The first thing that hit me about the 50% number was. "That much!", and the second thing was, "That little!" The third take was that aren't most of these people 'workers for hire' instead of 'artists'? In that case, there's no need to pay any 'artist', because there was none. I know there was some recent talk on legislation of this issue, but don't remember where it went.
But it makes you realize that timing really is everything. I suppose the RIAA thinks that all the other lawyers are SOOOO busy in Florida that they can pull a fast one on us, if they act quickly.
Finally, for the ultimate reference, go to that one sentence in the US Constitution, where it references rights for a 'limited time' for 'artists and inventors'. It says nothing about unlimiting that time, or their heirs and assignees, or middlemen, publishers, and distributers. IMHO, wait for the right case, and a VERY interesting Constitutional Case could be made of the whole copyright/patent mess.
But privacy is closely related to security, and anyone truly versed in security knows that policy is the real issue. You can throw all the technology at your security that you want, and if the policies are broken most likely the security will be, also. But if you have a good security policy, it will guide you on the correct technology to deploy, how to deploy it, and how to assess and manage the risks you are taking.
Read the articles, and you'll see that that's what this is about.
This and the other articles didn't really get into some of the fundamental [S][DDR-S][R][ES]DRAM limits in terms of latency, and why this is just plain a losing battle.
At the cell level, DRAMs work by charge transfer. (That part was covered, IIRC) To write, you push some charge into the cell. To read, you share that charge and let it disturb voltages in your sensing system, and then evaluate it to a 0 or 1. If that sounds fuzzy, it's because it really is.
Anyway, there is a transistor used as a switch to get the charge in and out of the cell. It has to be a pretty darned good switch, especially in the 'off' position. We're about to the point where we can count the electrons that tell the difference between a 0 and a 1 - somewhere around 40,000. ANY leakage at all in that transistor HURTS.
Therefore, that transistor has to be optimized for leakage, and speed has to take a back seat. It simply takes TIME for those 40,000 electrons to get in and out of the cell. Oh, don't forget that this whole structure is optimized for size too, and there isn't any significant room to play around.
As we keep cramming more and more bits on to chips, the transistor (the D in the 1D memory) keeps getting smaller, and even with scaling, just can't get significantly faster. This aspect of performance just plain didn't show up, in the old days, because every other part swamped it out. We're now in the era where it shows, and causes pain. In the future, it will begin to dominate performance.
All else is addressing moving bits around, getting them to and from cells. That stuff is where most of the improvements have been happening. (There have also been improvements in wordlines and sensing systems, to credit them, too.)
My personal favorite is a large-ish L3 cache on the Northbridge. There have been some indications of this happening, already. Furthermore, on the Northbridge, you can differentiate between streaming data and random data, so streams don't flush the cache. You can't do that with cache in the DRAM.
More to the point, the moment we create artificial intelligence, would we be morally obligated to emancipate it?
Would shutting down a true AI without a restartable checkpoint (AI equivalent of general anaesthesia) be morally equivalent to murder?
Does a true AI have a soul? Does restarting from a checkpoint preserve that soul? What about restarting another from a copy of the checkpoint?
Perhaps silly questions, but we've gotten into any amount of trouble in the past by blundering into technology or other actions without considering ethical or long-term consequences of our actions. Maybe after consideration, we'd do it, anyway. But we should at least take that non-trivial pause.
This was the topic of one of the Comments to the Library of Congress, specifically by Aladdin, the makers of Ghostscript. They used some sort of font tool that locked up some of their fonts, and because of bugs would not allow them to export them into a more universally usable format. The fonts were their own work, but were 'held hostage' by a malfunctioning tool. Aladdin felt that circumvention was necessary in this case, especially considering that the copyright 'protected' material was their own.
As for your subscription-based model, from what I've seen, the next release of Microsoft Office will be, based on a recent/. story. But according to that story, after expiration, you will not be able to create new documents. Reading of old documents will not be impaired. I did not notice about exporting your documents OUT of the expired word processor. Offhand, I'll bet it won't work, since that is effectively creating a new document. So even though you can read it, I suspect that your expired Word document will be held hostage with respect to future revision and usage.
to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will be used against you.
You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you.
I'm sorry to say, I don't remember the rest of the Miranda's. I hope they survive the changes in the Supreme Court by the next administration. They survived on attack in the past year, already.
More on-topic, I fear you have the right to pay the [MP][RI]AA money for the least possible rights of media life or copyrighted content.
Digital signatures and CSS do nothing to prevent copying, in the bit-for-bit fashion. A bitwise copy will be playable on an authorized player, only the small-timers are kept out of piracy.
I fear the practical consequence of all of this is the slippery slope downhill into pay-per-[view][listen].
I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I just remember the RIAA boast about how he'd firewall us in. Quickly retracted, but I suspect it was a mistake of revalation rather than intent.
I'm now on a cable modem, and we're not permitted to run servers by the AUP. Nor do I have a choice, because DSL is unlikely to become available any time soon, because I'm too far from my CE. Based on the probability of increased legal pressure by parties like RIAA, MPAA, etc, who want publication to remain a 'big-shop' capability, I expect the no-server trend to continue and increase. From the ISP's point of view, it's a way to control liability. (Common-carrier status is far from assured, erosion has occurred already.) From Joe Sixpak's point of view, no big deal. Small-time hobby-oriented web space at the ISP and places like GeoCities serve just fine.
Give it less than 5 years, and the ability to 'Peer' may well be a big-budget item, past the range of the small-timer.
I heard that they started out as classic cars, and then some carmaker got upset. So given the names they had, it was fairly easy to change over to horses.
Anyone remember Apple's "Sagan" project codename that was changed to "BHA" after the namesake objected? Sounds like someone didn't learn from that lesson.
That's easy to say for you, at the pinnacle of geekdom, at the peak of your physical and mental powers. Let's not forget that Florida was a battleground state *because* of the extensive senior citizen population. While some seniors (like my mother) embrace computers, many do not. Even some of those that do (like my mother) do not truly understand how do use them, merely how to get a few things done with them.
When these people began to vote, long before we were born, it was with marks on paper, counted by officials with witnesses, etc. As low-tech as we may think a punch-out ballot is, it's pretty daunting to some of them.
Besides which, failing eyesight and hearing, (directions? huh?) and the fact that some of these people have become shut-ins, for whom simply getting out to vote is a major challenge and something of a sensory overload, and you have an ultimate UI challenge to allow them to vote their consciences.
Perhaps one could argue that ability to correctly use a ballot is a prerequisite for voting, but the Constitution doesn't say that.
I suspect your parents are still reasonably young, and you haven't lived this yet, even second-hand.
I checked ahead. Since my state isn't close, a vote for Nader isn't a vote for Bush. Last I saw, Vermont was going for Gore. If Gore lost Vermont by 1 vote, and Bush won the Presidency by 3 or fewer electoral votes, then you could blame (or thank) me.
I know you were being funny, but a lot of people say they don't vote as a form of protest.
Unfortunately, a protesting non-vote is completely indistinguishable from an apathetic non-vote. If you really want to protest, vote, but use the write-in space. Unfortunately, Mr. (or Ms.) NoneOfTheAbove will probably just get counted as a mismarked or invalid ballot, and still not give the message you really wish.
So I wish to nominate Jon Katz as the Protest Candidate of all Slashdotters. On the next election, or if you want to protest today, write in Jon Katz.
Spamming and acting as a spam haven is clearly bad netiquette, but that's not necessarily the same thing as bad business practices.
At the moment, I'm not sure that it's truly established in their minds that spamming is a bad business practice. From their point of view, it's CHEAP advertising, so cheap that it doesn't matter if the business rate from it is REALLY low.
If you really want to stop ATT from spam-related behavior, either permitting it or doing it, then drop them as a long-distance carrier. Do it by mail, and tell them why you are doing it.
Corporate spam won't stop until we, as consumers, manage to change it from a good business practice into a bad one.
Either that, or we'll get into the "JC Whitney" business. When I first moved to Vermont, there was a JC Whitney catalog waiting for me in my never-before-used mailbox. I was even the first occupant of that apartment, so it wasn't bulk mail for the previous resident. But JC Whitney and Sharper Image catalogs are a fact of life. We all get them, and several others. They've degenerated into background noise. As we get to more sophisticated mail handling, maybe spam will assume a level of normal noise, too.
You're so right, and NOBODY can EVER challenge this Microsoft product, AGAIN!!! Once Microsoft winds a product arena, it stays WON, FOREVER!!!
Competitors need NEVER apply!
Pardon me, but it's late, and I'm sick to death of this industry attitude that when someone wins a marketplace battle against Microsoft it's just until the next rev, but when Microsoft wins marketplace battles, it's forever.
This is one plain and simple reason they need to go down the tubes.
> Still, I grabbed a copy of Leather Goddesses of Phobos in about two minutes with Google.
I own Leather Goddesses of Phobos, as well as the original Popluous, and a few other titles on 5.25" floppies. But I don't have a working 5.25" floppy drive installed, at the moment. Every now and then, I have a wish to bring one of these oldies out for a spin, but it's not worth the effort of opening the case, and fussing hardware around. It's especially obnoxious because I'm bay-limited, and some of these old games are A:-only. It's just more trouble than it's worth.
But an abandonware site... That's a neat idea, and I already OWN the games, just on obsolete media.
My brother lived in Wyoming during the "55 saves lives" campaign. Their traffic death rates and insurance premiums went up as a result. Perhaps "55 saves lives" when the greatest hazard on the road is a collision with another vehicle. But when the greatest hazard is fatigue, because long trips are a necessary part of life in that area, 55 kills. I'm sure there are other fatality factors in other parts of the country.
Oh, I imagine the answer to your question can't be anything but (e).
The war on drugs helps all of us by financing legal and criminal systems, as well as the construction industry in building new prisons. Further, by making sure that just about everyone has some criminality in their background, arbitrary law enforcement is easier. Just wait till we put teeth in the old sodomy laws.
And if you thing the War on Drugs was something, just wait until you see our War on Hackers!
How does AFS compare with Coda?
on
IBM Releases AFS
·
· Score: 2
Since AFS began at CMU prior to going to Transarc, it seems relevant to compare it to what came next. Coda is now the distributed filesystem pet project at CMU. Can someone compare/contrast the two?
Coda also appears to be at least partly GPL (or LGPL?), since it shows up in the kernel configurator. Was this a reaction to AFS going for-profit?
"Let the market decide" sounds to me as if the market needs the ability to choose, and the information to properly make that choice. That way, superior products and producers are rewarded, and inferior ones punished, to the Darwinian limit if necessary.
It's pretty clear that Microsoft (and others, as well) attempts to limit both information and choice.
How the heck can ANYONE from the commercial software side call the utterly ruthless Darwinian meritocracy of Linux/Open Source, "Communism"?
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing that hit me about the 50% number was. "That much!", and the second thing was, "That little!" The third take was that aren't most of these people 'workers for hire' instead of 'artists'? In that case, there's no need to pay any 'artist', because there was none. I know there was some recent talk on legislation of this issue, but don't remember where it went.
But it makes you realize that timing really is everything. I suppose the RIAA thinks that all the other lawyers are SOOOO busy in Florida that they can pull a fast one on us, if they act quickly.
Finally, for the ultimate reference, go to that one sentence in the US Constitution, where it references rights for a 'limited time' for 'artists and inventors'. It says nothing about unlimiting that time, or their heirs and assignees, or middlemen, publishers, and distributers. IMHO, wait for the right case, and a VERY interesting Constitutional Case could be made of the whole copyright/patent mess.
But privacy is closely related to security, and anyone truly versed in security knows that policy is the real issue. You can throw all the technology at your security that you want, and if the policies are broken most likely the security will be, also. But if you have a good security policy, it will guide you on the correct technology to deploy, how to deploy it, and how to assess and manage the risks you are taking.
Read the articles, and you'll see that that's what this is about.
This and the other articles didn't really get into some of the fundamental [S][DDR-S][R][ES]DRAM limits in terms of latency, and why this is just plain a losing battle.
At the cell level, DRAMs work by charge transfer. (That part was covered, IIRC) To write, you push some charge into the cell. To read, you share that charge and let it disturb voltages in your sensing system, and then evaluate it to a 0 or 1. If that sounds fuzzy, it's because it really is.
Anyway, there is a transistor used as a switch to get the charge in and out of the cell. It has to be a pretty darned good switch, especially in the 'off' position. We're about to the point where we can count the electrons that tell the difference between a 0 and a 1 - somewhere around 40,000. ANY leakage at all in that transistor HURTS.
Therefore, that transistor has to be optimized for leakage, and speed has to take a back seat. It simply takes TIME for those 40,000 electrons to get in and out of the cell. Oh, don't forget that this whole structure is optimized for size too, and there isn't any significant room to play around.
As we keep cramming more and more bits on to chips, the transistor (the D in the 1D memory) keeps getting smaller, and even with scaling, just can't get significantly faster. This aspect of performance just plain didn't show up, in the old days, because every other part swamped it out. We're now in the era where it shows, and causes pain. In the future, it will begin to dominate performance.
All else is addressing moving bits around, getting them to and from cells. That stuff is where most of the improvements have been happening. (There have also been improvements in wordlines and sensing systems, to credit them, too.)
My personal favorite is a large-ish L3 cache on the Northbridge. There have been some indications of this happening, already. Furthermore, on the Northbridge, you can differentiate between streaming data and random data, so streams don't flush the cache. You can't do that with cache in the DRAM.
It't attempting to show how bandwidth, as measured by several benchmarks, correlates to real-world performance, as measured by Expendable.
Interesting how games have become some of the most quoted benchmarks in recent years.
Reading it, now.
Are you a meat chauvinist? What's wrong with machine awareness to go along with the AI?
More to the point, the moment we create artificial intelligence, would we be morally obligated to emancipate it?
Would shutting down a true AI without a restartable checkpoint (AI equivalent of general anaesthesia) be morally equivalent to murder?
Does a true AI have a soul? Does restarting from a checkpoint preserve that soul? What about restarting another from a copy of the checkpoint?
Perhaps silly questions, but we've gotten into any amount of trouble in the past by blundering into technology or other actions without considering ethical or long-term consequences of our actions. Maybe after consideration, we'd do it, anyway. But we should at least take that non-trivial pause.
This was the topic of one of the Comments to the Library of Congress, specifically by Aladdin, the makers of Ghostscript. They used some sort of font tool that locked up some of their fonts, and because of bugs would not allow them to export them into a more universally usable format. The fonts were their own work, but were 'held hostage' by a malfunctioning tool. Aladdin felt that circumvention was necessary in this case, especially considering that the copyright 'protected' material was their own.
/. story. But according to that story, after expiration, you will not be able to create new documents. Reading of old documents will not be impaired. I did not notice about exporting your documents OUT of the expired word processor. Offhand, I'll bet it won't work, since that is effectively creating a new document. So even though you can read it, I suspect that your expired Word document will be held hostage with respect to future revision and usage.
As for your subscription-based model, from what I've seen, the next release of Microsoft Office will be, based on a recent
to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will be used against you.
You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed for you.
I'm sorry to say, I don't remember the rest of the Miranda's. I hope they survive the changes in the Supreme Court by the next administration. They survived on attack in the past year, already.
More on-topic, I fear you have the right to pay the [MP][RI]AA money for the least possible rights of media life or copyrighted content.
Digital signatures and CSS do nothing to prevent copying, in the bit-for-bit fashion. A bitwise copy will be playable on an authorized player, only the small-timers are kept out of piracy.
I fear the practical consequence of all of this is the slippery slope downhill into pay-per-[view][listen].
I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I just remember the RIAA boast about how he'd firewall us in. Quickly retracted, but I suspect it was a mistake of revalation rather than intent.
I'm now on a cable modem, and we're not permitted to run servers by the AUP. Nor do I have a choice, because DSL is unlikely to become available any time soon, because I'm too far from my CE. Based on the probability of increased legal pressure by parties like RIAA, MPAA, etc, who want publication to remain a 'big-shop' capability, I expect the no-server trend to continue and increase. From the ISP's point of view, it's a way to control liability. (Common-carrier status is far from assured, erosion has occurred already.) From Joe Sixpak's point of view, no big deal. Small-time hobby-oriented web space at the ISP and places like GeoCities serve just fine.
Give it less than 5 years, and the ability to 'Peer' may well be a big-budget item, past the range of the small-timer.
Simple, Mozilla is the director's cut version of Netscape. That's terminology Joe Sixpak can understand.
I heard that they started out as classic cars, and then some carmaker got upset. So given the names they had, it was fairly easy to change over to horses.
Anyone remember Apple's "Sagan" project codename that was changed to "BHA" after the namesake objected? Sounds like someone didn't learn from that lesson.
That's easy to say for you, at the pinnacle of geekdom, at the peak of your physical and mental powers. Let's not forget that Florida was a battleground state *because* of the extensive senior citizen population. While some seniors (like my mother) embrace computers, many do not. Even some of those that do (like my mother) do not truly understand how do use them, merely how to get a few things done with them.
When these people began to vote, long before we were born, it was with marks on paper, counted by officials with witnesses, etc. As low-tech as we may think a punch-out ballot is, it's pretty daunting to some of them.
Besides which, failing eyesight and hearing, (directions? huh?) and the fact that some of these people have become shut-ins, for whom simply getting out to vote is a major challenge and something of a sensory overload, and you have an ultimate UI challenge to allow them to vote their consciences.
Perhaps one could argue that ability to correctly use a ballot is a prerequisite for voting, but the Constitution doesn't say that.
I suspect your parents are still reasonably young, and you haven't lived this yet, even second-hand.
I checked ahead. Since my state isn't close, a vote for Nader isn't a vote for Bush. Last I saw, Vermont was going for Gore. If Gore lost Vermont by 1 vote, and Bush won the Presidency by 3 or fewer electoral votes, then you could blame (or thank) me.
I know you were being funny, but a lot of people say they don't vote as a form of protest.
Unfortunately, a protesting non-vote is completely indistinguishable from an apathetic non-vote. If you really want to protest, vote, but use the write-in space. Unfortunately, Mr. (or Ms.) NoneOfTheAbove will probably just get counted as a mismarked or invalid ballot, and still not give the message you really wish.
So I wish to nominate Jon Katz as the Protest Candidate of all Slashdotters. On the next election, or if you want to protest today, write in Jon Katz.
Spamming and acting as a spam haven is clearly bad netiquette, but that's not necessarily the same thing as bad business practices.
At the moment, I'm not sure that it's truly established in their minds that spamming is a bad business practice. From their point of view, it's CHEAP advertising, so cheap that it doesn't matter if the business rate from it is REALLY low.
If you really want to stop ATT from spam-related behavior, either permitting it or doing it, then drop them as a long-distance carrier. Do it by mail, and tell them why you are doing it.
Corporate spam won't stop until we, as consumers, manage to change it from a good business practice into a bad one.
Either that, or we'll get into the "JC Whitney" business. When I first moved to Vermont, there was a JC Whitney catalog waiting for me in my never-before-used mailbox. I was even the first occupant of that apartment, so it wasn't bulk mail for the previous resident. But JC Whitney and Sharper Image catalogs are a fact of life. We all get them, and several others. They've degenerated into background noise. As we get to more sophisticated mail handling, maybe spam will assume a level of normal noise, too.
We can, but do we?
There's more to high quality than a feature list.
Security, for starters.
But remember, MS never gets it right before Rev 3 or 4.
Bob's son is a paper clip. (Wonder who the mother was...)
Don't we all wonder who Bob's grandson will be...
You're so right, and NOBODY can EVER challenge this Microsoft product, AGAIN!!! Once Microsoft winds a product arena, it stays WON, FOREVER!!!
Competitors need NEVER apply!
Pardon me, but it's late, and I'm sick to death of this industry attitude that when someone wins a marketplace battle against Microsoft it's just until the next rev, but when Microsoft wins marketplace battles, it's forever.
This is one plain and simple reason they need to go down the tubes.
> Still, I grabbed a copy of Leather Goddesses of Phobos in about two minutes with Google.
I own Leather Goddesses of Phobos, as well as the original Popluous, and a few other titles on 5.25" floppies. But I don't have a working 5.25" floppy drive installed, at the moment. Every now and then, I have a wish to bring one of these oldies out for a spin, but it's not worth the effort of opening the case, and fussing hardware around. It's especially obnoxious because I'm bay-limited, and some of these old games are A:-only. It's just more trouble than it's worth.
But an abandonware site... That's a neat idea, and I already OWN the games, just on obsolete media.
Infinion, too.
My brother lived in Wyoming during the "55 saves lives" campaign. Their traffic death rates and insurance premiums went up as a result. Perhaps "55 saves lives" when the greatest hazard on the road is a collision with another vehicle. But when the greatest hazard is fatigue, because long trips are a necessary part of life in that area, 55 kills. I'm sure there are other fatality factors in other parts of the country.
Oh, I imagine the answer to your question can't be anything but (e).
The war on drugs helps all of us by financing legal and criminal systems, as well as the construction industry in building new prisons. Further, by making sure that just about everyone has some criminality in their background, arbitrary law enforcement is easier. Just wait till we put teeth in the old sodomy laws.
And if you thing the War on Drugs was something, just wait until you see our War on Hackers!
Since AFS began at CMU prior to going to Transarc, it seems relevant to compare it to what came next. Coda is now the distributed filesystem pet project at CMU. Can someone compare/contrast the two?
Coda also appears to be at least partly GPL (or LGPL?), since it shows up in the kernel configurator. Was this a reaction to AFS going for-profit?
"Let the market decide" sounds to me as if the market needs the ability to choose, and the information to properly make that choice. That way, superior products and producers are rewarded, and inferior ones punished, to the Darwinian limit if necessary.
It's pretty clear that Microsoft (and others, as well) attempts to limit both information and choice.
How the heck can ANYONE from the commercial software side call the utterly ruthless Darwinian meritocracy of Linux/Open Source, "Communism"?