Abstract: Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.
If you've read Michael Howard's writings, he's certainly not a "narrow minded fool". On his blog, he talked about security features in the compiler and linker such as/GS and/SafeSEH. With these in place--and OS-based onese, such as Address Space Layout Randomization and Data Execution Prevention-- buffer overflows still exist, but are much harder to effectively exploit. Yes, the process will abort, so you could still have a denial of service attack, but you've greatly reduced the chance of a more serious remote code execution.
Note that OpenBSD is also adopting similar defense-in-depth strategies, including SSP and N^X. Adoption is much more haphazard on Linux Distros, so you may be at much more risk running an application such as SSH on Linux than on OpenBSD even when it is compiled from the same source code.
Can I use the File Format Specification to create a SWF interpreter or player?
No, the File Format Specification is provided for the specific purpose of enabling software applications to export to the Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF).
The problem comes when a company claims "ownership" of your code and then determines who benefits and under what contitions. That's what happens when you don't worry enough to make things right.
I can't figure out what happened with Macsyma from either your post or the two pages you link to. It sounds like MIT initially did not release Macsyma under any kind of open-source license to begin with, in which case your example is irrelevant to the question of BSD v. MIT v. GPL.
It seems that eventually the original Macsyma did become open source, but maybe you're complaining that the commercial version ever existed or maybe you're complaining that the commercial version isn't open source or maybe you're complaining that software developed with public funds (if that was the case with Macsyma) wasn't initially released as open source.
So are you saying that we should insist that when tax-payer funded research that creates software, it should always be open source? Are you saying that creating a commercial product out of open source software is wrong? What do you mean by "theft"?
In the non-fiction book The Cuckoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll is trying to get a call to his computer in Berkeley traced; the person at British Telecom that he talks to originally took computer programming via a correspondence course. He had to write his program out on coding forms, then mail them. They would be keypunched and he would be mailed back the output from the line printer.
He got in the habit of getting it right the first time.
"Zero-Day exploits are released on the same day the vulnerability -- and, sometimes, the vendor patch -- are released to the public. The term derives from the number of days between the public advisory and the release of the exploit. The term 'zero-day exploits' is sometimes misused to indicate publicly known exploits for which no patches yet exist."
The misuse of "zero day" in this article and "back door" in the Adobe article bother me more than the existence of the exploits themselves! Silly, perhaps, but true!
This is not a problem for a survey. In exit polls, voters are chosen in a random way, (say every 5th that comes out the door), it's not up to them. And if someone diclines to answer, it is noted, and counted in the statistical error:
from 100 ppl, 40 voted for A, 30 voted for B, 20 for C and 10 refused, so you have a 40% +- 10% for A
That's not how results from exit polls are reported. From the report linked above, the actual refusal rates are 30 to 40 percent, with about another 10% missed because the interviewer could not physically reach the selected interviewee. The completion rate for interviews is in the range 49% to 62%. If the results were reported the way you suggest, we would have something like 28% Bush (+/- 40%), 27% Kerry (+/- 40%). Obviously it does not work that way.
No, it came about from taking an existing standard which a committee had sat for months in a room and defined, and handed down graven tablets describing--and then specializing it for online hypertext use and removing a lot of unnecessary functionality.
Specifically, the committee was ISO JTC1 SC34, and the standard was ISO 8879 or SGML. That's where DTDs came from, and that's why the HTML specifications still refer to ISO 8879 today.
Not really. HTML was designed to be in the same style as SGML (and many other markup languages), but it wasn't really SGML, none of the implementations used SGML technology and the DTDs came after the implementations. Furthermore, SGML was a standardization effort that followed more than a decade of implementations of markup langauages, most notably IBM's GML.
Netscape had a good try at screwing up the ability to treat HTML as SGML, but we're on the way to fixing that as XML is a subset of SGML and XHTML is XML.
And hardly anybody uses XHTML because it provides no advantage over HTML.
People do use XML as a tagged-data language, but not that much as a markup language.
Thats the problem, none of the browsers fully implement any of the standards. Some are just better than others.
Hmmm, 8 years since CSS2 came out and not a single browser implements all of it. Until this year, no browser even got 90%. Perhaps there is something wrong with the standard and the standards process.
Just a thought.
HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented. The actual implementors talked about it on a mailing list. Different features were proposed, discussed, implemented, discussed again, etc. The standards guys met afterwards to try to figure out what the standard was. Messy, maybe, but it worked. Implementation intermixed with specification. Free (open-source) reference implementations. That's how TCP/IP came about, too. We all use TCP/IP instead of the "standard" network protocols. (For those too young to know, the ISO was developing the real networking standards (OSI) for many, many years. TCP/IP was a protocol barely used outside academia before 1994. It wasn't included at all in Windows for Workgroups, it was not in the default Novell installation, etc.) Why are you guys not berating Thunderbird for its non-compliance with the e-mail standard (X.400)?
The best thing about standards is we have so many to chose from.
What I'm interested to know is how this affects parents who use their DVR's to achieve the same purpose to sanitize movies for their children. Hollywood has expressed anger over THAT practice, too, which seems to me wholly unfair.
This was added to the United States Code last year:
[Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not
infringements of copyright:]
[...]
(11) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a
member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or
video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or
transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an
authorized copy of the motion picture, or the creation or
provision of a computer program or other technology that enables
such making imperceptible and that is designed and marketed to
be used, at the direction of a member of a private household,
for such making imperceptible, if no fixed copy of the altered
version of the motion picture is created by such computer
program or other technology.; and
In fact many tens of thousands of people already died or will die of some form of cancer as a consequence of the disaster.
Sorry but the best estimate of the scientists is that a total of 4000 deaths will be caused by Chernobyl, not "tens of thousands".
By contrast the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were estimated to have cost 1,300 to 2,600 lives in the United States just during 1993 according to a National Academy of Sciences study.
Remember: MS sued Borland over having drop-down menus in their applications... and won.
I don't remember this at all. Searches on Google and Lexis/Nexis only reveal lawsuits between the two corporation about employee poaching. Are you sure you have your facts right? I remember lots of suits against Microsoft from Apple, Digital Research, Stac, Eolas, etc. But I don't recall Microsoft ever suing a software company over patent infringement, and other than the (bogus) FAT patent licensing for hardware companies, they've been good on this issue...so far.
Why would anyone think that East Asians have been selected for intelligence, unless they buy into a particular cultural stereotype that has been common only in the past few decades, as the East has sent its best and brightest to the West for education? A generation ago East Asians were considered much less mentally capable than Europeans. Both stereotypes are fact-free.
I was in high school "a generation ago"--c.1980--and the stereotype then was the same as it is now.
Furthermore, if you took the time to acquaint yourself with the research, you would find that the stereotypes are not "fact-free." IQ studies done here and abroad show that East Asians score slightly higher than the European average.
The earliest published study of Asian IQs in America that I know of is from 1921. This was long before the East sent "the best and the brightest to the West for education". These were children of poor immigrants. The most common occupations of the parents were laundry worker and rancher. Despite this, the average IQ was 97, essentially the same as white, native-born Americans, and considerably above the average at the time of, for example, children of Italian immigrants.
"Intelligence of Chinese Children in San Francisco and Vicinities" Yeung, K. T., Journal of Applied Psychology 54:267-274 (1921).
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized. Even the Germans had the good sense to leave Paris alone during both wars and they're the original Vandals.
...
You are also wrong about the Germans. A number of old inner cities and over 200 medieval castles in my country (the Netherlands) were destroyed beyond repair by the Germans in the 4 days we fought them. Paris was saved because it wasn't fought over. Still the Germans are not more destructive than our other neighbours. Overall they are our most peaceful neighbours.
Also, Hitler ordered Paris to be destroyed and many explosives were
placed but never detonated because Dietrich von
Choltitz did not follow the orders from Hitler, risking reprisals
against his family back in Germany. Paris was saved. There
is a gripping book "Is Paris Burning?", as well as a movie by the same name
that I haven't seen.
This is a good suggestion. You can use JScript or VBScript, usually without installing anything on the Windows PC, unless they have a really old system.
You can also use JScript in Microsoft.NET. The compilers for C#, JScript, and VB.NET are included when you download the.NET framework, which is free.
Look in
c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\version
for CSC.EXE, JSC.EXE, and VBC.EXE. You may already have them.
As somebody else noted, c99 also supports long long. Of course
older compilers don't have stdint.h. I don't think Microsoft C does
either, although I don't have the latest version.
Although it's been mentioned before on Slashdot, it's nice to remember the total data loss that was avoided by averted by Boris Smeds discovering a huge problem early enough to do something about it.
(I was reminded of this by a story on NPR this morning.)
The mission of the Tsunami Society includes "the dissemination of knowledge about tsunamis to scientists, officials, and the public". We have established a committee of private, university, and government scientists to accomplish part of this goal by correcting misleading or invalid information released to public about this hazard. We can supply both valid, correct and important information and advice to the public, and the names of reputable scientists active in the field of tsunami, who can provide such information.
Most recently, the Discovery Channel has replayed a program alleging potential destruction of coastal areas of the Atlantic by tsunami waves which might be generated in the near future by a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands. Other reports have involved a smaller but similar catastrophe from Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawai`i. They like to call these occurences "mega tsunamis". We would like to halt the scaremongering from these unfounded reports. We wish to provide the media with factual information so that the public can be properly informed about actual hazards of tsunamis and their mitigation.
Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:
- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE.
- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.
- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.
- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.
Some papers on this subject include:
"Evaluation of the threat of Mega Tsunami Generation From....Volcanoes on La Palma... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
"Modeling the La Palma Landslide Tsunami", Charles L. Mader, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 160-180, 2001.
"Volcano Growth and the Evolution of the Island of Hawaii", J.G. Moore and D.A.Clague, in the Geologic Society of America Bulletin, 104, 1992.
Committee members for this report include:
Mr. George Curtis, Hilo, HI (Committee Chairman) 808-963-6670
Dr. Tad Murty, Ottawa, Canada, 613-731-8900
Dr. Laura Kong, Honolulu, HI, 808-532-6422
Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis, Honolulu, HI, 808-943-1150
Dr. Charles L. Mader, Los Alamos, NM, 808-396-9855
and all can comment on this or other tsunami matters.
For information regarding the Tsunami Society and its publications, visit: www.sthjo
Slashdot Mirror
"Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market"
Matthew J. Salganik, Peter S. Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts.
Science, 311:854-856, 2006.
Abstract: Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful
than average, suggesting that "the best" alternatives are qualitatively
different from "the rest"; yet experts routinely fail to predict which
products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by
creating an artificial "music market" in which 14,341 participants
downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of
previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social
influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success.
Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs
rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result
was possible.
I just noticed today that Russinovich's utilities are available in a single-file download: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Util ities/SysinternalsSuite.mspx
Note that OpenBSD is also adopting similar defense-in-depth strategies, including SSP and N^X. Adoption is much more haphazard on Linux Distros, so you may be at much more risk running an application such as SSH on Linux than on OpenBSD even when it is compiled from the same source code.
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/fileforma t/faq/#item-1-8:
It seems that eventually the original Macsyma did become open source, but maybe you're complaining that the commercial version ever existed or maybe you're complaining that the commercial version isn't open source or maybe you're complaining that software developed with public funds (if that was the case with Macsyma) wasn't initially released as open source.
So are you saying that we should insist that when tax-payer funded research that creates software, it should always be open source? Are you saying that creating a commercial product out of open source software is wrong? What do you mean by "theft"?
He got in the habit of getting it right the first time.
"Zero-Day exploits are released on the same day the vulnerability -- and, sometimes, the vendor patch -- are released to the public. The term derives from the number of days between the public advisory and the release of the exploit. The term 'zero-day exploits' is sometimes misused to indicate publicly known exploits for which no patches yet exist."
The misuse of "zero day" in this article and "back door" in the Adobe article bother me more than the existence of the exploits themselves! Silly, perhaps, but true!
Wouldn't you know... there's a web site of "famous" Belgians.
People do use XML as a tagged-data language, but not that much as a markup language.
Just a thought.
HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented. The actual implementors talked about it on a mailing list. Different features were proposed, discussed, implemented, discussed again, etc. The standards guys met afterwards to try to figure out what the standard was. Messy, maybe, but it worked. Implementation intermixed with specification. Free (open-source) reference implementations. That's how TCP/IP came about, too. We all use TCP/IP instead of the "standard" network protocols. (For those too young to know, the ISO was developing the real networking standards (OSI) for many, many years. TCP/IP was a protocol barely used outside academia before 1994. It wasn't included at all in Windows for Workgroups, it was not in the default Novell installation, etc.) Why are you guys not berating Thunderbird for its non-compliance with the e-mail standard (X.400)?
The best thing about standards is we have so many to chose from.
[Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:]
[...]
(11) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an authorized copy of the motion picture, or the creation or provision of a computer program or other technology that enables such making imperceptible and that is designed and marketed to be used, at the direction of a member of a private household, for such making imperceptible, if no fixed copy of the altered version of the motion picture is created by such computer program or other technology.; and
See original press release with animations.
By contrast the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards were estimated to have cost 1,300 to 2,600 lives in the United States just during 1993 according to a National Academy of Sciences study.
Science writer Carl Zimmer (author of At the Water's Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea) has an excellent blog post about how this new find fits in with the larger picture.
I don't remember this at all. Searches on Google and Lexis/Nexis only reveal lawsuits between the two corporation about employee poaching. Are you sure you have your facts right? I remember lots of suits against Microsoft from Apple, Digital Research, Stac, Eolas, etc. But I don't recall Microsoft ever suing a software company over patent infringement, and other than the (bogus) FAT patent licensing for hardware companies, they've been good on this issue...so far.
Furthermore, if you took the time to acquaint yourself with the research, you would find that the stereotypes are not "fact-free." IQ studies done here and abroad show that East Asians score slightly higher than the European average.
The earliest published study of Asian IQs in America that I know of is from 1921. This was long before the East sent "the best and the brightest to the West for education". These were children of poor immigrants. The most common occupations of the parents were laundry worker and rancher. Despite this, the average IQ was 97, essentially the same as white, native-born Americans, and considerably above the average at the time of, for example, children of Italian immigrants.
"Intelligence of Chinese Children in San Francisco and Vicinities" Yeung, K. T., Journal of Applied Psychology 54:267-274 (1921).
His Brain, Her Brain from the May 2005 Scientific American.
The Inequality Taboo by Charles Murray, in the current Commentary magazine, this online version has more notes and references.
You can also use JScript in Microsoft.NET. The compilers for C#, JScript, and VB.NET are included when you download the .NET framework, which is free.
Look in c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\version for CSC.EXE, JSC.EXE, and VBC.EXE. You may already have them.
As somebody else noted, c99 also supports long long. Of course older compilers don't have stdint.h. I don't think Microsoft C does either, although I don't have the latest version.
(I was reminded of this by a story on NPR this morning.)
See Tidal wave threat 'over-hyped' at the BBC web site, and this statement from the Tsunami Society:
....Volcanoes on La Palma ... and Hawaii", George Pararas-Carayannis, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol 20, No.5, pages 251-277, 2002.
MEGA TSUNAMI HAZARDS
January 15, 2003
The mission of the Tsunami Society includes "the dissemination of knowledge about tsunamis to scientists, officials, and the public". We have established a committee of private, university, and government scientists to accomplish part of this goal by correcting misleading or invalid information released to public about this hazard. We can supply both valid, correct and important information and advice to the public, and the names of reputable scientists active in the field of tsunami, who can provide such information.
Most recently, the Discovery Channel has replayed a program alleging potential destruction of coastal areas of the Atlantic by tsunami waves which might be generated in the near future by a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands. Other reports have involved a smaller but similar catastrophe from Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawai`i. They like to call these occurences "mega tsunamis". We would like to halt the scaremongering from these unfounded reports. We wish to provide the media with factual information so that the public can be properly informed about actual hazards of tsunamis and their mitigation.
Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:
- While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
- No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE.
- The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.
- The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean.
- These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.
Some papers on this subject include:
"Evaluation of the threat of Mega Tsunami Generation From
"Modeling the La Palma Landslide Tsunami", Charles L. Mader, in Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 160-180, 2001.
"Volcano Growth and the Evolution of the Island of Hawaii", J.G. Moore and D.A.Clague, in the Geologic Society of America Bulletin, 104, 1992.
Committee members for this report include:
Mr. George Curtis, Hilo, HI (Committee Chairman) 808-963-6670
Dr. Tad Murty, Ottawa, Canada, 613-731-8900
Dr. Laura Kong, Honolulu, HI, 808-532-6422
Dr. George Pararas-Carayannis, Honolulu, HI, 808-943-1150
Dr. Charles L. Mader, Los Alamos, NM, 808-396-9855
and all can comment on this or other tsunami matters.
For information regarding the Tsunami Society and its publications, visit: www.sthjo
Here are some blogs I like that are often political, but not stupidly partisan, such as:
In case you haven't heard, BlogLines is a great way to read blogs online.