Before Dmitry was detained, who had heard of Elcomsoft? Apparently, they had sold very few copies of their software. Not that they'd asked for it, but now they've got more publicity than they could have paid for. I wonder if sales are picking up too? Could it be that Adobe's strategy has completely backfired?
Is Russian fiction (SF or otherwise) a product of its culture? Sure, but that's a reason to read it, not a reason to ignore it.
Chekhov said that only Russians could understand Russian lit. Perhaps only Russians can completely understand it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should stop trying.
What do you think that commercial code doesn't have comments like this? Or, worse yet, that commercial code doesn't have comments like this because it doesn't need them?
There was a famous comment in the SunOS proc.h header file that said something like
/* Please forgive me for this hack */
And I've seen plenty of commercial code that should have had comments like that, but didn't, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
I know of a bunch of products which use embedded Linux (and several which use *BSD). However, none of these are laying out big bucks to any embedded Linux company, like Lineo or Montavista. Right now, hackers (good sense) are choosing embedded Linux because they are familiar with it, they can fiddle with the kernel, etc. They just download a linux (usually PPC based) distribution, and go from there.
The people who need the hand-holding which Lineo, etc. are trying to sell, those people are too conservative to choose Linux, they just go with the Microsoft of the embedded word, Wind River.
I will beg to differ entirely on the Tivo. I've gained lots of benefits from the fact that the kernel is GPLed
I maintain my point. The reason people could add an ethernet card (and driver ?) to the tivo is that they are familiar with the OS, not because it is GPLed. If the Tivo's OS was Windows NT (embedded) ((uck)), or, more probably, Windows CE, which lots of hackers are familiar with, I bet that same ethernet driver could have been added.
L/GPL wasn't written with embedded software in mind, and it shows. Consider the use of this codec in a portable digital music player -- all the code would be burned into ROM, and there is no way for the user to replace/update the code or libraries within the code.
Even if all the code in the gizmo is under the GPL, the end-user has none of the freedoms to fix/update/hack it which RMS likes to talk about.
Just look at the Tivo -- what benefit does a Tivo owner have because the kernel is GPL'ed -- has anyone rebuilt their Tivo linux kernel to fix a bug in it? I doubt it. Certainly the Tivo people benefit from having a robust, stable, flexible, royalty-free kernel. But the freedoms the GPL and LGPL theoretically give to the tivo owners seem hypothetical at best.
Eclipse contains the tools used to build the Visual Age for Java IDE. These are mainly Java based tools, and include the really cool SWT/JFace graphics library for Java, which be used instead of AWT and Swing. Imagine building UIs for Java which don't suck -- SWT is fast and look like native GUI apps, and don't have the stink of AWT about them.
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore
be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be
propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war
and they are screened at once from scrutiny.... In war, then, as in peace,
assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark
of all our rights and privileges.
-- William Ellery Channing
Trying to set up truely redundant telco access can be really hard to get in practice. Sure, anyone can buy separate T-1 (or whatever) lines from two different carriers, but given how frequently equipment and capacity is leased and co-located throughout all the big players, it is just about impossible to guarantee that those two lines don't share a single point of failure somewhere.
Linus himself said, that they should rather fix the CAUSE of those latencies instead of the symptoms.
Isn't that like saying that you'd rather fix all buggy applications instead of providing a protected memory environment?
Right now, a copy of Interzone magazine ( http://www.sfsite.com/interzone ) is sitting atop my television, making it far and away the best SF on my television.
Most SF fans know that many of the most interesting genre movies are derived from short stories (i.e Blade Runner, The Minority Report, even A.I.). What a lot of people don't know is that these short stories often first appeared in SF magazines. Magazines such as Interzone, Asimov's, and F&SF aren't in good financial health right now, even though they are the nursery for a lot of SF writers.
A yearly subscription to most of these costs less than on month's cable bill, but gives a lot more entertainment, and helps to ensure the future of SF writers.
End of pledge break -- now back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing
For a company that spent in excess of one milion dollars for a single Super Bowl advertisement, is a $100k penalty really suitable?
Or is the penalty small because instant karma has already gotten them?
What about the whole generation of web-browsing devices that are coming out that _aren't_ desktop computers running Windows? For example, there's the "Internet Appliances", like our friends at Netpliance, the Compaq i-paq, and a whole bunch of competitors. I'm sure that web browsers in cars are coming soon, but they won't be running Internet Explorer, nor will they be running a desktop version of Windows.
I think that there's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem here -- if not enough web sites are usable from standards compliant (but not Microsoft) browsers, these internet appliances are doomed to failure. However, without a large base of these clients, few web sites will be willing to
"port" their code to more portable HTML.
Ask 1-800-flowers if phone numbers aren't property
on
URLs Aren't Property?
·
· Score: 1
1-800-flowers basis its whole business on their phone number, and I believe pays big bucks for that number. Ditto for other phone-based businesses. Granted, _local_ phone numbers might not be property, but non-local 800 numbers are a whole nother can of wax.
TPC-C is a massive benchmark, requiring a massive effort. I've heard anecdotal evidence that is costs the big RDBMS vendors 6 figures for each run. However, there are a couple of specific reasons why MySQL and PostgreSQL will never see TPC-C results.
First, TPC-C requires transactions That's what the T is for! MySQL doesn't support transactions. So, it's right out.
Next, to get decent TPC-C numbers, most vendors need a TP-Monitor sitting in front of the database. Seeing as the commercial TP-Monitors ain't cheap, and there are no open source TP-Monitors, that sort of rules out an all open-source TPC-C number.
Finally, to simulate the thousands of concurrent users that TPC-C requires, one needs an awful lot of hardware just to drive the test -- the top scoring IBM DB2 results used 128 CPUs for the servers and 196 CPUs for the clients. Can you imagine how much time was spent tuning this beast?
Just as a final note on how expensive this is, note that there are no published TPC-C numbers for the existing commercial RDBSes running on Linux or BSD. Given Larry Ellison's famous hatred of Microsoft, and how much he'd love for Oracle on Linux to outperform Oracle on Windows, doesn't this say something about the expense of running these tests?
Even though the mantra is "release early, release often", it is possible to "release" too early. Consider the windows clone guys mentioned last week. They have a web site with pretty graphics, but no code. They kinda maybe have sortof an idea, but nothing useful to download. They shouldn't have announced until they had something to download. Even though they intend to leverage a bunch of existing OSS code, they could have done at least some programming work and had something to show that they know what they are doing.
Consider Our Hero, Linus. The first time he publically announced linux, in comp.os.minix, he had a boot disk that you could download and boot up into a shell. I downloaded 0.12, and it did work. It didn't do much, but you could see the potential, and could tell that the author wasn't some poseur.
If you release too early, hackers won't take you seriously, and thing that you are just another wannabe.
I can't believe how many posts say that languages with automagic bounds checking (Java, Perl, Lisp, etc.) have too much overhead. Instead, these posters say, we should all manually insert bounds checking code by ourselves, and somehow that will magically have less overhead, and be more secure than having the compiler do it.
Ick. That's just the sort of mundane task I want a compiler for. As a programmer, I already have too much to worry about -- bounds checking is one simple task that I'd just as soon have the compiler do.
In most cases, the bounds check can be hoisted out of loops, so there's almost no overhead. In a perfect world, I'd like to see a compiler that, when given a high enough warning level, warns that it can't hoist bounds checks.
What most reviewers fail to mention, or at least gloss over, is that this car has a 350 pound limit on total amount of passengers + cargo. Maybe that's sufficient for a commuter's car, which only carries one person, two people on a grocery shopping trip routinely breaks this weight limit.
I'm not trying to be a troll, but if I read the SPEC page correctly, the results indicate that TUX can keep > 4000 connections streaming at 400kbits per second, or 1.6 Gigabits/second. How many "e-commerce" sites even have this kind of bandwith to the internet?
Are these results even relevant outside of benchmarks?
So, we all know that Tivo uses the linux kernel, which is GPLed, and distributes their kernel changes, but not their user code. This is fine according to the GPL.
Presumably, Tivo uses a LGPLed libc, and their user code links (staticly -- dynamically?) to that. Although the LGPL is a little unclear (at least to me) wrt embedded devices, I think that the intent is to let users update the LGPL'ed library (i.e. libc) independently of the application. Clearly, we can't do that with our Tivo's, for a number of reasons. Doesn't this violate at least the spirit of the LGPL?
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Before Dmitry was detained, who had heard of Elcomsoft? Apparently, they had sold very few copies of their software. Not that they'd asked for it, but now they've got more publicity than they could have paid for. I wonder if sales are picking up too? Could it be that Adobe's strategy has completely backfired?
Is Russian fiction (SF or otherwise) a product of its culture? Sure, but that's a reason to read it, not a reason to ignore it.
Chekhov said that only Russians could understand Russian lit. Perhaps only Russians can completely understand it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should stop trying.
And the FreeBSD team had to pay $3k in legal fees to lawyers to wrangle licensing terms, so it is hardly free as in beer.
There was a famous comment in the SunOS proc.h header file that said something like /* Please forgive me for this hack */
And I've seen plenty of commercial code that should have had comments like that, but didn't, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
The people who need the hand-holding which Lineo, etc. are trying to sell, those people are too conservative to choose Linux, they just go with the Microsoft of the embedded word, Wind River.
I maintain my point. The reason people could add an ethernet card (and driver ?) to the tivo is that they are familiar with the OS, not because it is GPLed. If the Tivo's OS was Windows NT (embedded) ((uck)), or, more probably, Windows CE, which lots of hackers are familiar with, I bet that same ethernet driver could have been added.
Even if all the code in the gizmo is under the GPL, the end-user has none of the freedoms to fix/update/hack it which RMS likes to talk about.
Just look at the Tivo -- what benefit does a Tivo owner have because the kernel is GPL'ed -- has anyone rebuilt their Tivo linux kernel to fix a bug in it? I doubt it. Certainly the Tivo people benefit from having a robust, stable, flexible, royalty-free kernel. But the freedoms the GPL and LGPL theoretically give to the tivo owners seem hypothetical at best.
Eclipse contains the tools used to build the Visual Age for Java IDE. These are mainly Java based tools, and include the really cool SWT/JFace graphics library for Java, which be used instead of AWT and Swing. Imagine building UIs for Java which don't suck -- SWT is fast and look like native GUI apps, and don't have the stink of AWT about them.
graphviz
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore ... In war, then, as in peace,
be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be
propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war
and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
assert the freedom of speech and of the press. Cling to this as the bulwark
of all our rights and privileges.
-- William Ellery Channing
Trying to set up truely redundant telco access can be really hard to get in practice. Sure, anyone can buy separate T-1 (or whatever) lines from two different carriers, but given how frequently equipment and capacity is leased and co-located throughout all the big players, it is just about impossible to guarantee that those two lines don't share a single point of failure somewhere.
Linus himself said, that they should rather fix the CAUSE of those latencies instead of the symptoms.
Isn't that like saying that you'd rather fix all buggy applications instead of providing a protected memory environment?
Most SF fans know that many of the most interesting genre movies are derived from short stories (i.e Blade Runner, The Minority Report, even A.I.). What a lot of people don't know is that these short stories often first appeared in SF magazines. Magazines such as Interzone, Asimov's, and F&SF aren't in good financial health right now, even though they are the nursery for a lot of SF writers.
A yearly subscription to most of these costs less than on month's cable bill, but gives a lot more entertainment, and helps to ensure the future of SF writers.
End of pledge break -- now back to our regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing
For a company that spent in excess of one milion dollars for a single Super Bowl advertisement, is a $100k penalty really suitable? Or is the penalty small because instant karma has already gotten them?
Off the top of my head:
Using pthreads makes core dumps unusable
Despite "thread aware" patches to gdb, the debugger still wierds out on my when using pthreaded application
Pthreads mmaps 2Mb for each pthread's stack, meaning that there is a hard limit of around a thousand threads in any 32 bit system
Doesn't look like the new pthreads implementation really fixes any but the last one, though.
What about the whole generation of web-browsing devices that are coming out that _aren't_ desktop computers running Windows? For example, there's the "Internet Appliances", like our friends at Netpliance, the Compaq i-paq, and a whole bunch of competitors. I'm sure that web browsers in cars are coming soon, but they won't be running Internet Explorer, nor will they be running a desktop version of Windows. I think that there's an interesting chicken-and-egg problem here -- if not enough web sites are usable from standards compliant (but not Microsoft) browsers, these internet appliances are doomed to failure. However, without a large base of these clients, few web sites will be willing to "port" their code to more portable HTML.
1-800-flowers basis its whole business on their phone number, and I believe pays big bucks for that number. Ditto for other phone-based businesses. Granted, _local_ phone numbers might not be property, but non-local 800 numbers are a whole nother can of wax.
First, TPC-C requires transactions That's what the T is for! MySQL doesn't support transactions. So, it's right out.
Next, to get decent TPC-C numbers, most vendors need a TP-Monitor sitting in front of the database. Seeing as the commercial TP-Monitors ain't cheap, and there are no open source TP-Monitors, that sort of rules out an all open-source TPC-C number.
Finally, to simulate the thousands of concurrent users that TPC-C requires, one needs an awful lot of hardware just to drive the test -- the top scoring IBM DB2 results used 128 CPUs for the servers and 196 CPUs for the clients. Can you imagine how much time was spent tuning this beast?
Just as a final note on how expensive this is, note that there are no published TPC-C numbers for the existing commercial RDBSes running on Linux or BSD. Given Larry Ellison's famous hatred of Microsoft, and how much he'd love for Oracle on Linux to outperform Oracle on Windows, doesn't this say something about the expense of running these tests?
Windows: 87.7 %
MacOS: 5.0%
Linux: 4.1%
Other: 3.8 %
My addition is rusty, but isn't this 100.6%? Even if each of the four entries were rounded up by the least sig fig, wouldn't that be 100.4% at most?
Consider Our Hero, Linus. The first time he publically announced linux, in comp.os.minix, he had a boot disk that you could download and boot up into a shell. I downloaded 0.12, and it did work. It didn't do much, but you could see the potential, and could tell that the author wasn't some poseur.
If you release too early, hackers won't take you seriously, and thing that you are just another wannabe.
Ick. That's just the sort of mundane task I want a compiler for. As a programmer, I already have too much to worry about -- bounds checking is one simple task that I'd just as soon have the compiler do.
In most cases, the bounds check can be hoisted out of loops, so there's almost no overhead. In a perfect world, I'd like to see a compiler that, when given a high enough warning level, warns that it can't hoist bounds checks.
What most reviewers fail to mention, or at least gloss over, is that this car has a 350 pound limit on total amount of passengers + cargo. Maybe that's sufficient for a commuter's car, which only carries one person, two people on a grocery shopping trip routinely breaks this weight limit.
Are these results even relevant outside of benchmarks?
Presumably, Tivo uses a LGPLed libc, and their user code links (staticly -- dynamically?) to that. Although the LGPL is a little unclear (at least to me) wrt embedded devices, I think that the intent is to let users update the LGPL'ed library (i.e. libc) independently of the application. Clearly, we can't do that with our Tivo's, for a number of reasons. Doesn't this violate at least the spirit of the LGPL?
And we all thought that Quark was fiction!