Software Archaeology 434
Plug1 writes "Salon (day pass needed) has an article about preserving software for historical purposes. It discusses source code archiving, and the effect the DMCA is having on attempts to catalog and analyze legacy code. It will be a shame if in the future a wealth of information is locked away because knoweldge of the underlying technology is lost."
full article text, no pass required (Score:2, Informative)
The only problem, of course, is that they don't know it. All the images are recorded in an obsolete digital format, JPEG, and nobody knows how to unscramble the data. As a result, the hard disk containing said artwork spends its days not in a museum but as a coffee coaster in some college professor's crowded office.
"It might seem silly now, but put yourself 1,000 years in the future," says Booch, chief scientist at IBM's Rational Software subsidiary. "It's not too hard to imagine."
In an industry where one man's clever C code is another man's Linear B, Booch already knows the frustration of playing software archaeologist. As co-developer of the Universal Modeling Language (UML), a mid-1990s effort to create a common "blueprint" notation for object-oriented software programs, he's spent the last 10 years laboring to spare future programmers the same torment.
It's an uphill battle on a hill that is only growing steeper. With new programs replacing old and no major company or institution playing the central role of source-code archivist, the amount of software history currently circling the memory hole is scarily large. And even if there were a central institution, recent changes to the copyright code have made the transfer of source code from old media to new forms of storage a dicey prospect, legally. Add it all up, and you have the ideal makings for what some are already calling the "digital dark age."
"Things are going to be lost not because people don't want to save them or because the original creators don't want to save them, but because they can't save them," says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, an institution that has lobbied for a safe harbor within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to shield institutions looking to archive source code.
For Booch, the barriers to software preservation aren't so much legal as educational. Most developers have come to accept the evolvable nature of software programs. What is lacking is the ability to examine static source-code snapshots with a scholarly, comparative eye. In the interest of encouraging that skill, Booch this fall will lead a seminar on software archaeology and preservation at the newly reopened Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
"Our industry has had a major effect in changing the world," says Booch, talking over the phone from his Denver, Colo., office. "It would be great if we could preserve the artifacts and interview the architects while they're still alive."
Booch isn't alone. Now that the hysteria surrounding Y2K has faded, developers are free to worry about legacy code again. One increasingly common worry is what to do with it? For every modern offshoot of DOS/Windows, Unix and Macintosh OS evolving with the marketplace, a dozen ghost programs lurk inside yellowed engineering pads, punch-card stacks and slowly degaussing magnetic memories. Even if programmers could get their hands on these programs and find a way to preserve and update their contents, a new question emerges: How do you qualitatively analyze those contents on a historical basis?
"It's funny," says Dave Thomas, a Dallas software consultant and co-author, with Andrew Hunt, of "The Pragmatic Programmer," a 1999 book on software design methods. "Colleges spend a lot of time teaching people how to write code, but very few teach them how to read code. When you think about it, we programmers spend most of our time reading code, not writing code."
To help fill the gap, Thomas served as cohost of the 2001 Software Archaeology: Understanding Large Systems workshop, hosted by Object Oriented Programming,
Re:Please understand... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just a thought you guys.... (Score:3, Informative)
Copying an entire article from another web site is also copyright infringement, unless of course the copyright terms of the article permit it.
Salon probably makes some money per page view. They want you to look at their web site, not copy text off of it. Copying an entire article is almost certainly copyright infringement, and makes whoever does it liable for damages.
Re:Please understand... (Score:5, Informative)
TCPA hardware is not the same as DRM, and is not evil
The TCPA hardware specifies a cryptography co-processor on the mainboard. This can be used for DRM, but it can also be used for offloading things like SSL from the CPU. Emulating the hardware would be no good. Under *NIX, it would just be mounted at /dev/crypto (or something), and emulated if the hardware were not availible. It is the software which manages DRM.
Re:Nestalgia (Score:1, Informative)
Funny kills your kharma (Score:0, Informative)
You could lose 10 points on a funny post.
archive.org (Score:3, Informative)
It's a matter of survival (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, it's copyright infringement, but Salon isn't going to devote resources to suing Slashdot or Slashdot readers. If we were going to go that route, we'd start with the Freerepublic assholes, who actively want us to go bankrupt and do everything they can to help us down that road. To slashdot readers, the best appeal I can make is simple.
We want to make a living at what we do, so we can keep doing it. I want to keep paying great technology writers like Rachel Chalmers and Sam Williams to do interesting stories. If we convince enough readers to watch our ads or subscribe, we'll pull off this magic trick. So basically, the way I see it, any time a Slashdot reader posts the full text of a story on Slashdot, it's a vote against our survival, which is ironic, since you wouldn't be posting the stories if you didn't think there was some merit in them, right?
Re:DMCA is already taking bite (Score:2, Informative)
ISDA spiders are trolling around and seeing a ftp/web site with "video game" in the text and offering files like pacman.zip and streetfighter2.zip for download.
C&D notices are automatically being sent, none of it has to do with the DMCA, but with regular old copyright law, since the ISDA assumes the games are being put up for download.
Whatshisface (who had the big manual site and shut it down) just couldnt be bothered to explain to anyone at the ISDA what files are.
I dont think any manufacturer really gives a shit about people collecting/trading/photocopying the service and operation manuals, or even schematics for out of production machines.
Re:Heh... (Score:2, Informative)
Don't just complain, DO SOMETHING (Score:4, Informative)
Re:full article text, no pass required (Score:4, Informative)
The Day Pass is a great idea, but some day or other I notice it plain doesn't work. Today, I tried to go to the article mentioned here, only to be redirected again and again to the same partial-content page. The Sprint ad never appears. Under Win 2000. Bot from IE and from Mozilla 1.4. I'd guess a technical problem on your (Ultramercial's?) side.
In this circumstances, I'd consider the posting of the entire article forgivable (although the poster didn't state Day Pass problems as the reason, which puts his/her motives in question). Otherwise, I agree it's a rather uncivilized behavior.
Re:full article text, no pass required (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Eyeglasses (Score:1, Informative)
What you are talking about, however, is not IP; it was a trade secret.
With modern computers, keeping something key (such as how SSL encryption is done) a trade secret is nay-to-impossible. From 1987 to 1994, RC4 was a trade secret; you had to buy RC4 from RSA labs to get the RC4 algorithm.
This all changed in 1994; someone spilled the beans on the the cyberpunks mailing list (anonymously), and RC4 was no longer a trade secret.
Because RSA labs opted to keep RC4 a trade secret instead of opting for IP protection, once the secret was out, there was nothing RSA labs could have done to protect the trade secret.
If, however, they opted for IP protection, RC4 would be under a patent, and never would have been secret. The idea behind patents is that one gets 20 years of protection in exchange for not keeping their invention a secret. Of course, like anything else legal, this gets abused by greedy scum (such as Forgent and whats-his-face who delayed his patent filings).
There is a difference between a copyright, a patent, and a trade secret; it would do the Slashdot readership quite some good to know these differences.
Anyone else think of Vinge? (Score:4, Informative)
In that book, code-as-data is taken to an extreme, and the best programmers have the title "Programmer Archaeologist", since they spend little time writing new code; instead they look through old code to find something written for a similar situation. It isn't that old programmers are better-- it's that the software contains facts and information that are of value.
Whereas on Star Trek someone might look through an ancient captain's log to learn about a bizarre planet/new race/weird disease/strange technology, in Vinge's book that sort of specialized information is stored in the source code for software that was written at the time to deal with the situation.
Re:Please understand... (Score:3, Informative)
Before continuing to demonstrate your ignorance on this subject, you might wish to visit this site [nra.org] and enlighten yourself. At the very least, you might consider at least not automatically taking what these [bradycampaign.org] maroons [vpc.org] say as gospel. This [amazon.com] is also highly-recommended reading.
It's just a suggestion...take it or leave it, but I'd rather not engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man. It's too much like shooting fish in a barrel...it quickly gets boring.
Re:Please understand... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, target shooting guns are designed to accurately put a tiny hole in a piece of paper at varying distances. This includes some handguns. Yup, they're designed for sports shooting, wow, imagine that. These are generally low caliber, now you can kill a person with a
Handguns are designed for varying purposes, but mainly that purpose is to put some form of projectile into the air at something over 1,000 feet per second. This projectile can be a bullet (lethal, or perhaps just for stopping power [like shooting someone in the arm or leg to knock him down]) or a non-lethal rubber bullet. For instance law-enforcement in this country often uses
In fact, paper suffers more than just about anything else in this country from firearm ownership.
Won't somebody think of the trees?
Dark Ages II (Score:3, Informative)