That list is painfully biased toward first-person shooters
...and also towards newer games.
Now, technically speaking, obviously, the likes of Halflife appear to blow out the games of a decade ago totally. But really, to achieve Halflife on an MMX Pentium, while a great technical achievement, is maybe not quite on a par with achieving my personal favourite...
Elite on a 6502-based BBC micro. (other versions don't quite make it in my book).
To generate 8 galaxies of 256 planets from a randomizing algorithm taking just 3 bytes of seed data, and create within those galaxies an open-ended game, playable as real-time action, strategy, trading, exploration, and with no fixed ending, was nothing short of genius by Braben and Bell. It's a game I still play today. 17 years after it was released.
A couple of others that this geriatric would have liked to see on the list
Pole Position - the first Geoff Crammond racing game I played, progenitor of the Grand Prix series now at v3 and still blindingly good. In fact, where were the racers?
Frak, Chuckie, Manic Miner, the whole Platform Game genre. which was perhaps as pervasive all those years back as the FPS's seem to be now. And of course Attack of the Mutant Camels and all the Llamatron stuff (vast respect ot the eternal YAK)
The Hobbit, and the whole Adventure genre, only lightly touched upon. And for that matter the original MUD's were, if not widely played by the standards of today's console market, gargantuanly influential.
Someone mentioned Pong. Today, it would seem stupidly simplistic. But it must be one of the all-time great games, along with Spacewar and Star Trek, simply because of the number of us turned on to the whole Computer thing at the time, and still working in the field two decades later. Yup, it's Pong's fault I'm in on a sunny sunday afternoon, and I don't hold it against it for one moment, because it was a genuinely eye-opening great game and the fascination it triggered is still in me today.
Why is it that Code Red gets the trumpets and klaxons, while Sircam continues to spread private documents(!) with considerably less attention?
I suspect it's simply because whitehouse.gov was a known DoS target for Code Red. So, surprise surprise, the US state went into full-on battle mode. And an FBI warning makes for a good news story.
Meanwhile, I was very "impressed" to hear the BBC news last night explaining that 'the code red bug is a type of virus called a worm'. Did no-one with even an ounce of clue get a look at that script before it went out?
TomV
Re:Joy of Sex...er...Linux!
on
Joy of Linux
·
· Score: 1
These guys, Dodgy released 3 albums thru A&M, had a few UK hit singles including "Good Enough" which was the most played song of 2000 on FM radio here, then when Polygram took over A&M they got the chance to cancel their $1M debt and terminate the contract. They ran.
£25 got you a credit on the new CD plus a five-track demo CD. £1000 and over got you a share of the profits once the CD was released. They managed to cover £35,000 in recording costs this way and the album, "Real Estate" is now available through all the normal distribution channels, high street shops, Amazon and so forth.
Now admittedly they made their name with the help of major label promotion, but on the other hand, the execrable "all your base" meme did pretty well without a multinational company to push it.
And meanwhile, Courtney Love's case is due in court soon.
A more definite answer to that question (and a nice exercise in interstellar navigation and precision landing) could be obtained by landing a probe right next to one of the Viking probes and seeing if some of the materials they were made of have been chewed at, or consumed, at a rate that's not explainable by natural phenomena
This is roughly the insight that led to the Gaia hypothesis.
James Lovelock came up with the idea when he was hired to do some life-detectors for Viking. His reasoning went along the lines of:
'Life' can be taken to refer to a property of a system that allows it to stay in a non-equilibrium chemical state. (bear with me)
'life' achieves this by interaction with its environment.
This interaction therefore leaves the environment in a non-equilibrium chemical state - for instance the Earth's atmosphere wouldn't contain 20% oxygen in the presence of lots of reducing agents unless something is actively producing fresh oxygen.
therefore a nice test for life on, e.g., Mars is to look at the chemical composition of the atmosphere and see if it's chemically stable in isolation. Which, disappointingly perhaps, it is.
The nice bit about this approach, I thought, is that it uses a sufficiently generic definition of life that it avoids the carbon-centric issue. As long as you go along with his 'life' definition.
The really hairy conceptual leap from there is the full-on Gaia hypothesis which roughly says that if 'life' is defined as above, then the whole Earth might be treatable as 'life' since it's out of chemical equilibrium. Take it or leave it - Lovelock refuses to refer to Gaia as other than a Hypothesis.
Good piece or Gordian-knot cutting by Lovelock, I thought.
Uuuh. It's my house. I bought it. I can do what the hell I want to do with it, including demolition. Don't you think making up such analogies rather than discussing the topic at hand is rather silly? (When reading your text again).
Ah, to clarify the analogy, "I" refers to Adobe rather than to Joe-Who-Bought-An-eBook.
As far as I'm concerned, Joe should certainly be allowed to do as he pleases with the eBook, or house, or whatever. I bought a house, then I added an extension. My house, no argument. any attempt to limit that means that the state treats Joe, and the work he had to do to earn the cost of the things he bought (or 'bought', as it now seems to be) with contempt. and the state which treats its citizens with contempt deserves to be smashed. That's why I said I'm grateful I don't live in a country with a DMCA-alike, yet.
And in general, I find analogies work well. I'm a great fan of reductio ad absurdum which tends to depend on analogies. And I'd even argue that a great deal of the problem with IP law at the moment seems to be that it's based on an inappropriate analogy with physical property law, in which basis, a good way to fight it seems to be to provide better analogies.
Scary... they write poor encryption nowadays and make up for it by simply arresting anyone who cracks it.
I'm sort of in two minds about this..
On the one hand, I really don't like the DMCA approach to IP, and am very thankful I live in a country without it. So far.
On the other hand, There's a law against Breaking and Entering my house. Now, in a sense, my house has poor protection - the brick walls are only a foot thick, the windows have easily breakable glass... in short, any fool with a bulldozer or a bit of semtex (hello echelon!!) could break in if they really wanted to. But there's still a law against their doing so. Without which I'd have no legal recourse if they chose to do so. It's my responsibility to take some reasonable precautions, and if I do, then an Insurance company (not the state) will mitigate my losses. But it's not my responsibility to make sure my house is a castle with a moat, portcullis, 12 foot thick granite walls and an army ready with the boiling tar.
But if I were to be criminally liable merely for mentioning the thing with the bulldozer, which seems to be the DMCA way, that would be as close to Justice as Paris is to Betelgeuse.
Out of curiosity, would German law then permit Adobe to sue the law firm for something along the lines of defamation, in that even though Adobe never made a move on the KIllustrator people, they've now gained a pretty horrible reputation which could possibly damage their global sales revenue?
Little countersuit for, say, 1/2 a percent of Adobe's annual revenue, or the cost of a major publicity campaign to restore their reputation, or similar?
Or even (getting a bit twisted here) a suit for commercial abuse of Adobe's trademarks "Adobe" and "Illustrator" in the lawyers' quest for 2000 dollars?
But it's really only relevant to people and companies who are selling downloads. So if you require payment before someone can download some information, this patent might (or might not) be relevant.
What this brings to mind is the glorious Chaos Computer Club VMS login backdoor.
As I recall, the main thrust of this crack involved downloading and modifying the login code to the as-yet-unshipped VMS {can't remember the version number right now}, then uploading the modified backdoored version back to DEC's online distribution centre just before the patch was due to 'ship', thus getting it into a silly number of VMS sites via a totally trusted route.
And what makes this relevant here is that
This happened in about 1985
This probably wasn't the first VMS patch/version distributed electronically, and
VMS costs money
all of which, circumstantially at least as I haven't got the dates to hand, could be taken to suggest that DEC was providing software across a network in return for money (whether it was a transaction fee or a service contract I don't know).
Which hazy circumstantial speculation might or might not constitute prior art.
If the JLE signal work involved all of the stuff you describe, how come there are *still* signal failures?
At first sight, the fact there are still 'failures' does indeed look bad (and it's certainly not inherently *good*).
But the point of the Safety-critical approach is no to eliminate all failures (though minimising them is good). The main thing is to make sure that all possible failures are mitigated if they DO occur - so if the system loses a train, say, it needs to stop enough of the network to maintain safety at all times. It's about restricting to certain modes of failure, safe modes. There's a gulf of difference between:
Failure: system loses a train and stops everything, delaying thousands of busy passengers, and
Failure: system loses a train which ploughs into another one just outside Canning Town, killing 500 commuters on board and spraying red-hot metal across the platforms.
And how comes the piccadilly gets trains through at an interval of 1-2 mins but the Jubilee can't do better than 3mins?
Well, as originally designed, JLE was to have been the first 'moving block' railway, using braking-distance approaches similar to what we do in a car. But when the govt decided the JLE would be the sole means of getting the The Dome (tm), this moved our delivery date forward by about 3 years. So, with the timescale of the safety certification process, JLE had to be delivered in fixed-block form (traditional only-one-train-per-chunk-of-track stuff). Moving-block was intended to run at about 1 train a minute, why the fixed-block compromise, arrived at late, was restricted to 3 minutes I'm not sure.
Just because the software wasn't written by Microsoft doesn't mean a crash or memory lean isn't MS's fault if that SW is running under windows.
It does when you're dealing with what is patently a piece of Safety-Critical software. I spent a little while working on railway signalling software, and the whole methodology is meant to eliminate this sort of vulerability.
Microsoft wrote a dodgy database server and a leaky OS. But they didn't make the decision to use those products as the basis for a piece of S-C software. They didn't write the software, design the SP's, build the data abstraction layers, create the failsafe routines.
What I find disturbing in particular is: where was the testing? Where was the useage simulation? How did a piece of software which turned out to have data integrity issues ever get a Safety Certificate?
For the Jubilee Line extension signalling, we didn't just limit development to ADA, there was a specified subset of permitted constructs, there were function point limits, a specified compiler, a specified runtime environment, there was rigorous analysis, code inspection, traceability, self-correcting feedback, three copies of everything which all had to match or the system stopped. There were no less than 3 teams of independent testers.
And even then it took a very long time to get the Safety Case signed off.
Microsoft shouldn't produce flaky tools, no question. But the very serious culpability here lies not with the creators of the shoddy toolset but with those who chose to implement a Safety-Critical application using these shoddy tools, and those who passed it for use.
Basic professional skill no. 1: know the right tools for the job in hand
According to the ARM site, and as long as I can remember, ARM stood for Advanced RISC Machines. Just a small nitpick.
Oh, go on then, i'll pick an even smaller nit:-)
Advanced RISC Machines, the company, was spun off from the then Olivetti-owned Acorn computers in 1990. Herman Hauser (we are SO not worthy!) felt that the Acorn RISC Machine chip, which went into production for the Archie in 1985, wouldn't get much take-up by other companies so long as it was owned by a single computer manufacturer.
So ARM the company did indeed always stand for Advanced RISC Machines, and ARM the chip was, indeed, born as the Acorn RISC Machine, changing its name at the time of the spin-off.
"to abandon development or production of new personal digital assistants (PDAs)."
Then, a few paragraphs later, it states
"Chief executive David Levin said that, although the company would stop making new consumer handheld computers, the current products would continue to be sold"
And the Press Centre part of the Psion website is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a weenzy bit sloooow right now.
Looks like the cash-cow products will continue, but no new PDA hardware will be developed.
Then again, with Symbian partners like Nokia, why bother to make the hardware at all?
Consider the current power situation in California for instance. Solving that will likely INCREASE the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere. How can you expect to reduce these emissions when you have no choice but to increase them?
Oh, please. I have a certain amount of patience when it comes to intransigence, ignorance, short-sightedness and so forth. But as I get older (where DID I leave my teeth?) I find myself less and less able to face abject defeatism with a sense of calm.
2010 is 9 years away. And just because you won't necessarily make a target doesn't mean it's a bad thing to aim(tm) at.
First up, why must the convenience of the population of California take priority over the fate of 6 billion people?
Secondly, you don't have "no choice but to increase them" even if you do increase massively the amount of power available to California, or anyone else. Unless you choose to stick with 50-year old generating technologies. You probably can't get rid of all the existing fossil or nuclear sources, but that's no reason not to start supplementing them with other, less climate-harming sources. Solar rooftops, for example. wind farms catching the Pacific sea breezes, geothermal plants
And that's just the supply side. There's also an embedded assumption here that to get the light output of a 100 watt incandescent bulb requires 100 watts. It simply doesn't have to. But for decades, we've been designing, manufacturing and using massively profligate technologies rather than coming up with alternatives which, while they may be more costly in the short term to produce or buy, end up using far less energy and thus requiring far less funding, over their useful lifetime. And for that matter, making things by energy-hungry processes, packaging and transporting them similarly, only to throw them away 3 years later for the latest, greatest model.
Note - I am NOT criticising any particular 'western developed' nation here. I live in the UK, and we're every bit as disgraceful as anyone else in this respect. And I'm no enviro-saint living in a bender and farming my own food. I'm a city-dwelling car-driving TV-watching enviro-nightmare myself. But I AM aware that it's a terribly, terribly wrong way to exist, and that we all need to make our little contributions to the big picture wherever we can.
I find it difficult to accept that an ecosystem as complex and massive as earth's atmosphere could be irreversibly damaged by the puny acts of man.
Two points:
Firstly, the damage needn't be irreversible to do us as a species a great deal of harm. A rise, or fall, in global average temperatures ot 10 degrees C, lasting perhaps 50 years before returning to its previous levels would do the trick nicely. And although the 'developed' world might think itself able to use technological measures to survive, it seems pretty certain that the vast majority of the population, living without such advantages, would tend to get a weenzy bit hostile. And I suspect that a nation which found itself having to nuke most of Africa and Asia to protect itself would have a certain amount of harmful angst to deal with.
Secondly, don't underestimate the scope of our ability to do damage in the short term. Suffice it to say, I would very strongly advise against spending a New Zealand summer without high-factor sunscreen. It's only recently that NZ has become the world capital of skin cancers, and the circumstantial evidence, at least, would appear to relate this to the appearance of a walloping great hole in the ozone layer directly above them. Which i take personally, since some of my family are amongst those endangered by it.
The Earth, the biosphere, Gaia, call it what you will... I have no doubt whatsoever it will survive whatever we as a species do to the environment.
But I see no reason whatsoever to believe that we, as a species, would be amongst the survivors. Cockroaches, weevils, deep-sea fish, plants, and all those billions of microbes, yes. A big, specialised primate whose genetic heritage is so inbred that there's more genetic diversity between chimpanzee siblings than between any two humans, would be one of the less likely survivors.
Now you might take the view, as I do to some extent, that in the long term the eradication of the 'virus with shoes' wouldn't actually be a bad thing. In which case, no problem, and the beautiful, magic blue jewel continues to thrive.
But if you're homo-sapien-centric, it would seem like a huge and very brave gamble.
Didn't Billy G. steal Basic off of another company to begin with? At the very least I know they bought it and didn't actually program it themselves.
It's DOS that was 'acquired', but it was bought rather than stolen.
Altair BASIC was rather earlier (1975), and was, of course, like all BASICs, derived from the 1963 Dartmouth college BASIC. Now of course, since Dartmouth BASIC was an academic rather than commercial thing, and since Bill hadn't yet published his 'piracy' letter, it wasn't really possible to steal it - how BASICs worked was public domain anyway.
There's a rather interesting little site with an investigation into exactly who did what in Altair 4K BASIC. According to the disassembled code (1975 printouts found behind a filing cabinet in Aiden during 1980, apparently),
00560 PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF.
00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF.
00600 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.
Unfortunately, linking within the site isn't all that great, so you have to do a bit of URL-fisting to find everything, but surprisingly, the conclusion these guys reach is that, in 1975 at least, the kid Gates was pretty good with Assembly Language.
Of course, he turned out to be even better at aggressive business, so that's what he's done for most of the time since then
Interesting read, anyway. Thank %deity there's no such thing as -1 Heretical
Do you remember how it used to be in the UK? Three months wait to have a new phone line? Assholes in public services who knew they couldn't be sacked however asshole-like they were? The Austin Allegro
Yup. I certainly do. And I wouldn't deny it for a second. A lot of what that evil h3ll-b!tch did desperately needed doing, but I come from the 'end can't justify the means' camp, so i tend to feel that putting 3 million people out of work to create a pool of potential blacklegs so the Tories could punish the miners for 1974 was a pretty appalling move.
And as you say, the idea that an economy could run entirely on service industries was nonsense, and she knew it. And it was three months wait to have a new phone line that didn't work most of the time even if Hughie and the boys didn't have their tanks on the lawn that week. And which model of handset would you like? Oh yes, the only one available, which you didn't own, you had to lease. In cream or black. Magic.
And rolling blackouts of course. I remember always having to have candles in the house because we only had mains electricity about 4 days a week.
But how can you diss the immortal Allegro Vanden Plas, a truly groundbreaking adventure in, er, foulness?
How on Earth did they manage to sell us something that we already owned?
A large number of us bought a tiny fraction of the equity, while the big City investors bought the lion's share. They mainly got away with it due to a combination of '80's cocaine hype and a 180-seat majority in the House of Commons based on a 40% share of the vote. They mainly got away with it because they never asked, they just did it and their lobby-fodder let them.
Doesn't matter which party, a majority like that is just too much temptation for whichever politician holds 'the royal prerogative'
.Here in the UK, we did the privatisation bit, but forgot to give the regulators enough power to do anything useful
Well, 'forgot' isn't quite the right way to express this.
More accurately, the Thatcher government had a vast cash-flow problem, and rather than do the honest thing and offer the public a choice between massive cuts in public services or a significant rise in income taxes (though they DID double VAT), decided to raise a bunch of cash by, as Harold MacMillan put it, 'selling off the family silver'. The public infrastructure, that I and my parents had paid for with our taxes was embezzled away from us to pay for tax cuts for tory voters. The buyers got the public utilities at a knock-down price (the whole privatisation programme only raised £300 Billion, a pathetically low price for the infrastructure of a G7 economy), and the govt were only able to sell even at that reduced price by making absolutely sure that the companies would be profitable.
And the way this was achieved was by giving them token regulation with all the power of a week-dead halibut on mogadon.
i don't actually blame the operators for the state of the utilities. They're plc's, so legally speaking they DO have a duty to their shareholders, and DON'T have any duty towards their customers. But I do have some very serious objections to both the principle, and the implementation that we got in terms of regulation.
I can't re-read the article because it's giving a JRUN error now
Whoops, sorry, my mistake:-)
Didn't look at the website as this was the article I read in my dead-tree-edition just before I came to work this morning, so it was still pretty fresh (unlike the jeans in question!)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, technically speaking, obviously, the likes of Halflife appear to blow out the games of a decade ago totally. But really, to achieve Halflife on an MMX Pentium, while a great technical achievement, is maybe not quite on a par with achieving my personal favourite...
Elite on a 6502-based BBC micro. (other versions don't quite make it in my book).
To generate 8 galaxies of 256 planets from a randomizing algorithm taking just 3 bytes of seed data, and create within those galaxies an open-ended game, playable as real-time action, strategy, trading, exploration, and with no fixed ending, was nothing short of genius by Braben and Bell. It's a game I still play today. 17 years after it was released.
A couple of others that this geriatric would have liked to see on the list
- Pole Position - the first Geoff Crammond racing game I played, progenitor of the Grand Prix series now at v3 and still blindingly good. In fact, where were the racers?
- Frak, Chuckie, Manic Miner, the whole Platform Game genre. which was perhaps as pervasive all those years back as the FPS's seem to be now. And of course Attack of the Mutant Camels and all the Llamatron stuff (vast respect ot the eternal YAK)
- The Hobbit, and the whole Adventure genre, only lightly touched upon. And for that matter the original MUD's were, if not widely played by the standards of today's console market, gargantuanly influential.
- Someone mentioned Pong. Today, it would seem stupidly simplistic. But it must be one of the all-time great games, along with Spacewar and Star Trek, simply because of the number of us turned on to the whole Computer thing at the time, and still working in the field two decades later. Yup, it's Pong's fault I'm in on a sunny sunday afternoon, and I don't hold it against it for one moment, because it was a genuinely eye-opening great game and the fascination it triggered is still in me today.
EnoughElite, anyway.
TomV
<snip!>
VisualBasic Perl Interpreter for ASP
LOL, but just for information, here's a page from MSDN (dated Aug 1999) about the perl interpreter for ASP, since you mention it.
TomV
TomV
I suspect it's simply because whitehouse.gov was a known DoS target for Code Red. So, surprise surprise, the US state went into full-on battle mode. And an FBI warning makes for a good news story.
Meanwhile, I was very "impressed" to hear the BBC news last night explaining that 'the code red bug is a type of virus called a worm'. Did no-one with even an ounce of clue get a look at that script before it went out?
TomV
- unix
- minix
- posix
- aix
- ultrix
- hp-ux
- xenix
- irix
- arix
- a/ux
- ctix
- dvix
- dynix
- ep/ix
- sinix
- esix
- eurix
But not sex.Is it posix compliant? If I ask nicely?
TomV
£25 got you a credit on the new CD plus a five-track demo CD. £1000 and over got you a share of the profits once the CD was released. They managed to cover £35,000 in recording costs this way and the album, "Real Estate" is now available through all the normal distribution channels, high street shops, Amazon and so forth.
Now admittedly they made their name with the help of major label promotion, but on the other hand, the execrable "all your base" meme did pretty well without a multinational company to push it.
And meanwhile, Courtney Love's case is due in court soon.
TomV
And still the tourists come into Auckland, drive around for a few days, and ask
"So where's this volcano?"
Ruapehu's very pretty and all, but hardly counts compared to Taupo.
TomV
This is roughly the insight that led to the Gaia hypothesis.
James Lovelock came up with the idea when he was hired to do some life-detectors for Viking. His reasoning went along the lines of:
- 'Life' can be taken to refer to a property of a system that allows it to stay in a non-equilibrium chemical state. (bear with me)
- 'life' achieves this by interaction with its environment.
- This interaction therefore leaves the environment in a non-equilibrium chemical state - for instance the Earth's atmosphere wouldn't contain 20% oxygen in the presence of lots of reducing agents unless something is actively producing fresh oxygen.
- therefore a nice test for life on, e.g., Mars is to look at the chemical composition of the atmosphere and see if it's chemically stable in isolation. Which, disappointingly perhaps, it is.
The nice bit about this approach, I thought, is that it uses a sufficiently generic definition of life that it avoids the carbon-centric issue. As long as you go along with his 'life' definition.The really hairy conceptual leap from there is the full-on Gaia hypothesis which roughly says that if 'life' is defined as above, then the whole Earth might be treatable as 'life' since it's out of chemical equilibrium. Take it or leave it - Lovelock refuses to refer to Gaia as other than a Hypothesis.
Good piece or Gordian-knot cutting by Lovelock, I thought.
TomV
I'm no christian. I'm the atheist (with Daoist tendencies) son of a lapsed jew and a lapsed catholic. Nevertheless...
TomV
Ah, to clarify the analogy, "I" refers to Adobe rather than to Joe-Who-Bought-An-eBook.
As far as I'm concerned, Joe should certainly be allowed to do as he pleases with the eBook, or house, or whatever. I bought a house, then I added an extension. My house, no argument. any attempt to limit that means that the state treats Joe, and the work he had to do to earn the cost of the things he bought (or 'bought', as it now seems to be) with contempt. and the state which treats its citizens with contempt deserves to be smashed. That's why I said I'm grateful I don't live in a country with a DMCA-alike, yet.
And in general, I find analogies work well. I'm a great fan of reductio ad absurdum which tends to depend on analogies. And I'd even argue that a great deal of the problem with IP law at the moment seems to be that it's based on an inappropriate analogy with physical property law, in which basis, a good way to fight it seems to be to provide better analogies.
TomV
I'm sort of in two minds about this..
- On the one hand, I really don't like the DMCA approach to IP, and am very thankful I live in a country without it. So far.
- On the other hand, There's a law against Breaking and Entering my house. Now, in a sense, my house has poor protection - the brick walls are only a foot thick, the windows have easily breakable glass... in short, any fool with a bulldozer or a bit of semtex (hello echelon!!) could break in if they really wanted to. But there's still a law against their doing so. Without which I'd have no legal recourse if they chose to do so. It's my responsibility to take some reasonable precautions, and if I do, then an Insurance company (not the state) will mitigate my losses. But it's not my responsibility to make sure my house is a castle with a moat, portcullis, 12 foot thick granite walls and an army ready with the boiling tar.
But if I were to be criminally liable merely for mentioning the thing with the bulldozer, which seems to be the DMCA way, that would be as close to Justice as Paris is to Betelgeuse.TomV
Out of curiosity, would German law then permit Adobe to sue the law firm for something along the lines of defamation, in that even though Adobe never made a move on the KIllustrator people, they've now gained a pretty horrible reputation which could possibly damage their global sales revenue?
Little countersuit for, say, 1/2 a percent of Adobe's annual revenue, or the cost of a major publicity campaign to restore their reputation, or similar?
Or even (getting a bit twisted here) a suit for commercial abuse of Adobe's trademarks "Adobe" and "Illustrator" in the lawyers' quest for 2000 dollars?
TomV
What this brings to mind is the glorious Chaos Computer Club VMS login backdoor.
As I recall, the main thrust of this crack involved downloading and modifying the login code to the as-yet-unshipped VMS {can't remember the version number right now}, then uploading the modified backdoored version back to DEC's online distribution centre just before the patch was due to 'ship', thus getting it into a silly number of VMS sites via a totally trusted route.
And what makes this relevant here is that
- This happened in about 1985
- This probably wasn't the first VMS patch/version distributed electronically, and
- VMS costs money
all of which, circumstantially at least as I haven't got the dates to hand, could be taken to suggest that DEC was providing software across a network in return for money (whether it was a transaction fee or a service contract I don't know).Which hazy circumstantial speculation might or might not constitute prior art.
TomV
At first sight, the fact there are still 'failures' does indeed look bad (and it's certainly not inherently *good*).
But the point of the Safety-critical approach is no to eliminate all failures (though minimising them is good). The main thing is to make sure that all possible failures are mitigated if they DO occur - so if the system loses a train, say, it needs to stop enough of the network to maintain safety at all times. It's about restricting to certain modes of failure, safe modes. There's a gulf of difference between:
And how comes the piccadilly gets trains through at an interval of 1-2 mins but the Jubilee can't do better than 3mins?
Well, as originally designed, JLE was to have been the first 'moving block' railway, using braking-distance approaches similar to what we do in a car. But when the govt decided the JLE would be the sole means of getting the The Dome (tm), this moved our delivery date forward by about 3 years. So, with the timescale of the safety certification process, JLE had to be delivered in fixed-block form (traditional only-one-train-per-chunk-of-track stuff). Moving-block was intended to run at about 1 train a minute, why the fixed-block compromise, arrived at late, was restricted to 3 minutes I'm not sure.
It does when you're dealing with what is patently a piece of Safety-Critical software. I spent a little while working on railway signalling software, and the whole methodology is meant to eliminate this sort of vulerability.
Microsoft wrote a dodgy database server and a leaky OS. But they didn't make the decision to use those products as the basis for a piece of S-C software. They didn't write the software, design the SP's, build the data abstraction layers, create the failsafe routines.
What I find disturbing in particular is: where was the testing? Where was the useage simulation? How did a piece of software which turned out to have data integrity issues ever get a Safety Certificate?
For the Jubilee Line extension signalling, we didn't just limit development to ADA, there was a specified subset of permitted constructs, there were function point limits, a specified compiler, a specified runtime environment, there was rigorous analysis, code inspection, traceability, self-correcting feedback, three copies of everything which all had to match or the system stopped. There were no less than 3 teams of independent testers.
And even then it took a very long time to get the Safety Case signed off.
Microsoft shouldn't produce flaky tools, no question. But the very serious culpability here lies not with the creators of the shoddy toolset but with those who chose to implement a Safety-Critical application using these shoddy tools, and those who passed it for use.
Basic professional skill no. 1: know the right tools for the job in hand
TomV
Oh, go on then, i'll pick an even smaller nit :-)
Advanced RISC Machines, the company, was spun off from the then Olivetti-owned Acorn computers in 1990. Herman Hauser (we are SO not worthy!) felt that the Acorn RISC Machine chip, which went into production for the Archie in 1985, wouldn't get much take-up by other companies so long as it was owned by a single computer manufacturer.
So ARM the company did indeed always stand for Advanced RISC Machines, and ARM the chip was, indeed, born as the Acorn RISC Machine, changing its name at the time of the spin-off.
TomV
Then, a few paragraphs later, it states
And the Press Centre part of the Psion website is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a weenzy bit sloooow right now.
Looks like the cash-cow products will continue, but no new PDA hardware will be developed.
Then again, with Symbian partners like Nokia, why bother to make the hardware at all?
TomV
Oh, please. I have a certain amount of patience when it comes to intransigence, ignorance, short-sightedness and so forth. But as I get older (where DID I leave my teeth?) I find myself less and less able to face abject defeatism with a sense of calm.
2010 is 9 years away. And just because you won't necessarily make a target doesn't mean it's a bad thing to aim(tm) at.
First up, why must the convenience of the population of California take priority over the fate of 6 billion people?
Secondly, you don't have "no choice but to increase them" even if you do increase massively the amount of power available to California, or anyone else. Unless you choose to stick with 50-year old generating technologies. You probably can't get rid of all the existing fossil or nuclear sources, but that's no reason not to start supplementing them with other, less climate-harming sources. Solar rooftops, for example. wind farms catching the Pacific sea breezes, geothermal plants
And that's just the supply side. There's also an embedded assumption here that to get the light output of a 100 watt incandescent bulb requires 100 watts. It simply doesn't have to. But for decades, we've been designing, manufacturing and using massively profligate technologies rather than coming up with alternatives which, while they may be more costly in the short term to produce or buy, end up using far less energy and thus requiring far less funding, over their useful lifetime. And for that matter, making things by energy-hungry processes, packaging and transporting them similarly, only to throw them away 3 years later for the latest, greatest model.
Note - I am NOT criticising any particular 'western developed' nation here. I live in the UK, and we're every bit as disgraceful as anyone else in this respect. And I'm no enviro-saint living in a bender and farming my own food. I'm a city-dwelling car-driving TV-watching enviro-nightmare myself. But I AM aware that it's a terribly, terribly wrong way to exist, and that we all need to make our little contributions to the big picture wherever we can.
Guilty as charged.
TomV
Two points:
Firstly, the damage needn't be irreversible to do us as a species a great deal of harm. A rise, or fall, in global average temperatures ot 10 degrees C, lasting perhaps 50 years before returning to its previous levels would do the trick nicely. And although the 'developed' world might think itself able to use technological measures to survive, it seems pretty certain that the vast majority of the population, living without such advantages, would tend to get a weenzy bit hostile. And I suspect that a nation which found itself having to nuke most of Africa and Asia to protect itself would have a certain amount of harmful angst to deal with.
Secondly, don't underestimate the scope of our ability to do damage in the short term. Suffice it to say, I would very strongly advise against spending a New Zealand summer without high-factor sunscreen. It's only recently that NZ has become the world capital of skin cancers, and the circumstantial evidence, at least, would appear to relate this to the appearance of a walloping great hole in the ozone layer directly above them. Which i take personally, since some of my family are amongst those endangered by it.
TomV
Whoops, non-sequitur.
The Earth, the biosphere, Gaia, call it what you will... I have no doubt whatsoever it will survive whatever we as a species do to the environment.
But I see no reason whatsoever to believe that we, as a species, would be amongst the survivors. Cockroaches, weevils, deep-sea fish, plants, and all those billions of microbes, yes. A big, specialised primate whose genetic heritage is so inbred that there's more genetic diversity between chimpanzee siblings than between any two humans, would be one of the less likely survivors.
Now you might take the view, as I do to some extent, that in the long term the eradication of the 'virus with shoes' wouldn't actually be a bad thing. In which case, no problem, and the beautiful, magic blue jewel continues to thrive.
But if you're homo-sapien-centric, it would seem like a huge and very brave gamble.
TomV
It's DOS that was 'acquired', but it was bought rather than stolen.
Altair BASIC was rather earlier (1975), and was, of course, like all BASICs, derived from the 1963 Dartmouth college BASIC. Now of course, since Dartmouth BASIC was an academic rather than commercial thing, and since Bill hadn't yet published his 'piracy' letter, it wasn't really possible to steal it - how BASICs worked was public domain anyway.
There's a rather interesting little site with an investigation into exactly who did what in Altair 4K BASIC. According to the disassembled code (1975 printouts found behind a filing cabinet in Aiden during 1980, apparently),
Unfortunately, linking within the site isn't all that great, so you have to do a bit of URL-fisting to find everything, but surprisingly, the conclusion these guys reach is that, in 1975 at least, the kid Gates was pretty good with Assembly Language.Of course, he turned out to be even better at aggressive business, so that's what he's done for most of the time since then
Interesting read, anyway. Thank %deity there's no such thing as -1 Heretical
TomV
Yup. I certainly do. And I wouldn't deny it for a second. A lot of what that evil h3ll-b!tch did desperately needed doing, but I come from the 'end can't justify the means' camp, so i tend to feel that putting 3 million people out of work to create a pool of potential blacklegs so the Tories could punish the miners for 1974 was a pretty appalling move.
And as you say, the idea that an economy could run entirely on service industries was nonsense, and she knew it. And it was three months wait to have a new phone line that didn't work most of the time even if Hughie and the boys didn't have their tanks on the lawn that week. And which model of handset would you like? Oh yes, the only one available, which you didn't own, you had to lease. In cream or black. Magic.
And rolling blackouts of course. I remember always having to have candles in the house because we only had mains electricity about 4 days a week.
But how can you diss the immortal Allegro Vanden Plas, a truly groundbreaking adventure in, er, foulness?
Oh I feel old now...
TomV
A large number of us bought a tiny fraction of the equity, while the big City investors bought the lion's share. They mainly got away with it due to a combination of '80's cocaine hype and a 180-seat majority in the House of Commons based on a 40% share of the vote. They mainly got away with it because they never asked, they just did it and their lobby-fodder let them.
Doesn't matter which party, a majority like that is just too much temptation for whichever politician holds 'the royal prerogative'
TomV
Well, 'forgot' isn't quite the right way to express this.
More accurately, the Thatcher government had a vast cash-flow problem, and rather than do the honest thing and offer the public a choice between massive cuts in public services or a significant rise in income taxes (though they DID double VAT), decided to raise a bunch of cash by, as Harold MacMillan put it, 'selling off the family silver'. The public infrastructure, that I and my parents had paid for with our taxes was embezzled away from us to pay for tax cuts for tory voters. The buyers got the public utilities at a knock-down price (the whole privatisation programme only raised £300 Billion, a pathetically low price for the infrastructure of a G7 economy), and the govt were only able to sell even at that reduced price by making absolutely sure that the companies would be profitable.
And the way this was achieved was by giving them token regulation with all the power of a week-dead halibut on mogadon.
i don't actually blame the operators for the state of the utilities. They're plc's, so legally speaking they DO have a duty to their shareholders, and DON'T have any duty towards their customers. But I do have some very serious objections to both the principle, and the implementation that we got in terms of regulation.
TomV
Whoops, sorry, my mistake :-)
Didn't look at the website as this was the article I read in my dead-tree-edition just before I came to work this morning, so it was still pretty fresh (unlike the jeans in question!)
kind of reminds me of Roosta's towel...
TomV