Copyright Vs Community w/ Richard Stallman

Just got a chance to attend a seminar on Copyright Vs Community by Richard Stallman
I hope most of you are aware of this guy who pioneered the free software movement .
coined the term GNU is not UNIX , developed the most popular gcc compiler and emacs editors .

Free software movement started in early eighties and by now its just as a dominant
race as the non-free softwares . Freedom is our right and proprietary softwares just
donot respect individual freedom . People are entitled to use only the way developer
design that software – there is no freedom to customize it to their need because the
source codes were not available. Stallman defined four degrees of freedom for a software
to be called a free software -
0 – they should be available freely for use \
1 – source code should be available for customized by the user
2 – user can distribute the custom software freely
3 – user can make as many copy of the software as he wants freely .

After this brief introduction he moved to the constraints that hinders the freedom of the users
Here comes the theme of the lecture . He mentioned how the copyright laws came into existence and how they
are helping the corporates to make money and comprising on the freedom of individual in a democratic society.
Example ranging from books to digital music got mention in his talk .
One example that worth mentioning is the music CDs prepared by Sony . Sony hides a copyright management
software in their music disks that runs automatically and and modifies some of the system parameters permanently so that
the software remains hidden from the user and prevent user from making copy of the music.
This caused a permanent security loophole in the system and computers became vulnerable to attacks.
Sony was finally forced to recall million of its CDs .

I personally feel that copyright should be there – but I believe this should not be the same way as they
are today . And when it comes to different category of copyright able subjects they
should be treated differently.He mentioned some innovative way publishers are making money
without sharing much of the revenue with the author or the composer. Stallman mentioned that books , musics
etc are subjected to a limited copyright. In case of softwares , he insisted that their non commercial use
should be free and the above four freedom should exists in the software world to help maintaining a democratic society.

He finally urge everyone to stand against the wave and support the freedom of software .
If you would like to participate in the movement here is a good point to start .

Fade up of Vista ? Wait !!

Many people do not like Vista for a lot of reasons. I personally donot like it because I can no longer use my favorite softwares that runs in XP due to compatibility issues. Initially I thought I would just install Windows XP over Vista. But again I had some issues with the drivers for my laptops – they are just made for Vista it seems. Finally I found a turnaround.

Microsoft thankfully provides a virtual desktop environment called Virtual PC. You can use it as a virtual machine in most of the Vista Versions and install Windows XP and other Windows OS on it.

Details on how to set up the Virtual PC on your machine can be found in this link.

I am currently using it and found it powerful and fast enough for my programming stuff.

It comes FREE of cost.

A $1200 million software crash

    I have read somewhere that the costliest  bug in   software  is out-of-range error where software produces unexpected results due to  inputs out of the expected range. In the trading software as well this is the erroneous conversion of price. Almost every exchange uses different format to represent price of stocks, bonds etc they deal with. So there were always special considerations needed  to convert price. This is not quite straight forward. We need to take care of almost all possible boundary conditions without compromising the time complexity. You cannot trust even the widely used boost::lexical_cast . (  boost trims some of the decimal points while converting double to string and it created a serious  issue once ).  Morgan Stanley was once fined $300,000 for sending a wrong price to NYSE. 

That was a descent $0.3 million bug. But unbelievebly  a bug in a program segment for converting a floating point number to a signed 16 bit integer cost $1200 million. “This out of range error which arose in both the active and the backup computers at Ariane 5 launcher at about the same time, was detected and both computers shut themselves down. This resulted in the total loss of attitude control of the launcher. The Ariane 5 turned uncontrollably and aerodynamic forces broke the vehicle apart. This breakup was detected by an on-board monitor which ignited the explosive charges to destroy the vehicle in the air. Ironically, the result of this format conversion was no longer needed after lift off.. “  And the cost was $1200 million.

Lesson learnt .. But  can we write a bug free software ? Not easy  I belive .. A few more disappointing statistcs -

—Windows 2000, 35 million lines of code ,63,000 known bugs at the time of release, 2 per 1000 lines

— software errors cost the U.S. economy about $59.5 billion annually
Any thoughts ?