base 3 balanced ternary floating point may well turn out to have nicer properties, and the hardware for adds, multiplies, etc, might well be more efficient.
Okay, you work for an imaging company, and you're obsessive about image quality. Most people don't give a damn about image quality, and it's "most people" who are the target market for this thing.
I have a 1.2 megapixel camera, but I always run it in.3 megapixel mode, because its good enough for the family snapshots I take, and because the ability to cram a huge number of photos onto a single memory card is more important than having more than 640x480 pixels of resolution. I will also note that my parents get prints made from my 640x480 snapshots and they think the quality is comparable to film quality. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant, it's the perception that counts.
So even though your comments about image quality are probably correct, I don't expect the average consumer who is paying $16 for one of these devices is going to care.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's silly. What other products, other than operating system software, does the TIA use? Are the makers of all those other products also committing an ethical breach?
I believe that contributing to free/open source software is ethically good. Making the world a better place is a good thing. Generosity is a good thing. If your main concern in distributing free software that you write is: how can I manipulate the licence terms to hurt those people that I don't like, then your ethical system is in serious need of debugging.
There is a good pragmatic reason why the Free Software and Open Source rules forbid us to put restrictions into our licences forbidding our enemies from using our software. If we did that, then a software distribution containing software from thousands of different authors (like Red Hat) would have a combined enemies list that would probably prohibit just about everybody from using the software. But beyond that, I also think such restrictions are unethical.
Doug Moen.
The funny thing is, the lock system was not designed to have a single master key. Instead, there was supposed to be a different master key for each building. The campus wide master key was an "emergent property" of the similarities between the various building master keys. Only students possessed this master key :-)
I still have the key, but it's not so useful any more, as they've changed many of the locks.
Doug Moen
Here are the IMDB ratings for all 10 movies.
It's the worst even-numbered movie ever released,
but it still beats all of the odd-numbered movies. Note that the even/odd rule still applies.
#10 Nemesis: 6.5 (based on 52 votes)
#9 Insurrection 6.3
#8 First Contact 7.2
#7 Generations 6.1
#6 Undiscovered Country 6.8
#5 The Final Frontier 4.7
#4 The Voyage Home 7.0
#3 Search for Spock 6.1
#2 Wrath of Khan 7.5
#1 The Motionless Picture 5.7
Doug Moen.
The article says: The trial this week has been dominated by the prosecution's painstaking attempts to argue that Johansen deliberately contributed to the removal of copy protection of DVD films leading to their free distribution on the Internet.
But as far as I know, you don't need to decrypt a DVD in order to pirate it. You can just copy the encrypted data, optionally post it on the internet for your friends to copy, then burn the encrypted data onto a blank DVD. Isn't that right?
If that's true, then the prosecution case is considerably weakened. You only need deCSS if you want to convert the video to another, more convenient format.
Doug Moen
If a motherboard company took the LinuxBIOS source, modified it to lock out the user and perform DRM functions, and submitted it to MS for signing. Then LinuxBIOS could be installed in a palladium machine. Of course, the mobo company would still have to release the source code to their mod under the GPL, but that's not going to do the end user any good -- it won't get them a signed AND free bios.
The GPL requires that you distribute *all* of the sources used to generate an executable. In this case, the executable includes a digital signature (it isn't runnable without the digital signature), and the source used to generate that digital signature is Microsoft's private key. (note: IANAL)
Doug Moen.
I followed the link, and no they don't. Perforce offers a binary only licence that terminates after 1 year to individuals working on Open Source projects. The license can be renewed at Perforce's discretion. Perforce doesn't give you an Open Source licence to their product, because there is no source, and there is a termination clause.
Although I like Perforce, I wouldn't base an Open Source project on it based on this kind of licence. No source, so you can't customize it. If Perforce goes away, or the management team changes their strategy, then you are screwed.
Doug Moen
I know of one AOL Grandma who has only one troubleshooting strategy: she power cycles her iMac whenever she has a computer problem.
Doug Moen
That sounds about right. Although it would be much cooler if the hacker community were to put Ogg Vorbis on the iPod first. I'd be happier to buy an iPod if I knew I could run open source software on it, including my choice of transcoder. It would be nice if FLAC were also available (Ogg Vorbis is lossy, FLAC isn't).
So what I really want is for Apple to publish the APIs for programming the iPod.
Doug Moen
> Your program is linking against Sony's code (the PS1's firmware). According to the FSF, this requires Sony's permission - at least, they say linking against other code requires that code's author's permission. (That's how the GPL bans non-GPL code calling GPLed libraries, unlike the LGPL...)
That's not right. The FSF says that distributing a combined work consisting of copyrighted code plus your code requires the permission of the copyright owner.
But there is no distribution of a combined work when you run your own software on a modded PS1.
Anyway, we already know that the copyright violation in this case was selling pirated games.
Doug Moen.
I couldn't agree less. I flipped through the book in the bookstore, and I wasn't impressed. Blunden is a C/Assembly language programmer with little understanding of the requirements that a modern programming language places on a virtual machine. So his virtual machine is single threaded and runs in a fixed block of address space, with a fixed size code and data section, a growable stack, and a growable explicitly managed heap. This is fine if the target language is C or assembly language, but not so fine if you want garbage collection, threads, closures, first class continuations, or any of those other language features that were considered cutting edge back in the 1970s. How does his system link to external code, like the system calls in libc? Well, there are 11 "interrupts" called int0 through int10, sort of like the DOS system call interface.
His explanation of why he doesn't support garbage collection is pretty muddled: basically, he's not comfortable with the idea, and doesn't think its practical.
Although I think that a register machine probably is better than a stack machine for this kind of system, he gives none of the arguments I was expecting to see to support this design decision. Instead, we get vague handwaving: apparently, he's more comfortable with register machines, because that's what he's used to.
Doug Moen
Security researchers who don't work for dominant companies like Symantec aren't in such a sweet position, and rely on public forums to learn about exploits. And it's not enough to be told "there is a new virus that attacks X", with the details held secret (eg, known only by Microsoft, Symantec and a few other giants). Security researchers need precise details of how the exploit works, and they need to see the virus code itself in order to write code for detecting that virus signature, or to protect against certain aspects of its behaviour.
Sarah's proposal is just a way to shut down the competition by criminalizing the only way that independent researchers have for getting information.
Doug Moen
With virtual memory hardware, you can write an operating system that simulates non-volatile main memory, using hard disk as a backing store. What you get is a Persistent Operating System. You don't need a file system. Instead, you store data structures in main memory, and they persist forever, surviving reboots.
Doug Moen.
Darwin runs on x86 as well.
The interesting thing about Apple is that MacOS X is *not* open source, although the Darwin kernel component is. The Quartz graphics engine, the Aqua gui layer, and all of the traditional MacOS apis, are not open source.
Microsoft has a product called Interix, which consists of a Unix subsystem that plugs into the Windows 2000/XP kernel, plus a large set of Unix utilities. Microsoft has open sourced their versions of gcc, gdb, etc, because they have to, but they haven't open sourced the BSD based utilities that come with Interix, even though they'd lose little by doing so.
If Microsoft open sourced the entire Interix product (utilities and subsystem), then their operating system would be like Apple's, with an open source Unix component, and a larger proprietary component containing all of the APIs that are special to Windows.
Doug Moen
Nope.
The GPL cannot and does not take legal precedence over copyright law itself. The definition of derived work, and the definition of who owns a work, is the same, regardless of whether the GPL or the BSD licence is used.
If I write a patch to the Linux kernel, then I own the copyright to that patch, unless I explicitly relinquish the copyright. By default, nobody can do anything with my patch without my permission (subject to "fair use" exemptions). Linus cannot put my patch into the Linux kernel unless I give permission. One way for me to do this is to release the patch under the GPL.
The GPL cannot take away my ownership rights to my patch. What the GPL does is to prohibit me from distributing a copy of the Linux kernel with my modifications, unless I release those modifications under a licence compatible with the GPL, or place them in the public domain, or sign over the copyright to my patch to Linus.
Doug Moen
This is not a lead up to the release of Windows as open source code.
As I read the article, the only thing the states will be able to do with the source is verify whether or not it is possible to unbundle Internet Explorer from the rest of the operating system. Microsoft says this is impossible; everybody else knows they're lying, but the proof is in the source code.
This is very cool technology. So cool that the photodetector array must be cooled to "well below 1 degree Kelvin" in order to operate. This requires a liquid helium cryostat. So don't expect this to appear in pocket sized cameras any time soon. But it sounds great for astronomy.
Doug Moen
Looks good, but I also want a microphone, a speech recognition based interface, an integrated cell phone (eg: "computer phone home"), wireless internet access (now that GSM is generally available everywhere except the U.S.) and a separate full size bluetooth connected keyboard that I can put on my lap or a table and start typing on for tasks that aren't suitable for the voice recognition interface.
BTW, this machine sounds a bit underpowered for decent voice recognition, although I'd like to be proved wrong.
Doug Moen.
If you want a co-op ISP in your neighbourhood, then just go ahead and set one up. You don't need government handouts or new laws. Just do it.
There are lots of co-ops where I live (Waterloo Ontario). We have a co-op bank, a co-op grocery store, a co-op bike repair shop, etc. We used to have an internet co-op which offered fast 24x7 internet access to its members, but it fell apart when cheap broadband came to town a few years ago. There are quite a few 802.11 co-ops in existence (although not here, that I've heard). The point is, if you want it, then get together with some friends and organize it.
Doug Moen.
I have broadband. I live in Canada, and in my town, there is fierce competion between broadband providers.
I also run junkbuster, which speeds up page loading, and I don't have to look at X10 ads. You can too. Check out www.junkbuster.org.
Doug Moen.
Interesting. I think that a software process can be "strong" (tedious, bureaucratic) without necessary being "good" (ie, effective). Does Microsoft's current process actually deal with the problem of not being able to refactor your code without losing all of your bug fixes? Keeping all of your design history in labrynthine documentation that is difficult to find anything in is expensive, but doesn't solve this particular problem.
Doug Moen.
If you need to make big changes to the code, then you are already hosed. If you have no record of what bugs you fixed, and no way of testing if those bug fixes are still working after you make code changes, then keeping all of your spagetti in place is no guarantee that you won't re-introduce bugs later on.
The Code Nazi approach is to write a unit test for each bug you fix. And you have an easy way to re-run all of your unit tests. After you make a big change, you can test if all of your bug fixes are still working. And now you have the flexibility to refactor your code whenever you want. Which means you can keep your code base clean and elegant, and you'll never reach the crisis point that this group has reached. This is the approach advocated by Extreme Programming, as well as by other software disciplines.
Doug Moen
This advice makes sense if you are embedded in a culture like Microsoft, where you have a huge quantity of legacy code, and a really shitty software process. Microsoft has no record of what design decisions were responsible for making their code the way it is; they just have the code itself. They can't change it because they don't know what they might break by doing this.
If you enforce a good software process for every line of code that is written, then you have more flexibility. For example, suppose that you use Extreme Programming. Then you will have a unit tests for every bug that was fixed. Each time you re-run the unit tests, you find out if any of your previous bug fixes have become undone. This gives you the freedom to refactor your code whenever it needs to be refactored.
Doug Moen.
What I wanted then was a "moderate" button I could click beside the link to indicate that it was spam. With a voting system like this, Google could locate and remove spam a lot quicker. Maybe that's what this is all about.
Doug Moen.
What Goldberg shows is that base 2 is more efficient than base 10 or 16 on a binary machine.
He does not show that base 2 floating point on a binary machine is superior to base 3 floating point on a ternary machine.
Because of the wonderful properties of balanced ternary representation, I suspect the opposite. Base 3 balanced ternary floating point may well turn out to have nicer properties, and the hardware for adds, multiplies, etc, might well be more efficient.
Doug Moen
Okay, you work for an imaging company, and you're obsessive about image quality. Most people don't give a damn about image quality, and it's "most people" who are the target market for this thing.
.3 megapixel mode, because its good enough for the family snapshots I take, and because the ability to cram a huge number of photos onto a single memory card is more important than having more than 640x480 pixels of resolution. I will also note that my parents get prints made from my 640x480 snapshots and they think the quality is comparable to film quality. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant, it's the perception that counts.
I have a 1.2 megapixel camera, but I always run it in
So even though your comments about image quality are probably correct, I don't expect the average consumer who is paying $16 for one of these devices is going to care.
Doug Moen