If Dell wants to sell the latest Windows requiring Palladium, then they'll have to sell hardware which supports it. Just as is the case presently. Dell has to support hardware that supports, say, Windows XP.
If Dell doesn't, then they are at a competitive disadvantage.
Microsoft can run a $40 million ad campaign convincing Joe Fourpack that he needs Windows 2005 (or whatever it is called) because of all the benefits, including security and trust.
If the Joe Fourpacks of the world are now asking for this at their local Worst Buy or from Dell, then whoever doesn't give the customer what he (thinks he) wants is at a competitive disadvantage.
This argument seems very simple to me. Does this answer your question adequately?
Freenet shouldnt be just about porn and warez because it will be very easy to outlaw it, what we need to do is fill freenet up with useful content for the masses....
Yeah. Not just for warez and porn. Freenet needs mp3's!
The password you give is somehow easily mentally computed from the challenge code.
Using a different formula to mentally compute the response is a signal to the system that you can no longer be trusted. Sort of like how some alarm systems have an "ambush" code. If you enter that code instead of the real code, the system appears to disarm, but silently calls the police. My old employer had such a feature on their alarm system.
Once you've given a response code that indicates that it is YOU, but that you cannot be trusted, then the system, depending on sophistication and investment, could even appear to log you in and let you innocently work on stuff. Hypothetical example, you could read any non-classified documents. Maybe the filesystem needs to support a "secrecy" attribute. Of course, I'm a fan of filesystems like reiserfs that allow the arbitrary attachment of arbitrary attributes to files anyway. That way if you want to annoate your files with a level of secrecy, or with what icon should be displayed for the file, or what coordinates within the containing window the icon should be positioned at, etc. the filesystem will just accept whatever arbitrary attributes you wish to annoated the file with. These attributes don't go into the file's "data", but into the file's "directory entry" so to speak.
Whenever congress (or state legislatures) pass a law that is later found to be unconstitutional, public funds must be used to reimburse all legal costs that were incurred in bringing the suit and having the unconstitutional law found to be unconstitutional.
Why should private or industry money have to be used to combat ridiculous laws that legislators can freely pass at a whim? Let's make them at least have to budget the cost of overturning their unconstitutional laws.
Example. Some hypothetical attorney general, let's call him "Asscruft", proposes to congress, and congress later passes, and the president signs a bill making it illegal to think bad thoughts under penalty of 5 years of $500,000.
Everyone would be screaming to have this overturned. Lots of private money would have to be used to get this nonsense overturned. Why should the citizenry be forced to overturn bad laws that they didn't want but that their "representatives" thought would be good for them, or that corporate interests bought and paid for?
In a sense, all the w3c work in DOM and standardized events and event-bubbling is really just getting us back to where you could have been in 1990 with HyperCard.
Yes. It's amazing how many times I see that everything old is new again. Especially when it comes to things Apple did ten plus years ago.
One problem was that the programming languages of the day didn't really lend themselves to fully scriptable applications like we are seeing today, in OpenOffice, for example. The Finder and ScriptEdit were the only two highly scriptable applications, and among the few that were scriptable at all.
I've been learning how to control OpenOffice.org via. UNO. You can do this either in Java (even over the network!) or within StarBasic within the office program. My interest lies in scripting the draw module. So far I can build complex "spirograph" like geometric shapes, I also just got a maze generator running that makes draw documents of mazes. I've made a "turtle graphics" module for both Java and StarBasic to make programming drawings easy using turtle graphics.
Oh, how I would have loved for MacDraw to be scriptable from Macintosh Common Lisp. The ideas may have been there, back in the day, but it takes until the 21st century to get the stuff implemented!
but the idea of a human readable language is a pretty good one.
I'm not sure if I agree. It depends on what you mean by human readable.
A language that is easy for programmers to read is a good thing.
An attempt to make a language that a non-programmer can read is misguided. Examples? COBOL (as you point out).
Another example: HyperTalk and AppleTalk. Reading these languages is easy. They read almost like natural english sentences. Very easy to follow. Drawback? Writing the code. The programming language syntax is obviously not as unrestricted as english prose. You have to learn which operators can be applied to which operands and many other complex rules. Sure, when you apply them properly, it reads great. But the language is a "read-only" language.
My final argument that it is misguided to make a language that can be read by non-programmers would be this. Non programmers, especially managers, can't think logically anyway. They don't think in terms of formal semantics. Programming is an activity for humans to formally express an idea in a rigid way for a computer to execute. Learn the semantics of the language (the syntax part is easy) if you want to read the code. A manager might say: I want to see the people from new york with green hair AND the ones with purple hair who are over 8 feet tall. Now what he really meant was an OR condition.
I haven't read the copyright act since about 1988 or thereabouts. As I recall, when you register code for copyright protection, you must deposit a copy of the code with the copyright office. The copyright act was amended at some point such that you could register only the first 10 pages and last 10 pages of the program listing.
The last 10 pages of a Lisp program being registered for copyright would probably not be made up entirely of parenthesis.
It is not necessary to register a program in order to have copyright protection. It is only necessary if you are going to pursue litigation against a copyright infringer.
(We were writing, what amounted to a driver, in Pascal on Mac OS. Small main program. Many libraries. We never could figure out which were the "first" 10 pages and which were the "last" 10 pages. Some library units might not even be 10 pages.)
There was an article about this in Popular Electronics in the 1970's.
The article was entitled "How Accurate is your digital clock" or somesuch. It was comparing quartz crystal timebase clocks to digital clocks that derrived their timebase from the 60 Hz powerline frequency.
If you looked at the quartz oscillator error, it was very small. If you looked at the 60 Hz error, it was very high. The surprise was that the 60 Hz was actually more accurate over time. If you set up two clocks and let them run for one year, the Quartz crystal oscillator clock might be off by 148 seconds, assuming all errors are in the same direction. But the 60 Hz timebase clock might be off by only 3 seconds!
Why? Because in the US, when the powerline frequency errors have gotten off by 3 seconds or more, "factors are introduced" (whatever the hell that means) to bring it back to the correct time.
Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Anything you get from download.com.
After all, Microsoft might want to put shareware authors out of business too. Not just commercial authors. Shareware authors still actually take in some dollars. And Microsoft can't stand the thought of it.
More accurate sales numbers for most software is probably publicly available. There wouldn't be much of a point to this.
There would be some point to it.
This would give Microsoft actual usage numbers for titles. This is not the same thing as sales numbers.
Hey, look, the sales numbers for SuperFizzBlog are 19 million units, but the usage data shows 50 million units. This means 62% of all running copies of SuperFizzBlog are pirated. It is more popular than the sales figures suggest.
Trying to figure what other companies they should push out of business.
This should not be modded Funny. This is serious.
BillG: Look, everyone has Acrobat Reader, we need to develop XDoc.
Everyone has some SimXXX game, we need to develop Zoo Tychoon.
Business as usual. Take advantage of monopoly position of control. Discover what anyone else might be doing that is popular. Develop a competing product. Give it away, or bundle it into OS.
The actual RFID tag is a passive device, about the size of a grain of rice (kind of a big one) that gets injected between your pets shoulder blades. I think occasionally they have been known to 'migrate' from that position, but there are almost no health issues.
The vet charged us $30 U.S. Registering with the database is a one time $15 charge (now I'm reading from the website) and it costs $6 to change information in the database when you move.
As to privacy concerns with RFID in general, there are many reasons to be concerned, or at least watchful, of current trends, but I think this is a good application of technology.
You're right. I'm convinced. This particular use of RFID tags is a great application of technology!
I'll get busy writing a proposal for John Asscroft right away!
Rights, you see, are largely things which someone in the past has had the backbone to stand up for and insist upon.
It's too much trouble. Just click on I AGREE.
Pay for the same item more than once
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 1
You're walking around the mall. Each time you enter and exit a store that sells the same item you've already bought you get charged again? Maybe one retailler was just incompetent and didn't deactivate the tag.
In order to fix this problem so that we don't have to pay for things more than once, I propose that we establish a centralized database that keeps track of everything you have ever purchased so that you never have to pay for it again.
Of course, paying for it twice would be a boon to the economy. Anything that is good for corporations is automatically good for the economy, right?
Its actually hard to believe this interview is real. Actually is there any proof that it is? Gates sounded very unprofessional and not like himself in the interview, almost like he was attacking the FOCUS interviewer. Anyone else care to comment on this?
It is easy to believe it is real.
Some years back, mid or early 90's I saw on one of those glossy prime time TV magazine shows, Connie Chung doing an interview with Bill Gates.
She asked him some tough and critical questions. (Interviewers commonly do this, just watch any tv interview.) Bill Gates threw a temper tantrum right on TV and ended the interview. It was unbelievable.
Don't give me any of your nonsense about how "professional" Bill Gates is. What I'm talking about here didn't happen in secret. It was on national TV. One of the big 3 networks. (CBS, I think.)
Bill Gates is a spoiled brat. He lives in a world detached from reality. Surrounded by "yes men". Like any megalomaniac, such as Saddam, when you are surrounded by people who all say you can do no wrong and constantly praise your every utterance, you begin to become convinced that you are somehow great and infallible.
As for personal greed, why has he run Microsoft the way he has for so long? Because he thinks he can get away with it. And he has.
No amount of money is enough. There is no limit. Money does not satisfy what is really wrong. It only medicates. For awhile. It doesn't somehow make you a good person that everyone says you are.
It is not enough for Bill to succeed. Everyone else must fail. And even after that happens, if it does, I'm sure he won't feel satisfied.
Excuse the rant. But after what I saw, with my own eyes, in a TV interview, and then reading about how unbelievable it seems that Bill might act "unprofessional" just got under my skin.
Slashdot Mirror
If Dell wants to sell the latest Windows requiring Palladium, then they'll have to sell hardware which supports it. Just as is the case presently. Dell has to support hardware that supports, say, Windows XP.
If Dell doesn't, then they are at a competitive disadvantage.
Microsoft can run a $40 million ad campaign convincing Joe Fourpack that he needs Windows 2005 (or whatever it is called) because of all the benefits, including security and trust.
If the Joe Fourpacks of the world are now asking for this at their local Worst Buy or from Dell, then whoever doesn't give the customer what he (thinks he) wants is at a competitive disadvantage.
This argument seems very simple to me. Does this answer your question adequately?
"I wonder how Microsoft will convince consumers that loss of control is a good thing, and how long the convincing will take."
Since when does Microsoft have to convince anyone of anything?
Joe Fourpack will just buy his Dell with Palladium preinstalled. No convincing required.
The price is right. It's secure, right? It's from Microsoft, so it must be high quality? It's got shiny graphics, so it must be high quality?
... am I the only one who sees "WinHEC" and reads it as "WineHQ"?
When I see WinHEC, I read it differently. I figure that they used "Heck" because they couldn't use the stronger alternative word in polite company.
the 1790 Copyright Act is proof of that. The First Amendment came after the copyright clause.
If the copyright act came before the first amendment, then that might suggest something about the legislative priorities of the time.
Geez, I didn't even know the RIAA existed in 1790.
Freenet shouldnt be just about porn and warez because it will be very easy to outlaw it, what we need to do is fill freenet up with useful content for the masses....
Yeah. Not just for warez and porn. Freenet needs mp3's!
Ah, comrad. I see you have an encrypted filesystem on your laptop.
You must be hiding a collection of mp3's! Quick! Seize him!
Use a challenge/response password system.
Please login: goldilocks
Challenge code: 382AQ929
Password:
The password you give is somehow easily mentally computed from the challenge code.
Using a different formula to mentally compute the response is a signal to the system that you can no longer be trusted. Sort of like how some alarm systems have an "ambush" code. If you enter that code instead of the real code, the system appears to disarm, but silently calls the police. My old employer had such a feature on their alarm system.
Once you've given a response code that indicates that it is YOU, but that you cannot be trusted, then the system, depending on sophistication and investment, could even appear to log you in and let you innocently work on stuff. Hypothetical example, you could read any non-classified documents. Maybe the filesystem needs to support a "secrecy" attribute. Of course, I'm a fan of filesystems like reiserfs that allow the arbitrary attachment of arbitrary attributes to files anyway. That way if you want to annoate your files with a level of secrecy, or with what icon should be displayed for the file, or what coordinates within the containing window the icon should be positioned at, etc. the filesystem will just accept whatever arbitrary attributes you wish to annoated the file with. These attributes don't go into the file's "data", but into the file's "directory entry" so to speak.
I find it mildly disturbing that American copyright law ultimately decides the law for the rest of the world
Hey now, you don't want us to give up on copyright inspectors do you? If he doesn't disarm his weapons of mass P2P, then we will disarm him.
How about this one.
Whenever congress (or state legislatures) pass a law that is later found to be unconstitutional, public funds must be used to reimburse all legal costs that were incurred in bringing the suit and having the unconstitutional law found to be unconstitutional.
Why should private or industry money have to be used to combat ridiculous laws that legislators can freely pass at a whim? Let's make them at least have to budget the cost of overturning their unconstitutional laws.
Example. Some hypothetical attorney general, let's call him "Asscruft", proposes to congress, and congress later passes, and the president signs a bill making it illegal to think bad thoughts under penalty of 5 years of $500,000.
Everyone would be screaming to have this overturned. Lots of private money would have to be used to get this nonsense overturned. Why should the citizenry be forced to overturn bad laws that they didn't want but that their "representatives" thought would be good for them, or that corporate interests bought and paid for?
Uh, I think you mean "AppleScript" back there.
Oooops.... yes I did.
In a sense, all the w3c work in DOM and standardized events and event-bubbling is really just getting us back to where you could have been in 1990 with HyperCard.
Yes. It's amazing how many times I see that everything old is new again. Especially when it comes to things Apple did ten plus years ago.
One problem was that the programming languages of the day didn't really lend themselves to fully scriptable applications like we are seeing today, in OpenOffice, for example. The Finder and ScriptEdit were the only two highly scriptable applications, and among the few that were scriptable at all.
I've been learning how to control OpenOffice.org via. UNO. You can do this either in Java (even over the network!) or within StarBasic within the office program. My interest lies in scripting the draw module. So far I can build complex "spirograph" like geometric shapes, I also just got a maze generator running that makes draw documents of mazes. I've made a "turtle graphics" module for both Java and StarBasic to make programming drawings easy using turtle graphics.
Oh, how I would have loved for MacDraw to be scriptable from Macintosh Common Lisp. The ideas may have been there, back in the day, but it takes until the 21st century to get the stuff implemented!
There are also a few overlooked optimization macros that could be used in C.
// saves memory // saves cpu time
Just slip these into your header file and smoke it....
#define struct union
#define while if
but the idea of a human readable language is a pretty good one.
I'm not sure if I agree. It depends on what you mean by human readable.
A language that is easy for programmers to read is a good thing.
An attempt to make a language that a non-programmer can read is misguided. Examples? COBOL (as you point out).
Another example: HyperTalk and AppleTalk. Reading these languages is easy. They read almost like natural english sentences. Very easy to follow. Drawback? Writing the code. The programming language syntax is obviously not as unrestricted as english prose. You have to learn which operators can be applied to which operands and many other complex rules. Sure, when you apply them properly, it reads great. But the language is a "read-only" language.
My final argument that it is misguided to make a language that can be read by non-programmers would be this. Non programmers, especially managers, can't think logically anyway. They don't think in terms of formal semantics. Programming is an activity for humans to formally express an idea in a rigid way for a computer to execute. Learn the semantics of the language (the syntax part is easy) if you want to read the code. A manager might say: I want to see the people from new york with green hair AND the ones with purple hair who are over 8 feet tall. Now what he really meant was an OR condition.
I haven't read the copyright act since about 1988 or thereabouts. As I recall, when you register code for copyright protection, you must deposit a copy of the code with the copyright office. The copyright act was amended at some point such that you could register only the first 10 pages and last 10 pages of the program listing.
The last 10 pages of a Lisp program being registered for copyright would probably not be made up entirely of parenthesis.
It is not necessary to register a program in order to have copyright protection. It is only necessary if you are going to pursue litigation against a copyright infringer.
(We were writing, what amounted to a driver, in Pascal on Mac OS. Small main program. Many libraries. We never could figure out which were the "first" 10 pages and which were the "last" 10 pages. Some library units might not even be 10 pages.)
The bumper sticker description of this project is 'see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively,'
Whatever happened to shoot first, then see, understand, act, and finish?
GNU/CinePaint
There was an article about this in Popular Electronics in the 1970's.
The article was entitled "How Accurate is your digital clock" or somesuch. It was comparing quartz crystal timebase clocks to digital clocks that derrived their timebase from the 60 Hz powerline frequency.
If you looked at the quartz oscillator error, it was very small. If you looked at the 60 Hz error, it was very high. The surprise was that the 60 Hz was actually more accurate over time. If you set up two clocks and let them run for one year, the Quartz crystal oscillator clock might be off by 148 seconds, assuming all errors are in the same direction. But the 60 Hz timebase clock might be off by only 3 seconds!
Why? Because in the US, when the powerline frequency errors have gotten off by 3 seconds or more, "factors are introduced" (whatever the hell that means) to bring it back to the correct time.
One more point, pardon the second reply...
Not all software packages have sales figures.
Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Anything you get from download.com.
After all, Microsoft might want to put shareware authors out of business too. Not just commercial authors. Shareware authors still actually take in some dollars. And Microsoft can't stand the thought of it.
More accurate sales numbers for most software is probably publicly available. There wouldn't be much of a point to this.
There would be some point to it.
This would give Microsoft actual usage numbers for titles. This is not the same thing as sales numbers.
Hey, look, the sales numbers for SuperFizzBlog are 19 million units, but the usage data shows 50 million units. This means 62% of all running copies of SuperFizzBlog are pirated. It is more popular than the sales figures suggest.
I am wonderign what the usage rights will be on CDs you burn using songs from their service. One copy only?
Furthermore, are you allowed to listen to it, or only burn it?
Can anyone else in the same room also listen?
Trying to figure what other companies they should push out of business.
This should not be modded Funny. This is serious.
BillG: Look, everyone has Acrobat Reader, we need to develop XDoc.
Everyone has some SimXXX game, we need to develop Zoo Tychoon.
Business as usual. Take advantage of monopoly position of control. Discover what anyone else might be doing that is popular. Develop a competing product. Give it away, or bundle it into OS.
RFID tags might make it a less messy job of inspecting what is in people's trash.
The actual RFID tag is a passive device, about the size of a grain of rice (kind of a big one) that gets injected between your pets shoulder blades. I think occasionally they have been known to 'migrate' from that position, but there are almost no health issues.
The vet charged us $30 U.S. Registering with the database is a one time $15 charge (now I'm reading from the website) and it costs $6 to change information in the database when you move.
As to privacy concerns with RFID in general, there are many reasons to be concerned, or at least watchful, of current trends, but I think this is a good application of technology.
You're right. I'm convinced. This particular use of RFID tags is a great application of technology!
I'll get busy writing a proposal for John Asscroft right away!
Rights, you see, are largely things which someone in the past has had the backbone to stand up for and insist upon.
It's too much trouble. Just click on I AGREE.
You're walking around the mall. Each time you enter and exit a store that sells the same item you've already bought you get charged again? Maybe one retailler was just incompetent and didn't deactivate the tag.
In order to fix this problem so that we don't have to pay for things more than once, I propose that we establish a centralized database that keeps track of everything you have ever purchased so that you never have to pay for it again.
Of course, paying for it twice would be a boon to the economy. Anything that is good for corporations is automatically good for the economy, right?
Its actually hard to believe this interview is real. Actually is there any proof that it is? Gates sounded very unprofessional and not like himself in the interview, almost like he was attacking the FOCUS interviewer. Anyone else care to comment on this?
It is easy to believe it is real.
Some years back, mid or early 90's I saw on one of those glossy prime time TV magazine shows, Connie Chung doing an interview with Bill Gates.
She asked him some tough and critical questions. (Interviewers commonly do this, just watch any tv interview.) Bill Gates threw a temper tantrum right on TV and ended the interview. It was unbelievable.
Don't give me any of your nonsense about how "professional" Bill Gates is. What I'm talking about here didn't happen in secret. It was on national TV. One of the big 3 networks. (CBS, I think.)
Bill Gates is a spoiled brat. He lives in a world detached from reality. Surrounded by "yes men". Like any megalomaniac, such as Saddam, when you are surrounded by people who all say you can do no wrong and constantly praise your every utterance, you begin to become convinced that you are somehow great and infallible.
As for personal greed, why has he run Microsoft the way he has for so long? Because he thinks he can get away with it. And he has.
No amount of money is enough. There is no limit. Money does not satisfy what is really wrong. It only medicates. For awhile. It doesn't somehow make you a good person that everyone says you are.
It is not enough for Bill to succeed. Everyone else must fail. And even after that happens, if it does, I'm sure he won't feel satisfied.
Excuse the rant. But after what I saw, with my own eyes, in a TV interview, and then reading about how unbelievable it seems that Bill might act "unprofessional" just got under my skin.