Modern phones have quite much stuff in them already: address books, games, calendars, etc. And the traffic handling is not very simple either. Future phones will of course carry web browsers, and synchronize to your desktop calendars, and allow for third-party plug-ins. I believe a decent OS will make this sort of things easier to handle.
I see the difference between Ms-DevStudio and all the Linux tools a bit like the difference between coding in VB and C++. If all you need is a quick way to put up a simple program, it is easier in DevStudio and all its wizards that create stuff for you. But once you need to maintain this code for a while, or wish to do something the wizards did not provide for, you start to run into problems. Under Linux the initial costs of starting up are a bit higher, but once you have a project going, there are (almost) no limits to what you can do, all files are in documented formats and plain ASCII, so you can just go and edit them. Distributed projects are easier to maintain, with a publicly available CVS repository where anyone can get the latest development version, and a standardized way to submit patches etc. And of course the scripting facilites under Unix make it so much easier to make (semi)automatic regression tests and other advanced stuff..
Long time ago I was involved in a project that needed crypto. What we did was to find one of the best experts available (Peter Landrock, Aarhus University, Denmark), and explain our situation, and take his advice. At that time (this was many years ago) we ended up with DES. This was the quick and easy part of the process, a meeting or two. The hard part was the proper use of the library we got from him, and how to manage keys, passwords, etc.
When I found the Kerberos specs from microsoft (in a file kerbspec.exe, I was in the WinRAR directory browsing mode. When I double clicked them, it just opened the archive, bypassing the click through.
This is just common sense behaviour. Who on this planet would be silly enough to run an executable from a suspicious source without first checking what it contains?
Shooting the points down: Microsoft therefore has a reasonable expectation that: A. Only professional IT personnel would be interested in obtaining the specification, and B. Anyone qualified to be an IT professional is also qualified to enter into a binding contract.
A: many amateurs have shown interest. This argument is anlogous to claiming that a truck is of use only to professional truckers, therefore anyone owning a truck, or reading about one, must be professional trucker, and thus aware of the various rules and regulations concerning transportation of dnagerous materials.
B: There are many examples of people under the legal age writing and selling software. I have done it myself. None of those contracts would have been valid (in Finland, where it happened, and presumably also in the US) without my fathers written consent on them.
So far the only point in support of Microsoft has been that they have copyrighted the material, and such it actually *is* illegal to distribute it.
But can that copyright hold? If, as other posters have pointed out, most of the material is already published by some other entity (original Kerberos specs), then how come Microsoft can claim copyright on it?
If the copyright cna be shown to be faulty, MS has no case left. Better check with someone who knows the (US) law on these points.
Another little legal detail: It may be that the click-through EULA has some legal validity in the US of A. But as long as it can be stipulated that the AC who posted the offending material did so from somewhere else, the EULA will probably not be worth the paper its printed on.
Still, I hope MS will loose this case cleanly, and not to technical details like this. Keep up the spirit!
Not only do I wish to block ads, I would also like to have an option to simulate a click on the ad, and ignore the results. So I could simulate interest in (say) slashdots ads, and possibly provide them with some revenue, without having to look at the junk...
Some numerical perspective on Go
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 1
It has been said that there are some 10^120 possible chess games, based on the branching factor and game length. The same sort of analysis for go gives 10^720 possible games. So, if you want to build a good go-player the way they built good chess-players - by throwing more hardware at it - you need 10^600 times as much. That is not likely to happen.
This is why I like to consider go programming: If you can not do it with brute force, you need to do it intelligently. Or at least use some higher-level logic and reasoning. Just counting pieces won't get you anywhere, you need to evaluate forms and shapes, make long-term plans, and consider parts of the board separately, yet interconnected.
Chess has been compared to a battle. Go is better compred to a war, where you can loose many small skirmishes while positioning your forces so that you can just sit back and let your opponent starve to death. Win without firing a single shot. (in go terms: enclose him, sacrifice a little to force him to live small, and the rest of the board is yours. ) (of course there are other, better, strategies)
Instead of a language everyone speaks how about a language NO ONE speaks...
The language should be not only unused, but not clearly related to any other language, to be fair (Esperanto is very european, for example).
Another problem is that a completely unused language needs a lot of work and development, before it becomes useful. And this development is quite likely to split it into local variants, as some borrow from English, some from Madarin or Urdu.
No, we need an existing language that is almost unrelated to anything else, spoken by almost nobody, but still alive.
I hereby nominate FINNISH as the new international language! Spoken by only 5 M people, not related to other IndoEuropean language families, and has a well developed vocabulary also for high-tech stuff like the net.
That Microsoft's developers could be so recklessly dumb as to add a backdoor that will surely be discovered eventually (unencoded plaintext in a DLL, FFS!!), thus playing right into the hands of the open-source-is- good-for-security argument, and no-one at MS noticed it... the mind boggles.
Here's my theory: Not everyone at MS is happy working there, and some may even be friendly to Open Source. Instead of (or just before) leaving the Evil Empire they decide to leave a small present. Once safely out, they tip off a journalist in one of the papers that can hurt MS the most.
If nothing else, this shows a clear hole in MS quality control procedures. If this sort of feelings are common inside MS, they may well be running into more serious problems than anything DOJ can give them...
Never mind the mining, but I want a plot on Europa, with full fishing rights! After all, where there is liquid water and minerals, there's bound to be life.
Here's a question. I admit I haven't studied the propsed program very well, and that as an European the whole idea upsets me. Anyway:
How do you at Pinkerton plan to allocate resources for filtering out bad tips (individual or organised harassment, pranks, etc.)? And, assuming that you do have sufficient resources to effectively filter the calls (impossibility of which has been discussed in other messages), are the resources used for this in any decent proprotion to the resources assigned to actually helping the students?
I know it's been proposed before, and shot down many times, but I think the Open Source model might have some relevance for NASA projects.
The real effect of Open Source is not so much in thousands of people wiring thousands of lines of code, it is in thousands of eyes looking at the code, and one of them seeing a problem. So, why not publish all the design documents and all the code as you go along? Doing so would not cost much, and I am sure many readers here would like to have a look. It would require perhaps one full-time person to moderate a mailing list or web site with discussion, and to select the most relevant-looking stuff to be forwarded to whom it may concern. Just knowing it was going to be published might help the busy programmers and engineers to keep their motivation up.
Plus, it might well give NASA good publicity, no matter how the project went. If bugs were found and fixed in time, fine. And even if the project failed, at least there would be lots of people around who have seen the complexity of it, and might have some understanding for it, and voice it in various places.
In short, I think NASA may gain a lot by publishing everything, at a pretty low cost. Why not give it a try?
We all know not to let suspicious programs to execute on uor PCs, lest we get viruses. How could you trust a "memory & intelligence enhancer" pill also not carry political opinions or some sort of dependency thing that made you want more and more of those pills, at an ever increasign rate?
The librarians of this world have attempted to classify publications (mostly books, but also other stuff) for the past many centuries.
Katz's classification looks quite similar to some of the medieval systems (greek philosphers here, spanish there - like in the Name of the Rose). There is a long way to the more modern classification system.
And yes, although the librarians have had some amount of success, they have come to realize the magnitude of problems in classifying material, or even sorting it into alphabetical order...
I'm particularly not looking forward to the the future of recorded classical music, which online distribution will completely and thoroughly destroy. (Wanna stream The Ring on 56k, anyone?)
I am not at all sure. I can see at least three sorts of classical recordings that could survive.
1) I know of many small CD-labels that produce niche classical music (Wildboar, for example specializes in early keyboard repertoire, harpsichords etc.). They are visible on a few mailing lists, and sell mail order to the small market of enthusiasts. They produce really good quality stuff, and take care of covers and booklets as well.
2) Most young classical musicians try to build some name by publishing a CD or two early in their career.
3) Most large orchestras and operas (at least here in Europe) are sponsored anyway, and live for concerts. They could (and do) also record their music, although they won't be making much of profit on that.
At least in these cases allowing free download of MP3's would not hurt them much. Those who really appreciate the stuff would probably like to buy it anyway, either as a CD or as subscription to the "official" download site. The kind of classical music that would not survive is all those "mega" stars that are sold more as entertainment as for their musical value. (Three tenors on a skating ring, Vanessa Mae's violin and light show...) This sounds like good thing to me.
Didn't the Royal Society once make a short list of the few remaining real problems for science to solve - the rest was supposed to be perfecting the results and correcting minor mistakes that seemed to lead to inconsistencies, like small irregularities found in black-body radiation, and some electro-magnetic effects...
Many trucks in Europe are already equipped with (mechanical) reocrding devices that record speed and some other details. These have been used for checking not only speed, but various working-time limits (how many hours did he drive after how little sleep?). There are also some gps-based monitoring things that allow the *owner* of the truck to monitor where the truck (and its driver) is. Some Taxis also have this sort of equipment. I don't see these coming to private cars (yet), but monitoring trucks seems to be quite well accepted. - Heikki, posting from Denmark, not UK.
I have been speculating about filesystems for a while, and have come to the conclusion that performance is nice, but not a top priority for a home user/devloper like me. Instead I would like to see a little bit of "intelligence" in the fs, in the way it uses the unused (wasted?) part of the disk. With a little tracking of usage patterns, it should be able to do
automatic version control of files that I work with.
back-up copies of important system files
compress seldomly used files
reorder files on the disk by access patterns to save seek times
even delete unwanted files if running low on space (core dumps and editor backups more that a week old...)
This could be configured with special tools, and/or with a hidden file in each directory to tell what are the important things here. Most of this should happen automatically in the background, out of sight.
Has this been done already? where? Anyone working on this sort of things? Anyone willing to steal these ideas? Technically feasible?
Slashdot Mirror
Modern phones have quite much stuff in them already: address books, games, calendars, etc. And the traffic handling is not very simple either. Future phones will of course carry web browsers, and synchronize to your desktop calendars, and allow for third-party plug-ins. I believe a decent OS will make this sort of things easier to handle.
I see the difference between Ms-DevStudio and all the Linux tools a bit like the difference between coding in VB and C++. If all you need is a quick way to put up a simple program, it is easier in DevStudio and all its wizards that create stuff for you. But once you need to maintain this code for a while, or wish to do something the wizards did not provide for, you start to run into problems. Under Linux the initial costs of starting up are a bit higher, but once you have a project going, there are (almost) no limits to what you can do, all files are in documented formats and plain ASCII, so you can just go and edit them. Distributed projects are easier to maintain, with a publicly available CVS repository where anyone can get the latest development version, and a standardized way to submit patches etc. And of course the scripting facilites under Unix make it so much easier to make (semi)automatic regression tests and other advanced stuff..
Long time ago I was involved in a project that needed crypto. What we did was to find one of the best experts available (Peter Landrock, Aarhus University, Denmark), and explain our situation, and take his advice. At that time (this was many years ago) we ended up with DES. This was the quick and easy part of the process, a meeting or two. The hard part was the proper use of the library we got from him, and how to manage keys, passwords, etc.
This is just common sense behaviour. Who on this planet would be silly enough to run an executable from a suspicious source without first checking what it contains?
Microsoft therefore has a reasonable expectation that:
A. Only professional IT personnel would be interested in obtaining the specification, and
B. Anyone qualified to be an IT professional is also qualified to enter into a binding contract.
A: many amateurs have shown interest. This argument is anlogous to claiming that a truck is of use only to professional truckers, therefore anyone owning a truck, or reading about one, must be professional trucker, and thus aware of the various rules and regulations concerning transportation of dnagerous materials.
B: There are many examples of people under the legal age writing and selling software. I have done it myself. None of those contracts would have been valid (in Finland, where it happened, and presumably also in the US) without my fathers written consent on them.
But can that copyright hold? If, as other posters have pointed out, most of the material is already published by some other entity (original Kerberos specs), then how come Microsoft can claim copyright on it?
If the copyright cna be shown to be faulty, MS has no case left. Better check with someone who knows the (US) law on these points.
Another little legal detail: It may be that the click-through EULA has some legal validity in the US of A. But as long as it can be stipulated that the AC who posted the offending material did so from somewhere else, the EULA will probably not be worth the paper its printed on.
Still, I hope MS will loose this case cleanly, and not to technical details like this. Keep up the spirit!
Heikki Levanto
Not only do I wish to block ads, I would also like to have an option to simulate a click on the ad, and ignore the results. So I could simulate interest in (say) slashdots ads, and possibly provide them with some revenue, without having to look at the junk...
This is why I like to consider go programming: If you can not do it with brute force, you need to do it intelligently. Or at least use some higher-level logic and reasoning. Just counting pieces won't get you anywhere, you need to evaluate forms and shapes, make long-term plans, and consider parts of the board separately, yet interconnected.
Chess has been compared to a battle. Go is better compred to a war, where you can loose many small skirmishes while positioning your forces so that you can just sit back and let your opponent starve to death. Win without firing a single shot. (in go terms: enclose him, sacrifice a little to force him to live small, and the rest of the board is yours. ) (of course there are other, better, strategies)
This is already happening: The most common second language on this planet (some even speak it natively) is called BAD ENGLISH.
The language should be not only unused, but not clearly related to any other language, to be fair (Esperanto is very european, for example).
Another problem is that a completely unused language needs a lot of work and development, before it becomes useful. And this development is quite likely to split it into local variants, as some borrow from English, some from Madarin or Urdu.
No, we need an existing language that is almost unrelated to anything else, spoken by almost nobody, but still alive.
I hereby nominate FINNISH as the new international language! Spoken by only 5 M people, not related to other IndoEuropean language families, and has a well developed vocabulary also for high-tech stuff like the net.
Here's my theory: Not everyone at MS is happy working there, and some may even be friendly to Open Source. Instead of (or just before) leaving the Evil Empire they decide to leave a small present. Once safely out, they tip off a journalist in one of the papers that can hurt MS the most.
If nothing else, this shows a clear hole in MS quality control procedures. If this sort of feelings are common inside MS, they may well be running into more serious problems than anything DOJ can give them...
Never mind the mining, but I want a plot on Europa, with full fishing rights! After all, where there is liquid water and minerals, there's bound to be life.
How do you at Pinkerton plan to allocate resources for filtering out bad tips (individual or organised harassment, pranks, etc.)? And, assuming that you do have sufficient resources to effectively filter the calls (impossibility of which has been discussed in other messages), are the resources used for this in any decent proprotion to the resources assigned to actually helping the students?
Heikki Levanto
Copenhagen, Denmark
The real effect of Open Source is not so much in thousands of people wiring thousands of lines of code, it is in thousands of eyes looking at the code, and one of them seeing a problem. So, why not publish all the design documents and all the code as you go along? Doing so would not cost much, and I am sure many readers here would like to have a look. It would require perhaps one full-time person to moderate a mailing list or web site with discussion, and to select the most relevant-looking stuff to be forwarded to whom it may concern. Just knowing it was going to be published might help the busy programmers and engineers to keep their motivation up.
Plus, it might well give NASA good publicity, no matter how the project went. If bugs were found and fixed in time, fine. And even if the project failed, at least there would be lots of people around who have seen the complexity of it, and might have some understanding for it, and voice it in various places.
In short, I think NASA may gain a lot by publishing everything, at a pretty low cost. Why not give it a try?
We all know not to let suspicious programs to execute on uor PCs, lest we get viruses. How could you trust a "memory & intelligence enhancer" pill also not carry political opinions or some sort of dependency thing that made you want more and more of those pills, at an ever increasign rate?
Katz's classification looks quite similar to some of the medieval systems (greek philosphers here, spanish there - like in the Name of the Rose). There is a long way to the more modern classification system.
And yes, although the librarians have had some amount of success, they have come to realize the magnitude of problems in classifying material, or even sorting it into alphabetical order...
I am not at all sure. I can see at least three sorts of classical recordings that could survive.
1) I know of many small CD-labels that produce niche classical music (Wildboar, for example specializes in early keyboard repertoire, harpsichords etc.). They are visible on a few mailing lists, and sell mail order to the small market of enthusiasts. They produce really good quality stuff, and take care of covers and booklets as well.
2) Most young classical musicians try to build some name by publishing a CD or two early in their career.
3) Most large orchestras and operas (at least here in Europe) are sponsored anyway, and live for concerts. They could (and do) also record their music, although they won't be making much of profit on that.
At least in these cases allowing free download of MP3's would not hurt them much. Those who really appreciate the stuff would probably like to buy it anyway, either as a CD or as subscription to the "official" download site. The kind of classical music that would not survive is all those "mega" stars that are sold more as entertainment as for their musical value. (Three tenors on a skating ring, Vanessa Mae's violin and light show...) This sounds like good thing to me.
Like a mobile phone. The phone central can deduct quite much from the handshaking signals alone, even if no call is active. No need for satellites.
Many trucks in Europe are already equipped with (mechanical) reocrding devices that record speed and some other details. These have been used for checking not only speed, but various working-time limits (how many hours did he drive after how little sleep?). There are also some gps-based monitoring things that allow the *owner* of the truck to monitor where the truck (and its driver) is. Some Taxis also have this sort of equipment. I don't see these coming to private cars (yet), but monitoring trucks seems to be quite well accepted. - Heikki, posting from Denmark, not UK.
automatic version control of files that I work with.
back-up copies of important system files
compress seldomly used files
reorder files on the disk by access patterns to save seek times
even delete unwanted files if running low on space (core dumps and editor backups more that a week old...)
This could be configured with special tools, and/or with a hidden file in each directory to tell what are the important things here. Most of this should happen automatically in the background, out of sight.
Has this been done already? where? Anyone working on this sort of things? Anyone willing to steal these ideas? Technically feasible?