Analogous to real virii and worms, Those that destroy their host too quickly dont spread.
Those that dont spread die off.
Making a system unbootable doenst destroy the data on the harddrive. But if the data on the harddrive is destroyed- the admin will reboot.
The computer is now offline and the worm gets no more opportunities to spread.
A common way to overcome this is to set a logic bomb: have the worm set a cutoff date after which it becomes destructive. The problem with this approach is that it allows people time to patch their systems.
A good compromise would be to make the system unbootable immediately- with a boot loader that wipes the harddrive. Then set a logic bomb with a cutoff date after which data gets deleted.
Its tricky though. A good twist may be to rearrange some dll's in the filesystem- to cause patches to fail. Also setting up a backdoor vector for reinfestation. Then at least 3 subtly different versions would have to be released simultaneosly.
Its a lot harder than it sounds. And not worth it really.
Telling them that you just found a way to skip all of the ads is as clever as telling a store owner that you found a neat way to shoplift from his store (although the former is not illegal -- yet).
Its more like telling a waiter you dont really have to tip him. Or telling a priest you arent required to put money in the collection plate.
If enough people stop doing these things voluntarily, well then they will probably start charging outright for their services.
There is really nothing wrong with that per se.
But the store/stealing analogy is all wrong. Content is not a product. It cannot be stolen.
Tabloid rags are still around today, so copyrights certainly didnt cure that problem. The French are a bit snooty about their "culture", so they overreacted again when they thought it was being diluted.
Basically without copyrights the printing houses couldnt afford to commision the creation of new books. But they could print whatever they wanted at the same cost.
So they print what they think people want to buy. There is no artificial scarcity of tabloids, or popular books, and no artificial abundance of books that noone wants to buy. No artificial monopolies. Whats wrong with that?
If no printer was making a book that people wanted- then the first publisher to do so would stand to make some good money.
If another printer insisted upon printing books that were not worth buying, or were overpriced, they would go out of business.
Good writers have other motivations for writing books, so content would always come around, though one might never see millionaire authors.
actually in says quite explicitly that each entity will get a/48 address, and can can assign all the subnet ranges as it sees fit.
The whole idea behind this is so that an ISP will not have to distinguish address assignment between an occaisional dialup user and a major multinational corporation- they both get as many routable addresses as they could ever use.
The rfcrfc also makes a long argument about why this is desirable. Go read it;)
Even if we were to increase our energy prodution by factors of 100 million so as to compete with the sun, we would still have tricks available to us to dissipate the excess heat.
Increasing the earths albedo and reducing its greenhouse effect help to a point. In fact the increasing occurance of cloud cover might begin to block out the sun completly, but that would be an extreme case.
Thermoeletric generators that absorb energy from temperature differentials then beams them into space as microwaves could be possible, or we could simply transmit generated energy into space
for consumption off-planet.
A higher dependency on Solar Cells and heat-energy-converting/trapping devices could also help lower the amount of heat we have to deal with.
umm, these devices, which allow you to store heat energy only take heat out of the system until you actually use them, at which point they return all the heat they took originally.
Sure fusion may allow us to have access to alot more heat, but the stuff is quite willing to radiate off the planet with minimal fuss (Given proper atomospheric conditions).
Now turning our planet into a solar greenhouse or toxic waste dump- those are potential problems. "Heat Pollution" is a non-issue.
Actually Global warming will most likely NOT be merely hotter weather. The extra energy in the system will be spent creating more violent weather.
You will get more hurricanes & tornadoes. Droughts in usually wet areas, floods in dry areas. Youll see warm water where cold used to be.
Mosquitoes and other disease vectors will have new ranges open to them, and diseases will spread quickly among vulnerable populations of animals, plants, and people.
Dont underestimate the power of humans to change climate. It is well within our power the eliminate all vegetation on the surface of the earth in a geological instant. We have a massive effect on the earths albedo and chemical composition. A very small change in the energy in the earth's system can have a very macroscopic effect.
When weather changes, it tends to do so quickly, though it can change back just as fast. And the effect of civilization on the earth is unprecedented- so looking at the geological record is of limited utility.
The Earth has nothing to fear from humans. Itll recover even if we wipe ourselves out by ruining our habitat.
Some people at first lambasted Stallman as a hypocrite: "Creating free software for extravagantly expensive toys is preposturous" they would say.
Of course they were wrong. If Stallman had to wait until the advent of commodity sub-$1000 PC's to develop any GNU project, then where would we be today? More hopelessly dependant upon IBM, Sun and Microsoft no doubt.
Forcing a "Third World" country develop their infrastructure to depend expensive proprietary software is hurtful, especially since they can start with no legacy depandancies to break.
No one claims the Free software will solve all of societies problems- but when they are ready to
start solving those, Free software can certainly help them to do it.
Ximian's desktop IS Free. They sell it too. And they want to make money. Nothing wrong with that.
Difference is that they dont distribute non-Free code (so far). They believe in selling Free software, whereas the Kompany believes in selling commercial software ( they also give away some Free software for free ).
To work on a big publicly visible project, youve got to expect a large quanta of flamage to come your way- most of it ignorant babble, but some is genuine ranting of people defending their turf.
I think Martin was making a good contribution, and he had many good ideas. I also think Havoc (among others) should turn down his flamthrower a notch.
But quitting because of flames? Thats the same as quitting for no reason. Any technical decisions can be sorted out- ultimately by appealing to Miguel or the board, and everyone agreeing that the main branch will honor the decision.
Quitting because of a disagreement is just giving up. You want to get as many developers on a free project as you can, but theyve got to be willing to stand up for themselves.
If you were to take code from 20 different programs under the "Caucho.com" license and combine them, you would have an enormous amount of difficulty trying to sell copies of that software. If anyone wanted to pay you, then you would have to charge enough to cover all those 20 other companies. If any of those 20 companies decides to set an unreasonable price, then your product is dead. (If a company was threatened by your product they could buy one of them and take you off the market)
If you take code from 20 different GPL programs,
and combine them, the resultant license would be just as simply as if you had written it all yourself.
Having licenses which stack up makes it more difficult for people to derive from your work. This works against people who are hoping for someone to return the favor.
This is why the "free for non commercial" type of license is effectivly a proprietary license.
I think java is not a fine education language for the following reasons:
It has uncertain semantics (Deep copy vs shallow copy)
It encourages inneficient coding style. (memory bloat)
It introduces object-oriented concepts. A beginner who doesnt understand procedures and data structures yet isnt ready for that.
It is not useful as a foundation from which to learn other languages.
Otherwise I think its a fine language, I just dont think its most approprite for learning.
C or Assembly should be studied first, to understand how to relate an algorithm to a machine. You cannot understand what java really does if its the only language you know.
CSS Region coding is a tool used to "extract the customer surplus". You charge a price in a given market which is optimal for profits considering the number of units that will sell and the margin.
It is also the first step down a slippery slope. Its a tenative first step: right now the average person wont notice it, and will probably not even realize that it exists.
But if its accepted then it will fester. Pretty soon the price for a movie or a song will be set based upon which state you live in. Then by which city. Ultimatly they will charge each customer the most they are willing to pay.
We will each end up with "trusted" computers and electronics that use a "secure media path" all the way to the speakers and screen. Each individual will have to get their own copies, digitally signed to their account number and device id's. Of course when you buy a new Movie player youll have to buy your movies all over again- because the old ones will only play on your old player.
It wont be so bad, fairly well automated, all content downloaded online right into your player.
$40 wont be too bad for a flick. And you dont really care that the rich guy down the street has to pay $400 for the same exact movie- thats his problem, right?
Sure they are going to grandfather the old customers with the ability to record, but what about new ones?
I've been wanting to get a Tivo, but I've been holding off. I probably wont be a subscriber because I just dont watch that much TV.
If the new Tivos wont let you record, and they pop-up nag screens to get you to subscribe- what the hell good are they?(to a non subscriber) What do they actually let you do without a subscription...
Mabye I can build my own Tivo.
Does anybody know how to setup a linux box to function like a tivo? (Matrox card?)
Does anyone know a a real language that has a simpler writing system than english?
Almost every other european language I have seen uses some set of accent marks or diacriticals. And having studied japanese and vietnamese, they have orders of magnitude more complexity. Even esperanto has a larger alphabet than english.
Is it just a coincidence that the simplest writing system was the first to be digitized?
Too bad pronunciation of english isnt equally simply.
UTF8 is cabable of encoding up to 31 bits per character, which is 2,147,483,648 distinct glyphs. This should be plenty for all languages, and at least for linux/*nix, it is well recognized as the way to go.
One upside of it is that that is almost no cost for english/ascii, which will remain 1 byte per character. You dont even have to recompile most apps to support it- only those that format character glyphs.
Slashdot Mirror
Its true that right now we have telco/switched style and decentralized/routed networks.
Its also possible to have the best of both worlds: decentralized/Switched.
Using MPLS, or even better a rehashed ATM which drops its QoS and extends cell sizes to say 1500 bytes fixed, this could be the real Infobahn.
Analogous to real virii and worms, Those that destroy their host too quickly dont spread.
Those that dont spread die off.
Making a system unbootable doenst destroy the data on the harddrive. But if the data on the harddrive is destroyed- the admin will reboot.
The computer is now offline and the worm gets no more opportunities to spread.
A common way to overcome this is to set a logic bomb: have the worm set a cutoff date after which it becomes destructive. The problem with this approach is that it allows people time to patch their systems.
A good compromise would be to make the system unbootable immediately- with a boot loader that wipes the harddrive. Then set a logic bomb with a cutoff date after which data gets deleted.
Its tricky though. A good twist may be to rearrange some dll's in the filesystem- to cause patches to fail. Also setting up a backdoor vector for reinfestation. Then at least 3 subtly different versions would have to be released simultaneosly.
Its a lot harder than it sounds. And not worth it really.
Telling them that you just found a way to skip all of the ads is as clever as telling a store owner that you found a neat way to shoplift from his store (although the former is not illegal -- yet).
Its more like telling a waiter you dont really have to tip him. Or telling a priest you arent required to put money in the collection plate.
If enough people stop doing these things voluntarily, well then they will probably start charging outright for their services.
There is really nothing wrong with that per se. But the store/stealing analogy is all wrong. Content is not a product. It cannot be stolen.
Tabloid rags are still around today, so copyrights certainly didnt cure that problem. The French are a bit snooty about their "culture", so they overreacted again when they thought it was being diluted.
Basically without copyrights the printing houses couldnt afford to commision the creation of new books. But they could print whatever they wanted at the same cost.
So they print what they think people want to buy. There is no artificial scarcity of tabloids, or popular books, and no artificial abundance of books that noone wants to buy. No artificial monopolies. Whats wrong with that?
If no printer was making a book that people wanted- then the first publisher to do so would stand to make some good money.
If another printer insisted upon printing books that were not worth buying, or were overpriced, they would go out of business.
Good writers have other motivations for writing books, so content would always come around, though one might never see millionaire authors.
actually in says quite explicitly that each entity will get a /48 address, and can can assign all the subnet ranges as it sees fit.
The whole idea behind this is so that an ISP will not have to distinguish address assignment between an occaisional dialup user and a major multinational corporation- they both get as many routable addresses as they could ever use.
The rfcrfc also makes a long argument about why this is desirable. Go read it ;)
So then if photons have energy (obvious), then they have mass.
And it is well demonstrated that reflecting a photon tranfers momentum. Convert electron volts to grams in your equations and it'll all work out :)
Increasing the earths albedo and reducing its greenhouse effect help to a point. In fact the increasing occurance of cloud cover might begin to block out the sun completly, but that would be an extreme case.
Thermoeletric generators that absorb energy from temperature differentials then beams them into space as microwaves could be possible, or we could simply transmit generated energy into space for consumption off-planet.
A higher dependency on Solar Cells and heat-energy-converting/trapping devices could also help lower the amount of heat we have to deal with.
umm, these devices, which allow you to store heat energy only take heat out of the system until you actually use them, at which point they return all the heat they took originally.
Sure fusion may allow us to have access to alot more heat, but the stuff is quite willing to radiate off the planet with minimal fuss (Given proper atomospheric conditions).
Now turning our planet into a solar greenhouse or toxic waste dump- those are potential problems. "Heat Pollution" is a non-issue.
Mosquitoes and other disease vectors will have new ranges open to them, and diseases will spread quickly among vulnerable populations of animals, plants, and people.
Dont underestimate the power of humans to change climate. It is well within our power the eliminate all vegetation on the surface of the earth in a geological instant. We have a massive effect on the earths albedo and chemical composition. A very small change in the energy in the earth's system can have a very macroscopic effect.
When weather changes, it tends to do so quickly, though it can change back just as fast. And the effect of civilization on the earth is unprecedented- so looking at the geological record is of limited utility.
The Earth has nothing to fear from humans. Itll recover even if we wipe ourselves out by ruining our habitat.
Of course they were wrong. If Stallman had to wait until the advent of commodity sub-$1000 PC's to develop any GNU project, then where would we be today? More hopelessly dependant upon IBM, Sun and Microsoft no doubt.
Forcing a "Third World" country develop their infrastructure to depend expensive proprietary software is hurtful, especially since they can start with no legacy depandancies to break.
No one claims the Free software will solve all of societies problems- but when they are ready to start solving those, Free software can certainly help them to do it.
Well lets compare Ximian to the Kompany:
Ximian's desktop IS Free. They sell it too. And they want to make money. Nothing wrong with that.
Difference is that they dont distribute non-Free code (so far). They believe in selling Free software, whereas the Kompany believes in selling commercial software ( they also give away some Free software for free ).
Get it?
I think Martin was making a good contribution, and he had many good ideas. I also think Havoc (among others) should turn down his flamthrower a notch.
But quitting because of flames? Thats the same as quitting for no reason. Any technical decisions can be sorted out- ultimately by appealing to Miguel or the board, and everyone agreeing that the main branch will honor the decision.
Quitting because of a disagreement is just giving up. You want to get as many developers on a free project as you can, but theyve got to be willing to stand up for themselves.
If you were to take code from 20 different programs under the "Caucho.com" license and combine them, you would have an enormous amount of difficulty trying to sell copies of that software. If anyone wanted to pay you, then you would have to charge enough to cover all those 20 other companies. If any of those 20 companies decides to set an unreasonable price, then your product is dead. (If a company was threatened by your product they could buy one of them and take you off the market)
If you take code from 20 different GPL programs, and combine them, the resultant license would be just as simply as if you had written it all yourself.
Having licenses which stack up makes it more difficult for people to derive from your work. This works against people who are hoping for someone to return the favor.
This is why the "free for non commercial" type of license is effectivly a proprietary license.
The "always cooperate never defect" strategy is more like the BSD license. (If you share fine, if you dont fine)
The GPL is more of a Tit-for-Tat strategy: if you defect (close our source) we'll defect too (sue your ass).
If our world was an optimal maxima system (no copyright restrictions for software?), then the BSD and GPL licenses would be effectivly identical.
But that isnt our world, so in a sense, the GPL is a concession to reality.
The only pressure put on them to be GPL compatible was the number of programmers who would use a GPL compatible python vs the number who would not.
So this choice to become compatible was entirely the developers free will.
It has uncertain semantics (Deep copy vs shallow copy)
It encourages inneficient coding style. (memory bloat)
It introduces object-oriented concepts. A beginner who doesnt understand procedures and data structures yet isnt ready for that.
It is not useful as a foundation from which to learn other languages.
Otherwise I think its a fine language, I just dont think its most approprite for learning.
C or Assembly should be studied first, to understand how to relate an algorithm to a machine. You cannot understand what java really does if its the only language you know.
CSS Region coding is a tool used to "extract the customer surplus". You charge a price in a given market which is optimal for profits considering the number of units that will sell and the margin.
It is also the first step down a slippery slope. Its a tenative first step: right now the average person wont notice it, and will probably not even realize that it exists.
But if its accepted then it will fester. Pretty soon the price for a movie or a song will be set based upon which state you live in. Then by which city. Ultimatly they will charge each customer the most they are willing to pay.
We will each end up with "trusted" computers and electronics that use a "secure media path" all the way to the speakers and screen. Each individual will have to get their own copies, digitally signed to their account number and device id's. Of course when you buy a new Movie player youll have to buy your movies all over again- because the old ones will only play on your old player.
It wont be so bad, fairly well automated, all content downloaded online right into your player. $40 wont be too bad for a flick. And you dont really care that the rich guy down the street has to pay $400 for the same exact movie- thats his problem, right?
Is this where we want to end up?
To save you the time Ill tell you how he would answer:
Q:What, exactly, is .Net?
A: .Net is Innovation.
Q: And what is the difference between Open Source, Free Software, Linux and GPL.
A: They are all the same
Q: Do you have cancer?
A: No, I do not use open source products.
I've been wanting to get a Tivo, but I've been holding off. I probably wont be a subscriber because I just dont watch that much TV.
If the new Tivos wont let you record, and they pop-up nag screens to get you to subscribe- what the hell good are they?(to a non subscriber) What do they actually let you do without a subscription...
Mabye I can build my own Tivo. Does anybody know how to setup a linux box to function like a tivo? (Matrox card?)
...theyll have both better uptime *and* better downtime than you.
most of the cruft you mention is as irrelevant as calligraphy. upper vs lower case could be called a stylistic difference.
thats why the original implementations of english-machines were all caps. and this reply works fine in all lower.
and sorry, the numbers are written and read left to right. 123 is "one hundred twenty three" not "three hundred twenty one"
now, if you mention grammer, spelling, etc, youd have a point.
What you are talking about is UTF-16. Unicode can support up to 2^31 character codes, but they are not all reserved yet.
quote: All possible 2^31 UCS codes can be encoded.
Almost every other european language I have seen uses some set of accent marks or diacriticals. And having studied japanese and vietnamese, they have orders of magnitude more complexity. Even esperanto has a larger alphabet than english.
Is it just a coincidence that the simplest writing system was the first to be digitized? Too bad pronunciation of english isnt equally simply.
One upside of it is that that is almost no cost for english/ascii, which will remain 1 byte per character. You dont even have to recompile most apps to support it- only those that format character glyphs.