Other folks have already pointed out how little sense this makes (how many other ways can you get the same info? why draw so much attention to yourself?). The more I think about it, the more this seems like it has nothing to do with Google maps -- it's just a convenient way for this guy to force politicians to pony up for more security. He releases this thing, accuses Google, and people all over the world are talking about how undefended this reactor is. Who wants to bet that, within a week, the whole complex will be secure?
I don't really see the problem with "bloated" xml, when the files are zipped by default. Instead of smushing your efficiency requirements in with your readability and standardization requirements (and screwing all three), you first handle readability and standardization and then rap it in a standard efficiency layer. The upshot is, not only are the files often *smaller* than the old Word equivalent, but I can also hack through them using a couple of standard perl packages that have come with linux, OS X and cygwin for years.
Fair point, but when a 300 lb gorilla goes on a rampage, you know about it. When Microsoft goes on a rampage, you only know about it through papers like this (assuming this one turns out to hold any water).
I think you're late by about a month, but I'll add another one: hardware that runs both OS X and Windows is better for my needs than hardware that runs only Windows.
You sound like you're pretty eager to hear that, so, glad I could help.
I hear you -- that's the same story I've heard from a psychiatrist friend of mine. At conferences, they call it "poop-out" -- the damn drugs just keep giving out. After ten years, you're on three instead of one, and it's not working as well.
My friend is into a new treatment called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy -- have you come across it? It sounds a little wishy-washy when you first look at it, but it's basically just learning to hack your brain. She's looking at it from a front-lines scientific perspective, and seeing some impressive things...
Zoloft, IIRC, took 3 tries to find a study where it performed better than placebo, and when it did it wasn't all that much better (has *some* effect on 70% of cases, or the like). I may be misremembering, but the point is sound -- *all* depression treatments at this point have pretty high fail rates, and if you've seen serious depression, you know that *any* new tools are welcome.
Elsewhere it's been pointed out that truly successful depression treatments could mask problems in our society, the same way that truly successful cancer treatments could mask pollution problems. That's true -- but if your mother is dying of cancer, it's sure hard to care...
Well... in all fairness, severe clinical depression is very much on the rise. It must be caused by *something*.
There's really not much difference between your mind and your brain. It doesn't have to be unrelated to your social environment just because it's very much a physical illness.
I wonder if this will drive businesses to a true pay-for-what-you-get mode of operation. No cell minutes will be free because it will be too easy to abuse free minutes. No single-use device will be as cheap -- it will require a deposit for the value of the asset.
If they also stop vastly overcharging for other services, I'd be all for it. Back-of-the-envelope, GSM voice bandwidth can send 60,000 characters per minute -- why does a 20 character text message cost the same as a minute of voice? Because that's what we'll pay...
If there was a cell provider who came out and said, we'll let you do anything you want with your phone, and charge you in direct relation to how much it costs us to provide that service, I'd sign up with them in a second. I'm tired of arbitrary overcharges, undercharges, weird marketing entanglements... just let me do whatever I want and tell me how much it actually costs.
This is a nifty hack, but I wonder what your thoughts are on the ethics of it. If the database is inaccurate to the point where you have to make guesses about what the correct data really is, it's also likely that it points to a fair number of entirely innocent people. By making it easy for folks to find entries near them, you're aiding a process with the potential to do a lot of harm, for better or worse.
This is the kind of project I can easily imagine myself starting -- but around the time I was making guesses about misspelled street names, I think I'd can it and move on to something with less potential to ruin lives. With no negative judgment implied, why didn't you?
On a separate note, at a first glance I see a surprising number of pairs of dots very near to each other. Is this some kind of bug in the data or the mapping process? Am I just inventing patterns where there aren't any? Or perhaps there's some strange tendency for sex offenders to settle in pairs...
BTW, what is wrong with opening a (Chinese) blog account on one of Western sites and emailing blog posts via some foreign Webmail site that provides HTTPS encryption of Web sessions?
Popular blog hosting sites are trivially easy to censor and track. Hosting on thousands of unrelated volunteer sites is meant to be harder to block.
If I want to play tetris, pong, etc, I'll use my PDA...
Sweet, so if *I* want to play tetris, pong, etc, I can use your PDA too?...
No?
Oh, maybe saying that a free software install is worthless because you have hundreds of dollars of hardware that can do the job better isn't really that insightful, after all.
My DVP642 standalone DVD player handles most DivX-type video files, and has regular firmware updates. Does anyone know if this new menu format will be possible to support as a firmware update, or if it can only be supported in new hardware? Also, will it at least degrade gracefully and play like a normal avi, or will we need some kinda utility to rip out the data stream and put it in a package older players understand?
Remember that a patent is not just a free reward for being so clever. It's a social contract: a voluntary limitation on all of our rights (e.g. my freedom to create a one-click checkout process) in exchange for a social benefit (e.g. the public revelation of a system for creating a one-click checkout process). If Jeff Bezos had been unable to prevent everyone else from creating one-click checkout processes, would it have made it economically impossible for him to implement them, or encouraged him to keep them a secret, and therefore deprived our society of anything?
Please. Of course not. In this particular social contract, we got ripped off. It's time to renegotiate.
IBM, for instance, uses the chip securely to store user passwords and encrypt the contents of the hard drive.
Of course, there's a world of difference between using hardware protection to protect things for the user and using it to protect things from the user. Specifically, one relies on the security of a password stored inside a single human brain, and the other relies on the security of a password stored on millions of chips using current technology... guess which one we currently have the technology to reverse?
Is there any word on how well the Intel build actually works for serious use yet? I mean, I agree that there'll be tons of PC-only folks trying this out soon, but I'm not sure it'll be such a big win. It'll be an OS running most applications in emulation, with native code that's never been tested on any large scale, and no patches available. Sure I understand the reasons for all of that, but if you were predisposed to think Macs had sparse application support, ran slowly, and weren't really as stable as everyone claimed, this could easily reinforce everything you thought...
I don't know, tell me I'm wrong. Am I not giving average warez-users enough credit? Is this build more usable than I think?
I *am* really a fanatic, and I want to remind you that the reason it was starting to work for them was that they finally had hardware to sell that was competitive in terms of price and performance. That reason was slipping away as IBM screwed up all their promises, and Apple is doing what they have to to get it back. I'm one fanatic who's glad he won't have to justify buying drastically slower hardware anymore.
Fair point. I'm all for making better tools to sift through that stuff. I just want to make sure we remember how useful it is to put something somewhere, and then go back there to find it again. That's built into my brain at least, I suspect everyone's, and it's not going to be replaced, only augmented.
Isn't there more to a computer than simply a processor? [...] Apple already does a pretty good job of limiting what computers an OS can run on. [...] Can't Apple just have its installer check to make sure you are on their hardware before installing?
The difficulty is that a CPU, by definition practically, is a logical machine that can pretend to be any other logical machine. That's what Turing-complete means, I think (no promises, I've never taken a CS class:-). That means that there are no provably secure ways to *prevent* it from running on a standard x86, only practical obstacles to throw up. Specifically -- is the CPU fast enough to pretend to be the appropriate machine? And, is there sufficient motivation to make it worth the time to teach it how?
This change obviously makes it many times easier and faster to have a generic PC emulate a Mac -- and that promise feeds an incentive that was never there before either. There aren't exactly armies of hackers trying to get their software restore disks to work on a different model, but you bet there are armies of hackers gearing up for this.
All of this means that, probably not long after the Mac comes out, you'll be able to download a disk image that installs it on your PC. Will that in turn cause public panic and freakiness? I doubt it, but that's what we're talking about...
You know that memory trick, where you remember a long list of items by mentally walking through your house and assigning them positions? There's a huge chunk of our brains that's devoted to remembering *what* something is based on *where* it is.
So for example: 5 or 6 days ago I downloaded a plugin for some blog package or other, written in php or perl I think... it had a name like Exercise or Expendable, I forget... Now I need to find it. What do I remember about it? That I saved it to the Desktop.
That kind of thing will always have a place in my Finder. I like metadata search too, but I'm just not with-it enough to give up my brain's best way of remembering things...
If you permit Windows to run on OS X as well as on native Windows, you concede the most important battle by telling developers that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using your own APIs.
I never saw OS/2, but it happens all the time that some useful app comes to the Mac as an ugly port from windows/linux and gets picked up. Its popularity always lasts precisely as long as it takes for a Mac-native competitor to appear.
The fact is, any developer who decides that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using Apple's APIs isn't going to last very long on Apple's platform -- not because they'll give up but because they'll be replaced. Mac-native applications will still be written as long as users keep voting with their feet, the same way they do now. I haven't seen any reason that should change.
If things *didn't* work out this way with OS/2, it's either because their users didn't strongly prefer native apps, or there weren't enough of those users to justify independent development. I've been on Macs for a decade, and everything I've seen suggests that your history just doesn't apply here.
If Windows apps can run on Intel-based Macs, at full frame rates, with all the features turned on, the effect on Mac gaming could be devastating. ...
OK, I can definitely see how the effect on Mac game porting jobs will be devastating, but that quote actually sounds pretty sweet to me as a Mac user. The thing is, running most non-native apps (eg OpenOffice) on a Mac sucks, because the interface isn't Mac-like enough. But 3D games are the one case where that doesn't matter -- they all have their own (crappy) interfaces anyway. If this change means that there are half as many real ports, but twice as many game companies who make sure their title plays on a Mac via emulation, I have trouble seeing the long-term problem. This won't affect normal GUI apps -- any Mac GUI app that isn't friendly enough gets beat down by one that is.
Short term, of course, it will suck if the shift to emulation happens before you've had a chance to upgrade to a macintel... but if not being able to play the latest 3D games is a problem for you, I imagine you'll have gotten around to it, somehow.
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you have it backward. They're not saying that hack.ru could have a frameset that pointed to a frame with a real ebay page. They're saying that if ebay had a frameset, hack.ru could use javascript to insert itself as one of the frames. That is indeed a security hole -- unless you want to claim that it's one of those extra features that differentiates Firefox from Safari and IE...
Great, now they're going to wrap you in chickenwire, set your feet in concrete, and drop you off the pier, where you will float in murky water for days until you starve, dissolve, get eaten or die of thirst.
Slashdot Mirror
Other folks have already pointed out how little sense this makes (how many other ways can you get the same info? why draw so much attention to yourself?). The more I think about it, the more this seems like it has nothing to do with Google maps -- it's just a convenient way for this guy to force politicians to pony up for more security. He releases this thing, accuses Google, and people all over the world are talking about how undefended this reactor is. Who wants to bet that, within a week, the whole complex will be secure?
I don't really see the problem with "bloated" xml, when the files are zipped by default. Instead of smushing your efficiency requirements in with your readability and standardization requirements (and screwing all three), you first handle readability and standardization and then rap it in a standard efficiency layer. The upshot is, not only are the files often *smaller* than the old Word equivalent, but I can also hack through them using a couple of standard perl packages that have come with linux, OS X and cygwin for years.
Where's the downside?
Fair point, but when a 300 lb gorilla goes on a rampage, you know about it. When Microsoft goes on a rampage, you only know about it through papers like this (assuming this one turns out to hold any water).
I think you're late by about a month, but I'll add another one: hardware that runs both OS X and Windows is better for my needs than hardware that runs only Windows.
You sound like you're pretty eager to hear that, so, glad I could help.
What other sites does Telus block that promote physical violence or make snap judgments about people, that aren't directly linked to Telus's profits?
:-)
Oh, none?
Please -- legal or not, this is a shocking abuse of power.
(Oh, and thanks for your post. Aside from the "I would not condemn them" point, it's very good background to have. Hope I wasn't too harsh.
I hear you -- that's the same story I've heard from a psychiatrist friend of mine. At conferences, they call it "poop-out" -- the damn drugs just keep giving out. After ten years, you're on three instead of one, and it's not working as well.
...
My friend is into a new treatment called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy -- have you come across it? It sounds a little wishy-washy when you first look at it, but it's basically just learning to hack your brain. She's looking at it from a front-lines scientific perspective, and seeing some impressive things
Zoloft, IIRC, took 3 tries to find a study where it performed better than placebo, and when it did it wasn't all that much better (has *some* effect on 70% of cases, or the like). I may be misremembering, but the point is sound -- *all* depression treatments at this point have pretty high fail rates, and if you've seen serious depression, you know that *any* new tools are welcome.
...
Elsewhere it's been pointed out that truly successful depression treatments could mask problems in our society, the same way that truly successful cancer treatments could mask pollution problems. That's true -- but if your mother is dying of cancer, it's sure hard to care
Well ... in all fairness, severe clinical depression is very much on the rise. It must be caused by *something*.
There's really not much difference between your mind and your brain. It doesn't have to be unrelated to your social environment just because it's very much a physical illness.
I wonder if this will drive businesses to a true pay-for-what-you-get mode of operation. No cell minutes will be free because it will be too easy to abuse free minutes. No single-use device will be as cheap -- it will require a deposit for the value of the asset.
...
... just let me do whatever I want and tell me how much it actually costs.
If they also stop vastly overcharging for other services, I'd be all for it. Back-of-the-envelope, GSM voice bandwidth can send 60,000 characters per minute -- why does a 20 character text message cost the same as a minute of voice? Because that's what we'll pay
If there was a cell provider who came out and said, we'll let you do anything you want with your phone, and charge you in direct relation to how much it costs us to provide that service, I'd sign up with them in a second. I'm tired of arbitrary overcharges, undercharges, weird marketing entanglements
Can this be done by Friday?
This is a nifty hack, but I wonder what your thoughts are on the ethics of it. If the database is inaccurate to the point where you have to make guesses about what the correct data really is, it's also likely that it points to a fair number of entirely innocent people. By making it easy for folks to find entries near them, you're aiding a process with the potential to do a lot of harm, for better or worse.
...
This is the kind of project I can easily imagine myself starting -- but around the time I was making guesses about misspelled street names, I think I'd can it and move on to something with less potential to ruin lives. With no negative judgment implied, why didn't you?
On a separate note, at a first glance I see a surprising number of pairs of dots very near to each other. Is this some kind of bug in the data or the mapping process? Am I just inventing patterns where there aren't any? Or perhaps there's some strange tendency for sex offenders to settle in pairs
Thanks for the interesting link.
BTW, what is wrong with opening a (Chinese) blog account on one of Western sites and emailing blog posts via some foreign Webmail site that provides HTTPS encryption of Web sessions?
Popular blog hosting sites are trivially easy to censor and track. Hosting on thousands of unrelated volunteer sites is meant to be harder to block.
If I want to play tetris, pong, etc, I'll use my PDA ...
...
Sweet, so if *I* want to play tetris, pong, etc, I can use your PDA too?
No?
Oh, maybe saying that a free software install is worthless because you have hundreds of dollars of hardware that can do the job better isn't really that insightful, after all.
My DVP642 standalone DVD player handles most DivX-type video files, and has regular firmware updates. Does anyone know if this new menu format will be possible to support as a firmware update, or if it can only be supported in new hardware? Also, will it at least degrade gracefully and play like a normal avi, or will we need some kinda utility to rip out the data stream and put it in a package older players understand?
Remember that a patent is not just a free reward for being so clever. It's a social contract: a voluntary limitation on all of our rights (e.g. my freedom to create a one-click checkout process) in exchange for a social benefit (e.g. the public revelation of a system for creating a one-click checkout process). If Jeff Bezos had been unable to prevent everyone else from creating one-click checkout processes, would it have made it economically impossible for him to implement them, or encouraged him to keep them a secret, and therefore deprived our society of anything?
Please. Of course not. In this particular social contract, we got ripped off. It's time to renegotiate.
IBM, for instance, uses the chip securely to store user passwords and encrypt the contents of the hard drive.
... guess which one we currently have the technology to reverse?
Of course, there's a world of difference between using hardware protection to protect things for the user and using it to protect things from the user. Specifically, one relies on the security of a password stored inside a single human brain, and the other relies on the security of a password stored on millions of chips using current technology
Is there any word on how well the Intel build actually works for serious use yet? I mean, I agree that there'll be tons of PC-only folks trying this out soon, but I'm not sure it'll be such a big win. It'll be an OS running most applications in emulation, with native code that's never been tested on any large scale, and no patches available. Sure I understand the reasons for all of that, but if you were predisposed to think Macs had sparse application support, ran slowly, and weren't really as stable as everyone claimed, this could easily reinforce everything you thought ...
I don't know, tell me I'm wrong. Am I not giving average warez-users enough credit? Is this build more usable than I think?
I *am* really a fanatic, and I want to remind you that the reason it was starting to work for them was that they finally had hardware to sell that was competitive in terms of price and performance. That reason was slipping away as IBM screwed up all their promises, and Apple is doing what they have to to get it back. I'm one fanatic who's glad he won't have to justify buying drastically slower hardware anymore.
Fair point. I'm all for making better tools to sift through that stuff. I just want to make sure we remember how useful it is to put something somewhere, and then go back there to find it again. That's built into my brain at least, I suspect everyone's, and it's not going to be replaced, only augmented.
Isn't there more to a computer than simply a processor? [...] Apple already does a pretty good job of limiting what computers an OS can run on. [...] Can't Apple just have its installer check to make sure you are on their hardware before installing?
:-). That means that there are no provably secure ways to *prevent* it from running on a standard x86, only practical obstacles to throw up. Specifically -- is the CPU fast enough to pretend to be the appropriate machine? And, is there sufficient motivation to make it worth the time to teach it how?
...
The difficulty is that a CPU, by definition practically, is a logical machine that can pretend to be any other logical machine. That's what Turing-complete means, I think (no promises, I've never taken a CS class
This change obviously makes it many times easier and faster to have a generic PC emulate a Mac -- and that promise feeds an incentive that was never there before either. There aren't exactly armies of hackers trying to get their software restore disks to work on a different model, but you bet there are armies of hackers gearing up for this.
All of this means that, probably not long after the Mac comes out, you'll be able to download a disk image that installs it on your PC. Will that in turn cause public panic and freakiness? I doubt it, but that's what we're talking about
You know that memory trick, where you remember a long list of items by mentally walking through your house and assigning them positions? There's a huge chunk of our brains that's devoted to remembering *what* something is based on *where* it is.
... it had a name like Exercise or Expendable, I forget ... Now I need to find it. What do I remember about it? That I saved it to the Desktop.
...
So for example: 5 or 6 days ago I downloaded a plugin for some blog package or other, written in php or perl I think
That kind of thing will always have a place in my Finder. I like metadata search too, but I'm just not with-it enough to give up my brain's best way of remembering things
If you permit Windows to run on OS X as well as on native Windows, you concede the most important battle by telling developers that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using your own APIs.
I never saw OS/2, but it happens all the time that some useful app comes to the Mac as an ugly port from windows/linux and gets picked up. Its popularity always lasts precisely as long as it takes for a Mac-native competitor to appear.
The fact is, any developer who decides that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using Apple's APIs isn't going to last very long on Apple's platform -- not because they'll give up but because they'll be replaced. Mac-native applications will still be written as long as users keep voting with their feet, the same way they do now. I haven't seen any reason that should change.
If things *didn't* work out this way with OS/2, it's either because their users didn't strongly prefer native apps, or there weren't enough of those users to justify independent development. I've been on Macs for a decade, and everything I've seen suggests that your history just doesn't apply here.
If Windows apps can run on Intel-based Macs, at full frame rates, with all the features turned on, the effect on Mac gaming could be devastating. ...
... but if not being able to play the latest 3D games is a problem for you, I imagine you'll have gotten around to it, somehow.
OK, I can definitely see how the effect on Mac game porting jobs will be devastating, but that quote actually sounds pretty sweet to me as a Mac user. The thing is, running most non-native apps (eg OpenOffice) on a Mac sucks, because the interface isn't Mac-like enough. But 3D games are the one case where that doesn't matter -- they all have their own (crappy) interfaces anyway. If this change means that there are half as many real ports, but twice as many game companies who make sure their title plays on a Mac via emulation, I have trouble seeing the long-term problem. This won't affect normal GUI apps -- any Mac GUI app that isn't friendly enough gets beat down by one that is.
Short term, of course, it will suck if the shift to emulation happens before you've had a chance to upgrade to a macintel
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you, but I think you have it backward. They're not saying that hack.ru could have a frameset that pointed to a frame with a real ebay page. They're saying that if ebay had a frameset, hack.ru could use javascript to insert itself as one of the frames. That is indeed a security hole -- unless you want to claim that it's one of those extra features that differentiates Firefox from Safari and IE ...
Great, now they're going to wrap you in chickenwire, set your feet in concrete, and drop you off the pier, where you will float in murky water for days until you starve, dissolve, get eaten or die of thirst.
Have a nice day.
Easy, we'll just have to learn to run around the display 30 times a second --
Hmm.
Fair point.