Ok, so adobe checks which IP's are running products with cracked serials. They're not the first to do this. Like most companies that do it, they're probably just sitting on the data for now, using it for analysis, or just waiting for the rules to change a bit.
It's not unthinkable, though, that they've implemented so me sort of code based on what's in the GIF. They probably send back a GIF to make the communication look more inconspicuous (I've seen apps taken layout elements from the web before), but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also some command in there. It should be possible to route the IP to an internal server, and have the server return some different GIF's.
Much like light cones in physics. Very cool indeed. Not strictly true, though. There have been smoke signals, drums and similar communication methods since the dawn of man. You need to go a lot further back to find a time when the speed of communication limited the homogeneity of cultures. And if you go that far back, the distances between tribes and lack of general communication is the source of the separation, rather than the actual speed of communication.
The point? The point is I can write proper CSS now, without having to worry about how IE will fuck it up. I can use alpha channels in png's and all sorts of things without writing it two different ways, so it will render across all browsers. I don't care about how crappily written the rest of the web is, I can write my little bits of it properly. Standards compliance isn't about punishing content authors that don't adhere to the standard. It perfectly alright to be lenient about non-validating code. But validating code needs to be rendered properly, and Microsoft seems to be getting that point at last.
Firstly, anything criminal happens over your internet connection, you're responsible. You can't even plead you didn't know about open access points and all that, because you have a picture of a frickin' robot on your homepage.
Now, copyright infringement isn't a criminal matter, so that may be different, but once the *AA's lawyers find this post (which links to your homepage, which is a link to you) and read it out in court, you will get your ass handed to you.
As for wiping your own disks, same story. And don't take my word for it, this actually happened, it was even on slashdot. Girl got sued by the RIAA, wiped her harddrive, and lost the case because she destroyed evidence (and probably got fined more than she would have for what she downloaded).
And that's exactly why almost the entire field of information retrieval is focused on these 'statistical' approaches instead of some sort of deep semantics. It works. Semantic analysis is very difficult, highly language dependent and slow as hell. For google to do something like that they would have to not only make it work, but make it work for many different languages and make it fast.
Let's not forget that information retrieval requires highly optimized algorithms. Linear time (over the size of the document collection) isn't enough. You can't search all documents for a single query, you need to retrieve a subset that belongs to a given keyword in (sort of) constant time. So even if you do semantic analysis, you need to either translate your semantic understanding of the query and the document to some sort of keywords anyway, or restrict your deep semantics to a very small subset that you've retrieved using keyword analysis. Once the academics succeed in getting semantics right, then we can start to think about transferring it to the domain of IR. Currently all the interest is in solutions that work.
Wikipedia's search is bad because the implementation blows. It not Lucene's fault, it's the fault of the mediawiki devs. Lucene has implementations ready for every kind of search improvement trick you can think of. Simple example, you can boost the importance of different fields. Mediawiki could easily boost the influence of the title field, but I'm pretty sure that they don't. When I search for UDP, the first hit is about UDP ports, the second is the disambiguation page for UDP. Lucene allows for all sorts of improvements to your search strategy, MediaWiki just doesn't use them.
It's important to consider the structure of Dutch government in this case. The Netherlands have a system of many parties. There are some big ones, two of which usually make up the government, with a third smaller one. But the Dutch congress (which can veto bills, and bring up points of discussion) comprises all parties that got some minimum number of votes. I suppose most parliamentary democracies work this way, but the difference with countries like America and the UK is that in the Netherlands there is actually great diversity of parties in congress, many of which are small enough to really care about the issues. And a common divisor between all the parties that aren't in government is that none of them will care much about how great a deal the government is going to get from Microsoft (especially when there are free alternatives).
Don't get me wrong, we don't have a magnificent government at the moment, but the parliament usually works pretty well. The one party that would be most sympathetic to Microsoft here is the liberal VVD, and one of their prominent politicians is the Eurocommisioner that managed to give Microsoft a kicking in the recent antitrust suit. There is some hope for this one.
It also shows what happens in situations like these. Right now, the German police can tap anybody's phonecall, except that of terrorists. If they get their trojans (god forbid), the terrorists will switch to encrypted drives under an obscure operating system with their own voip network over tor. And again, the regular folk that don't care enough to set all that up get spied on for downloading mp3's and the terrorists that mean business evade the police with minimal effort.
However I do see us attempting to clone wooly mammoths and dodos and other extinct animals.
Yes. We could put them in a zoo for people to see. Or better yet, some sort of theme park. We'd need an isolated island somewhere. We'd need two paleontologists, a chaos theorist, a lawyer and two kids to appraise the safety of the place. And we'd need some sort of hacker to set up the security systems, preferably with those unix systems with the pink boxes.
The iPhone isn't about features. Of course, other phones have camera's and music players and whatnot. The iPhone is about getting it right. I have a simple Samsung phone. I picked it because I wanted a phone with a music player and a decent amount of storage. When I got it, I realized that feature listings aren't everything. The interface is impossibly complicated, the music player is enormously whimsical, it's impossible to get it to play a specific playlist, once it's playing you can't turn it off, file transfer between phone and computer works only if you're lucky and, well, the list goes on and on.
That's why the iPhone is different. It not only has the features, but they're designed to be used. They got it right. The iPhone really is beautiful and exceptional, not because of all its features, but because of how they work and how well they work. Most phones are designed to be bought, the iPhone is designed to be used.
Wikipedia is flexible, it'll bounce back. If the additions have no redeeming qualities, they'll be reverted, and if they're good, but not up to the standard, they'll be improved. The idea of wikipedia is to converge to a good encyclopedia. Not to be perfect everywhere all the time. That's not going to happen until they figure out a way to take 'stable' snapshots.
The advantage is that there are now 20 extra people every year that know how to edit wikipedia. Everybody I know uses wikipedia, and nobody edits. They just don't know how, and they don't have the time to get in to it. Out of these 20 students, I'd say 5 will never edit again, 10 will correct the occasional small error or reference, and the remaining 5 will do more than that, or start writing for other wikimedia projects.
As the founding member of both the OpenDocument Federation, and the OpenDocument Alliance (both very recently founded), I can now officially state that we support a move back to unformatted text files. We are also in favor of increased funding to OpenDocument organizations, people paying attention to us, and we are in talks with Microsoft about our recent "Porsches for founding members" program.
If these initiatives are successful, we intend to combine our operations with the OpenDocument Union, the OpendDocument Pan-Atlantic Pact, the OpenDocument Coven, the OpenDocument Reading Group and the OpenDocument David Hasselhoff fanclub in hopes of getting many more people to pay attention to us.
Exactly. If they wanted absolute minimal cost, they could just license everything under a CC license. Done. The community that's currently ripping and distributing their stuff illegally would be so overjoyed at finally being legitimate, the interest would be overwhelming. The technology, the know-how and the infrastructure are all there already. They could let just go of it, and it would settle itself. There would be more interest than the BBC could ever get with their shitty DRM'ed player.
I can understand that they won't do that, but don't give me this bullshit about minimum cost. It's about maximum control. Even with the BBC, the only entity that has absolutely no reason for it.
Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh?
Yes, I'm sure they've completely given up on that one. What they're doing now is saying: "Well, Writer is finished, nothing could make that any better. Let's get Thunderbird in, call it an outlook replacement, and that'll be that." And you, lone soul crying in the desert, are the only person who sees that Thunderbird and Outlook don't actually share all the same features. Hundreds of people, whose day job it is to think about office software, just happened to have missed that one. If only they'd talked to you first.
An alternative theory, if you'll permit me, is that they are attempting to compete with Word. They know that to compete with word, they have to compete in the business arena. To compete in the business arena they have to compete with office as a whole. To compete with office as a whole, you need to present the following features: A word processor (check), a spreadsheet program (check), everything that an Outlook/Exchange combination offers. This is the grim reality of open source in the workplace in 2007. People don't need much from their word processor, people don't need much from their spreadsheet, but they will not accept anything but full feature completeness from their personal information manager. And we don't have that. We don't have a decent PI manager, and we don't have a decent server back-end. There are many solutions being worked on, both for clients and server backends, but none of them have reached the stage where the idea can be sold to management. If the new word processor doesn't have a nice zoom button, so be it, it's free, we'll get by. But if the new PIM software doesn't allow me to plan a meeting, allocate a room, and email the people involved in a single button click, screw that, we're sticking with Office.
So if any kind of workplace is going to switch to OO.o, it needs this functionality, and it needs to get it right. Really, really right. Righter than it's ever gotten anything before. So what's the plan of action? Incorporate Evolution? Evolution's a mess. Chandler? perpetually in alpha, and way too experimental. So how about Thunderbird? Very solid and stable codebase. In fact more secure and stable than Outlook has ever been. Calendaring, task management and what-have-you can be added through plugins (some already in progress), and best of all, it's mother has recently abandoned it, so it could do with a little support. In fact, since Mozilla has the Eudora codebase to develop into a new simple email client, it's not such a bad idea to let Thunderbird grow into a full fledged PIM. Personally, I'd welcome it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so adobe checks which IP's are running products with cracked serials. They're not the first to do this. Like most companies that do it, they're probably just sitting on the data for now, using it for analysis, or just waiting for the rules to change a bit.
It's not unthinkable, though, that they've implemented so me sort of code based on what's in the GIF. They probably send back a GIF to make the communication look more inconspicuous (I've seen apps taken layout elements from the web before), but I wouldn't be surprised if there's also some command in there. It should be possible to route the IP to an internal server, and have the server return some different GIF's.
Yeah, especially the "spread firefox" guys.
"Great work folks! Now, could you do it again for our new name?"
Much like light cones in physics. Very cool indeed. Not strictly true, though. There have been smoke signals, drums and similar communication methods since the dawn of man. You need to go a lot further back to find a time when the speed of communication limited the homogeneity of cultures. And if you go that far back, the distances between tribes and lack of general communication is the source of the separation, rather than the actual speed of communication.
The calculations will come out correctly?
The point? The point is I can write proper CSS now, without having to worry about how IE will fuck it up. I can use alpha channels in png's and all sorts of things without writing it two different ways, so it will render across all browsers. I don't care about how crappily written the rest of the web is, I can write my little bits of it properly. Standards compliance isn't about punishing content authors that don't adhere to the standard. It perfectly alright to be lenient about non-validating code. But validating code needs to be rendered properly, and Microsoft seems to be getting that point at last.
Firstly, anything criminal happens over your internet connection, you're responsible. You can't even plead you didn't know about open access points and all that, because you have a picture of a frickin' robot on your homepage.
Now, copyright infringement isn't a criminal matter, so that may be different, but once the *AA's lawyers find this post (which links to your homepage, which is a link to you) and read it out in court, you will get your ass handed to you.
As for wiping your own disks, same story. And don't take my word for it, this actually happened, it was even on slashdot. Girl got sued by the RIAA, wiped her harddrive, and lost the case because she destroyed evidence (and probably got fined more than she would have for what she downloaded).
And that's exactly why almost the entire field of information retrieval is focused on these 'statistical' approaches instead of some sort of deep semantics. It works. Semantic analysis is very difficult, highly language dependent and slow as hell. For google to do something like that they would have to not only make it work, but make it work for many different languages and make it fast.
Let's not forget that information retrieval requires highly optimized algorithms. Linear time (over the size of the document collection) isn't enough. You can't search all documents for a single query, you need to retrieve a subset that belongs to a given keyword in (sort of) constant time. So even if you do semantic analysis, you need to either translate your semantic understanding of the query and the document to some sort of keywords anyway, or restrict your deep semantics to a very small subset that you've retrieved using keyword analysis. Once the academics succeed in getting semantics right, then we can start to think about transferring it to the domain of IR. Currently all the interest is in solutions that work.
Wikipedia's search is bad because the implementation blows. It not Lucene's fault, it's the fault of the mediawiki devs. Lucene has implementations ready for every kind of search improvement trick you can think of. Simple example, you can boost the importance of different fields. Mediawiki could easily boost the influence of the title field, but I'm pretty sure that they don't. When I search for UDP, the first hit is about UDP ports, the second is the disambiguation page for UDP. Lucene allows for all sorts of improvements to your search strategy, MediaWiki just doesn't use them.
Ancows unbellyfeel newspeak. It's Minitrue.
Wait a sec. You fought in Iraq, and while there, during your time off, you played America's Army? Holy crap.
Or are all AA servers located in Iraq, for added realism?
It's important to consider the structure of Dutch government in this case. The Netherlands have a system of many parties. There are some big ones, two of which usually make up the government, with a third smaller one. But the Dutch congress (which can veto bills, and bring up points of discussion) comprises all parties that got some minimum number of votes. I suppose most parliamentary democracies work this way, but the difference with countries like America and the UK is that in the Netherlands there is actually great diversity of parties in congress, many of which are small enough to really care about the issues. And a common divisor between all the parties that aren't in government is that none of them will care much about how great a deal the government is going to get from Microsoft (especially when there are free alternatives).
Don't get me wrong, we don't have a magnificent government at the moment, but the parliament usually works pretty well. The one party that would be most sympathetic to Microsoft here is the liberal VVD, and one of their prominent politicians is the Eurocommisioner that managed to give Microsoft a kicking in the recent antitrust suit. There is some hope for this one.
I have a robot that can meet your challenge. Allow me to introduce the BlockOfConcrete 3000! A revolution in stabilizing robots.
Thus extending the life of the universe. Keep it up!
Ouch.
It also shows what happens in situations like these. Right now, the German police can tap anybody's phonecall, except that of terrorists. If they get their trojans (god forbid), the terrorists will switch to encrypted drives under an obscure operating system with their own voip network over tor. And again, the regular folk that don't care enough to set all that up get spied on for downloading mp3's and the terrorists that mean business evade the police with minimal effort.
These armchair rockets you speak of intrigue me. Are they available for purchase?
The iPhone isn't about features. Of course, other phones have camera's and music players and whatnot. The iPhone is about getting it right. I have a simple Samsung phone. I picked it because I wanted a phone with a music player and a decent amount of storage. When I got it, I realized that feature listings aren't everything. The interface is impossibly complicated, the music player is enormously whimsical, it's impossible to get it to play a specific playlist, once it's playing you can't turn it off, file transfer between phone and computer works only if you're lucky and, well, the list goes on and on.
That's why the iPhone is different. It not only has the features, but they're designed to be used. They got it right. The iPhone really is beautiful and exceptional, not because of all its features, but because of how they work and how well they work. Most phones are designed to be bought, the iPhone is designed to be used.
Indeed, people without a body have enough to worry about without being convicted of all sorts of crimes.
Simple discrimination against being unable to manifest on the corporeal plane, that's what it is.
(I have nothing of value to add to this discussion)
Wikipedia is flexible, it'll bounce back. If the additions have no redeeming qualities, they'll be reverted, and if they're good, but not up to the standard, they'll be improved. The idea of wikipedia is to converge to a good encyclopedia. Not to be perfect everywhere all the time. That's not going to happen until they figure out a way to take 'stable' snapshots.
The advantage is that there are now 20 extra people every year that know how to edit wikipedia. Everybody I know uses wikipedia, and nobody edits. They just don't know how, and they don't have the time to get in to it. Out of these 20 students, I'd say 5 will never edit again, 10 will correct the occasional small error or reference, and the remaining 5 will do more than that, or start writing for other wikimedia projects.
The good news is you've won. The bad news is you'll have to share the prize with 500,000 other nerds.
Have fun with your 20 bucks.
As the founding member of both the OpenDocument Federation, and the OpenDocument Alliance (both very recently founded), I can now officially state that we support a move back to unformatted text files. We are also in favor of increased funding to OpenDocument organizations, people paying attention to us, and we are in talks with Microsoft about our recent "Porsches for founding members" program.
If these initiatives are successful, we intend to combine our operations with the OpenDocument Union, the OpendDocument Pan-Atlantic Pact, the OpenDocument Coven, the OpenDocument Reading Group and the OpenDocument David Hasselhoff fanclub in hopes of getting many more people to pay attention to us.
It's a shame that all that extra productivity will be completely negated when everybody gets addicted to Duke Nukem Forever.
Exactly. If they wanted absolute minimal cost, they could just license everything under a CC license. Done. The community that's currently ripping and distributing their stuff illegally would be so overjoyed at finally being legitimate, the interest would be overwhelming. The technology, the know-how and the infrastructure are all there already. They could let just go of it, and it would settle itself. There would be more interest than the BBC could ever get with their shitty DRM'ed player.
I can understand that they won't do that, but don't give me this bullshit about minimum cost. It's about maximum control. Even with the BBC, the only entity that has absolutely no reason for it.
Yes, I'm sure they've completely given up on that one. What they're doing now is saying: "Well, Writer is finished, nothing could make that any better. Let's get Thunderbird in, call it an outlook replacement, and that'll be that." And you, lone soul crying in the desert, are the only person who sees that Thunderbird and Outlook don't actually share all the same features. Hundreds of people, whose day job it is to think about office software, just happened to have missed that one. If only they'd talked to you first.
An alternative theory, if you'll permit me, is that they are attempting to compete with Word. They know that to compete with word, they have to compete in the business arena. To compete in the business arena they have to compete with office as a whole. To compete with office as a whole, you need to present the following features: A word processor (check), a spreadsheet program (check), everything that an Outlook/Exchange combination offers. This is the grim reality of open source in the workplace in 2007. People don't need much from their word processor, people don't need much from their spreadsheet, but they will not accept anything but full feature completeness from their personal information manager. And we don't have that. We don't have a decent PI manager, and we don't have a decent server back-end. There are many solutions being worked on, both for clients and server backends, but none of them have reached the stage where the idea can be sold to management. If the new word processor doesn't have a nice zoom button, so be it, it's free, we'll get by. But if the new PIM software doesn't allow me to plan a meeting, allocate a room, and email the people involved in a single button click, screw that, we're sticking with Office.
So if any kind of workplace is going to switch to OO.o, it needs this functionality, and it needs to get it right. Really, really right. Righter than it's ever gotten anything before. So what's the plan of action? Incorporate Evolution? Evolution's a mess. Chandler? perpetually in alpha, and way too experimental. So how about Thunderbird? Very solid and stable codebase. In fact more secure and stable than Outlook has ever been. Calendaring, task management and what-have-you can be added through plugins (some already in progress), and best of all, it's mother has recently abandoned it, so it could do with a little support. In fact, since Mozilla has the Eudora codebase to develop into a new simple email client, it's not such a bad idea to let Thunderbird grow into a full fledged PIM. Personally, I'd welcome it.