Re:The BSD license principle still applies
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
You have obviously never tried to make changes to some of the GPLed projects that are floating around. In my experience, most OSS source code is so poorly written as to make it unusable by anyone except the author; and even then, if more than a few weeks passes then the author no longer recognizes it either.
Too many people believe that ownership of a text editor and a compiler is the key to being a big-time code jockey.
No, I was just actually being biased. I conveniently ignored the OSS code that isn't good enough to attract collaborators, but you're leading me back to my point: If someone (competent OSS programmer) finds a software project that is *almost* what they want, but the code is a mess (ie. the original poster's employer's GPL mods) they will always think hard about starting their own project. The principle is, if you make well organized source trees for interesting and useful projects (products), you will attract volunteer contributions. If your project (product) is cool, but your code is unreadable/unavailable you will attract competitors. If your project isn't cool who cares anyway?
So the lawyers give up? When peaceful legal avenues are closed, the only recourses left are violent and/or illegal. What we have here is more like a "software mafia" than legal corporations.
The BSD license principle still applies
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
I'm guessing your employer intends to release unreadable, modified source code which compiles to a salable binary. The modified source still has to be released for free, meaning anyone can compile it and use the resulting binaries without paying. This does not protect them from a fork in the original GPL code base, and for the same reason it doesn't always pay to take BSD source code and run with it: the BSD folks (just as the GPL folks) can implement the software application you've tried to sell, and their modifications will be readable and subject to improvement by anyone.
The risk is that soon after you start charging for yours, someone else is giving away and equal/better alternative. The more money you charge, the more GPL programmers' employers stand to save by duplicating your effort in a cooperative way (spreading the development cost as thin and wide as the market for such software).
Here's another reason your company's management is screwing the owners: Source written for GPL release is written with readbility in mind. That makes code management easier. If you are in a race, and there is no requirement for the code to be widely readable, it will eventually become spaghetti that must be scrapped. At that point you will have to "borrow" from the competing GPL project again. Admitting that you will have to spend money "following" the GPL code, do you want to try and get as much free code as possible (by promoting volunteer contributions to the code base) or do you want to maximise your own development costs aside from the initial code "import" while you rewrite and reintegrate the proprietary side of the app each time? Free software is more economically efficient. You may save on some of the sunk costs, but you can't avoid the risks of proprietary software.
Copyright law is civil law. The reason is this: the court system refuses to make copyright infringement suits the way to make money off copyrights. If they did, copyright holders would entrap people and then sue them. This is the legal system's way of giving those punks the finger.
*ucknut. Don't take my word for it, ask a lawyer, or better yet DO THE RESEARCH YOURSELF. Did you ever wonder WHY it works like that for trademarks? What makes them so different from other IP? Is that difference relevant?
The RIAA has to do something even if it is the wrong thing because if the courts ever accept the claim that people freely violated the copyright on a recording and that RIAA or the artist knew about it and did nothing, the recording goes into the public domain with no copyrights.
If that happens even once, the RIAA will get dropped like a fresh turd by everyone in the industry. (It's really an old crusty turd)
The reason they want to go after the Gnutella supernodes and the ISPs is that supernodes and ISPs are few in number compared to the masses of users who may-or-may-not be breaking the law until someone spends a couple of hours investigating and documenting each case. The man hours required to enforce a $15 CD sale is orders of magnitude costlier than the money they stand to gain by prosecuting individual Gnutella swappers.
They don't even care if they lose sales in the mean time (because people do tend to buy the CD if they collect every song on MP3) squelching the promotional effect of peer-to-peer sharing. What they care about is whether the courts will eventually declare the music public domain.
You see, copyrights are civil law, not criminal law as corporations wish it were. When the courts decide you have slacked in your effort to protect your own copyright they can declare the copyright lost, and what used to be copyrighted becomes public domain. Not even a restrictive EULA can supercede that declaration, so they have to do something in order to keep building the case they they did everything they could to enforce their copyrights. So, we will continue to see them fritter away millions of dollars ineffectually persecuting anyone they can drag into court. All the future possible money they could make is at stake, and it adds up.
If you don't like it, then pool your money, buy the song catalogs (the copyrights for a set of recordings) and release them to the public domain. How much did Micahel Jackson buy the Beatles' catalog for? They are trying to spend the least money possible to exhaust their legal alternatives. How much are they paying their lawyers? Maybe we should start making offers?
Please investigate DNSSEC. True the ISP can tranparently proxy your DNS requests, but he would have to log each of his successfully spoofed DNS answers and bill based on that. The marketdroids will want proof they are getting something for their money.
Stuart Lynn, ICANN CEO (Primus: super mack-daddy of all ICANN biznezz?), whoever the hell he thinks he is, is obviously crying out for help because he says ICANN can't make DNS work in the future. I read his stupid whining polemic, and it isn't really worth more than a brief scan. He wants some real money and guns so he can pay lawyers and boss the root DNS server operators around. De facto, he says they can do whatever they want without accountability to the ICANN or anyone else. He wants to make policy decisions to govern the technical operation (and design) of current and future DNS services.
ICANN is going down, because it doesn't DO anything for anyone involved. He is like the country bumpkin character from Kafka's short story: Before the Law. BIND comes with a list of compiled-in root server IP addresses. You can query all of those for a complete and curent list of root servers. This is how your DNS server knows who to ask when it doesn't know the IP address you're trying to get. Your DNS server (at the whim of your ISP) could possibly start using root servers that are not on that list. The websites you thought you knew (or maybe just their typos) would not come up; maybe you would see some nasty pr0nz (from people who paid marketing $$ to your ISP) instead. The nasty pr0n fake root operators (NPFROs) can't guarantee the pr0n marketdroids that their sites will get hits because you might configure your computer to use an independent (or your own) DNS server that the ISP doesn't control. Therefore the ISP can't get marketing kickbacks for screwing with your DNS. Likewise, none of your ISP's upstream DNS providers can do it, nor any of the root DNS operators. People could always just stop hitting their DNS.
What Mr. Stuart Lynn wants is a legal binding document that says "one ring to bind them all" so his ICANN can force the root DNS operators to become like his own personal NPFROs, but now bona fide by the contract (called a Memorandum Of Understanding or MOU) that opens the root server operator up to civil lawsuits and criminal liability. He wants to say "You must agree on penalty of law to publish the list of root DNS servers I tell you to" to make the root DNS operators kow tow to the corporate and lobbying interests that pay.
Right now, nobody has any reason to pay him for anything. People who don't understand how the political consensus exists and flows in DNS de facto tried to make ICANN do it artificially. Everyone who can, right now should go learn how to run a DNS server (not trivial) and imagine you and all your buddies and everyone who used to be on Napster are all going to run your own root servers. Think yourself through all the possibilities, and act on the best one(s) you can come up with. Stuart Lynn is not going to get his money, because we can all change our DNS settings and no amount of money or lawyers can change that. Be prepared if some root servers start humming a different tune, you might decide you want to hear something else.
This makes no sense, in a non sequitur way that pretends to know about software development.
GNOME is an example of what happens when you try to clone Microsoft.
You get bloated, non-portable code.
In actuality, the reason Gnome is bloated is that making modular reusable code isn't easy. How general/compatible do you make the component functions/classes? How autonomous/integrated should you make your application? Which libraries should you depend on, and which should you rewrite?
The reason Gnome isn't portable is that in order to simplify the above problem, inadvertently or on purpose, developers tend to forget about other platforms (system dependencies) and concentrate on application dependencies. It's a symptom of just how hard these problems are. We have some lofty goals for our software these days, please pardon them for getting it somewhat wrong while they figure out how to do things.
Smartcards suck because they are portable/pocketable and opaque to the (ab)user. A bogus smartcard (key grabber) can be made to look just like a bonafide smartcard that a person wouldn't know has been foisted on them. What is that thingy DOING when you wave it over the sensor pad?
This is kind of ridiculous because it requres you to take the whole firewall down to make rule changes. Why not just blackhole all packets with the firewall's interface addresses as destination, and leave a local serial console with password authentication and idled running?
Alternately, this is kind-of a solution for embedded firewalls or something.. maybe for tiny flash-card bootable network probes (remember firewalls are routers and can be made to do nasty things too) that you boot and then eject the flash media...
This is not an all-or-nothing issue. Even if trusting the vote of an almost anonynmous user somewhere on the Internet is ludicrous, this doesn't mean that we should ignore the Internet's rightful place in the electoral process: distributing public information
Because we have strong crypto, and we have the political institutions to handle certification authority, and there *are* ways to do authentic but anonymous signatures, I feel we should use a vote recording system that takes advantage of these features to avoid the vote recording problems of the 2000 US presidential election.
Imagine authenticating ONCE PER YEAR with the County Clerk's office, where they register you in their LDAP directory and give you a card with an x509 certificate. The judges at the polling places can hand you an anonymous x509 certificate -w- private key from a pile once they authenticate you via LDAP (with your picture). You can use the anonymous x509 to record your votes to another LDAP directory from a machine in a voting booth. You put your card in, the machine asks you to verify the fingerprint on the certificate matches what the card says, and then presents you with a slate of choices. When you're done, it shows you a raw XML format completed ballot. You sign it with the anonymous key. The voting machine accepts the signed ballot only when it has a certificate revocation for the signing key to go with it. The election judge sees a green light over your booth, presses a button, and the directory of votes and CRL of valid anonymous certificates are updated. You go home, and at the prescribed closing of the polls, each polling place opens its directory of recorded votes up for the big LDAP replication. Votes are tallied in batch time, and recounts can be done at will after the tally directory is populated.
The real problem is the federated system of feifdoms down in all the County Clerk's offices of your hometowns. Putting this kind of minimum standard to their practices amounts to cutting their crooked balls off. The bigger the Clerk's office, the bigger the fight they put up.
In case you're too illiterate to read ALL THE WORDS, I will leave out the details so you can avoid missing the point again.
I believe Tomshardware crossed the line separating responsible hard-nosed journalism and candy-coated marketspeak. Tomshardware has a reputation for the hardnose stuff. This XBox feature is not hardnose journalism. It is shameless promotion. There's no two sides about it. I'm talking about JOURNALISM.
The XBox may be everything that has thus been promised. We may all be better off if we spend our fun money on XBox, but Tomshardware failed to provide any real reason to support that notion. There's nothing to draw strict inferences from. It doesn't make any real sense to decide based on Tomshardware reporting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hendorsements.
The only thing to agree or diagree about is VAPOR, and therefore discussion about XBox in Tomshardware context is pointless as if Tomshardware HAD NO CONTEXT. It's just like "Joe Nobody said I should by XBox 'casue it gots triple buffer Z caching vertex pipelines." WTF does that mean? NOTHING! Therefore: bad journalism. It doesn't cut through the fluff; it IS fluff. Any opinion you form from here on might as well be pulled directly from your ass. (though it still could possibly be correct) Batteries not included: arguments must supply their own facts. You didn't read it in Tomshardware.
One pound of your enemy's provisions is worth twenty of your own.
I would apply the corollary: "One hour of your enemy's time is worth twenty of your own." The principle is that you are not only getting your enemy's preparations and resources to work for your goals, but you also prevent him from using them against you. Your own resources are many times more costly to build up. Microsoft sees Miguel as a tool, and they are waging Ximian against Gnome (the GNU GUI) with the goal of making GNU oriented developers waste their time even learning C#.
If we need a new language, why don't more people get together and decide on all the goals of that language? If we need to link compiled code from disparate languages together, why not write a CORBA spec or something? The key concept here is DO NOT LET MICROSOFT SLIP INTO YOUR PROJECT'S DEPENDANCIES.
Your retort would be well placed if Tomshardware were in fact a developer review site, but it is in fact a consumer review site, designed to take the technical details and "bring them down the mountain" from the perspective of "what do I get if I buy this." Your retort is off-base though. The reason is , the answer to "what do I get..." is "promises, promises." That is not good journalism by the same standard TomsHardware *itself* has set.
Per SkywalkerOS8 (brian.jackson.2000@m[ ]trincoll.edu ['ail.' in gap) on Tue 05 Feb 09:50AM (#2955553):
It only been out 2.5 months! It's allowed to have a warm up period.
Point taken, but TomsHardware didn't have anything substantial/incisive to say about it. All the article details could have been design/engineering docs reworked by MS marketing people. While I agree with your comment, I think you basically missed the point of my critique.
I was repeatedly dissapointed on each and every repetitive page of prediction after prediction of what the XBox *WILL* be and what it *WILL* do, and how cool games *WILL* be. It all adds up: Xbox is SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever, but even Tomshardware.com can only say that it's SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever. There is precious little hard empirical truth to demonstrate any of the projections made in the pages. Here's what I mean. If these way-cool features are really available, where are the games that demonstrate them? How do we know it works as described? If a feature never appears in a single game you want to buy, then it doesn't add to the value of XBox does it?
Having read a good many well informed articles there, I kept clicking the next page links thinking Tomshardware was teasing me before he got to the meat of the article, but I wore through 2/3 of it before I gave up looking for the gritty pull-no-punches analysis. This is NOT journalism, it's advertisement, and it's wrong to print it without the "Sponsored by Microsoft" disclaimer. I will never feel the same about Tomshardware again.
I've read past Slashdot flames toward Tomshardware, but I had to reserve judgement for myself. Granted, I deserve it; you told me so., but please try to add something more if you reply to this.
I used to work for the CBOE as a Systems Support Analyst. In this job I was supposed to do hands-on troubleshooting of the options quote distribution system that populates the arrays of screens with stock tickers and options prices.
At the core was a huge tablespace (database) of product:Bid:Offer:Last:Timestamp. That was an Amdahl mainframe running TPF (like the Sabre system backend for Travelocity). From there, the prices went through a ring-buffer where they were synchronously distributed (by another corporate entity: OPRA) back to all the derivatives exchanges including the CBOE. This happened over a T-1 in my time. Some Stratus Continuum (Wicked expensive redundant out the wazoo HPPA boxes running VOS) modules massaged the data out to and back in from OPRA. No traders on the CBOE floor have yet seen the effects of their bid/ask changes or last-sales on the overhead ticker displays.
The Stratus modules maintained a first-tier subscription list for 10 georaphic "cells" (really called "posts" at CBOE), and streamed the appropriate updates to a "Post Display Server" (PDS). Each PDS server maintained a second-tier subscription list for 4 (possibly more) "Remote Control Node" (RCN servers) which fed a third-tier of subscriptions to the RCN displays, the end-client, a Tektronix X terminal running proprietary quote-screen software locally.
We could never get clocks on all the servers to synchronise completely, but I estimate it took less than 500ms for a price change to make it to the screens, and peak trading times would see delays of 2-3 seconds.
The multiple tier distribution system is designed to limit the impact of demand/performance spikes to the fewest number of clients possible. For example: your MMPOLG might have a server for each "city" in your game. I've always thought this might be a good application for a Beowulf cluster because of all the paralellism in dealing with all the clients simultaneous actions. Basically, you're a database of game state, and you have to sort and forward events to the fewest clients possible in order to keep things from getting overloaded. Clients recieve state, and they feed input to a state-engine, which generates events, which get sent back to the clients. The server sends the client a pond, the client throws a stone in it, and the server sends ripples back to all the clients at the pond. Your job is to keep that process as lightweight and distributed as possible.
So you wouldn't be able to call it Linux? If you think you can do it better than Linus then by all means do! As long as you release the source code you are within GPL.
Copy the Linux kernel source to another location, and import it into a CVS database under a new name. Of course, then you're playing with Linux the game which BSD plays with all software projects. You'd better be sure you can organise your code to easily import features and fixes when Linus gets something you don't have.
Regardless of whether Microsoft has been proven to abuse the power, there are laws which make it illegal to posess the ability to abuse the power. The idea comes from a legal term: "conflict of interest."
When a person offers a service to another person in the financial/legal/medical world they are acting as an agent on behalf of the customer. Legally, that arragement has an implied "fiduciary responsibility" to the customer. That means if someone gives you the key to their account and you do something they wouldn't have agreed to, you are wrong and subject to criminal and civil liability. In the case of finances, there are EXTRA laws that say you are not even allowed to ofer such services to people if you have an interest in ripping them off (like other competing customers).
Bill Gates comes from a long line of lawyers: his family is a lawyer family. He knows he can flout the law wherever there is grey area because he has the money to risk. If he manages to win some small legal challenge, he has stretched the law to allow more exploitation and the windfall revenue that goes with.
When you (the US) have a big dog, you put a pinch (or shock) collar on him, and you jerk it hard (or shock him) when he *starts* to get out of line. You can let up a little, but only when he has a compelling fear of disproportionate retribution. Corporations are less like people who deserve rights, and more like dangerous, powerful animals that must be attended to with preemptive stewardship. Emotions, values, and ethics are not present in the brains of reptiles or boardrooms.
I recognise your point that following kernel code isn't that hard, but I still wonder why Linux couldn't borrow some FreeBSD VM code where FreeBSD drivers often come from a rewrite of Linux drivers.
If the code is unreadable for most advanced users (people with enough C background to follow execution flow in readable code), then you really can't get the benefit of having a large community debugging the software.
What you have here is a LARGE body of (l)users, and a small cadre of kernel hackers who are separated and out of communication. The three times I've found a problem in FreeBSD-STABLE (to be honest, I think one was the 2.2.6, and two were 3.x branches), I sent my bug report in with instructions on how to repeat the problem, and a patch for the ugly hack I made to make the problem go away. I never beat the committers to the bug. Now, before I do all the work, I watch the WebCVS for commits for a couple of days and email the committer who touched the effective files last with a quick question "hey, I see this problem.. have you?"
I tried to read some Linux (the kernel) code a long while ago. There were some funny comments, error messages, and variable identifiers, but otherwise it gave me a headache. I just felt being a Linux participant was beyond my tolerance. I browsed the FreeBSD source code though, and even in the midst of reorganization, both organising schemes were apparent, well documented, and there is a clean style to all FreeBSD code I've seen that makes for (relatively) easy reading.
I guess that the difference is culture, but in this case it seems to be a serious problem. I have to wonder why the Linux kernel people haven't broken the Linux VM code out for modularity and borrowed the FreeBSD VM as an option? I mean: FreeBSD is free-as-in-beer and also free-as-in-software. I'm not volunteering, but after all these years wouldn't it make sense to hack out some Linux wrappers for the FreeBSD VM system? I think I remember reading a Matthew Dillon interview where he talks about all the good stuff he's done to FreeBSD VM recently...
"They're eating the seed corn." I like that better. There's prolly quite a few parables to go along with that metaphor.
I believe good software is always an elegant solution to a well understood problem. Elegant means it performs as intended with a beautiful simplicity. Understanding the problem is never easy for someone who isn't personally affected firsthand. If you separate the affected person (the paying software customer) from the solution designer (the programmer/software-engineer), you just don't get the same quality software. Academics in the CS community will now be forced to deal with the petty and uninteresting personal peeves of the moneyed-elite. Human computing problems will go on the back-burner. Corporations will employ University "Office of Development" cronies to bulldog the best and brightest into submission before they get tenure. In this way they intend to control the "means of production" of "Intellectual Capital".
The real problem is that the College of Business people are making more noise than the Liberal Arts Economics people. Everybody knows you can get a business degree without studying. It's because of the damn students paying all that crappy tuition and taking on all that debt. Business schools are not really academic in nature: they are an alumni factory churning out certified idiots who think profit is equal to value!
The Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences are not churning out economists who can explain the difference to us. So, when we, as a somewhat educated people, decide our aggregate path, the business propaganda is tune to which we march--when we march that is...
Slashdot Mirror
No, I was just actually being biased. I conveniently ignored the OSS code that isn't good enough to attract collaborators, but you're leading me back to my point: If someone (competent OSS programmer) finds a software project that is *almost* what they want, but the code is a mess (ie. the original poster's employer's GPL mods) they will always think hard about starting their own project. The principle is, if you make well organized source trees for interesting and useful projects (products), you will attract volunteer contributions. If your project (product) is cool, but your code is unreadable/unavailable you will attract competitors. If your project isn't cool who cares anyway?
So the lawyers give up? When peaceful legal avenues are closed, the only recourses left are violent and/or illegal. What we have here is more like a "software mafia" than legal corporations.
I'm guessing your employer intends to release unreadable, modified source code which compiles to a salable binary. The modified source still has to be released for free, meaning anyone can compile it and use the resulting binaries without paying. This does not protect them from a fork in the original GPL code base, and for the same reason it doesn't always pay to take BSD source code and run with it: the BSD folks (just as the GPL folks) can implement the software application you've tried to sell, and their modifications will be readable and subject to improvement by anyone.
The risk is that soon after you start charging for yours, someone else is giving away and equal/better alternative. The more money you charge, the more GPL programmers' employers stand to save by duplicating your effort in a cooperative way (spreading the development cost as thin and wide as the market for such software).
Here's another reason your company's management is screwing the owners: Source written for GPL release is written with readbility in mind. That makes code management easier. If you are in a race, and there is no requirement for the code to be widely readable, it will eventually become spaghetti that must be scrapped. At that point you will have to "borrow" from the competing GPL project again. Admitting that you will have to spend money "following" the GPL code, do you want to try and get as much free code as possible (by promoting volunteer contributions to the code base) or do you want to maximise your own development costs aside from the initial code "import" while you rewrite and reintegrate the proprietary side of the app each time? Free software is more economically efficient. You may save on some of the sunk costs, but you can't avoid the risks of proprietary software.
Really, I retract my claim. I'm sorry. I wasn't careful about my research, and I goofed.
Copyright law is civil law. The reason is this: the court system refuses to make copyright infringement suits the way to make money off copyrights. If they did, copyright holders would entrap people and then sue them. This is the legal system's way of giving those punks the finger.
*ucknut. Don't take my word for it, ask a lawyer, or better yet DO THE RESEARCH YOURSELF. Did you ever wonder WHY it works like that for trademarks? What makes them so different from other IP? Is that difference relevant?
The RIAA has to do something even if it is the wrong thing because if the courts ever accept the claim that people freely violated the copyright on a recording and that RIAA or the artist knew about it and did nothing, the recording goes into the public domain with no copyrights.
If that happens even once, the RIAA will get dropped like a fresh turd by everyone in the industry. (It's really an old crusty turd)
The reason they want to go after the Gnutella supernodes and the ISPs is that supernodes and ISPs are few in number compared to the masses of users who may-or-may-not be breaking the law until someone spends a couple of hours investigating and documenting each case. The man hours required to enforce a $15 CD sale is orders of magnitude costlier than the money they stand to gain by prosecuting individual Gnutella swappers.
They don't even care if they lose sales in the mean time (because people do tend to buy the CD if they collect every song on MP3) squelching the promotional effect of peer-to-peer sharing. What they care about is whether the courts will eventually declare the music public domain.
You see, copyrights are civil law, not criminal law as corporations wish it were. When the courts decide you have slacked in your effort to protect your own copyright they can declare the copyright lost, and what used to be copyrighted becomes public domain. Not even a restrictive EULA can supercede that declaration, so they have to do something in order to keep building the case they they did everything they could to enforce their copyrights. So, we will continue to see them fritter away millions of dollars ineffectually persecuting anyone they can drag into court. All the future possible money they could make is at stake, and it adds up.
If you don't like it, then pool your money, buy the song catalogs (the copyrights for a set of recordings) and release them to the public domain. How much did Micahel Jackson buy the Beatles' catalog for? They are trying to spend the least money possible to exhaust their legal alternatives. How much are they paying their lawyers? Maybe we should start making offers?
Please investigate DNSSEC. True the ISP can tranparently proxy your DNS requests, but he would have to log each of his successfully spoofed DNS answers and bill based on that. The marketdroids will want proof they are getting something for their money.
Stuart Lynn, ICANN CEO (Primus: super mack-daddy of all ICANN biznezz?), whoever the hell he thinks he is, is obviously crying out for help because he says ICANN can't make DNS work in the future. I read his stupid whining polemic, and it isn't really worth more than a brief scan. He wants some real money and guns so he can pay lawyers and boss the root DNS server operators around. De facto, he says they can do whatever they want without accountability to the ICANN or anyone else. He wants to make policy decisions to govern the technical operation (and design) of current and future DNS services.
ICANN is going down, because it doesn't DO anything for anyone involved. He is like the country bumpkin character from Kafka's short story: Before the Law. BIND comes with a list of compiled-in root server IP addresses. You can query all of those for a complete and curent list of root servers. This is how your DNS server knows who to ask when it doesn't know the IP address you're trying to get. Your DNS server (at the whim of your ISP) could possibly start using root servers that are not on that list. The websites you thought you knew (or maybe just their typos) would not come up; maybe you would see some nasty pr0nz (from people who paid marketing $$ to your ISP) instead. The nasty pr0n fake root operators (NPFROs) can't guarantee the pr0n marketdroids that their sites will get hits because you might configure your computer to use an independent (or your own) DNS server that the ISP doesn't control. Therefore the ISP can't get marketing kickbacks for screwing with your DNS. Likewise, none of your ISP's upstream DNS providers can do it, nor any of the root DNS operators. People could always just stop hitting their DNS.
What Mr. Stuart Lynn wants is a legal binding document that says "one ring to bind them all" so his ICANN can force the root DNS operators to become like his own personal NPFROs, but now bona fide by the contract (called a Memorandum Of Understanding or MOU) that opens the root server operator up to civil lawsuits and criminal liability. He wants to say "You must agree on penalty of law to publish the list of root DNS servers I tell you to" to make the root DNS operators kow tow to the corporate and lobbying interests that pay.
Right now, nobody has any reason to pay him for anything. People who don't understand how the political consensus exists and flows in DNS de facto tried to make ICANN do it artificially. Everyone who can, right now should go learn how to run a DNS server (not trivial) and imagine you and all your buddies and everyone who used to be on Napster are all going to run your own root servers. Think yourself through all the possibilities, and act on the best one(s) you can come up with. Stuart Lynn is not going to get his money, because we can all change our DNS settings and no amount of money or lawyers can change that. Be prepared if some root servers start humming a different tune, you might decide you want to hear something else.
This makes no sense, in a non sequitur way that pretends to know about software development.
In actuality, the reason Gnome is bloated is that making modular reusable code isn't easy. How general/compatible do you make the component functions/classes? How autonomous/integrated should you make your application? Which libraries should you depend on, and which should you rewrite? The reason Gnome isn't portable is that in order to simplify the above problem, inadvertently or on purpose, developers tend to forget about other platforms (system dependencies) and concentrate on application dependencies. It's a symptom of just how hard these problems are. We have some lofty goals for our software these days, please pardon them for getting it somewhat wrong while they figure out how to do things.Smartcards suck because they are portable/pocketable and opaque to the (ab)user. A bogus smartcard (key grabber) can be made to look just like a bonafide smartcard that a person wouldn't know has been foisted on them. What is that thingy DOING when you wave it over the sensor pad?
This is kind of ridiculous because it requres you to take the whole firewall down to make rule changes. Why not just blackhole all packets with the firewall's interface addresses as destination, and leave a local serial console with password authentication and idled running?
Alternately, this is kind-of a solution for embedded firewalls or something.. maybe for tiny flash-card bootable network probes (remember firewalls are routers and can be made to do nasty things too) that you boot and then eject the flash media...
This is not an all-or-nothing issue. Even if trusting the vote of an almost anonynmous user somewhere on the Internet is ludicrous, this doesn't mean that we should ignore the Internet's rightful place in the electoral process: distributing public information
Because we have strong crypto, and we have the political institutions to handle certification authority, and there *are* ways to do authentic but anonymous signatures, I feel we should use a vote recording system that takes advantage of these features to avoid the vote recording problems of the 2000 US presidential election.
Imagine authenticating ONCE PER YEAR with the County Clerk's office, where they register you in their LDAP directory and give you a card with an x509 certificate. The judges at the polling places can hand you an anonymous x509 certificate -w- private key from a pile once they authenticate you via LDAP (with your picture). You can use the anonymous x509 to record your votes to another LDAP directory from a machine in a voting booth. You put your card in, the machine asks you to verify the fingerprint on the certificate matches what the card says, and then presents you with a slate of choices. When you're done, it shows you a raw XML format completed ballot. You sign it with the anonymous key. The voting machine accepts the signed ballot only when it has a certificate revocation for the signing key to go with it. The election judge sees a green light over your booth, presses a button, and the directory of votes and CRL of valid anonymous certificates are updated. You go home, and at the prescribed closing of the polls, each polling place opens its directory of recorded votes up for the big LDAP replication. Votes are tallied in batch time, and recounts can be done at will after the tally directory is populated.
The real problem is the federated system of feifdoms down in all the County Clerk's offices of your hometowns. Putting this kind of minimum standard to their practices amounts to cutting their crooked balls off. The bigger the Clerk's office, the bigger the fight they put up.
In case you're too illiterate to read ALL THE WORDS, I will leave out the details so you can avoid missing the point again.
I believe Tomshardware crossed the line separating responsible hard-nosed journalism and candy-coated marketspeak. Tomshardware has a reputation for the hardnose stuff. This XBox feature is not hardnose journalism. It is shameless promotion. There's no two sides about it. I'm talking about JOURNALISM.
The XBox may be everything that has thus been promised. We may all be better off if we spend our fun money on XBox, but Tomshardware failed to provide any real reason to support that notion. There's nothing to draw strict inferences from. It doesn't make any real sense to decide based on Tomshardware reporting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hendorsements.
The only thing to agree or diagree about is VAPOR, and therefore discussion about XBox in Tomshardware context is pointless as if Tomshardware HAD NO CONTEXT. It's just like "Joe Nobody said I should by XBox 'casue it gots triple buffer Z caching vertex pipelines." WTF does that mean? NOTHING! Therefore: bad journalism. It doesn't cut through the fluff; it IS fluff. Any opinion you form from here on might as well be pulled directly from your ass. (though it still could possibly be correct) Batteries not included: arguments must supply their own facts. You didn't read it in Tomshardware.
Sun Tzu:
I would apply the corollary: "One hour of your enemy's time is worth twenty of your own." The principle is that you are not only getting your enemy's preparations and resources to work for your goals, but you also prevent him from using them against you. Your own resources are many times more costly to build up. Microsoft sees Miguel as a tool, and they are waging Ximian against Gnome (the GNU GUI) with the goal of making GNU oriented developers waste their time even learning C#.If we need a new language, why don't more people get together and decide on all the goals of that language? If we need to link compiled code from disparate languages together, why not write a CORBA spec or something? The key concept here is DO NOT LET MICROSOFT SLIP INTO YOUR PROJECT'S DEPENDANCIES.
Your retort would be well placed if Tomshardware were in fact a developer review site, but it is in fact a consumer review site, designed to take the technical details and "bring them down the mountain" from the perspective of "what do I get if I buy this." Your retort is off-base though. The reason is , the answer to "what do I get..." is "promises, promises." That is not good journalism by the same standard TomsHardware *itself* has set.
Per SkywalkerOS8 (brian.jackson.2000@m[ ]trincoll.edu ['ail.' in gap) on Tue 05 Feb 09:50AM (#2955553):
Point taken, but TomsHardware didn't have anything substantial/incisive to say about it. All the article details could have been design/engineering docs reworked by MS marketing people. While I agree with your comment, I think you basically missed the point of my critique.
I was repeatedly dissapointed on each and every repetitive page of prediction after prediction of what the XBox *WILL* be and what it *WILL* do, and how cool games *WILL* be. It all adds up: Xbox is SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever, but even Tomshardware.com can only say that it's SUPPOSED to be the coolest console ever. There is precious little hard empirical truth to demonstrate any of the projections made in the pages. Here's what I mean. If these way-cool features are really available, where are the games that demonstrate them? How do we know it works as described? If a feature never appears in a single game you want to buy, then it doesn't add to the value of XBox does it?
Having read a good many well informed articles there, I kept clicking the next page links thinking Tomshardware was teasing me before he got to the meat of the article, but I wore through 2/3 of it before I gave up looking for the gritty pull-no-punches analysis. This is NOT journalism, it's advertisement, and it's wrong to print it without the "Sponsored by Microsoft" disclaimer. I will never feel the same about Tomshardware again.
I've read past Slashdot flames toward Tomshardware, but I had to reserve judgement for myself. Granted, I deserve it; you told me so., but please try to add something more if you reply to this.
I used to work for the CBOE as a Systems Support Analyst. In this job I was supposed to do hands-on troubleshooting of the options quote distribution system that populates the arrays of screens with stock tickers and options prices.
At the core was a huge tablespace (database) of product:Bid:Offer:Last:Timestamp. That was an Amdahl mainframe running TPF (like the Sabre system backend for Travelocity). From there, the prices went through a ring-buffer where they were synchronously distributed (by another corporate entity: OPRA) back to all the derivatives exchanges including the CBOE. This happened over a T-1 in my time. Some Stratus Continuum (Wicked expensive redundant out the wazoo HPPA boxes running VOS) modules massaged the data out to and back in from OPRA. No traders on the CBOE floor have yet seen the effects of their bid/ask changes or last-sales on the overhead ticker displays.
The Stratus modules maintained a first-tier subscription list for 10 georaphic "cells" (really called "posts" at CBOE), and streamed the appropriate updates to a "Post Display Server" (PDS). Each PDS server maintained a second-tier subscription list for 4 (possibly more) "Remote Control Node" (RCN servers) which fed a third-tier of subscriptions to the RCN displays, the end-client, a Tektronix X terminal running proprietary quote-screen software locally.
We could never get clocks on all the servers to synchronise completely, but I estimate it took less than 500ms for a price change to make it to the screens, and peak trading times would see delays of 2-3 seconds.
The multiple tier distribution system is designed to limit the impact of demand/performance spikes to the fewest number of clients possible. For example: your MMPOLG might have a server for each "city" in your game. I've always thought this might be a good application for a Beowulf cluster because of all the paralellism in dealing with all the clients simultaneous actions. Basically, you're a database of game state, and you have to sort and forward events to the fewest clients possible in order to keep things from getting overloaded. Clients recieve state, and they feed input to a state-engine, which generates events, which get sent back to the clients. The server sends the client a pond, the client throws a stone in it, and the server sends ripples back to all the clients at the pond. Your job is to keep that process as lightweight and distributed as possible.
Good luck.
Thanks, I'd like to think my LAS degree is worth something... :)
So you wouldn't be able to call it Linux? If you think you can do it better than Linus then by all means do! As long as you release the source code you are within GPL.
Copy the Linux kernel source to another location, and import it into a CVS database under a new name. Of course, then you're playing with Linux the game which BSD plays with all software projects. You'd better be sure you can organise your code to easily import features and fixes when Linus gets something you don't have.
Regardless of whether Microsoft has been proven to abuse the power, there are laws which make it illegal to posess the ability to abuse the power. The idea comes from a legal term: "conflict of interest."
When a person offers a service to another person in the financial/legal/medical world they are acting as an agent on behalf of the customer. Legally, that arragement has an implied "fiduciary responsibility" to the customer. That means if someone gives you the key to their account and you do something they wouldn't have agreed to, you are wrong and subject to criminal and civil liability. In the case of finances, there are EXTRA laws that say you are not even allowed to ofer such services to people if you have an interest in ripping them off (like other competing customers).
Bill Gates comes from a long line of lawyers: his family is a lawyer family. He knows he can flout the law wherever there is grey area because he has the money to risk. If he manages to win some small legal challenge, he has stretched the law to allow more exploitation and the windfall revenue that goes with.
When you (the US) have a big dog, you put a pinch (or shock) collar on him, and you jerk it hard (or shock him) when he *starts* to get out of line. You can let up a little, but only when he has a compelling fear of disproportionate retribution. Corporations are less like people who deserve rights, and more like dangerous, powerful animals that must be attended to with preemptive stewardship. Emotions, values, and ethics are not present in the brains of reptiles or boardrooms.
I recognise your point that following kernel code isn't that hard, but I still wonder why Linux couldn't borrow some FreeBSD VM code where FreeBSD drivers often come from a rewrite of Linux drivers.
If the code is unreadable for most advanced users (people with enough C background to follow execution flow in readable code), then you really can't get the benefit of having a large community debugging the software.
What you have here is a LARGE body of (l)users, and a small cadre of kernel hackers who are separated and out of communication. The three times I've found a problem in FreeBSD-STABLE (to be honest, I think one was the 2.2.6, and two were 3.x branches), I sent my bug report in with instructions on how to repeat the problem, and a patch for the ugly hack I made to make the problem go away. I never beat the committers to the bug. Now, before I do all the work, I watch the WebCVS for commits for a couple of days and email the committer who touched the effective files last with a quick question "hey, I see this problem.. have you?"
I tried to read some Linux (the kernel) code a long while ago. There were some funny comments, error messages, and variable identifiers, but otherwise it gave me a headache. I just felt being a Linux participant was beyond my tolerance. I browsed the FreeBSD source code though, and even in the midst of reorganization, both organising schemes were apparent, well documented, and there is a clean style to all FreeBSD code I've seen that makes for (relatively) easy reading.
I guess that the difference is culture, but in this case it seems to be a serious problem. I have to wonder why the Linux kernel people haven't broken the Linux VM code out for modularity and borrowed the FreeBSD VM as an option? I mean: FreeBSD is free-as-in-beer and also free-as-in-software. I'm not volunteering, but after all these years wouldn't it make sense to hack out some Linux wrappers for the FreeBSD VM system? I think I remember reading a Matthew Dillon interview where he talks about all the good stuff he's done to FreeBSD VM recently...
"They're eating the seed corn." I like that better. There's prolly quite a few parables to go along with that metaphor.
I believe good software is always an elegant solution to a well understood problem. Elegant means it performs as intended with a beautiful simplicity. Understanding the problem is never easy for someone who isn't personally affected firsthand. If you separate the affected person (the paying software customer) from the solution designer (the programmer/software-engineer), you just don't get the same quality software. Academics in the CS community will now be forced to deal with the petty and uninteresting personal peeves of the moneyed-elite. Human computing problems will go on the back-burner. Corporations will employ University "Office of Development" cronies to bulldog the best and brightest into submission before they get tenure. In this way they intend to control the "means of production" of "Intellectual Capital".
The real problem is that the College of Business people are making more noise than the Liberal Arts Economics people. Everybody knows you can get a business degree without studying. It's because of the damn students paying all that crappy tuition and taking on all that debt. Business schools are not really academic in nature: they are an alumni factory churning out certified idiots who think profit is equal to value!
The Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences are not churning out economists who can explain the difference to us. So, when we, as a somewhat educated people, decide our aggregate path, the business propaganda is tune to which we march--when we march that is...