Indeed. The problem is that our governments are passing these laws under the veil of anti-terrorism, but it's putting the whole of society in fear; just what the terrorists want.
Interesting idea. Though I think we've always had, and still have the expectation that in public we can be observed by anyone; whether they are visible or not. The difference now is that people are fearing what the government are going to do with that information.
They say that if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, but everyone does something wrong (e.g. downloading music). With the surveillance nation, you could theoretically be caught for wrongdoings that you didn't even realize were wrong. Ignorance isn't a defense in law, but to know every stupid little law is impossible.
Take speeding for example. Sometimes breaking the speed limit isn't unsafe. There are some roads that have asinine speed limits, and curiously they also tend to have a speed camera. Now, you see people checking their speedo every 20 seconds to ensure they're not going over the limit. The reason they fear the speed cameras isn't because they hate being observed in public, it's because they might be prosecuted for an extremely silly reason; a reason where a police officer might have given them the benefit of the doubt in the past, or at most a warning.
As humans, we're not perfect. Occasionally we might make mistakes, not big ones, but mistakes nevertheless. Particularly given the amount of dumb laws, it's very reasonable to worry about the government having the ability to observe you wherever you are in public, even if you don't expect any form of privacy. Even if they don't prosecute everyone, it's a worry that some police officer might dislike you and use the CCTV tapes to find something to convict you on. The second worry is if people misinterpret your actions, as you mentioned "reaching for a concealed explosive" or "intent to expose oneself in public". This isn't because people worry about privacy, it's because they worry about the government and police forces misusing information.
They need lots of things, and a laptop can certainly help with some of the things you mentioned.
educational/vocational/agricultural training.
didn't have the money for basic materials like pencils for lessons in reading and writing The OLPC project is targetted at those who are in a situation where they've got food, and life's necessities but now need help becoming self sustaining... this is done through education. With these fancy laptops, it's possible that they won't need to spend nearly as much on paper and resources, as well as providing a great educational link to the internet.
I personally use an open wireless network. I trust my open wireless network as much as I trust my ISP and unsecure wired network, and all sensitive data that I throw around internally is securely encrypted or otherwise done through a secure tunnel. If I need to put a password I care about into a HTTP site, and I want to minimize risk, I just use my proxy, which is directly and securely* wired into the switch. Generally, if you have a large wired network, you need to make the assumption that any piece of cable not in a secure room could be spliced and packets logged.
Of course, considering a large amount of web traffic is HTTP when it should be HTTPS, and certain operating systems expose services onto the network which they probably shouldnt, it's probably a bit irresponsible to suggest that home users leave their stuff unencrypted. Personally, the reason I run an open AP is because open APs have helped me in the past. There's a form of QoS to stop people abusing and give priority to certain computers on my network.
* Considering it's a house, 'secure' means it's in a locked cupboard;)
If IPv4 networks worked in 1980... it's 27 years later, I think computers can handle the increased memory requirements (and they do)
IPv6 has Jumbograms
IPv6 is for where every electronic device has one (or more) IP address, plus you generally need to assume at least 50% more than required for expansion purposes if you're an ISP.
IP network have a MINIMUM MTU of 576 bytes... you can increase that
Cisco will update their routers over the next 4 years... Corporate greediness isn't the fault of IPv6
That's strange. The main aspects I like about my Mac are the menu placement and the way the dock+expose manages applications and windows.
The Mac argument for zoom is that noone wants maximised windows... which is true when you really think about it. Most Windows or indeed Linux converts (that includes me) I see are always struggling to maximise their windows until it hits them - they never really wanted it maximised in the first place. Why would they want to maximise Word on a 36" monitor?
I'm not sure why we maximise windows. I think I had two reasons: - It was hard to tell which window was what. I have quite a bit of difficulty distinguishing between windows without decent shadows behind them, which neither Windows or Linux at the time provided. - I always used to use the top of the screen as a sort of mouse reflection point. I knew that if I threw the mouse up there from any point on the screen, it's stop and I could be more precise and lower it carefully to select a menu button... it was easier because the top of the screen was a sort of infinite height target.
The small screen argument has been irrelevant for a few years, I think.
I think the problem you're having is that your mouse settings are crap. Macs are really optimised towards high precision mice optimised so that you can cover the entire screen in a short sweep as well as having good precision when you move slowly. This means quite high acceleration. I can cover over 1000 pixels in about 4cm when I move my mouse sharply, but if I move slowly I can almost move the mouse with 1:1 distance correspondence between mouse distance and screen distance... about 40px/cm.
Plus, try using cmd+tab (and other shortcuts or expose once in a while, though expose is also optimised for decent mouse settings. You do have a point about dual monitor, but I think even mac fanboys tend to accept that it's a PITA for dual monitor. What applications are you using that require menu interaction that frequently? CS3 suite or something? If so, do yourself a favour and learn the shortcuts. It's damn near impossible to use a program with that much menu interaction without learning shortcuts... Windows, Linux or OS X.
Being a Linux/OS X user myself, and having just spent the last 2 hours setting up Ubuntu Gutsy Tribe III on my MacBook Pro, I feel that it's not quite ready to compete with OS X yet. Though, a considerable amount of what you said was factually inaccurate.
Cutting and pasting a table from Excel into Word requires that both applications agree on what the format of that data will be
*nix applications are developed entiresly independantly of one another
That's a bit of an odd thing to say. Applications on all OSes are developed somewhat independently of each other; that's what makes them individual applications. They aren't developed entirely independently of each other, otherwise they plain wouldn't work. They make use of each other's APIs, they talk to each other, they collaborate and depend on each other. A lot of apps on Linux tend to cooperate very well considering that they are developed pretty much all by third parties. 3rd party applications in Windows tend to be pretty bad for cooperation with each other and the OS in general... they tend to try and all compete for the user's attention in a highly uncoordinated way.
if you want to cut something from gnumeric and past it into OOo writer, it's not going to work
Copy and pasting from Excel into Word works fine. As does copy and pasting from OOo Calc into OOo Writer. This covers 95% of use cases. I wonder, though, how well things like Lotus 1-2-3 or Gnumeric/Win32 works when copying into Microsoft Word... I don't know, I've never tried... but I do know that a lot of the cooperation between Microsoft Office and third party applications isn't because of their solid foundation on standards, but rather because support has been hacked into the application. There may well be standards, but Microsoft in particular seem to be pretty good at diverging from even their own standards. Admittedly, clipboard is a bit of a soft spot
X needs a "com"unication layer
There is lots of session/system communication in Linux, all for different purposes and with different ideas. Many are agreed upon and collaborated with. DBUS is one.
"just use Samba or NFS" you say? Ha. Linux security works at the OS level. If you're root on one system and you access a filesystem on another system over NFS you can modify files owned by root without having authenticated. That's a HUGE security flaw and it's been that way forever.
You've fudged an awful lot of information here....
It is true that NFSv3 works this way, but it is also true that NFSv3 should only be used on trusted networks. This is nothing to do with filesystem security being at the OS level. It's true that this is the case, but that's nothing to do with the fact that being root allows you to behave as root on other computers... this is purely the way that NFS is implemented. Filesystem security should be at the OS level... that's merely how applications interact with the filesystem. Applications mediate the network access to filesystems, so if they're running as root and allow external users to access as root, it's their fault. NFSv4 fixes a lot of these flaws.
Samba/SMB/CIFS (or indeed AFS, DFS, or many of the other network filesystems) do not have this problem whatsoever. They work exactly the same as Windows File Sharing and in the case of Samba, is completely cross compatible with Windows.
NFSv4 isn't anywhere near the "just works" stage
I don't think it will ever be, and I think this is the idea of NFS. I don't think NFS was ever meant to be "just
Ah I see. I understand the mathematical meaning of idempotent, but I interpreted Wikipedia as saying there is an alternate comp-sci meaning. Still, maybe GET should be revised to only allow actions that don't change server side state.
a single call or multiple calls produce the same result and the same side effects to the entire system as a whole.
It says here, not just the same effect on the system as a whole, but also the same result.
If you call delete twice on the same record, the second time will have a failure result, rather than a success result like the first. Doesn't this make deletion non-idempotent?
As much as it makes me uneasy, potentially it's not that much less secure than downloading and running those random closed source shareware apps from download.com, and probably just as secure as providing your credit card info to a trusted site over the internet.
But yeah... something about it scares me. Not sure what...
One of the worst problems in my personal experience, worse than phishing, is people sharing passwords between all the untrusted/trusted websites they frequent AND their email; when they sign up to an 'evil' site, it stores their email and password and uses it to access all their stuff.
What'd be nice if Firefox would automatically enter a very complicated random unique password into password signup form, save it, and automatically enter it into relevant password entry boxes. The user wouldn't even need to think about it - they'd just need to remember their master password. This could then be carried around on a USB pen.
Obviously, there are security implications and problems with this, but it's nice as a simple idea - the implementation details could be worked out later. Web developers should be careful to ensure that the pages they develop are architected in a standard way with regards to security architecture, such that firefox knows what forms it should fill, and what forms are in an untrusted (e.g. user generated content) subdirectory. Something like a robots.txt.... like domain/login_forms.xml which contains the URIs that have trusted login forms and their XPATH.
X is being fixed, thankfully (finally). There are a lot of interesting projects, including but not limited to Xegl. Xegl, is the long term goal of the X server and pretty much reduces the X server to a tiny part of the system, basically mediating the input devices, rotation and display management and TCP/over-the-wire GL, if I understand correctly, by using the Embedded GL specifications.
Dumb neutral networks: Packets aren't prioritised, charged, changed in any way based on their data or their endpoints. Proponents of this system assure it's possible provided you have lots of bandwidth available.
QoS neutral network: Packets are prioritised based on the nature of the data involved. VoIP and gaming is prioritised, followed by burst transfers like page requests, followed by bulk transfers like torrents and downloads which eat the spare bandwidth. Higher priority service can't be assigned based on endpoints or based - You can't charge to improve a particular companies traffic.
Tiered network: You can pay for higher quality internet traffic or to be prioritised over other types of traffic.
The first two positions generally seem to be considered in support of network neutrality, whereas the latter against network neutrality. The second one's idea being that latency involved with sending a file is unimportant compared to the latency of a VoIP packet. Essentially, this means VoIP gets prioritised, but it doesn't necessarily mean it impacts on the speed of the file transfer. It's supposed to be a cooperative rather than a capitalist idea, where the reason one type of packet is prioritised over another is for everyone's benefit without. I subscribe to this view, since I believe that no matter how much you increase the bandwidth available, torrent data and file transfers are probably going to increase to fill the available bandwidth, so certain types should be prioritised.
I would, however, be satisfied with either 1 or 2 being implemented. I am completely against 3, though.
6. As an exception to the Sections above, you may also combine or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.
Is this the bit you're referring to? I think this is referring to if you make a new work that is produced from combining statically a library with your work, you can distribute it under your own terms if you allow debugging and modifications. Indeed, the word work seems ambiguous, but with copyright law I think you take the most unrestricted interpretation to be correct if it's ambiguous.
I can't see what in the iPhone can be potentially violating the GPL. I thought they released WebKit changes back to the community and as it's LGPL they don't need to release Safari's entire codebase. Despite GPLv3 being released just before this device was released doesn't mean that all the "GPLv2" or "GPLv2 or higher" software was magically turned into "GPLv3 only" software, so they're not required to make it modifiable. Instead, I believe the distributor can decide what license he wants to distribute the software under.
Unfortunate though. I'd love there to be a problem. If they had to release modification docs then it'd be a hacker's dream.
By managed code, I was referring specifically to the CLI code used by MS.NET. I think MS invented this term, but I'm not certain. Anyway, that's just definitions... replace the "managed code" reference with "Code executed by any CLI compliant interpreter I've used" if you want.
Not in Flash 9/CS3/Actionscript 3. It's far faster than previous versions due to the removal of features like variable watching and a new event system, better class system and an entirely redesigned VM. Infact, in my experience, it's of equal speed or faster than managed code as well as easier to hack for.
Interestingly, the UK Maths Challenge does this. The first 13 questions are relatively easy and you get 5 marks for getting them correct, 0 marks for getting them wrong. The next 10 questions are harder and worth 6 points, but you get -1 or -2 marks for getting them wrong. It really does, in my personal experience, ensure that the people who are great at maths get great scores. There is definitely a correlation between what me and my teachers rate the skill of a particular student, and the score they get in the UKMT Maths Challenges. A far better correlation than what is shown between scores in A level and their skill, which tend to be closer to what the person scores in a memory test.
IPv6 is a completely different protocol that nobody uses. It should be turned off by default.
This is the point.. nobody uses it.. IPv4 will run out soon. People will need to start using IPv6 soon unless we want to have ISP-based NAT which is painful to even think of. I've used such a system before, it's horrendous. Vista, as I understand it, uses Teredo so that people without true IPv6 can access IPv6 addresses by tunneling to Teredo servers using IPv4.
IPv6 is not compatible with IPv4
I know that. I never suggested it was, and the reason I just said a different addressing scheme was because the article suggested that was what applications were having problems with. I said it was a layering problem, since for IPv6 to interfere with IPv4 was strange, considering they are siblings on the network layer, and shouldn't be dependent on each other in any way.
However, to suggest making IPv4 applications IPv6 *compatible* is extremely difficult is a bit overboard. IPv4 applications can be made IPv6 compatible fairly simply, especially when it's just a network client or basic network server application and is well designed and modular. I've done it before, by the way. It's mostly a case of using a different API with roughly equivelant functions. For databases, migrate to 128-bit addresses and use a 6to4 address, or use an alternative table for IPv6 and IPv4 and reference the ID of the record in those tables. The main problem being that a load of applications assumed that IPv4 would exist forever and just placed raw IPv4-specific network calls throughout their application, rather than using a generic connection oriented API or whatever in general.
If you've got a very network intensive application, designing a network API, or are forwarding packets left right and centre or doing stuff like NAT break-outs and broadcasting without an API like bonjour or Avahi, then yes, it will be more difficult, but most of those apps and libs have been ported and you can do open("192.168.0.5") just as easily as open("2001::33a2:64c:0:3ee8:4d8f:78f6"). Even if it's a pure network app, it's not hellish to migrate. Plus, IPv6 has less hacks than IPv4 like breaing from NATs etc. that generally make applications far more difficult to write.
The hardware is the big issue here. Being that chips have been specifically engineered to work with IPv4 and it's still quite difficult to set up an upgrade route for hardware. On the plus side, once we've got IPv6, we probably won't go much further, given that it provides billions (literally) of IP addresses to every living person on Earth. Maybe once we discover extra-terrestrial planets or migrate to mars or something we'll change again. I think though, that networking produts should be more extensible, even though it's difficult. That and optimising applications for IPv6 can be difficult, just as it can be with IPv4.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying IPv6 is perfect and IPv4 is shit, but we do need to migrate to it eventually; we will run out of IPv4 addresses at some point, NAT is horrible anyway, and the third world are becoming more economically advanced as we speak.
Indeed. Though, XMPP (commonly known as Jabber) stands to be able to solve these problems. I suggest you try getting involved with that project. Check out some of their specifications: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/
Examples include: XML-RPC, SOAP, geolocation, vcards, nested sub-groups. Metacontacts: these are the sort of things that Pidgin and Adium are so great at doing, where you combine multiple accounts of the same people into one. Officially supported user mood, activity, tune, avatars, gaming, browsing, encryption, message formatting with XHTML rather than the sort of hack applications for other protocols such as MSN Plus-style applications.
Officially, things like transports work fine to combine your IRC, MSN, AIM, etc. all into one at the server side. It's distributed and inter operable, and the server admin can make his/her own rules for corporation use and such, like no talking outside the business unless you're on breaks. Officially, the file transfer spec has stuff for breaking through firewalls using WebDAV, or if not possible, fallback on sending it through the server (obviously would be throttled though). It supports transfer resuming too. Even things like encrypted offline messaging is supported.
Voice and video works with RTP... using codecs such as Speex for voice and Theora, x264 for video, again using things like STUN to set up the session. SVG whiteboards are in the works too.
The protocol is fabulous, and clients are busy implementing it all. Don't think that Pidgin's jabber performance is representitive of the protocol, it's very out of date and crappy. I think work is going into this though. The hard part is GUI-ifying the features of XMPP, especially when clients such as Jabber insist of doing it with perfect integration to the systems.
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Indeed. The problem is that our governments are passing these laws under the veil of anti-terrorism, but it's putting the whole of society in fear; just what the terrorists want.
Interesting idea. Though I think we've always had, and still have the expectation that in public we can be observed by anyone; whether they are visible or not. The difference now is that people are fearing what the government are going to do with that information.
They say that if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear, but everyone does something wrong (e.g. downloading music). With the surveillance nation, you could theoretically be caught for wrongdoings that you didn't even realize were wrong. Ignorance isn't a defense in law, but to know every stupid little law is impossible.
Take speeding for example. Sometimes breaking the speed limit isn't unsafe. There are some roads that have asinine speed limits, and curiously they also tend to have a speed camera. Now, you see people checking their speedo every 20 seconds to ensure they're not going over the limit. The reason they fear the speed cameras isn't because they hate being observed in public, it's because they might be prosecuted for an extremely silly reason; a reason where a police officer might have given them the benefit of the doubt in the past, or at most a warning.
As humans, we're not perfect. Occasionally we might make mistakes, not big ones, but mistakes nevertheless. Particularly given the amount of dumb laws, it's very reasonable to worry about the government having the ability to observe you wherever you are in public, even if you don't expect any form of privacy. Even if they don't prosecute everyone, it's a worry that some police officer might dislike you and use the CCTV tapes to find something to convict you on. The second worry is if people misinterpret your actions, as you mentioned "reaching for a concealed explosive" or "intent to expose oneself in public". This isn't because people worry about privacy, it's because they worry about the government and police forces misusing information.
I personally use an open wireless network. I trust my open wireless network as much as I trust my ISP and unsecure wired network, and all sensitive data that I throw around internally is securely encrypted or otherwise done through a secure tunnel. If I need to put a password I care about into a HTTP site, and I want to minimize risk, I just use my proxy, which is directly and securely* wired into the switch. Generally, if you have a large wired network, you need to make the assumption that any piece of cable not in a secure room could be spliced and packets logged.
;)
Of course, considering a large amount of web traffic is HTTP when it should be HTTPS, and certain operating systems expose services onto the network which they probably shouldnt, it's probably a bit irresponsible to suggest that home users leave their stuff unencrypted. Personally, the reason I run an open AP is because open APs have helped me in the past. There's a form of QoS to stop people abusing and give priority to certain computers on my network.
* Considering it's a house, 'secure' means it's in a locked cupboard
http://universitytoolkit.com/
;)
They don't appear to have a link to the source. Quick! Someone send them a DMCA takedown!
Didn't know that... In that case: Even better :)
That's strange. The main aspects I like about my Mac are the menu placement and the way the dock+expose manages applications and windows.
The Mac argument for zoom is that noone wants maximised windows... which is true when you really think about it. Most Windows or indeed Linux converts (that includes me) I see are always struggling to maximise their windows until it hits them - they never really wanted it maximised in the first place. Why would they want to maximise Word on a 36" monitor?
I'm not sure why we maximise windows. I think I had two reasons:
- It was hard to tell which window was what. I have quite a bit of difficulty distinguishing between windows without decent shadows behind them, which neither Windows or Linux at the time provided.
- I always used to use the top of the screen as a sort of mouse reflection point. I knew that if I threw the mouse up there from any point on the screen, it's stop and I could be more precise and lower it carefully to select a menu button... it was easier because the top of the screen was a sort of infinite height target.
The small screen argument has been irrelevant for a few years, I think.
I think the problem you're having is that your mouse settings are crap. Macs are really optimised towards high precision mice optimised so that you can cover the entire screen in a short sweep as well as having good precision when you move slowly. This means quite high acceleration. I can cover over 1000 pixels in about 4cm when I move my mouse sharply, but if I move slowly I can almost move the mouse with 1:1 distance correspondence between mouse distance and screen distance... about 40px/cm.
Plus, try using cmd+tab (and other shortcuts or expose once in a while, though expose is also optimised for decent mouse settings. You do have a point about dual monitor, but I think even mac fanboys tend to accept that it's a PITA for dual monitor. What applications are you using that require menu interaction that frequently? CS3 suite or something? If so, do yourself a favour and learn the shortcuts. It's damn near impossible to use a program with that much menu interaction without learning shortcuts... Windows, Linux or OS X.
Gross oversimplification. The real difficulty is what happens after one of the applications is closed. This post explains how the Windows clipboard works: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/ 2003-September/msg00257.html
That's a bit of an odd thing to say. Applications on all OSes are developed somewhat independently of each other; that's what makes them individual applications. They aren't developed entirely independently of each other, otherwise they plain wouldn't work. They make use of each other's APIs, they talk to each other, they collaborate and depend on each other. A lot of apps on Linux tend to cooperate very well considering that they are developed pretty much all by third parties. 3rd party applications in Windows tend to be pretty bad for cooperation with each other and the OS in general... they tend to try and all compete for the user's attention in a highly uncoordinated way.
Copy and pasting from Excel into Word works fine. As does copy and pasting from OOo Calc into OOo Writer. This covers 95% of use cases. I wonder, though, how well things like Lotus 1-2-3 or Gnumeric/Win32 works when copying into Microsoft Word... I don't know, I've never tried... but I do know that a lot of the cooperation between Microsoft Office and third party applications isn't because of their solid foundation on standards, but rather because support has been hacked into the application. There may well be standards, but Microsoft in particular seem to be pretty good at diverging from even their own standards. Admittedly, clipboard is a bit of a soft spot
There is lots of session/system communication in Linux, all for different purposes and with different ideas. Many are agreed upon and collaborated with. DBUS is one.
You've fudged an awful lot of information here....
It is true that NFSv3 works this way, but it is also true that NFSv3 should only be used on trusted networks. This is nothing to do with filesystem security being at the OS level. It's true that this is the case, but that's nothing to do with the fact that being root allows you to behave as root on other computers... this is purely the way that NFS is implemented. Filesystem security should be at the OS level... that's merely how applications interact with the filesystem. Applications mediate the network access to filesystems, so if they're running as root and allow external users to access as root, it's their fault. NFSv4 fixes a lot of these flaws.
Samba/SMB/CIFS (or indeed AFS, DFS, or many of the other network filesystems) do not have this problem whatsoever. They work exactly the same as Windows File Sharing and in the case of Samba, is completely cross compatible with Windows.
I don't think it will ever be, and I think this is the idea of NFS. I don't think NFS was ever meant to be "just
Ah I see. I understand the mathematical meaning of idempotent, but I interpreted Wikipedia as saying there is an alternate comp-sci meaning. Still, maybe GET should be revised to only allow actions that don't change server side state.
If you call delete twice on the same record, the second time will have a failure result, rather than a success result like the first. Doesn't this make deletion non-idempotent?
As much as it makes me uneasy, potentially it's not that much less secure than downloading and running those random closed source shareware apps from download.com, and probably just as secure as providing your credit card info to a trusted site over the internet.
But yeah... something about it scares me. Not sure what...
Vienna is a codename, just as Longhorn was. http://www.windowslonghorn.com/ also isn't a domain either.
One of the worst problems in my personal experience, worse than phishing, is people sharing passwords between all the untrusted/trusted websites they frequent AND their email; when they sign up to an 'evil' site, it stores their email and password and uses it to access all their stuff.
What'd be nice if Firefox would automatically enter a very complicated random unique password into password signup form, save it, and automatically enter it into relevant password entry boxes. The user wouldn't even need to think about it - they'd just need to remember their master password. This could then be carried around on a USB pen.
Obviously, there are security implications and problems with this, but it's nice as a simple idea - the implementation details could be worked out later. Web developers should be careful to ensure that the pages they develop are architected in a standard way with regards to security architecture, such that firefox knows what forms it should fill, and what forms are in an untrusted (e.g. user generated content) subdirectory. Something like a robots.txt.... like domain/login_forms.xml which contains the URIs that have trusted login forms and their XPATH.
Just an idea; I'm sure there are flaws...
X is being fixed, thankfully (finally). There are a lot of interesting projects, including but not limited to Xegl. Xegl, is the long term goal of the X server and pretty much reduces the X server to a tiny part of the system, basically mediating the input devices, rotation and display management and TCP/over-the-wire GL, if I understand correctly, by using the Embedded GL specifications.
- Dumb neutral networks: Packets aren't prioritised, charged, changed in any way based on their data or their endpoints. Proponents of this system assure it's possible provided you have lots of bandwidth available.
- QoS neutral network: Packets are prioritised based on the nature of the data involved. VoIP and gaming is prioritised, followed by burst transfers like page requests, followed by bulk transfers like torrents and downloads which eat the spare bandwidth. Higher priority service can't be assigned based on endpoints or based - You can't charge to improve a particular companies traffic.
- Tiered network: You can pay for higher quality internet traffic or to be prioritised over other types of traffic.
The first two positions generally seem to be considered in support of network neutrality, whereas the latter against network neutrality. The second one's idea being that latency involved with sending a file is unimportant compared to the latency of a VoIP packet. Essentially, this means VoIP gets prioritised, but it doesn't necessarily mean it impacts on the speed of the file transfer. It's supposed to be a cooperative rather than a capitalist idea, where the reason one type of packet is prioritised over another is for everyone's benefit without. I subscribe to this view, since I believe that no matter how much you increase the bandwidth available, torrent data and file transfers are probably going to increase to fill the available bandwidth, so certain types should be prioritised.I would, however, be satisfied with either 1 or 2 being implemented. I am completely against 3, though.
Is this the bit you're referring to?
I think this is referring to if you make a new work that is produced from combining statically a library with your work, you can distribute it under your own terms if you allow debugging and modifications. Indeed, the word work seems ambiguous, but with copyright law I think you take the most unrestricted interpretation to be correct if it's ambiguous.
I can't see what in the iPhone can be potentially violating the GPL. I thought they released WebKit changes back to the community and as it's LGPL they don't need to release Safari's entire codebase. Despite GPLv3 being released just before this device was released doesn't mean that all the "GPLv2" or "GPLv2 or higher" software was magically turned into "GPLv3 only" software, so they're not required to make it modifiable. Instead, I believe the distributor can decide what license he wants to distribute the software under.
Unfortunate though. I'd love there to be a problem. If they had to release modification docs then it'd be a hacker's dream.
The microcode needs to be updated every boot. It's volatile and resets when you turn off the system. See http://urbanmyth.org/microcode/
As far as I know, all OSes do this.
I thought the definition didn't actually exist before Microsoft invented it? I'd never heard of it before then... did they just popularise it?
By managed code, I was referring specifically to the CLI code used by MS.NET. I think MS invented this term, but I'm not certain. Anyway, that's just definitions... replace the "managed code" reference with "Code executed by any CLI compliant interpreter I've used" if you want.
9 25.aspx
.NET: "Managed code is code that has its execution managed by the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime."
This is supposedly the definition: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/09/48
It seems to refer specifically to
Not in Flash 9/CS3/Actionscript 3. It's far faster than previous versions due to the removal of features like variable watching and a new event system, better class system and an entirely redesigned VM. Infact, in my experience, it's of equal speed or faster than managed code as well as easier to hack for.
Interestingly, the UK Maths Challenge does this. The first 13 questions are relatively easy and you get 5 marks for getting them correct, 0 marks for getting them wrong. The next 10 questions are harder and worth 6 points, but you get -1 or -2 marks for getting them wrong. It really does, in my personal experience, ensure that the people who are great at maths get great scores. There is definitely a correlation between what me and my teachers rate the skill of a particular student, and the score they get in the UKMT Maths Challenges. A far better correlation than what is shown between scores in A level and their skill, which tend to be closer to what the person scores in a memory test.
This is the point.. nobody uses it.. IPv4 will run out soon. People will need to start using IPv6 soon unless we want to have ISP-based NAT which is painful to even think of. I've used such a system before, it's horrendous. Vista, as I understand it, uses Teredo so that people without true IPv6 can access IPv6 addresses by tunneling to Teredo servers using IPv4.
I know that. I never suggested it was, and the reason I just said a different addressing scheme was because the article suggested that was what applications were having problems with. I said it was a layering problem, since for IPv6 to interfere with IPv4 was strange, considering they are siblings on the network layer, and shouldn't be dependent on each other in any way.
However, to suggest making IPv4 applications IPv6 *compatible* is extremely difficult is a bit overboard. IPv4 applications can be made IPv6 compatible fairly simply, especially when it's just a network client or basic network server application and is well designed and modular. I've done it before, by the way. It's mostly a case of using a different API with roughly equivelant functions. For databases, migrate to 128-bit addresses and use a 6to4 address, or use an alternative table for IPv6 and IPv4 and reference the ID of the record in those tables. The main problem being that a load of applications assumed that IPv4 would exist forever and just placed raw IPv4-specific network calls throughout their application, rather than using a generic connection oriented API or whatever in general.
If you've got a very network intensive application, designing a network API, or are forwarding packets left right and centre or doing stuff like NAT break-outs and broadcasting without an API like bonjour or Avahi, then yes, it will be more difficult, but most of those apps and libs have been ported and you can do open("192.168.0.5") just as easily as open("2001::33a2:64c:0:3ee8:4d8f:78f6"). Even if it's a pure network app, it's not hellish to migrate. Plus, IPv6 has less hacks than IPv4 like breaing from NATs etc. that generally make applications far more difficult to write.
The hardware is the big issue here. Being that chips have been specifically engineered to work with IPv4 and it's still quite difficult to set up an upgrade route for hardware. On the plus side, once we've got IPv6, we probably won't go much further, given that it provides billions (literally) of IP addresses to every living person on Earth. Maybe once we discover extra-terrestrial planets or migrate to mars or something we'll change again. I think though, that networking produts should be more extensible, even though it's difficult. That and optimising applications for IPv6 can be difficult, just as it can be with IPv4.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying IPv6 is perfect and IPv4 is shit, but we do need to migrate to it eventually; we will run out of IPv4 addresses at some point, NAT is horrible anyway, and the third world are becoming more economically advanced as we speak.
Indeed. Though, XMPP (commonly known as Jabber) stands to be able to solve these problems. I suggest you try getting involved with that project. Check out some of their specifications: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/
Examples include: XML-RPC, SOAP, geolocation, vcards, nested sub-groups. Metacontacts: these are the sort of things that Pidgin and Adium are so great at doing, where you combine multiple accounts of the same people into one. Officially supported user mood, activity, tune, avatars, gaming, browsing, encryption, message formatting with XHTML rather than the sort of hack applications for other protocols such as MSN Plus-style applications.
Officially, things like transports work fine to combine your IRC, MSN, AIM, etc. all into one at the server side. It's distributed and inter operable, and the server admin can make his/her own rules for corporation use and such, like no talking outside the business unless you're on breaks. Officially, the file transfer spec has stuff for breaking through firewalls using WebDAV, or if not possible, fallback on sending it through the server (obviously would be throttled though). It supports transfer resuming too. Even things like encrypted offline messaging is supported.
Voice and video works with RTP... using codecs such as Speex for voice and Theora, x264 for video, again using things like STUN to set up the session. SVG whiteboards are in the works too.
The protocol is fabulous, and clients are busy implementing it all. Don't think that Pidgin's jabber performance is representitive of the protocol, it's very out of date and crappy. I think work is going into this though. The hard part is GUI-ifying the features of XMPP, especially when clients such as Jabber insist of doing it with perfect integration to the systems.