I think this is the least coherent thing i've ever read on slashdot. I have no idea what you are trying to say, but i'm going to attempt to respond to what vaguely seems to be your point:
Spider-man is something called "art". They aren't selling you the property of times square. They are selling you pictures of it, with a fictional story and some sounds overlaid.
The U.S. legal system has an idea built in called "freedom of expression". This implies that if you are creating a piece of art, you have a right to do anything in it that you like that corresponds to promoting your artistic vision, and that no man or government has the right to restrict that because freedom of speech and expression is a basic, universal, human right.
OK?
There is the question of slander-- i.e., if you took a public figure of some sort, which would include a church of some sort, and represented them publicly in a light they disapprove of, then they could go after you for slander. You could say that this is an exception to the "there should be no legal limits on art" rule. However, this only applies when you step outside the realm of artistic expression and into journalism-- i.e., when you are actively stating that the portrayal of things that you are offering in your product is *true*, as opposed to simply offering an artistic portrayal of the universe. The new york times has an obligation to not print things like "Newt Gingrinch is an Alien" when they have no proof of such. The makers of the movie "Men in black" are under no such obligation. I think it's pretty safe to say no one could be misled to believe that the movie "Spider-man" is meant to be an accurate portrayal of New York City.
There's also the question of copyright and image reuse-- i.e., do you have the legal right to use someone/something's image if you can consider the image you are reusing an artistic product that someone else "owns". I would say that that doesn't apply here becuase the image of Times Square is just a part of our culture, and has become something that the owners of the physical property Times Square no longer have control over.
Would you imply that someone doing an impressionist, blurry painting of times square has a legal obligation to preseve the clarity of the advertisements there?
You'd probably argue that that example is different, because in that case, the altering of the nature of the buildings and advertisements is required by the nature of the artistic decisions made by the painter; whereas in the case of Spider-man, the advertisements were altered out of sheer greed.
That argument would be invalid for one simple reason: no matter what the law says currently, neither the government nor the courts have the right to determine what is a valid artistic decision and what is greed. That is simply not their business; the supreme court has said again and again that the government has no right to discriminate a legal difference between "good art" and "bad art"; there is only the question "is it art", and if so, you have to treat it legally in a manner consistent with the way you treat all other art..
Re:You've completely missed the point....
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 2
particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).
Ad hominem attacks on microsoft and microsoft products on slashdot are done in a situation where it's reasonably certain that the people hearing will have enough experience to understand the attacks and their context. Whereas the currently discussed microsoft ads are specifically targeted at those people who don't understand at all what they mean, and are the most likely to form blind prejudices based simply on random things they hear in TV ads without questioning, researching, or checking for veracity.
On slashdot if someone is being silly, going overboard, or making statements about microsoft products that are either stupidly subjective or just aren't true, anyone has the option of posting a reply and refuting the dumbass. Nasty attack tv commercials, meanwhile, are not really a forum where "the other side" has a chance to respond with anything other than more nasty attack tv commercials.
Yeah, i know what you meant. Just.. just a thought, you know?
Anyone else suspect microsoft's goal with all this is probably just to goad Sun, Oracle, etc., into paying for response ads.. meaning that the computer industry gets in a huge circular contest of paying for increasingly expensive ads and pissing money into a hole.. meaning in the end sun, oracle and co. have a significant amount of money drained away from their much smaller bank accounts, while microsoft just has a slightly smaller percentage of money and still billions left to absentmindedly burn?
Is that this would be great for people who for one reason or another no longer have voiceboxes.
I had a great-aunt who lost a decent portion of her lungs to cancer and cigarettes, and up until her death a few years ago she had to use one of those darth-vader vibration-amplifier things like the "Ned" character does on south park. I was terrified of her when i was six.. (Give me a break, i was six years old and stupid.)
Anyway, i can imagine that technology like this would be just about perfect for people disabled in a similar manner through tobacco, cigarettes or who knows what. No? At least it would keep such people from having to deal with their idiot six-year-old-nephews reactions to the harsh sounds of the vibration amplifier box..
and really, even beyond that, tech like this would be just about the only option for people who are going through whatever that intensive vocal-node-therapy thing is where you're banned from speaking for six months. and i know a number of theatrical singers who would be intensely happy to have one of these so that they could rest their voices between performances without cutting themselves off from the world...
I hope that once this complete, they'll sell a unit where the voice-synth thing outputs into speakers rather than a phone.. I'm sure they would have looked into this possibility by now, right?
(P.S.: While we're on the subject, sort of.. just in case anyone reading knows: This came up as an argument the other night when we were watching the Oscars and examining how much pain Enye appeared to be in from having to exert her voice. What's the difference between a vocal node and a vocal nodule?
A while ago i came across this programming language called Unlambda, which is a superset of the s-k combinatorial logic calculus thing that this turing machine is written in. (not a very big superset, mind you. they added call/cc, some input/output functions, and an operator that lets you fiddle with evaluation order.. just look at the webpage i linked. it's interesting..). Thus far, about the most complicated program written in unlambda (not counting the quines) is something that prints out the prime numbers one by one as a series of increasingly longer rows of asterisks.
Now, though, it would appear that we can run a universal turing machine in unlambda! I think! I haven't read the paper closely enough yet to work out how exactly the block of encoded binary at the end functions:)
In the meanwhile, though, i'm posting for this reason: i'm really, really wierdly interested by lambda calculus and combinatorial functions and church numerals and all these other bizarre functional-programming offshoots. I can't, however, seem to find any really good resources explaining how they work. I mean, you look around on google or whatever, and occationally you'll find something explaining the basics of what an anonymous function is, and maybe explaining how to construct a church numeral or putting the old ((lambda (x x) (x x) (lambda (x x) (x x))) infinite loop thing up. But i've yet to find something that actually, you know, goes on and explains to you how to use all of this. None of them reach the point of beginning to explain how you go from knowing what a church numeral and "successor to 1" means to expressing foreach (1..10) {} using only anonymous functions.
The site with the universal turing machine links to what claims to be an overview of how to use combinatorial functions, which makes me really happy. However, i was wondering: does anyone have any good links, examples of books, etc, that explain how to construct programs using lambdas and/or combinatorial s/k functions and all that? I hear some college courses cover this stuff (although near as i can gather, unfortunately, no courses at my current college do), so there has to be some kind of information online somewhere. I'll probably find something on my own eventually, but just as long as i have your attention: is there any reading material anyone *recommends* for someone who just finds lambda calculus and such interesting?
For now, though, i'm going to read this intro to combinators thing linked from Tromp's site. Maybe it'll teach me enough i'll be able to finally realize my crack-addled dream of porting the lambda calculus DeCSS program to Unlambda. Though more likely it'll just make me really confused:)
Re:Wasn't this already solved in the Sony case?
on
EFF Takes Bnetd Case
·
· Score: 2
The polyglot quines were on the polyglot page i linked, not the quine page i linked (both of which were on nyx.net..). The quine page was linked in case a given reader didn't know what a quine was. The C/LISP hybrid quine was the 10th entry on the polyglot page. It was this one.
You may be interested in a type of program called a "polyglot"-- a program which is simultaneously valid, and preferably does the same thing, in more than one language simultaneously. Several previous IOCCC winners have been polyglots. (You maybe should look in particular at the one entry-- i'm *pretty* sure this was last year-- for a program that #DEFINED a bunch of english words as chunks of C that did the same thing the english words did, and then wrote a short *compilable* program in totally readable pseudocode.. with the gimmick being that the program actually did something wholly other than what the pseudocode said it did! Even if you know this coming in, it still is near impossible even on several readings to figure out how exactly it works out. It was rather cute.)
With the crazy-ass language redefinition capabilities in perl 6, i think we can expect to see a resurgence in some very odd polyglots very soon..
Grrr.. mean, mean slashdot editors.. telling us the IOCCC winners were announced just so we can wait in suspense for a full month to see the entries.. bleh. I love the IOCCC..
just think of it this way: java was (is) a first-generation technology. of course it's been a disappointment.
if it appears microsoft's attempt to duplicate java is better, it's just because microsoft has been able to look at java and learn from what mistakes sun made.
sun was not able to learn from their mistakes when they were developing java because no one had ever made those mistakes before. sun cannot learn from their mistakes, go thorugh and fix their problems now becuase they do not have the resources. microsoft at this point has nearly all the resources-- people, cash, mindshare-- in the entire industry.
if sun had the kind of level of ability to develop things quickly and ability to psuh people into upgrading their products on a frequent basis that microsoft does -- things that are products of microsoft's monopoly power, not products of the worthiness of the intellectual holdings or products of either microsoft or sun -- i think it'ws safe to say that java would be something you could really call a success, as opposed to "oh, well it's a neat little platform for servlets, has some minor but omnipresent and hellishly obnoxious issues when you try to use it for anything else though".
i agree totally on the bit that this would be better if java had been an open-from-the-start technology; hell , i think all they need is the willingness and ability to *change* java *NOW* in serious ways. i'm hoping Parrot produces something interesting. it would be neat to have a public vm that actually lets your code cross languages elegantly, as opposed to java's "well, you have the specs to the vm, write a compiler for whatever language you like, you'll have to figure out how to bridge object systems yourself though" or.NETs "it bridges between any language automatically! but you can only use languages that have been modified until they are just c# with syntactic sugar!". (is 'isomorphic' an insult?)
i suspect no real progress will take place in the way of the public usage of portable bytecode systems and standard object frameworks until both java and.NET lie in ruins. or until java is willing to face the issues with java at a deep-rooted level and do some serious rethinking and serious rewriting. or until the java standards board takes java away from sun and runs with it.
i look at it this way, though: sun has done a hell of a lot with java with not a lot of resources. everyone who's used java in any capacity has probably been annoyed a decent amount for its shortcomings, but its shortcomings usually come down to "it isn't everything". maybe it was foolish for java to *try* to be everything, but i'll say this: they got a lot closer to being everything a lot faster than any other computing platform i'm aware of. i for one am impressed. i just wish it was better.
i dunno. all i want is a cross-platform object system that looks likenextstep that actually *works* crossplatformly, and a garbage collector.
My point is that they already have little interest in the long-term value of an album, but that what tiny incentive they have in that direction would be removed if the copyright terms became *too* short. (The post i was responding to seemed to be almost implying copyright terms of 10yrs from publication..)
I.E: It's never so bad you can't make it *worse*. Besides which, not all labels are major.. and some (some) of the non-major labels *are* interested in long-term album sales. And more and more lately i find these are the only record labels that interest me anymore..
I mean-- i agree with what you're saying. I just don't see how it's disagreeing with my post:P Whatever. I give up.
But if the copyright only lasted long enough for you and your label to recoup expenses and make a tidy profit on top of that, chances are you'd be getting back to work a lot sooner. When you're hungry, you work.
But this leaves the problem of that the music companies will *ONLY* pick up on those things they can make a quick buck on. There's ALREADY a problem where they only care about stuff that they can make money off as quickly as possible, thus leading them to almost exclusively push "catchy", BUYMEBUYME but artless and substance-free bullshit like, well, everything on the radio. As is, they do at least have the possibility in the back of their minds that some bands are worth keeping around because their albums have *relisten* value, meaning people are still keeping those CDs around six years from now and playing them to their friends, meaning that that CD could potentially still be making money 20 years from now. As opposed to, say, the backstreet boys or new kids on the block, who 15 years from now will be lucky to get a single track on "HITS OF THE 90s VOLUME III!". Remove the incentive to put out long-lasting, solid albums with substance and shit, and you'll see a LOT more "britney"s and a LOT less "Dark Side of the Moon"s.. which makes this clearly not a solution to the current problems with the musical art.
Clearly, instead, the solution is for all pop musicians to have heroin addictions. You see, if they have a heroin addiction to feed, then the money from that hit single will run out an order of magnitude faster, thus requiring them to continually produce new stuff to stay at the top of the charts.
What, why do you THINK all great musicians have had drug addictions? You really buy that "troubled artist"/"escaping the intoxicating pain of intense creativity" line?
It is my belief, and i know the belief of most of the people on slashdot, that the DOJ is currently neither acting in the best interests of the american people or acting to see the law of the united states of america upheld.
Whether from "contributions" or bribes, or from the simple republican belief that laws should keep quiet and go play alone in their room and leave the nice Important People alone when they're trying to make money (now run along now. shoo), the DOJ seems pretty clearly to me to be currently of the belief that microsoft is doing a good job and should be let loose from the responsibilities of the good of the american people or either the letter or intent of the antitrust laws. Put plainly, the executive branch is currently against the idea of antitrust regulation.
However, it is not the executive branches job to make the law. That is the job of the legislative branch. And the legislative branch has declared anticompetitive behavior to gain monopolistic control over a market harmful and illegal. And it is not the executive branches job to decide whether extant law is valid and worthy to be carried out. That is the job of the judicial branch. And the judicial branch seems in this case to want the law to be carried out.
But it is the executive branch that is currently trying to end this. So i ask: can they be removed from this? In any way? I know nothing of law-- this is why i am asking. Can citizen groups sue to state that the prosecution of this case should be taken out of the hands of the DOJ and into the hands of the EFF or some specially-appointed board? Can the judge appoint some kind of Special Master or Special Prosecutor or someone who will be picked to actually attempt to push for the most stringent judgement possible for microsoft? (REMEMBER, it is NOT the job of the prosecutor to decide what is just. It is the job of the prosecutor to argue for the strongest judgement possible, the job of the defendant to argue for the weakest judgement possible, and the JUDGE to ensure all arguments are reasonable and find the most just and legal balance behind all. The judge should be unbiased. The prosecution is not really intended to be someone unbiased against the defendant, so it doesn't matter if the prosecutor is someone picked by Sun or Oracle or whoever; whether biased or no, the prosecutor should *act* biased against the defendant, because that is their *job*.) Can we declare John Ashcroft tainted because he recieved campaign contributions from microsoft, and have him chineese-walled away from the case?
Don't police officers and judges and FBI agents and Attourneys General of the United States of America have to swear to protect the american people and uphold the law? If the people currently trying to short-circuit the case against microsoft make it clear they are against in this case the upholding of the law, are they violating those oaths? Can there be legal repercussions for them in doing that?
A quick note to those responding: I am not *particularly* trying to start a flamewar (flamewar bad. informative comments good. HULK SMASH) on whether the doj SHOULD be blocked out of the microsoft antitrust case. I am not 100% convinced it is the best thing (just mostly:) ) The question i am asking is, technically, legally, is this a thing which is an *option*; asking "is there a law by which Sun or whoever can sue to have Bush appointees taken away from this case", not "if Sun sued under such a law, would they succeed". Is it possible under the laws of the U.S.. But respond how you will. Thanks..
Seriously.. i was a macworld subscriber back when they were GOOD, and i consider steven levy to be one of if not the biggest badasses in computer journalism. And this article is just about perfect-- i would have emphasized the anti-competitive nature of the RIAA middlemen, and maybe put in something noting that the sssca effectively illegalizes computer engineering research (the copyright protection-in-everything rule does not have an exception for test models, last i checked.. no?), but i can forgive that.
But the question comes up of how much help his support is. This is being printed on msnbc.com.. which is a step removed from, say, slashdot, true, but not a huge step. If someone is reading msnbc.com, there's an excellent chance they're aware of the SSSCA. These are not the people who we need to reach. The people we need to reach are the random uninformed trailer trash and soccer moms.
My question is this: this piece is copyrighted by newsweek. Is it being printed *in* Newsweek? If it is, i'm overjoyed, because that gives this issue the kind of public exposure it so violently needs. People read newsweek. Like, mass numbers of people who are not already relatively in touch with the slashdot groupthink.
We don't need a scattered collection of geeks with excellent philosophical, moral, and constitutional arguments against the SSSCA. We need a large body of uninformed persons who, while they may not be able to understand what "DeCSS" is even if you explained it to them, understand vaguely what the SSSCA is saying and understand *EXACTLY* what its repercussions would be. The congresscritters aren't afraid of lone gunmen with weblogs. They're afraid of herd behavior-- afraid of anything that the uninformed voter mass begins to do en masse that they aren't either in total control of or able to escape blame for. If a lot of people start asking questions about the SSSCA and have begun to realize an answer like "Congressman R. J. Theonomist has a tough anti-piracy stance and is pushing new digital encryption technology to help e-commerce and fight copyright theft" is just dodging the question, the congresscritters will spook and skitter away from the SSSCA like roaches when you turn on the kitchen light, trying to make sure they're not identifiably supporting the SSSCA in any way when the common voter figures out the people supporting the SSSCA are trying to take away consumer rights.
Again, it takes a lot for people to understand what DeCSS is, it takes a lot for people to understand what the DMCA does, and it seems to take a hell of a lot for people to begin to consider source code as "speech". It takes a lot to get people to the point that they understand that napster workalikes do less hurting of the revenues of the music industry than guns do killing people, much less to decide considering the first illegal and the second legal is absurd.. so there may not be hope for the DMCA anytime soon. But the SSSCA is simple to describe-- It makes it illegal for your teenage son to wire together circuitry in your garage because of the possibility your teenage son could potentially be making devices that have the effect of enabling people to listen to music without paying!-- and so there may be hope in stomping it down forever, if the steven levys of the world can bring it up to enough people..
In the meantime, i'm wondering if there's anything we can do to help that process along. Maybe starting a mass movement for computer-savvy geeks to start emailing to their less computer-savvy relatives URLs to news articles explaining what the SSSCA does would be a good idea?
Eh.. i'm disappointed. I initially misread that as "degauss rifle"..
After discovering in computer labs that hitting the "deguass" button on a monitor will cause the monitors nearby to trip out very slightly for an instant, i had these vague daydreams of rewiring whatever it is in the monitor that makes it deguass to be unreasonably strong, so that hitting "deguass" would cause the monitors of all the computers in the lab or whatever else is in a 40-foot radius to be degaussed at once, Matrix EMP-blast style. This would probably break stuff, but then that's the point, i suppose.
I dunno.. i guess having instructions on how to build a mini-rail-gun really is much cooler, but still, i wonder if the guass-blast idea is possible.. and if it were, modifying the idea to create a gun you could stick at a monitor and pull the trigger to deguass it would be really funny. Alas, there's no practical use for such a thing as far as i can tell, and it isn't really *that* interesting, so i don't really care enough to do any research on the subject, so for now, it looks like i'm going to have to limit myself to putting an electric pencil sharpener next to the monitor, sticking in pencils, and giggling.
To be honest I have never understood this logic-- the breakup plans were very bad from a marketplace perspective. Why should we break one predatory company with two monopolies into two predatory companies with one monopoly each?
*sighs*
this has been gone over a million times, but i'll try to do it here as best i can.
horizontal and vertical monopolies are *very* different things. the point of such a move would not be to immedately break microsoft's OS stranglehold. the point would be to prevent microsoft leveraging its OS monopoly to create and maintain monopolies in application areas.
The idea is that microsoft's app division has, if they so desire, direct access to all sorts of internal things that no one outside microsoft has. If MS were split into two companies, then *all communication* between the apps and OS microsofts would have to be above-ground and visible to outside-microsoft entities. For example, if MS-Apps wants to embed a web browser into the OS, then they have to publicly ask MS-OS if this is possible, and MS-OS will have to create some kind of public object framework or plug-in architecture that would make such a thing possible and publish the interface to it. The end result of this would be that MSIE can be embedded into microsoft windows, but if netscape or opera so desires they can embed themselves into the OS as well because the manner in which MSIE did this was documented. There would be three upshots of this:
MS-OS would be forced to create more flexible and almost certainly superior interfaces because (to continue the above example) they'd be designing "an architecture to embed a web browser in file browser windows" rather than just copy&pasting code from internet explorer into the windows graphical shell. (i will attempt to refrain here from attempting in detail to explain how years before windows 98 was even thought of, apple had a plan to use something called opendoc to eventually merge any web browser you liked into the OS, because it not relevant..)
It would be an important first step toward levelling the playing field insofar as software apps go. Microsoft would still have an intense head start insofar as money in the bank and product inertia goes, but if the DOJ forced MS to fully document the Word file format then microsoft word would be forced to compete on its own merits. (Never mind that all of MS Word's real competitors are now dead; never mind that after all the time MS has had for a head start, MSWord would probably win on its own merits anyway..)
If MS was forced to document everything for the public, then projects like WINE would have an exponentially easier time.
You could of course say that the DOJ could just force MS to publicly document all interfaces, but MS has a quite clear history of basically spitting in the face of any legal judgements passed on them. Ensuring and enforcing compliance with something like "MS, you must publicly document all interfaces to the OS" would be near impossible, especially since MS has made it clear they are very good at avoiding obeying legal judgements. Witness the early 90s "no product tying" consent decree. . . this is just the *only* way to absolutely make certain that MS-Apps is not recieving preferential treatment, to ensure that the two divisions can only communicate by publishing APIs. Nothing else works. Moreover, once MS-OS and MS-Apps were seperate companies whose survival is not necessarily dependent on each other, if they continue to give each other preferential treatment then their respective stockholders will NOT be happy.
This does not mean that a breakup would solve all problems. However, i think it would be an important first step towards allowing some fresh air in to the OS Apps industry, i believe there are a number of things that can only be achieved by breaking up MS. I believe that if MS-Apps was forced to compete the same way normal companies are, other companies might be able to create viable competing products, and those products might be ported to and make viable MS-OS's competitors. It may be it is too late to reverse the damage MS has done to the software industry in sucking up basically all of its resources into one entity. I don't know. Still, though, i would say that splitting up MS is certainly a valid course of action, even if it is not the most logical one.
From what i've heard, Chris Carter had a very specific way, given the mythology and the way it developed, that he wanted to end it.
At some point within about a season of the point he originally wanted to end it, Fox said "no, you can't end, you're still making money", and demanded he keep going with the series.
If i remember right, i read this in the Houston Chronicle, but i can't remember exactly.
I seem to remember this being about the time that they moved the production to California from Canada. I seem to remember the point at which the series was originally meant to end being about the time that all the crucial personell on the show started bitching mercilessly and quitting, and about the point the writing seemed to lose direction utterly. (Although the episodes that first season in Los Angeles were generally excellent..) "Like butter scraped over too much bread.."
I don't know how true any of this is, but it seems pretty plausible. If so, i would definitely say that the x-files could have ended as a much, much stronger and more interesting show if they'd just let Carter conclude it the way he originally meant to.
As is i kind of stopped watching altogether at some point shortly after the massive two-episode thing with Mulder being locked in the train while all the people with no faces ran away, or whatever (i think that's when it was), and though i watched pretty religiously up until that point i have absolutely no idea what has been happening since then. I know nothing at all about the "mulder's replacement" character. I'm wondering if there's any point at all in trying to watch, given i may not understand the plot of the show anymore and given i don't have a television anymore.
Well, no matter. Even if the show did kind of sputter out and die ungracefully (This is the way the series ends, not with a bang but a whimper?) the X-files production team has produced more quality television than you could possibly expect of any single show, and i'm applauding them quietly for a job very well done. Hopefully i'll be able to go back and pick up some of those episodes i missed (and hopefully i'll be able to do this without resorting to gnutella or other Questionable Methods:) ). In particular i wanna know whatever the hell it was that i missed with that recent episode on the oil rig where they were chasing mulder, or whatever..
P.S. : is the "groundhog day" workalike episode available on tape or DVD? if it is, i'd buy a copy:)
Objective C does not kill the app if it goes outside its memory space. The operating system kills the app if it goes outside its memory space, assuming you're in mac os x or linux (which you probably are if you're writing an objective c app, but not necessarily). If you compile an objective-c app for classic macos (though far as i'm aware no compiler allows that) then int *p=0;while(1)*(p++)=0; will lock up the machine just the same as a c program.
Objective C does, however, make pointer manipulation largely unnecessary for almost any program, because it and the Foundation framework provide a good solid object oriented.. um.. foundation that make you not particularly want to do pointer manipulation and such. This is probably what you were thinking of: NSString, NSArray and similar classes have you access not the direct contents of what is stored, but accessor methods which contain bounds checking and will not allow you to, say, get the 10th element of a 9-element NSArray. This provides the functionality of boundchecking in arrays and strings that CLR and Java give with their memory safety models with significant speed improvements over what happens in java and CLR.. but that all goes out the window the instant you start doing pointer arithmetic or using C-style arrays.
Objective C is C plus some objects, and like C it just gets compiled down to unsafe machine code in the end. I agree with your statement that Obj-C is "a good blend of OOP but without the kid gloves of Java", but that is not relevant.
The current line of discussion is memory integrity assurance in two combatting virtual machine platforms. Languages are not relevant to that discussion, because they are a layer above-- C++ and Objective C can both be just as easily compiled to either machine code or java bytecode or CLR bytecode.. and if they do pointer arithmetic or straight C arrays, they will be as "safe" as the memory checking of the virtual machine that runs them.. and if they do not do pointer arithmetic or straight C arrays, they will be as safe as the java programming language. (which disallows pointer arithmetic.)
And lots of administrators won't bother. The network of NT machines at the high school i went to, just for an example, had a random administrator who was given the job just becuase he'd been a teacher who knew some stuff about computers, and he knew how to set up racks of ethernet switches, and he read some books. This person didn't really have much concept of security; he just disabled anything at all anyone might possibly have wanted to have done, making the computers somewhat irritating to use. And then he went to the people who'd hired him and said, look, on the NT machines you can only run netscape and wordperfect and notepad! It is secure! You will not have to worry about the students abusing the computers! And they were content.
Despite this, there really was no security to speak of. All he'd done was limit the programs that could be executed to a small list of "approved" software. But he did it by name-- which meant that if you dropped winamp on a machine and renamed it to "notepad.exe", you could run it. The machines all had borland 5 on them, and you could execute programs you had the source to by running them in borland. And those programs could exec() others. And the write permissions were set such that one user could install Snood!, and every other user who used that particular machine forevermore would have Gator Download Assistant or whatever the hell it's called popping up every time they used netscape.
The point of my story is this: Admining is not all that simple, and many people don't try that hard at it. Windows administration gives you *lots* of options. Lots and lots of options. There's always going to be a couple configuration options that every administrator misses, somewhere, even if they're trying really hard. And lots of the administrators out there are just doing the bare minimum they have to to get their paycheck.
So, basically, even if it *is* really easy for an organisation to set up a windows xp machine to be really secure and locked down and 'safe', and even if the vast majority of deployers do go in and work out the settings just the way they're meant to,
If.NET blows up into something really, really big, then the networks of that minority of sysadmins who *don't* know what they're doing, like the one at my high school, are *all* that the next great internet worm needs to wreak quite a lot of havoc.
I've been looking for some kind of little handheld thing i can slip in a pocket or backpack and use for random field recordings, and this may be what i've been looking for for some time.. i'm not happy about the whole "128 kbps max" thing, and it would be convenient if there were an integrated mic (although i guess i could find a mic that would just clip on).. but still. That's handy. I wish there were pricing information available.. it'll probably be out of my budget, but if it's less than a few hundred dollars, or at least under the rediculous prices you seem to have to pay to get any kind of working portable DAT tape recorder, i want one..
A random thought: something i've been wishfully daydreaming about for some time is the idea of rigging an iPod to work like one of these-- get some kind of USB-firewire bridge and then hook up a USB microphone, then abuse the iPod's upgradeable firmware feature to add the ability to read in AIFFs to the iPod's hard drive. You could maybe even add the ability to have the iPod go back and encode the recorded AIFFs sitting around into mp3s to conserve space.. This may or may not be possible (i don't know how flexible/hackable the iPod is-- i believe it has an ARM chip though, doesn't it? that should be able to do just about whatever you like, no?) and it would require reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware, which would not be fun and definitely not be something i'm capable of (though someone out there is almost certainly already trying to do exactly that, at least for the purpose of A) adding some more games to complement the built-in breakout easter egg, TI-83 style or B) adding ogg vorbis support), but it's a lovely thought.
I have this mental image of someday some company creating a little slip-on chassis for the ipod that hooks into the firewire port and contains a firewire mic, then contracting with apple to create a legitimate version of the hacked firmware described above.. i know that will never happen, but that would be basically the most perfect piece of equipment possible for my needs..
Ahh, if only professional (read: no "copy protection" bullshit) DAT tape recorders weren't so expensive.. (i can't find any for under $700. Am i maybe just not looking hard enough?
Making the conversion from UNIX to Linux is relatively straightforward; you can easily recompile most versions of UNIX software to run under Linux. But Windows is based on an entirely different technology, and moving between the two environments isn't that straightforward.
This is an excellent point. However, it would seem to me that it is a problem that can be, to some extent, fixed.
First off, it should probably be noted here that POSIX is now, more or less, a universal standard. Microsoft has a POSIX compatibility layer in NT making up the remnants of what used to be that Internix thing they bought out, right? (Or was their main purpose in buying Internix to sit on it? I never quite figured out which.) Well, no matter; there's still Cygwin and a number of other things that will let you run POSIX software in NT. Anyway, my thought is that it would be really neat if a drive were made to convince people to write all new server software as POSIX command-line apps, and let the Windows NT version simply have some kind of GUI wrapper program added. From the developer's perspective, this would mean they could write one program that would run on all available platforms at once. (From my self-serving perspective as a mac user, this would rock because writing a GUI frontend to a UNIX command line app is damn near effortless if you do it in Cocoa. So best case scenario, people port their server software to OS X just because rewriting the GUI in OS X is something that takes no more than a couple days, and worst case scenario people like me can buy server software and write Cocoa GUIs ourselves. HEE HEE..) Would this be something, um, feasable? Would it be something developers would want to do, would it have any negative repurcussions for the performance of the program under windows NT?
And if convincing the NT developers to all move to UNIX isn't feasable, then how possible would it be to write some kind of VMS compatibility layer that would let windows nt server software run on UNIX once you stripped out or rewrote the GUI? Would that be worth the bother, and did such a compatibility layer exist would any vendors take advantage of it to port their NT software to UNIX?
Would either of these approaches help the problem to be solved? Do developers still *care* about cross-platform-ness?
And my final question: From a raw developer's standpoint, if you're going to just write command-line apps and then tack on GUI frontends later then which would you rather be writing for-- POSIX, or the vms-y internals of windows nt? Is POSIX really any better, or do we just all like it because the kernels that run the software we all like are POSIX? If POSIX ran on WinNT/XP and low-level WinNT/XP software ran on UNIX, which would be [[fingerquotes]] "better"?
Apple *says* that you can access the iPod as if it were a normal 5 GB Firewire hard drive.. This isn't that complicated. Writing a windows or Linux client that talks to this thing's hard drive and transfers mp3s to and fro couldn't possibly be even the tiniest bit complicated. Even if they're using some crazy proprietary filesystem for the iPod-- which i don't see why they'd go to the bother-- disassembling iTunes and figuring out how it talks to the machine would likely be effortless. Apple doesn't need to "support" windows and linux-- freeware authors can do that for them.
Trust me. In about six weeks someone will put up a "hacking iPod" website with DETAILED technical specifications of the thing, along with instructions of how to overload the thing's "upgradable firmware" to play.ogg files, run linux off the iPod's disk, play games on a TI-83 emulator, and do any number of complicated random things. The instant this happens, CdmrTaco will certainly suddenly love the thing..
(Note: does anyone know, what processor does the iPod run on? The tech specs site doesn't say. Either way, i'd imagine that anything powerful enough to decode mp3s is more than powerful enough to emulate the Game Boy.. and, hell, i'd imagine we could figure out some way to hook up input devices into the firewire port, which would lead to all kinds of crazy things. Emulating the newton or the palm, maybe even.. there are a *lot* of different nifty things you could do with a little portable device with a 5 GB hard drive, a firewire port, a little LCD screen, some buttons and a processor powerful enough to decode mp3s, once you overwrite the default firmware.. damn. The possibilities are almost limitless, and at the least i'm certain in about a year you'll see a LOT of fun little "ipod games" out there. I'm starting to wish that i was frivolous enough to spend $400 on an mp3 player..)
Anyway, my only thought on the subject is extreme happiness that the people trying to mount the iPod as a hard drive on a linux machines will FINALLY after all these years, give us HFS+ support for linux that actually works. I've been waiting so long..
So at what point does Apple violate the terms of the agreement with Apple Records for ripping off the name and logo?
1989.
Here's a nice summary of the whole thing. Basically, in 1981 (after years of squabbling) apple computer entered into a written agreement not to compete with apple records in any way. In 1989, Apple records decided that apple's computers had reached the point of qualifying as "musical editing equipment", and sued apple claiming that the agreement had been broached and Apple was infringing on Apple's trademark.
(I for some reason thought for a very long time that this was because 1989 was the year apple started putting built-in sound input ports on all shipping machines, but the apple-history site claims that the first apple machines to ship with onboard sound input-- the IIfx and the IIsi-- didn't come out until the beginning of 1990, so maybe that isn't it. Or maybe Apple Records was, in 1989, reacting to advance news from apple describing the upcoming IIfx and IIsi machines. I don't know.)
Anyway, all of this ended in 1990 when Apple and Apple settled; Apple computer had to something like 26.7 million dollars to Apple records, and in return Apple computer gained the right to do pretty much anything with the name "apple". The iPod would be, i am certain, covered under that 1990 agreement.
(There was, after the 1990 agreement, some rather long drawn out legal proceedings involving who paid for the settlement and legal bills from all this, Apple Computer or their insurance company; i think their insurance company finally won. I can't say i really care either way, though.)
d) The offered mp3 file was arbitrarily encoded at a higher bitrate than the offered quicktime file was.
Just in case someone would like me to continue stating the obvious: According to the "Movie Info" dialog in my copy of Quicktime Player, the quicktime file used the QDesign Music 2 codec and was encoded at 22.05 kHz and a bitrate of 2.4 kilobytes per second of sound (19.2 Kbps), and the mp3 file was encoded at 11.025 kHz and a bitrate of 2.9 kilobytes per second of sound (23.2 Kbps). Also for some unclear reason the mp3 version is about a minute longer, although given they're both just over two hours that probably wouldn't have much effect on the file size.
I personally think the (smaller) QDesign encoding sounds much clearer, but i'd definitely rather listen to the mp3 version-- the QDesign version seems kind of higher-pitched and grating for some reason. That, however, doesn't really reflect much on either codec, since the quality of files of this sort tends to vary wildly depending on how good a job the specific encoder program does of, um, encoding, and different formats have different ranges of bitrates where they perform better than other ranges..
And of course it probably isn't quite fair to compare QDesign directly to mp3, seeing as as far as i can gather QDesign was designed much more as a format for being flexibly streamed than it was as a format for good storage quality. The QDesign codec, for the record, is probably a more advanced codec than mp3 (if i remember correctly, it's a couple years newer than mp3 is), but i've no idea how it would stack up against mp3pro or ogg.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is the least coherent thing i've ever read on slashdot. I have no idea what you are trying to say, but i'm going to attempt to respond to what vaguely seems to be your point:
Spider-man is something called "art". They aren't selling you the property of times square. They are selling you pictures of it, with a fictional story and some sounds overlaid.
The U.S. legal system has an idea built in called "freedom of expression". This implies that if you are creating a piece of art, you have a right to do anything in it that you like that corresponds to promoting your artistic vision, and that no man or government has the right to restrict that because freedom of speech and expression is a basic, universal, human right.
OK?
There is the question of slander-- i.e., if you took a public figure of some sort, which would include a church of some sort, and represented them publicly in a light they disapprove of, then they could go after you for slander. You could say that this is an exception to the "there should be no legal limits on art" rule. However, this only applies when you step outside the realm of artistic expression and into journalism-- i.e., when you are actively stating that the portrayal of things that you are offering in your product is *true*, as opposed to simply offering an artistic portrayal of the universe. The new york times has an obligation to not print things like "Newt Gingrinch is an Alien" when they have no proof of such. The makers of the movie "Men in black" are under no such obligation. I think it's pretty safe to say no one could be misled to believe that the movie "Spider-man" is meant to be an accurate portrayal of New York City.
There's also the question of copyright and image reuse-- i.e., do you have the legal right to use someone/something's image if you can consider the image you are reusing an artistic product that someone else "owns". I would say that that doesn't apply here becuase the image of Times Square is just a part of our culture, and has become something that the owners of the physical property Times Square no longer have control over.
Would you imply that someone doing an impressionist, blurry painting of times square has a legal obligation to preseve the clarity of the advertisements there?
You'd probably argue that that example is different, because in that case, the altering of the nature of the buildings and advertisements is required by the nature of the artistic decisions made by the painter; whereas in the case of Spider-man, the advertisements were altered out of sheer greed.
That argument would be invalid for one simple reason: no matter what the law says currently, neither the government nor the courts have the right to determine what is a valid artistic decision and what is greed. That is simply not their business; the supreme court has said again and again that the government has no right to discriminate a legal difference between "good art" and "bad art"; there is only the question "is it art", and if so, you have to treat it legally in a manner consistent with the way you treat all other art..
particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).
You mean besides all this?
- Ad hominem attacks on microsoft and microsoft products on slashdot are done in a situation where it's reasonably certain that the people hearing will have enough experience to understand the attacks and their context. Whereas the currently discussed microsoft ads are specifically targeted at those people who don't understand at all what they mean, and are the most likely to form blind prejudices based simply on random things they hear in TV ads without questioning, researching, or checking for veracity.
- On slashdot if someone is being silly, going overboard, or making statements about microsoft products that are either stupidly subjective or just aren't true, anyone has the option of posting a reply and refuting the dumbass. Nasty attack tv commercials, meanwhile, are not really a forum where "the other side" has a chance to respond with anything other than more nasty attack tv commercials.
Yeah, i know what you meant. Just.. just a thought, you know?Anyone else suspect microsoft's goal with all this is probably just to goad Sun, Oracle, etc., into paying for response ads.. meaning that the computer industry gets in a huge circular contest of paying for increasingly expensive ads and pissing money into a hole.. meaning in the end sun, oracle and co. have a significant amount of money drained away from their much smaller bank accounts, while microsoft just has a slightly smaller percentage of money and still billions left to absentmindedly burn?
Is that this would be great for people who for one reason or another no longer have voiceboxes.
I had a great-aunt who lost a decent portion of her lungs to cancer and cigarettes, and up until her death a few years ago she had to use one of those darth-vader vibration-amplifier things like the "Ned" character does on south park. I was terrified of her when i was six.. (Give me a break, i was six years old and stupid.)
Anyway, i can imagine that technology like this would be just about perfect for people disabled in a similar manner through tobacco, cigarettes or who knows what. No? At least it would keep such people from having to deal with their idiot six-year-old-nephews reactions to the harsh sounds of the vibration amplifier box..
and really, even beyond that, tech like this would be just about the only option for people who are going through whatever that intensive vocal-node-therapy thing is where you're banned from speaking for six months. and i know a number of theatrical singers who would be intensely happy to have one of these so that they could rest their voices between performances without cutting themselves off from the world...
I hope that once this complete, they'll sell a unit where the voice-synth thing outputs into speakers rather than a phone.. I'm sure they would have looked into this possibility by now, right?
(P.S.: While we're on the subject, sort of.. just in case anyone reading knows: This came up as an argument the other night when we were watching the Oscars and examining how much pain Enye appeared to be in from having to exert her voice. What's the difference between a vocal node and a vocal nodule?
A while ago i came across this programming language called Unlambda, which is a superset of the s-k combinatorial logic calculus thing that this turing machine is written in. (not a very big superset, mind you. they added call/cc, some input/output functions, and an operator that lets you fiddle with evaluation order.. just look at the webpage i linked. it's interesting..). Thus far, about the most complicated program written in unlambda (not counting the quines) is something that prints out the prime numbers one by one as a series of increasingly longer rows of asterisks.
:)
:)
Now, though, it would appear that we can run a universal turing machine in unlambda! I think! I haven't read the paper closely enough yet to work out how exactly the block of encoded binary at the end functions
In the meanwhile, though, i'm posting for this reason: i'm really, really wierdly interested by lambda calculus and combinatorial functions and church numerals and all these other bizarre functional-programming offshoots. I can't, however, seem to find any really good resources explaining how they work. I mean, you look around on google or whatever, and occationally you'll find something explaining the basics of what an anonymous function is, and maybe explaining how to construct a church numeral or putting the old ((lambda (x x) (x x) (lambda (x x) (x x))) infinite loop thing up. But i've yet to find something that actually, you know, goes on and explains to you how to use all of this. None of them reach the point of beginning to explain how you go from knowing what a church numeral and "successor to 1" means to expressing foreach (1..10) {} using only anonymous functions.
The site with the universal turing machine links to what claims to be an overview of how to use combinatorial functions, which makes me really happy. However, i was wondering: does anyone have any good links, examples of books, etc, that explain how to construct programs using lambdas and/or combinatorial s/k functions and all that? I hear some college courses cover this stuff (although near as i can gather, unfortunately, no courses at my current college do), so there has to be some kind of information online somewhere. I'll probably find something on my own eventually, but just as long as i have your attention: is there any reading material anyone *recommends* for someone who just finds lambda calculus and such interesting?
For now, though, i'm going to read this intro to combinators thing linked from Tromp's site. Maybe it'll teach me enough i'll be able to finally realize my crack-addled dream of porting the lambda calculus DeCSS program to Unlambda. Though more likely it'll just make me really confused
Forced? No one forced anyone to do anything...
Incorrect. the bnetd and fsgs groups were forced to remove the results of their volunteer software projects from their websites.
The polyglot quines were on the polyglot page i linked, not the quine page i linked (both of which were on nyx.net..). The quine page was linked in case a given reader didn't know what a quine was. The C/LISP hybrid quine was the 10th entry on the polyglot page. It was this one.
Sorry if i was unclear.
Anyway, a few polyglot-related links:
With the crazy-ass language redefinition capabilities in perl 6, i think we can expect to see a resurgence in some very odd polyglots very soon..
Grrr.. mean, mean slashdot editors.. telling us the IOCCC winners were announced just so we can wait in suspense for a full month to see the entries.. bleh. I love the IOCCC..
just think of it this way: java was (is) a first-generation technology. of course it's been a disappointment.
.NETs "it bridges between any language automatically! but you can only use languages that have been modified until they are just c# with syntactic sugar!". (is 'isomorphic' an insult?)
.NET lie in ruins. or until java is willing to face the issues with java at a deep-rooted level and do some serious rethinking and serious rewriting. or until the java standards board takes java away from sun and runs with it.
if it appears microsoft's attempt to duplicate java is better, it's just because microsoft has been able to look at java and learn from what mistakes sun made.
sun was not able to learn from their mistakes when they were developing java because no one had ever made those mistakes before. sun cannot learn from their mistakes, go thorugh and fix their problems now becuase they do not have the resources. microsoft at this point has nearly all the resources-- people, cash, mindshare-- in the entire industry.
if sun had the kind of level of ability to develop things quickly and ability to psuh people into upgrading their products on a frequent basis that microsoft does -- things that are products of microsoft's monopoly power, not products of the worthiness of the intellectual holdings or products of either microsoft or sun -- i think it'ws safe to say that java would be something you could really call a success, as opposed to "oh, well it's a neat little platform for servlets, has some minor but omnipresent and hellishly obnoxious issues when you try to use it for anything else though".
i agree totally on the bit that this would be better if java had been an open-from-the-start technology; hell , i think all they need is the willingness and ability to *change* java *NOW* in serious ways. i'm hoping Parrot produces something interesting. it would be neat to have a public vm that actually lets your code cross languages elegantly, as opposed to java's "well, you have the specs to the vm, write a compiler for whatever language you like, you'll have to figure out how to bridge object systems yourself though" or
i suspect no real progress will take place in the way of the public usage of portable bytecode systems and standard object frameworks until both java and
i look at it this way, though: sun has done a hell of a lot with java with not a lot of resources. everyone who's used java in any capacity has probably been annoyed a decent amount for its shortcomings, but its shortcomings usually come down to "it isn't everything". maybe it was foolish for java to *try* to be everything, but i'll say this: they got a lot closer to being everything a lot faster than any other computing platform i'm aware of. i for one am impressed. i just wish it was better.
i dunno. all i want is a cross-platform object system that looks like nextstep that actually *works* crossplatformly, and a garbage collector.
Um.. yes. Perhaps i was not clear enough.
:P Whatever. I give up.
My point is that they already have little interest in the long-term value of an album, but that what tiny incentive they have in that direction would be removed if the copyright terms became *too* short. (The post i was responding to seemed to be almost implying copyright terms of 10yrs from publication..)
I.E: It's never so bad you can't make it *worse*. Besides which, not all labels are major.. and some (some) of the non-major labels *are* interested in long-term album sales. And more and more lately i find these are the only record labels that interest me anymore..
I mean-- i agree with what you're saying. I just don't see how it's disagreeing with my post
But if the copyright only lasted long enough for you and your label to recoup expenses and make a tidy profit on top of that, chances are you'd be getting back to work a lot sooner. When you're hungry, you work.
But this leaves the problem of that the music companies will *ONLY* pick up on those things they can make a quick buck on. There's ALREADY a problem where they only care about stuff that they can make money off as quickly as possible, thus leading them to almost exclusively push "catchy", BUYMEBUYME but artless and substance-free bullshit like, well, everything on the radio. As is, they do at least have the possibility in the back of their minds that some bands are worth keeping around because their albums have *relisten* value, meaning people are still keeping those CDs around six years from now and playing them to their friends, meaning that that CD could potentially still be making money 20 years from now. As opposed to, say, the backstreet boys or new kids on the block, who 15 years from now will be lucky to get a single track on "HITS OF THE 90s VOLUME III!". Remove the incentive to put out long-lasting, solid albums with substance and shit, and you'll see a LOT more "britney"s and a LOT less "Dark Side of the Moon"s.. which makes this clearly not a solution to the current problems with the musical art.
Clearly, instead, the solution is for all pop musicians to have heroin addictions. You see, if they have a heroin addiction to feed, then the money from that hit single will run out an order of magnitude faster, thus requiring them to continually produce new stuff to stay at the top of the charts.
What, why do you THINK all great musicians have had drug addictions? You really buy that "troubled artist"/"escaping the intoxicating pain of intense creativity" line?
(( note: i'm probably joking. i think. ))
Just a question.
:) ) The question i am asking is, technically, legally, is this a thing which is an *option*; asking "is there a law by which Sun or whoever can sue to have Bush appointees taken away from this case", not "if Sun sued under such a law, would they succeed". Is it possible under the laws of the U.S.. But respond how you will. Thanks..
It is my belief, and i know the belief of most of the people on slashdot, that the DOJ is currently neither acting in the best interests of the american people or acting to see the law of the united states of america upheld.
Whether from "contributions" or bribes, or from the simple republican belief that laws should keep quiet and go play alone in their room and leave the nice Important People alone when they're trying to make money (now run along now. shoo), the DOJ seems pretty clearly to me to be currently of the belief that microsoft is doing a good job and should be let loose from the responsibilities of the good of the american people or either the letter or intent of the antitrust laws. Put plainly, the executive branch is currently against the idea of antitrust regulation.
However, it is not the executive branches job to make the law. That is the job of the legislative branch. And the legislative branch has declared anticompetitive behavior to gain monopolistic control over a market harmful and illegal. And it is not the executive branches job to decide whether extant law is valid and worthy to be carried out. That is the job of the judicial branch. And the judicial branch seems in this case to want the law to be carried out.
But it is the executive branch that is currently trying to end this. So i ask: can they be removed from this? In any way? I know nothing of law-- this is why i am asking. Can citizen groups sue to state that the prosecution of this case should be taken out of the hands of the DOJ and into the hands of the EFF or some specially-appointed board? Can the judge appoint some kind of Special Master or Special Prosecutor or someone who will be picked to actually attempt to push for the most stringent judgement possible for microsoft? (REMEMBER, it is NOT the job of the prosecutor to decide what is just. It is the job of the prosecutor to argue for the strongest judgement possible, the job of the defendant to argue for the weakest judgement possible, and the JUDGE to ensure all arguments are reasonable and find the most just and legal balance behind all. The judge should be unbiased. The prosecution is not really intended to be someone unbiased against the defendant, so it doesn't matter if the prosecutor is someone picked by Sun or Oracle or whoever; whether biased or no, the prosecutor should *act* biased against the defendant, because that is their *job*.) Can we declare John Ashcroft tainted because he recieved campaign contributions from microsoft, and have him chineese-walled away from the case?
Don't police officers and judges and FBI agents and Attourneys General of the United States of America have to swear to protect the american people and uphold the law? If the people currently trying to short-circuit the case against microsoft make it clear they are against in this case the upholding of the law, are they violating those oaths? Can there be legal repercussions for them in doing that?
A quick note to those responding: I am not *particularly* trying to start a flamewar (flamewar bad. informative comments good. HULK SMASH) on whether the doj SHOULD be blocked out of the microsoft antitrust case. I am not 100% convinced it is the best thing (just mostly
These are good tidings indeed. I am happy and stuff. Yay for Steven Levy. Now lets see if any public informed-ness develops..
I don't know what "queegishly" means.
Seriously.. i was a macworld subscriber back when they were GOOD, and i consider steven levy to be one of if not the biggest badasses in computer journalism. And this article is just about perfect-- i would have emphasized the anti-competitive nature of the RIAA middlemen, and maybe put in something noting that the sssca effectively illegalizes computer engineering research (the copyright protection-in-everything rule does not have an exception for test models, last i checked.. no?), but i can forgive that.
But the question comes up of how much help his support is. This is being printed on msnbc.com.. which is a step removed from, say, slashdot, true, but not a huge step. If someone is reading msnbc.com, there's an excellent chance they're aware of the SSSCA. These are not the people who we need to reach. The people we need to reach are the random uninformed trailer trash and soccer moms.
My question is this: this piece is copyrighted by newsweek. Is it being printed *in* Newsweek? If it is, i'm overjoyed, because that gives this issue the kind of public exposure it so violently needs. People read newsweek. Like, mass numbers of people who are not already relatively in touch with the slashdot groupthink.
We don't need a scattered collection of geeks with excellent philosophical, moral, and constitutional arguments against the SSSCA. We need a large body of uninformed persons who, while they may not be able to understand what "DeCSS" is even if you explained it to them, understand vaguely what the SSSCA is saying and understand *EXACTLY* what its repercussions would be. The congresscritters aren't afraid of lone gunmen with weblogs. They're afraid of herd behavior-- afraid of anything that the uninformed voter mass begins to do en masse that they aren't either in total control of or able to escape blame for. If a lot of people start asking questions about the SSSCA and have begun to realize an answer like "Congressman R. J. Theonomist has a tough anti-piracy stance and is pushing new digital encryption technology to help e-commerce and fight copyright theft" is just dodging the question, the congresscritters will spook and skitter away from the SSSCA like roaches when you turn on the kitchen light, trying to make sure they're not identifiably supporting the SSSCA in any way when the common voter figures out the people supporting the SSSCA are trying to take away consumer rights.
Again, it takes a lot for people to understand what DeCSS is, it takes a lot for people to understand what the DMCA does, and it seems to take a hell of a lot for people to begin to consider source code as "speech". It takes a lot to get people to the point that they understand that napster workalikes do less hurting of the revenues of the music industry than guns do killing people, much less to decide considering the first illegal and the second legal is absurd.. so there may not be hope for the DMCA anytime soon. But the SSSCA is simple to describe-- It makes it illegal for your teenage son to wire together circuitry in your garage because of the possibility your teenage son could potentially be making devices that have the effect of enabling people to listen to music without paying!-- and so there may be hope in stomping it down forever, if the steven levys of the world can bring it up to enough people..
In the meantime, i'm wondering if there's anything we can do to help that process along. Maybe starting a mass movement for computer-savvy geeks to start emailing to their less computer-savvy relatives URLs to news articles explaining what the SSSCA does would be a good idea?
Eh.. i'm disappointed. I initially misread that as "degauss rifle"..
After discovering in computer labs that hitting the "deguass" button on a monitor will cause the monitors nearby to trip out very slightly for an instant, i had these vague daydreams of rewiring whatever it is in the monitor that makes it deguass to be unreasonably strong, so that hitting "deguass" would cause the monitors of all the computers in the lab or whatever else is in a 40-foot radius to be degaussed at once, Matrix EMP-blast style. This would probably break stuff, but then that's the point, i suppose.
I dunno.. i guess having instructions on how to build a mini-rail-gun really is much cooler, but still, i wonder if the guass-blast idea is possible.. and if it were, modifying the idea to create a gun you could stick at a monitor and pull the trigger to deguass it would be really funny. Alas, there's no practical use for such a thing as far as i can tell, and it isn't really *that* interesting, so i don't really care enough to do any research on the subject, so for now, it looks like i'm going to have to limit myself to putting an electric pencil sharpener next to the monitor, sticking in pencils, and giggling.
*sighs*
this has been gone over a million times, but i'll try to do it here as best i can.
horizontal and vertical monopolies are *very* different things. the point of such a move would not be to immedately break microsoft's OS stranglehold. the point would be to prevent microsoft leveraging its OS monopoly to create and maintain monopolies in application areas.
The idea is that microsoft's app division has, if they so desire, direct access to all sorts of internal things that no one outside microsoft has. If MS were split into two companies, then *all communication* between the apps and OS microsofts would have to be above-ground and visible to outside-microsoft entities. For example, if MS-Apps wants to embed a web browser into the OS, then they have to publicly ask MS-OS if this is possible, and MS-OS will have to create some kind of public object framework or plug-in architecture that would make such a thing possible and publish the interface to it. The end result of this would be that MSIE can be embedded into microsoft windows, but if netscape or opera so desires they can embed themselves into the OS as well because the manner in which MSIE did this was documented. There would be three upshots of this:
- MS-OS would be forced to create more flexible and almost certainly superior interfaces because (to continue the above example) they'd be designing "an architecture to embed a web browser in file browser windows" rather than just copy&pasting code from internet explorer into the windows graphical shell. (i will attempt to refrain here from attempting in detail to explain how years before windows 98 was even thought of, apple had a plan to use something called opendoc to eventually merge any web browser you liked into the OS, because it not relevant..)
- It would be an important first step toward levelling the playing field insofar as software apps go. Microsoft would still have an intense head start insofar as money in the bank and product inertia goes, but if the DOJ forced MS to fully document the Word file format then microsoft word would be forced to compete on its own merits. (Never mind that all of MS Word's real competitors are now dead; never mind that after all the time MS has had for a head start, MSWord would probably win on its own merits anyway..)
- If MS was forced to document everything for the public, then projects like WINE would have an exponentially easier time.
You could of course say that the DOJ could just force MS to publicly document all interfaces, but MS has a quite clear history of basically spitting in the face of any legal judgements passed on them. Ensuring and enforcing compliance with something like "MS, you must publicly document all interfaces to the OS" would be near impossible, especially since MS has made it clear they are very good at avoiding obeying legal judgements. Witness the early 90s "no product tying" consent decree. . . this is just the *only* way to absolutely make certain that MS-Apps is not recieving preferential treatment, to ensure that the two divisions can only communicate by publishing APIs. Nothing else works. Moreover, once MS-OS and MS-Apps were seperate companies whose survival is not necessarily dependent on each other, if they continue to give each other preferential treatment then their respective stockholders will NOT be happy.This does not mean that a breakup would solve all problems. However, i think it would be an important first step towards allowing some fresh air in to the OS Apps industry, i believe there are a number of things that can only be achieved by breaking up MS. I believe that if MS-Apps was forced to compete the same way normal companies are, other companies might be able to create viable competing products, and those products might be ported to and make viable MS-OS's competitors. It may be it is too late to reverse the damage MS has done to the software industry in sucking up basically all of its resources into one entity. I don't know. Still, though, i would say that splitting up MS is certainly a valid course of action, even if it is not the most logical one.
Does this make sense to you?
From what i've heard, Chris Carter had a very specific way, given the mythology and the way it developed, that he wanted to end it.
:) ). In particular i wanna know whatever the hell it was that i missed with that recent episode on the oil rig where they were chasing mulder, or whatever..
:)
At some point within about a season of the point he originally wanted to end it, Fox said "no, you can't end, you're still making money", and demanded he keep going with the series.
If i remember right, i read this in the Houston Chronicle, but i can't remember exactly.
I seem to remember this being about the time that they moved the production to California from Canada. I seem to remember the point at which the series was originally meant to end being about the time that all the crucial personell on the show started bitching mercilessly and quitting, and about the point the writing seemed to lose direction utterly. (Although the episodes that first season in Los Angeles were generally excellent..) "Like butter scraped over too much bread.."
I don't know how true any of this is, but it seems pretty plausible. If so, i would definitely say that the x-files could have ended as a much, much stronger and more interesting show if they'd just let Carter conclude it the way he originally meant to.
As is i kind of stopped watching altogether at some point shortly after the massive two-episode thing with Mulder being locked in the train while all the people with no faces ran away, or whatever (i think that's when it was), and though i watched pretty religiously up until that point i have absolutely no idea what has been happening since then. I know nothing at all about the "mulder's replacement" character. I'm wondering if there's any point at all in trying to watch, given i may not understand the plot of the show anymore and given i don't have a television anymore.
Well, no matter. Even if the show did kind of sputter out and die ungracefully (This is the way the series ends, not with a bang but a whimper?) the X-files production team has produced more quality television than you could possibly expect of any single show, and i'm applauding them quietly for a job very well done. Hopefully i'll be able to go back and pick up some of those episodes i missed (and hopefully i'll be able to do this without resorting to gnutella or other Questionable Methods
P.S. : is the "groundhog day" workalike episode available on tape or DVD? if it is, i'd buy a copy
Objective C does not kill the app if it goes outside its memory space. The operating system kills the app if it goes outside its memory space, assuming you're in mac os x or linux (which you probably are if you're writing an objective c app, but not necessarily). If you compile an objective-c app for classic macos (though far as i'm aware no compiler allows that) then int *p=0;while(1)*(p++)=0; will lock up the machine just the same as a c program.
Objective C does, however, make pointer manipulation largely unnecessary for almost any program, because it and the Foundation framework provide a good solid object oriented.. um.. foundation that make you not particularly want to do pointer manipulation and such. This is probably what you were thinking of: NSString, NSArray and similar classes have you access not the direct contents of what is stored, but accessor methods which contain bounds checking and will not allow you to, say, get the 10th element of a 9-element NSArray. This provides the functionality of boundchecking in arrays and strings that CLR and Java give with their memory safety models with significant speed improvements over what happens in java and CLR.. but that all goes out the window the instant you start doing pointer arithmetic or using C-style arrays.
Objective C is C plus some objects, and like C it just gets compiled down to unsafe machine code in the end. I agree with your statement that Obj-C is "a good blend of OOP but without the kid gloves of Java", but that is not relevant.
The current line of discussion is memory integrity assurance in two combatting virtual machine platforms. Languages are not relevant to that discussion, because they are a layer above-- C++ and Objective C can both be just as easily compiled to either machine code or java bytecode or CLR bytecode.. and if they do pointer arithmetic or straight C arrays, they will be as "safe" as the memory checking of the virtual machine that runs them.. and if they do not do pointer arithmetic or straight C arrays, they will be as safe as the java programming language. (which disallows pointer arithmetic.)
I hope this clears things up a little.
And lots of administrators won't bother. The network of NT machines at the high school i went to, just for an example, had a random administrator who was given the job just becuase he'd been a teacher who knew some stuff about computers, and he knew how to set up racks of ethernet switches, and he read some books. This person didn't really have much concept of security; he just disabled anything at all anyone might possibly have wanted to have done, making the computers somewhat irritating to use. And then he went to the people who'd hired him and said, look, on the NT machines you can only run netscape and wordperfect and notepad! It is secure! You will not have to worry about the students abusing the computers! And they were content.
.NET blows up into something really, really big, then the networks of that minority of sysadmins who *don't* know what they're doing, like the one at my high school, are *all* that the next great internet worm needs to wreak quite a lot of havoc.
Despite this, there really was no security to speak of. All he'd done was limit the programs that could be executed to a small list of "approved" software. But he did it by name-- which meant that if you dropped winamp on a machine and renamed it to "notepad.exe", you could run it. The machines all had borland 5 on them, and you could execute programs you had the source to by running them in borland. And those programs could exec() others. And the write permissions were set such that one user could install Snood!, and every other user who used that particular machine forevermore would have Gator Download Assistant or whatever the hell it's called popping up every time they used netscape.
The point of my story is this: Admining is not all that simple, and many people don't try that hard at it. Windows administration gives you *lots* of options. Lots and lots of options. There's always going to be a couple configuration options that every administrator misses, somewhere, even if they're trying really hard. And lots of the administrators out there are just doing the bare minimum they have to to get their paycheck.
So, basically, even if it *is* really easy for an organisation to set up a windows xp machine to be really secure and locked down and 'safe', and even if the vast majority of deployers do go in and work out the settings just the way they're meant to,
If
Just a thought.
I've been looking for some kind of little handheld thing i can slip in a pocket or backpack and use for random field recordings, and this may be what i've been looking for for some time.. i'm not happy about the whole "128 kbps max" thing, and it would be convenient if there were an integrated mic (although i guess i could find a mic that would just clip on).. but still. That's handy. I wish there were pricing information available.. it'll probably be out of my budget, but if it's less than a few hundred dollars, or at least under the rediculous prices you seem to have to pay to get any kind of working portable DAT tape recorder, i want one..
.. daydream 2), i guess..
A random thought: something i've been wishfully daydreaming about for some time is the idea of rigging an iPod to work like one of these-- get some kind of USB-firewire bridge and then hook up a USB microphone, then abuse the iPod's upgradeable firmware feature to add the ability to read in AIFFs to the iPod's hard drive. You could maybe even add the ability to have the iPod go back and encode the recorded AIFFs sitting around into mp3s to conserve space.. This may or may not be possible (i don't know how flexible/hackable the iPod is-- i believe it has an ARM chip though, doesn't it? that should be able to do just about whatever you like, no?) and it would require reverse-engineering the iPod's firmware, which would not be fun and definitely not be something i'm capable of (though someone out there is almost certainly already trying to do exactly that, at least for the purpose of A) adding some more games to complement the built-in breakout easter egg, TI-83 style or B) adding ogg vorbis support), but it's a lovely thought.
I have this mental image of someday some company creating a little slip-on chassis for the ipod that hooks into the firewire port and contains a firewire mic, then contracting with apple to create a legitimate version of the hacked firmware described above.. i know that will never happen, but that would be basically the most perfect piece of equipment possible for my needs..
Ahh, if only professional (read: no "copy protection" bullshit) DAT tape recorders weren't so expensive.. (i can't find any for under $700. Am i maybe just not looking hard enough?
Bleh. Well, back to my daydreams (daydream 1
From the article:
Making the conversion from UNIX to Linux is relatively straightforward; you can easily recompile most versions of UNIX software to run under Linux. But Windows is based on an entirely different technology, and moving between the two environments isn't that straightforward.
This is an excellent point. However, it would seem to me that it is a problem that can be, to some extent, fixed.
First off, it should probably be noted here that POSIX is now, more or less, a universal standard. Microsoft has a POSIX compatibility layer in NT making up the remnants of what used to be that Internix thing they bought out, right? (Or was their main purpose in buying Internix to sit on it? I never quite figured out which.) Well, no matter; there's still Cygwin and a number of other things that will let you run POSIX software in NT. Anyway, my thought is that it would be really neat if a drive were made to convince people to write all new server software as POSIX command-line apps, and let the Windows NT version simply have some kind of GUI wrapper program added. From the developer's perspective, this would mean they could write one program that would run on all available platforms at once. (From my self-serving perspective as a mac user, this would rock because writing a GUI frontend to a UNIX command line app is damn near effortless if you do it in Cocoa. So best case scenario, people port their server software to OS X just because rewriting the GUI in OS X is something that takes no more than a couple days, and worst case scenario people like me can buy server software and write Cocoa GUIs ourselves. HEE HEE..) Would this be something, um, feasable? Would it be something developers would want to do, would it have any negative repurcussions for the performance of the program under windows NT?
And if convincing the NT developers to all move to UNIX isn't feasable, then how possible would it be to write some kind of VMS compatibility layer that would let windows nt server software run on UNIX once you stripped out or rewrote the GUI? Would that be worth the bother, and did such a compatibility layer exist would any vendors take advantage of it to port their NT software to UNIX?
Would either of these approaches help the problem to be solved? Do developers still *care* about cross-platform-ness?
And my final question: From a raw developer's standpoint, if you're going to just write command-line apps and then tack on GUI frontends later then which would you rather be writing for-- POSIX, or the vms-y internals of windows nt? Is POSIX really any better, or do we just all like it because the kernels that run the software we all like are POSIX? If POSIX ran on WinNT/XP and low-level WinNT/XP software ran on UNIX, which would be [[fingerquotes]] "better"?
Apple *says* that you can access the iPod as if it were a normal 5 GB Firewire hard drive.. This isn't that complicated. Writing a windows or Linux client that talks to this thing's hard drive and transfers mp3s to and fro couldn't possibly be even the tiniest bit complicated. Even if they're using some crazy proprietary filesystem for the iPod-- which i don't see why they'd go to the bother-- disassembling iTunes and figuring out how it talks to the machine would likely be effortless. Apple doesn't need to "support" windows and linux-- freeware authors can do that for them.
.ogg files, run linux off the iPod's disk, play games on a TI-83 emulator, and do any number of complicated random things. The instant this happens, CdmrTaco will certainly suddenly love the thing..
Trust me. In about six weeks someone will put up a "hacking iPod" website with DETAILED technical specifications of the thing, along with instructions of how to overload the thing's "upgradable firmware" to play
(Note: does anyone know, what processor does the iPod run on? The tech specs site doesn't say. Either way, i'd imagine that anything powerful enough to decode mp3s is more than powerful enough to emulate the Game Boy.. and, hell, i'd imagine we could figure out some way to hook up input devices into the firewire port, which would lead to all kinds of crazy things. Emulating the newton or the palm, maybe even.. there are a *lot* of different nifty things you could do with a little portable device with a 5 GB hard drive, a firewire port, a little LCD screen, some buttons and a processor powerful enough to decode mp3s, once you overwrite the default firmware.. damn. The possibilities are almost limitless, and at the least i'm certain in about a year you'll see a LOT of fun little "ipod games" out there. I'm starting to wish that i was frivolous enough to spend $400 on an mp3 player..)
Anyway, my only thought on the subject is extreme happiness that the people trying to mount the iPod as a hard drive on a linux machines will FINALLY after all these years, give us HFS+ support for linux that actually works. I've been waiting so long..
So at what point does Apple violate the terms of the agreement with Apple Records for ripping off the name and logo?
1989.
Here's a nice summary of the whole thing. Basically, in 1981 (after years of squabbling) apple computer entered into a written agreement not to compete with apple records in any way. In 1989, Apple records decided that apple's computers had reached the point of qualifying as "musical editing equipment", and sued apple claiming that the agreement had been broached and Apple was infringing on Apple's trademark.
(I for some reason thought for a very long time that this was because 1989 was the year apple started putting built-in sound input ports on all shipping machines, but the apple-history site claims that the first apple machines to ship with onboard sound input-- the IIfx and the IIsi-- didn't come out until the beginning of 1990, so maybe that isn't it. Or maybe Apple Records was, in 1989, reacting to advance news from apple describing the upcoming IIfx and IIsi machines. I don't know.)
Anyway, all of this ended in 1990 when Apple and Apple settled; Apple computer had to something like 26.7 million dollars to Apple records, and in return Apple computer gained the right to do pretty much anything with the name "apple". The iPod would be, i am certain, covered under that 1990 agreement.
(There was, after the 1990 agreement, some rather long drawn out legal proceedings involving who paid for the settlement and legal bills from all this, Apple Computer or their insurance company; i think their insurance company finally won. I can't say i really care either way, though.)
OK, i'll byte. The correct answer is:
d) The offered mp3 file was arbitrarily encoded at a higher bitrate than the offered quicktime file was.
Just in case someone would like me to continue stating the obvious: According to the "Movie Info" dialog in my copy of Quicktime Player, the quicktime file used the QDesign Music 2 codec and was encoded at 22.05 kHz and a bitrate of 2.4 kilobytes per second of sound (19.2 Kbps), and the mp3 file was encoded at 11.025 kHz and a bitrate of 2.9 kilobytes per second of sound (23.2 Kbps). Also for some unclear reason the mp3 version is about a minute longer, although given they're both just over two hours that probably wouldn't have much effect on the file size.
I personally think the (smaller) QDesign encoding sounds much clearer, but i'd definitely rather listen to the mp3 version-- the QDesign version seems kind of higher-pitched and grating for some reason. That, however, doesn't really reflect much on either codec, since the quality of files of this sort tends to vary wildly depending on how good a job the specific encoder program does of, um, encoding, and different formats have different ranges of bitrates where they perform better than other ranges..
And of course it probably isn't quite fair to compare QDesign directly to mp3, seeing as as far as i can gather QDesign was designed much more as a format for being flexibly streamed than it was as a format for good storage quality. The QDesign codec, for the record, is probably a more advanced codec than mp3 (if i remember correctly, it's a couple years newer than mp3 is), but i've no idea how it would stack up against mp3pro or ogg.
Hey, you asked.
Interesting.
Thank you for correcting me..