The article showed the complained about downstream bandwidh use.
The article can complain about many things, and those complaints may be reasonable. But that shouldn't make them legally enforceable.
The point is not that what D-Link did was bad (it was), the point is that gps.dix.dk should not have a legal claim against D-Link unless D-Link actually agreed to their service agreement.
I can just say it again: if gps.dix.dk prevails, then Mozilla could be successfully sued for shipping bookmarks of other sites. It's a bad precedent.
We do have too many CS majors. No, it's not that there are more graduates than jobs, quite to the contrary. The real problem is that many people major in CS who have no business majoring in CS--they lack the skills, personality, and aptitude. That's why the US has had to attract tens of thousands of foreign CS students over the last several decades.
Someone at D-Link clearly wasn't doing their job then. They relied on a source that wasn't authorative. In motoring circles, an analogy would be "driving without due care and attention" and will get you done by the Police. The same applies to business procedures.
If signs aren't visible from the road, they aren't enforceable. In the case of NTP, the way you post signs is to require registration of the IP address or use authentication. It is not to put some conditions in a text file somewhere.
PHK would not have ignored his service agreement with DIX either and told D-Link otherwise. They waived a $4.4k service charge in order to have him provide this service to their members. I sincerely doubt he would be wanting to jeapordise that agreement with DIX
The courts and the police shouldn't be burdened with trying to figure out PHK's motives. He put up a public service without requiring a service agreement and people started using it in a way that he doesn't like. That's his problem, not anybody else's. If he wants people to be bound by a specific service agreement, he needs to make sure that people see it and agree to it.
If arbitrary people can impose and enforce arbitrary rules on users of open services merely by sticking conditions into a text file somewhere, the Internet would be in big trouble; let's hope it won't come to that.
Finally, a voice of reason. This is exactly the issue I have. I find nothing wrong with companies like Tivo and Netflix wanted to patent something that was truly innovative when it was released. Hindsight is 20/20, and for those of you saying how obvious this was, I question why you didn't create such a company.
Neither Tivo nor Netflix was innovative at the time; there were many people with the same ideas. Why didn't they create companies? Because it takes a lot more than a great idea to start a company: business talent, connections, capital, and a desire to go into business.
Unauthenticated requests will keep coming in, and the only thing you can do is not reply to them. That won't cut your downstream bandwidth use.
The point behind authentication is not to cut bandwidth use, it's to make sure that you can show that the people connecting to the server understand the conditions under which they can connect to the service. It's also so that you can make a disclaimer, because right now, you may well be liable to me if you give me the wrong time and I lose money because of it.
My reply wasn't sarcastic at all: I think it would set a very dangerous precedent if this guy prevailed. Why? Because all of a sudden, we might all be bound by terms we have never seen.
What part of "no client use" or "Networks BGP-announced on the DIX" don't you get?
Well, so how do you know that D-Link actually saw those terms? Maybe the guy told them it was OK to use their server. Maybe the service got announced somewhere else as open and unrestricted. The legal system shouldn't be bothered with resolving such stupidity on either side.
If you want people to use your services under specific terms, it should be your responsibility to ensure that people have seen and agreed to those terms. Since NTP lacks the provisions to present terms to users, that means that you need to require registration and/or authentication. Registration and/or authentication doesn't have to be strong, it just has to be strong enough that it is clear to every potential user that the service isn't completely unrestricted.
if you leave your door unlocked is it perfectly alright for someone you dont know to come in and hang out with you? how about 5 people you dont know.. how about 40? 100?
It's not "OK", and neither is what D-Link did "OK". But whether it's "OK" is not the issue.
The question is whether the police and the legal system (i.e., my tax money) should do anything about it, and, no, I don't think it should. If you can't be bothered locking your door (and, worse, advertise that fact on every street corner), don't make other people pay for arresting and throwing out the people that enter your house.
There is no point in doing this. You can use authentication with an NTP request, but it only increases the load. Unauthenticated requests will keep coming in, and the only thing you can do is not reply to them. That won't cut your downstream bandwidth use.
Sure it will, since people select time servers to get the time, and they'll stop requesting it if they don't get it (or get the wrong one). Furthermore, you don't have to use authentication on the server, it's sufficient to have people register their IP address.
I am running a server in the NTP pool mentioned in other replies. I don't mind providing this service for free, but why is it that some people have to abuse it by sending a request every second, every four seconds, or every fourteen seconds??? (common values encountered, apparently defaults of some extremely broken clients)
Geez, software is buggy. Imagine that. The solution is not to sue everybody who has buggy software, the solution is to make sure things continue working in the inevitable presence of bugs.
All in all, as an NTP server there is little you can do to fight abuse. There is no way to contact abusers, and no way to completely undo the damage.
Even if that were the case, it wouldn't change my point: a legal solution is the wrong solution for this--if you can't make it work with the NTP protocol, then the NTP protocol needs to be fixed.
I don't see any company building commercial software on QT Toolkit complains
No, those companies have already decided that the risk of going with a small vendor is acceptable (or they have simply not thought about it). That doesn't alter the fact that many companies have clearly decided not to build stuff on Qt.
Simple. CCCP is gone you know.
Yeah, and good riddance, too. Now, let's work on getting parasitical companies out of the market, too. It's only because of FOSS that Troll Tech managed to kill off their competitors with an overpriced and inferior product--and it's a bad deal for the open source community, as well as for commercial developers.
If he wants to limit the number of NTP users to his servers, the best way is to have some kind of authentication or registration scheme; it's not hard--many NTP servers do it--have a web page and a CAPTCHA.
While what D-Link did is stupid, trying to find a legal, rather than technical, solution to it will set a bad precedent. I mean, where does it end? Should we permit the Mozilla project be sued for distributing a bookmark to some site just because it turns out that the resulting site can't handle the load?
People who offer open, public services should be prepared to deal with whatever traffic comes their way.
If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices.
If someone thinks "reading" or "music" are "non-stimulating", they don't understand geeks and have no business giving advice to geeks. I have probably pulled more all-nighters because of music and books than anything else.
Both de-duplication and diffing at the file system level are useful. If done intelligently, they could probably save lots of space on a standard Linux or Windows file system. Of course, they are nothing new; the reason they aren't in the file systems of today is mostly that it's hard to implement them sufficiently efficiently; right now, file system authors are still struggling with just keeping their various tables and data strctures consistent.
If you make money from your software, by SELLING it, sorry but they will charge for the SDK you use. Sorry, they are human beings, they need to eat.
Yes, and, sorry, other human beings who need to eat will choose a toolkit that comes under a less restrictive license.
At issue isn't even the money Troll Tech charges, at issue are control and risk. One of the biggest advantages of open source is that if you have trouble with the direction of a piece of software, you can fork it. If you write commercial software with Troll Tech's toolkit, you don't have that choice because you can't fork the commercial version.
If you don't make money, it is GPL.
The goal of the GPL is not to keep you from making money; but evidently, both you and Troll Tech don't understand open source.
Programming by contract is not the right choice for every programming project
It seems reasonable that making formal assertions about how programs work ought to help create better software (along some dimension of "better"); even though that's never been rigorously demonstrated, let's just stipulate that.
That still leaves the question whether design-by-contract is the right way of doing that, and whether Eiffel is the language to do it in. Personally, I don't think so: I think you're more likely to write sound software by picking a less flawed language to begin with. Furthermore, I think the last people you want to write assertions about how code ought to work is the programmers writing the code themselves; I suspect when code quality matters, contracts and assertions ought to be separated from the code (and the structure of the code).
Actually, my post did have content. He doesn't like the Gnome color scheme, I don't like what the people developing and advocating KDE are doing. I think my concern is at least as important as his.
Is this fully open source? I.e., do you get the entire sources to EiffelStudio and all the libraries, compiler, and runtime?
Or is this one of those pseudo-open source releases, in which a large body of code gets released under an open source license, but in order to compile and run it, you need proprietary tools from the same vendor that released the code?
Yes, the community or organization that supports a piece of software matters, and I don't like KDE's: we have a big group of zealots that (apparently) oppose making software simple to use, then we have the developers that are wedded to C++ development and screwed up big time on licensing issues, and finally, we have at the heart of it a commercial software vendor that controls the core toolkit, charges commercial users, and for whom Windows and Macintosh are at least as important as Linux.
KDE is fairly good technically; if it weren't for its awful community, it would be a reasonable alternative to Gnome.
The benefits of Design by Contract include the following:
Ah, and this has been demonstrated how? Programming language designers like to dream about how their features are going to lead to fewer bugs, lower costs, and all that, but there is almost no acceptable experimental data to support their claims.
Slashdot Mirror
The article showed the complained about downstream bandwidh use.
The article can complain about many things, and those complaints may be reasonable. But that shouldn't make them legally enforceable.
The point is not that what D-Link did was bad (it was), the point is that gps.dix.dk should not have a legal claim against D-Link unless D-Link actually agreed to their service agreement.
I can just say it again: if gps.dix.dk prevails, then Mozilla could be successfully sued for shipping bookmarks of other sites. It's a bad precedent.
We do have too many CS majors. No, it's not that there are more graduates than jobs, quite to the contrary. The real problem is that many people major in CS who have no business majoring in CS--they lack the skills, personality, and aptitude. That's why the US has had to attract tens of thousands of foreign CS students over the last several decades.
Someone at D-Link clearly wasn't doing their job then. They relied on a source that wasn't authorative. In motoring circles, an analogy would be "driving without due care and attention" and will get you done by the Police. The same applies to business procedures.
If signs aren't visible from the road, they aren't enforceable. In the case of NTP, the way you post signs is to require registration of the IP address or use authentication. It is not to put some conditions in a text file somewhere.
PHK would not have ignored his service agreement with DIX either and told D-Link otherwise. They waived a $4.4k service charge in order to have him provide this service to their members. I sincerely doubt he would be wanting to jeapordise that agreement with DIX
The courts and the police shouldn't be burdened with trying to figure out PHK's motives. He put up a public service without requiring a service agreement and people started using it in a way that he doesn't like. That's his problem, not anybody else's. If he wants people to be bound by a specific service agreement, he needs to make sure that people see it and agree to it.
If arbitrary people can impose and enforce arbitrary rules on users of open services merely by sticking conditions into a text file somewhere, the Internet would be in big trouble; let's hope it won't come to that.
Finally, a voice of reason. This is exactly the issue I have. I find nothing wrong with companies like Tivo and Netflix wanted to patent something that was truly innovative when it was released. Hindsight is 20/20, and for those of you saying how obvious this was, I question why you didn't create such a company.
Neither Tivo nor Netflix was innovative at the time; there were many people with the same ideas. Why didn't they create companies? Because it takes a lot more than a great idea to start a company: business talent, connections, capital, and a desire to go into business.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way--that's still substantially the same invention.
"Case studies" aren't acceptable experimental data.
Unauthenticated requests will keep coming in, and the only thing you can do is not reply to them. That won't cut your downstream bandwidth use.
The point behind authentication is not to cut bandwidth use, it's to make sure that you can show that the people connecting to the server understand the conditions under which they can connect to the service. It's also so that you can make a disclaimer, because right now, you may well be liable to me if you give me the wrong time and I lose money because of it.
My reply wasn't sarcastic at all: I think it would set a very dangerous precedent if this guy prevailed. Why? Because all of a sudden, we might all be bound by terms we have never seen.
What part of "no client use" or "Networks BGP-announced on the DIX" don't you get?
Well, so how do you know that D-Link actually saw those terms? Maybe the guy told them it was OK to use their server. Maybe the service got announced somewhere else as open and unrestricted. The legal system shouldn't be bothered with resolving such stupidity on either side.
If you want people to use your services under specific terms, it should be your responsibility to ensure that people have seen and agreed to those terms. Since NTP lacks the provisions to present terms to users, that means that you need to require registration and/or authentication. Registration and/or authentication doesn't have to be strong, it just has to be strong enough that it is clear to every potential user that the service isn't completely unrestricted.
if you leave your door unlocked is it perfectly alright for someone you dont know to come in and hang out with you? how about 5 people you dont know.. how about 40? 100?
It's not "OK", and neither is what D-Link did "OK". But whether it's "OK" is not the issue.
The question is whether the police and the legal system (i.e., my tax money) should do anything about it, and, no, I don't think it should. If you can't be bothered locking your door (and, worse, advertise that fact on every street corner), don't make other people pay for arresting and throwing out the people that enter your house.
That is plausible, but there is at best one experiment that purports to show that (and even that one is in dispute).
There is no point in doing this. You can use authentication with an NTP request, but it only increases the load. Unauthenticated requests will keep coming in, and the only thing you can do is not reply to them. That won't cut your downstream bandwidth use.
Sure it will, since people select time servers to get the time, and they'll stop requesting it if they don't get it (or get the wrong one). Furthermore, you don't have to use authentication on the server, it's sufficient to have people register their IP address.
I am running a server in the NTP pool mentioned in other replies. I don't mind providing this service for free, but why is it that some people have to abuse it by sending a request every second, every four seconds, or every fourteen seconds??? (common values encountered, apparently defaults of some extremely broken clients)
Geez, software is buggy. Imagine that. The solution is not to sue everybody who has buggy software, the solution is to make sure things continue working in the inevitable presence of bugs.
All in all, as an NTP server there is little you can do to fight abuse. There is no way to contact abusers, and no way to completely undo the damage.
Even if that were the case, it wouldn't change my point: a legal solution is the wrong solution for this--if you can't make it work with the NTP protocol, then the NTP protocol needs to be fixed.
I don't see any company building commercial software on QT Toolkit complains
No, those companies have already decided that the risk of going with a small vendor is acceptable (or they have simply not thought about it). That doesn't alter the fact that many companies have clearly decided not to build stuff on Qt.
Simple. CCCP is gone you know.
Yeah, and good riddance, too. Now, let's work on getting parasitical companies out of the market, too. It's only because of FOSS that Troll Tech managed to kill off their competitors with an overpriced and inferior product--and it's a bad deal for the open source community, as well as for commercial developers.
If he wants to limit the number of NTP users to his servers, the best way is to have some kind of authentication or registration scheme; it's not hard--many NTP servers do it--have a web page and a CAPTCHA.
While what D-Link did is stupid, trying to find a legal, rather than technical, solution to it will set a bad precedent. I mean, where does it end? Should we permit the Mozilla project be sued for distributing a bookmark to some site just because it turns out that the resulting site can't handle the load?
People who offer open, public services should be prepared to deal with whatever traffic comes their way.
If one is awake in bed for more than 10-15 minutes, one should get up and do something non-stimulating. Listening to music or reading are excellent choices.
If someone thinks "reading" or "music" are "non-stimulating", they don't understand geeks and have no business giving advice to geeks. I have probably pulled more all-nighters because of music and books than anything else.
Marty, have you gone off your medication again?
By the way, if you want a de-duplicating data backup solution, there are a bunch of them around; faubackup is a simple example.
Both de-duplication and diffing at the file system level are useful. If done intelligently, they could probably save lots of space on a standard Linux or Windows file system. Of course, they are nothing new; the reason they aren't in the file systems of today is mostly that it's hard to implement them sufficiently efficiently; right now, file system authors are still struggling with just keeping their various tables and data strctures consistent.
If you make money from your software, by SELLING it, sorry but they will charge for the SDK you use. Sorry, they are human beings, they need to eat.
Yes, and, sorry, other human beings who need to eat will choose a toolkit that comes under a less restrictive license.
At issue isn't even the money Troll Tech charges, at issue are control and risk. One of the biggest advantages of open source is that if you have trouble with the direction of a piece of software, you can fork it. If you write commercial software with Troll Tech's toolkit, you don't have that choice because you can't fork the commercial version.
If you don't make money, it is GPL.
The goal of the GPL is not to keep you from making money; but evidently, both you and Troll Tech don't understand open source.
Programming by contract is not the right choice for every programming project
It seems reasonable that making formal assertions about how programs work ought to help create better software (along some dimension of "better"); even though that's never been rigorously demonstrated, let's just stipulate that.
That still leaves the question whether design-by-contract is the right way of doing that, and whether Eiffel is the language to do it in. Personally, I don't think so: I think you're more likely to write sound software by picking a less flawed language to begin with. Furthermore, I think the last people you want to write assertions about how code ought to work is the programmers writing the code themselves; I suspect when code quality matters, contracts and assertions ought to be separated from the code (and the structure of the code).
Actually, my post did have content. He doesn't like the Gnome color scheme, I don't like what the people developing and advocating KDE are doing. I think my concern is at least as important as his.
Is this fully open source? I.e., do you get the entire sources to EiffelStudio and all the libraries, compiler, and runtime?
Or is this one of those pseudo-open source releases, in which a large body of code gets released under an open source license, but in order to compile and run it, you need proprietary tools from the same vendor that released the code?
Yes, the community or organization that supports a piece of software matters, and I don't like KDE's: we have a big group of zealots that (apparently) oppose making software simple to use, then we have the developers that are wedded to C++ development and screwed up big time on licensing issues, and finally, we have at the heart of it a commercial software vendor that controls the core toolkit, charges commercial users, and for whom Windows and Macintosh are at least as important as Linux.
KDE is fairly good technically; if it weren't for its awful community, it would be a reasonable alternative to Gnome.
The benefits of Design by Contract include the following:
Ah, and this has been demonstrated how? Programming language designers like to dream about how their features are going to lead to fewer bugs, lower costs, and all that, but there is almost no acceptable experimental data to support their claims.
What software runs natively in Linux that does not run natively in Mac OS X?
OpenOffice 2.0, for starters.
The fact is that Intel Macs running Macs OS X UNIX and Windows XP in a dual boot setup really divides the *NIX community.
Dream on.
I'm sorry -- but Linux is not ready to support Home, nor Business, desktop users.
I'm sorry, but you're bullshitting; there are many home users and many business users that run Linux.
I'm sure many hardcore Linux fans will disagree, but I look at the attempts to make it such and the low level of success.
Says who? Your Apple ad-driven perception of the market? In real life, Linux appears to be on at least as many desktops as OS X.