In the end DRM is doomed because plaintext can be retrived from the speaker or monitor and then transfered to an insecure format. Watermarks are easily circumvented once the validation process is available for discetion. All that remains is optimizing the process.
Ease of use.
What does this mean? That the public does not want to spend time thinking or learning, thus the people won't assimilate a product that is differnet from what is mainstream
Information technology is a great thing. It should be as accessable as possible to everyone, including my grandmother, sister, the blind and the handicaped. Linux as it stands falls short of this promice, particularly when compared to Windows. It and the applications on top of it are too often built by technocrats for technocrats. This creates a better product for the few, but it has yet to reach the masses. This is what MS means by "ease of use", reaching beyond the new elite. Not until the Linux community figures this out and follows up will MS be in danger of losing the desktop.
Knuth's TAOCP has amazing depth of the subjects it covers, but it's a harder read than it has to be. Lets start with the decsion to use abstract assembly instead of psudocode or a C like language. It would also be nice to have more explaination and background reguarding the problems list, partularly the more difficult and unsolved ones.
I would love to see someone publish a reader's guide to TAOCP to help more programmers get more out of this great treasure. Like the Reader's Guide to Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has helped economics students understand a similar masterpiece in their field.
Programmers should be able to understand the material, but a tall glass of water makes the pill a lot easier to swallow.
To be clear. What I ment was I just spent a summer working with one of the best web severs ever written. It would be grossly unfair to apply what I had learned to Fnord and release the result of that GPL.
As for my personal view of GPL and free software, lets just say I'm more conservitive than Karl Marx and more liberal than Jim Allchin. But lean a lot closer to Jim Allchin.:-)
From _The_Golden_Apple_ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
[as extracted from pp.438f of _The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy_ compilation]
``Very nice,'' I said. ``But why did you bring me up here?''
``It's time for you to see the fnords,'' he replied. Then I woke up in bed
and it was the next morning. I made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering
if I'd seen the fnords, whatever the fell they were, in the hours he had
blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out into the street. I
has some pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three
eyes and tentacles, survivors from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due
to some form of mind shield, and did hideous work for the Illuminati. It was
unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked out the
window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first.
Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their busses and subways.
That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched the
_New_York_Times_ from the hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some
good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of toast and started skimming the first
page.
Then I saw the fnords.
The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia ad
the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the
Russian delegate I read a quite distinct ``Fnord!'' The second lead was about a
debate in congress on getting the troops out of costa Rica; every argument
presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another ``Fnord!'' At the bottom of
the page was a _Times_ depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and
the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing
chemical facts were interpolated with more ``Fnords.''
Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: ``Your
heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over
calm. You will not panic. you will look at the fnord and see the it. You will
not evade it or black it out. you will stay calm and face it.'' And further
back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a
wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned,
and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE
THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .
I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.
This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex
was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically
called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex
was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a
general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course,
was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in
themselves anyway.
Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole
population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers,
dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too
much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen
melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything
they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining,
watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never
fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human
emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing
either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their
security . . . Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. it
was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in
consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the
invisible fnords.
I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to
somebody who hadn't been deconditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would
he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. ``No _this_
word,'' I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their
panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to
try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject.
The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate
those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us
in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.
It's funny how these things just keep comming back. I always got a kick out of seeing it show up on the Netcraft survey (at least at recently as a year ago.) Anyway I guess a few comments are in order (easy Karma too.)
I wrote Fnord back in my Junior yeah of college (96-97.) Partialy because EWACs (or something like that) was the dominant web server at the time with IIS just comming around with it's magical version 3. Partitialy just to learn how they worked under the covers. The name Fnord was a joke that stuck. The thought of Fnords on the web being served by a Fnord Sever had a certain ring to it. Why GPL? Since part of my goal was understanding how these things work and would work under NT, GPL was as good of a way as any to share my work with others. I ended getting a little help from a couple people in the process. Overall, it was a fun experience I learned a lot from.
The summer of '97 I accepted an internship at Microsoft on the IIS ASP team. In the process I learned a hell of a lot about stuff I didn't know that I didn't know. After that experience, by my own initiative, I ceased to work on Fnord. I considered it ethicaly and perhaps legally wrong. So it laid idle on my homepage at WPI. Around then I got a letter from Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games asking me to cease and desist using the pyrimid and eye icon. However, by that point there wasn't much to cease and desist doing. Being a fan of his work made it all the more humorous. After graduation I accepted a postion at Microsoft.
After working for Microsoft for about a year, someone from research called me and asked me if they could use Fnord as an example for their IP6 effort. They needed a server example, releasing a subset of IIS was not possible (I suspect size and intellectual property issues) so Fnord fit the bill. Other than saying yes and being glad Fnord still was of some use to someone, I had no other role in MS release it.
Currently, I'm still working for Microsoft in XBox Online.
Hope this sheds some light on how this little inside joke came to be.
Which is faster, the exploit or the development staff?
I think we'll see more and more of this as software moves to a service model either via self-updates or a server component.
The answer thus far is that it depends on the commitment of the development staff. For examples see AOL vs MSN Messenger, online games, secure music delivery systems, etc.
In response to the original post. I'll bet on the hacker kid, but it's up to the development staff how long is work trickles down the grapevine....
Petreley should be shamed of that article. He makes a serious accusation without presenting *any* evidence to back it up. Not only is it unethical reporting, he comes out looking like just another Linux hack a little concerned about Win2k's increase in stability. I realize the MS vs Linux rivalry is intense, but lets not fall back to wild accusations.
As for why NT has become stable. First, Win2k is the 3rd generation of the OS. Most of the code that is run is tried and true for 2 or 3 generations. I know there are 5 gizillion new lines of code in the Win2k, but most of it is not core OS, it's peripheral features the market demands from an OS. Second, competition from Unix/Oracle data centers has made MS take reliability much more seriously. Even to the point that they're lightening up on their performance tunnel vision.
As for the security argument, closed systems are just as secure for several reasons already pointed out by others. If MS put a back-door in they'd spend even more time in court. Also, most security holes are unintentional, by keeping the source trade secret it makes discovery more difficult. Finally, it's not difficult to sneak a piece of poor quality code into a large open source project without a thorough review (see Mozilla:-)
I hope Nick has something more substantial to say in his next article.
Hmm... There are lots of intelligent people who can and want to come here to accept a relativly high paying job an pay taxes on that salary. Some even want to stay. These aren't sweatshop fodder comming up from Mexico, pregant wife in hand.
What's the problem here? Isn't this what made America great?
If we do anything with H1-B's we ought to contain the abuses and make it easier to make them citizens.
Your analysis is flawed. You are assuming that the cost of a consumer locating a given work of art is zero, when in fact it is much greater than that. Also, there is a network effect if other desired items can be found there.
Most people would be willing to pay a buck or so (under my understanding of album revenue to artists this would not be a bad deal) to download a John Lennon (or insert favorite artist) song from an offical site because they know it will be there (no messing with search queries and questionable capacity.) There could be realted goods there I may also be interested in (posters, T-shirts, etc.) Even if it's avaible for free from j-random warez site. If some party has a more organized unoffical site, then you can discredit them and sue them under existing copyright laws.
What's going to break SupiDMI is someone is going to reverse engineer or get specs to the validation routine. Once you have the validation routine, it should be just a matter of time to figure out how to recode the music to make the reader think whatever you want it to think. As many others have pointed out, there is no secret here, hence it's vulnerable.
If SDMI becomes half as widespread as they say, it will just be a matter of time until just enough decode information leaks just like what happened to DeCSS.
Why not just standarize on a simple watermark and use to as an *human* enforcement tool to go after the *real crinimals* (such as Asian redistributors), instead of dreaming up scheme's like this that just won't work. Stop using technology to solve a social problem!
I find it curious that Microsoft is trying to use an active mechanism to solve the copyright enforcement problems for books, music, etc. while it has not done so for software. Instead it has used serial numbers, holograms on licenses, etc. to aid *human* enforcement....
I can speak to the Transaction Processing expertise. MS SQL server 7 (by informal accounts a 95% rewrite of 6.5) is incredible. For core Relational Database stuff it's arguably the best on the market and the core tools kick the pants off anything else out there. Not all of the bells and whistles are there, but give it a couple major releases (and Win64 servers) and there could be a lot of shakeup in the market. We use SQL 7 heavily in our group and have some people who have used Oracle and Sybase, and they agree.
Microsoft not interested in pure research?!?! I don't know the exact dollar amounts, but it's comperable to IBM labs and is purely focused on software. See research.microsoft.com for more details and that's not including all of the really neat stuff I've seen under NDA I can't talk about that has and will have a huge effect on software.
I'm amazed that nothing really happened with this property since probably '90 or so. It had a strong following and would have made a strong internet port without the Telnet BBSing requirement (a bad idea motivated by nestalgia.) I would have thought EA, Origin or someone would have picked up the title cheap (relatively) for the brand recognition alone. Oh well...
I think anything done with this title now will be too little too late, and probably continue to be plagued by a lack of vision.
Text based languages are simple to design, implement and port. However there are some compelling advantages to be gained from a binary based model. Possible gains include better presentation, source control and templateling.
Do you forsee a move away from text based languages?
I think this might actually be a serious offer for a few reasons.
Building and maintaing another companies project very difficult. Look at what Mozilla had to go through to get regular builds out to the public. MS has entire build teams to manage this stuff. It would take months for anyone to catch up here
Microsoft still has all of the people who wrote and maintain the code. If MS doesn't screw the pooch, this reason alone should keep them on top of any efforts to fragment the OS
As previously brough up, patents could be used to defend key technology.
Opening up the source code could be a boon to support. Free bug fixes submitted and unoffical patches. Even Balmer acknowledges this as a key benefit of opening up the source tree.
The only significant loss I see is it makes reverse engineering really easy to their competitors. It would put WINE a lot closer to running MS Office and Mozilla could probably learn a lot about HTML rendering from the IE source.
Computer programming and the Internet are one of the few really equal opportunity workplaces in the world, or at least should be. Differences in physical abilities between men and women are not applicable here.
You're grossly wrong. Men and woman aren't just different physicaly, they are also different emotionaly.
You could (and some on this thread have) argue that woman aren't as inclined to think purly logicly, thus explaing the lack of interest in math and computers. But I won't touch that with a 10 foot pole and it just doesn't seem to hold up in my personal experience.
What does hold up is personalities. Particularly how men and woman collaberate. Men tend to be more confrontational. They are more likely to say "that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard" and respond aggresivly when told such a comment. Women build concensus, are more often self critical and don't respond well to agressive criticism.
That being said I think there is merrit to the criticism of Computer Science as a boys club with macho programmers who talk about the need for more "CS chicks." The aditude is at least half of the problem.
>The way to fix computer security is to make OS vendors strictly liable for security breaches made possible by OS vulnerabilities.
I wasn't aware that software companies weren't as liable for their defects as other companies.
>I have some concrete proposals circulating for peer review in this area, and I'll have more to say about that in future.
Who whould manage and conduct these reviews? Sounds like government and that scares me. Furthermore, how do you review systems with 1 million or more lines of code and add value without massive delays on the release of systems?
As sexy and important as systems are to develop, the money has always been in applications. There is far more money in bean counting, scheduling airplanes, tracking customers, etc. than building new and custom platforms. To do this you don't have to know a latch from a gate, just a programing language and few architecture fundamentals (disk slow, memory better; random access slow, sequential access better; etc.)
For this reason I've never understood why some people go dual CS/EE for money. The effort to learn two almost disjoint degrees (at my school the overlap in core classes was 2 or 3 classes) isn't worth it on money alone.
Computers in Elementry & Middle schools for the sake of having computers is a waste of money. While computers are useful tools, classes just for the sake of using a computer for kids learning "the three R's" isn't efficent. However, I think that aggressively pushing for open enrollment Computer Science classes in High Schools (not as a tool to further differentiate the High School AP elite) would help a lot. Moving to a district where such classes were available played a bit role in getting me into the field and through collage.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end DRM is doomed because plaintext can be retrived from the speaker or monitor and then transfered to an insecure format. Watermarks are easily circumvented once the validation process is available for discetion. All that remains is optimizing the process.
No legistlation or technology can stop this.
Ease of use. What does this mean? That the public does not want to spend time thinking or learning, thus the people won't assimilate a product that is differnet from what is mainstream
Information technology is a great thing. It should be as accessable as possible to everyone, including my grandmother, sister, the blind and the handicaped. Linux as it stands falls short of this promice, particularly when compared to Windows. It and the applications on top of it are too often built by technocrats for technocrats. This creates a better product for the few, but it has yet to reach the masses. This is what MS means by "ease of use", reaching beyond the new elite. Not until the Linux community figures this out and follows up will MS be in danger of losing the desktop.
Knuth's TAOCP has amazing depth of the subjects it covers, but it's a harder read than it has to be. Lets start with the decsion to use abstract assembly instead of psudocode or a C like language. It would also be nice to have more explaination and background reguarding the problems list, partularly the more difficult and unsolved ones.
I would love to see someone publish a reader's guide to TAOCP to help more programmers get more out of this great treasure. Like the Reader's Guide to Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has helped economics students understand a similar masterpiece in their field.
Programmers should be able to understand the material, but a tall glass of water makes the pill a lot easier to swallow.
To be clear. What I ment was I just spent a summer working with one of the best web severs ever written. It would be grossly unfair to apply what I had learned to Fnord and release the result of that GPL.
:-)
As for my personal view of GPL and free software, lets just say I'm more conservitive than Karl Marx and more liberal than Jim Allchin. But lean a lot closer to Jim Allchin.
Damn does that picture bring back memories. Wow do we look like a bunch of geeks....
Yes
From _The_Golden_Apple_ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
[as extracted from pp.438f of _The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy_ compilation]
``Very nice,'' I said. ``But why did you bring me up here?''
``It's time for you to see the fnords,'' he replied. Then I woke up in bed
and it was the next morning. I made breakfast in a pretty nasty mood, wondering
if I'd seen the fnords, whatever the fell they were, in the hours he had
blacked out, or if I would see them as soon as I went out into the street. I
has some pretty gruesome ideas about them, I must admit. Creatures with three
eyes and tentacles, survivors from Atlantis, who walked among us, invisible due
to some form of mind shield, and did hideous work for the Illuminati. It was
unnerving to contemplate, and I finally gave in to my fears and peeked out the
window, thinking it might be better to see them from a distance first.
Nothing. Just ordinary sleepy people, heading for their busses and subways.
That calmed me a little, so I set out the toast and coffee and fetched the
_New_York_Times_ from the hallway. I turned the radio to WBAI and caught some
good Vivaldi, sat down, grabbed a piece of toast and started skimming the first
page.
Then I saw the fnords.
The feature story involved another of the endless squabbles between Russia ad
the U.S. in the UN General Assembly, and after each direct quote from the
Russian delegate I read a quite distinct ``Fnord!'' The second lead was about a
debate in congress on getting the troops out of costa Rica; every argument
presented by Senator Bacon was followed by another ``Fnord!'' At the bottom of
the page was a _Times_ depth-type study of the growing pollution problem and
the increasing use of gas masks among New Yorkers; the most distressing
chemical facts were interpolated with more ``Fnords.''
Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: ``Your
heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over
calm. You will not panic. you will look at the fnord and see the it. You will
not evade it or black it out. you will stay calm and face it.'' And further
back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a
wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned,
and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE
THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . .
I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.
This was one step beyond Pavlov, I realized. The first conditioned reflex
was to experience the panic reaction (the activation syndrome, it's technically
called) whenever encountering the word ``fnord.'' The second conditioned reflex
was to black out what happened, including the word itself, and just to feel a
general low-grade emergency without knowing why. And the third step, of course,
was to attribute this anxiety to the news stories, which were bad enough in
themselves anyway.
Of course, the essence of control is fear. The fnords produced a whole
population walking around in chronic low-grade emergency, tormented by ulcers,
dizzy spells, nightmares, heart palpitations and all the other symptoms of too
much adrenalin. All my left-wing arrogance and contempt for my countrymen
melted, and I felt a genuine pity. No wonder the poor bastards believe anything
they're told, walk through pollution and overcrowding without complaining,
watch their son hauled off to endless wars and butchered, never protest, never
fight back, never show much happiness or eroticism or curiosity or normal human
emotion, live with perpetual tunnel vision, walk past a slum without seeing
either the human misery it contains or the potential threat it poses to their
security . . . Then I got a hunch, and turned quickly to the advertisements. it
was as I expected: no fnords. That was part of the gimmick, too: only in
consumption, endless consumption, could they escape the amorphous threat of the
invisible fnords.
I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to
somebody who hadn't been deconditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would
he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. ``No _this_
word,'' I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their
panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to
try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject.
The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate
those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us
in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.
It's funny how these things just keep comming back. I always got a kick out of seeing it show up on the Netcraft survey (at least at recently as a year ago.) Anyway I guess a few comments are in order (easy Karma too.)
I wrote Fnord back in my Junior yeah of college (96-97.) Partialy because EWACs (or something like that) was the dominant web server at the time with IIS just comming around with it's magical version 3. Partitialy just to learn how they worked under the covers. The name Fnord was a joke that stuck. The thought of Fnords on the web being served by a Fnord Sever had a certain ring to it. Why GPL? Since part of my goal was understanding how these things work and would work under NT, GPL was as good of a way as any to share my work with others. I ended getting a little help from a couple people in the process. Overall, it was a fun experience I learned a lot from.
The summer of '97 I accepted an internship at Microsoft on the IIS ASP team. In the process I learned a hell of a lot about stuff I didn't know that I didn't know. After that experience, by my own initiative, I ceased to work on Fnord. I considered it ethicaly and perhaps legally wrong. So it laid idle on my homepage at WPI. Around then I got a letter from Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games asking me to cease and desist using the pyrimid and eye icon. However, by that point there wasn't much to cease and desist doing. Being a fan of his work made it all the more humorous. After graduation I accepted a postion at Microsoft.
After working for Microsoft for about a year, someone from research called me and asked me if they could use Fnord as an example for their IP6 effort. They needed a server example, releasing a subset of IIS was not possible (I suspect size and intellectual property issues) so Fnord fit the bill. Other than saying yes and being glad Fnord still was of some use to someone, I had no other role in MS release it.
Currently, I'm still working for Microsoft in XBox Online.
Hope this sheds some light on how this little inside joke came to be.
Brian Morin
aka
Which is faster, the exploit or the development staff?
I think we'll see more and more of this as software moves to a service model either via self-updates or a server component.
The answer thus far is that it depends on the commitment of the development staff. For examples see AOL vs MSN Messenger, online games, secure music delivery systems, etc.
In response to the original post. I'll bet on the hacker kid, but it's up to the development staff how long is work trickles down the grapevine....
Petreley should be shamed of that article. He makes a serious accusation without presenting *any* evidence to back it up. Not only is it unethical reporting, he comes out looking like just another Linux hack a little concerned about Win2k's increase in stability. I realize the MS vs Linux rivalry is intense, but lets not fall back to wild accusations.
:-)
As for why NT has become stable. First, Win2k is the 3rd generation of the OS. Most of the code that is run is tried and true for 2 or 3 generations. I know there are 5 gizillion new lines of code in the Win2k, but most of it is not core OS, it's peripheral features the market demands from an OS. Second, competition from Unix/Oracle data centers has made MS take reliability much more seriously. Even to the point that they're lightening up on their performance tunnel vision.
As for the security argument, closed systems are just as secure for several reasons already pointed out by others. If MS put a back-door in they'd spend even more time in court. Also, most security holes are unintentional, by keeping the source trade secret it makes discovery more difficult. Finally, it's not difficult to sneak a piece of poor quality code into a large open source project without a thorough review (see Mozilla
I hope Nick has something more substantial to say in his next article.
Hmm... There are lots of intelligent people who can and want to come here to accept a relativly high paying job an pay taxes on that salary. Some even want to stay. These aren't sweatshop fodder comming up from Mexico, pregant wife in hand.
What's the problem here? Isn't this what made America great?
If we do anything with H1-B's we ought to contain the abuses and make it easier to make them citizens.
Your analysis is flawed. You are assuming that the cost of a consumer locating a given work of art is zero, when in fact it is much greater than that. Also, there is a network effect if other desired items can be found there. Most people would be willing to pay a buck or so (under my understanding of album revenue to artists this would not be a bad deal) to download a John Lennon (or insert favorite artist) song from an offical site because they know it will be there (no messing with search queries and questionable capacity.) There could be realted goods there I may also be interested in (posters, T-shirts, etc.) Even if it's avaible for free from j-random warez site. If some party has a more organized unoffical site, then you can discredit them and sue them under existing copyright laws.
No watermark validation code!
What's going to break SupiDMI is someone is going to reverse engineer or get specs to the validation routine. Once you have the validation routine, it should be just a matter of time to figure out how to recode the music to make the reader think whatever you want it to think. As many others have pointed out, there is no secret here, hence it's vulnerable.
If SDMI becomes half as widespread as they say, it will just be a matter of time until just enough decode information leaks just like what happened to DeCSS.
Why not just standarize on a simple watermark and use to as an *human* enforcement tool to go after the *real crinimals* (such as Asian redistributors), instead of dreaming up scheme's like this that just won't work. Stop using technology to solve a social problem!
I find it curious that Microsoft is trying to use an active mechanism to solve the copyright enforcement problems for books, music, etc. while it has not done so for software. Instead it has used serial numbers, holograms on licenses, etc. to aid *human* enforcement....
I can speak to the Transaction Processing expertise. MS SQL server 7 (by informal accounts a 95% rewrite of 6.5) is incredible. For core Relational Database stuff it's arguably the best on the market and the core tools kick the pants off anything else out there. Not all of the bells and whistles are there, but give it a couple major releases (and Win64 servers) and there could be a lot of shakeup in the market.
We use SQL 7 heavily in our group and have some people who have used Oracle and Sybase, and they agree.
Microsoft not interested in pure research?!?! I don't know the exact dollar amounts, but it's comperable to IBM labs and is purely focused on software. See research.microsoft.com for more details and that's not including all of the really neat stuff I've seen under NDA I can't talk about that has and will have a huge effect on software.
Funny, doesn't show up on terraserver.microsoft.com. Maybe terraserver.microsoft.com != terraserver.com.
8 &Y=5157&Z=11&W=2
I just get what looks like an image of a political map with the words "Groom Lake Test Site"
http:// terraserver.microsoft.com/image.asp?S=12&T=2&X=75
I'm amazed that nothing really happened with this property since probably '90 or so. It had a strong following and would have made a strong internet port without the Telnet BBSing requirement (a bad idea motivated by nestalgia.) I would have thought EA, Origin or someone would have picked up the title cheap (relatively) for the brand recognition alone. Oh well...
I think anything done with this title now will be too little too late, and probably continue to be plagued by a lack of vision.
Text based languages are simple to design, implement and port. However there are some compelling advantages to be gained from a binary based model. Possible gains include better presentation, source control and templateling.
Do you forsee a move away from text based languages?
The only significant loss I see is it makes reverse engineering really easy to their competitors. It would put WINE a lot closer to running MS Office and Mozilla could probably learn a lot about HTML rendering from the IE source.
Computer programming and the Internet are one of the few really equal opportunity workplaces in the world, or at least should be. Differences in physical abilities between men and women are not applicable here.
You're grossly wrong. Men and woman aren't just different physicaly, they are also different emotionaly.
You could (and some on this thread have) argue that woman aren't as inclined to think purly logicly, thus explaing the lack of interest in math and computers. But I won't touch that with a 10 foot pole and it just doesn't seem to hold up in my personal experience.
What does hold up is personalities. Particularly how men and woman collaberate. Men tend to be more confrontational. They are more likely to say "that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard" and respond aggresivly when told such a comment. Women build concensus, are more often self critical and don't respond well to agressive criticism.
That being said I think there is merrit to the criticism of Computer Science as a boys club with macho programmers who talk about the need for more "CS chicks." The aditude is at least half of the problem.
>The way to fix computer security is to make OS vendors strictly liable for security breaches made possible by OS vulnerabilities.
I wasn't aware that software companies weren't as liable for their defects as other companies.
>I have some concrete proposals circulating for peer review in this area, and I'll have more to say about that in future.
Who whould manage and conduct these reviews? Sounds like government and that scares me. Furthermore, how do you review systems with 1 million or more lines of code and add value without massive delays on the release of systems?
As sexy and important as systems are to develop, the money has always been in applications. There is far more money in bean counting, scheduling airplanes, tracking customers, etc. than building new and custom platforms. To do this you don't have to know a latch from a gate, just a programing language and few architecture fundamentals (disk slow, memory better; random access slow, sequential access better; etc.)
For this reason I've never understood why some people go dual CS/EE for money. The effort to learn two almost disjoint degrees (at my school the overlap in core classes was 2 or 3 classes) isn't worth it on money alone.
Computers in Elementry & Middle schools for the sake of having computers is a waste of money. While computers are useful tools, classes just for the sake of using a computer for kids learning "the three R's" isn't efficent. However, I think that aggressively pushing for open enrollment Computer Science classes in High Schools (not as a tool to further differentiate the High School AP elite) would help a lot. Moving to a district where such classes were available played a bit role in getting me into the field and through collage.