C|Net and ZDNet are reporting that the new variant not only chooses random subject lines for its email carriers, but also adds comments to its own script, in an attempt to thwart fingerprinting.
My question: who actually needs email-attached scripts to have write access to the registry and filesystem? And who thought there were enough of these people to allow such access by default?
So at issue here is whether the previous company's work fits the Copyright Act's definition of a "work made for hire."
Generally speaking, if there was no clause in the contract explicitly stating that the work done by the previous company was to be considered a "work made for hire," the previous company is considered the author, and thus, the controlling party of IP rights.
Circular 9 from the Copyright Office does a good job of explaining these issues.
From the circular:
Section 101 of the copyright law defines a "work made for hire" as:
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a sound recording, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a "supplementary work" is a work prepared for a publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes; and an "instructional text" is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
Visual Basic does what it is supposed to do and, over the years, has come to do it damn well. True, earlier revisions of the language were really weak, but it has evolved into an excellent language for rapid application development. It is quick to write, easy to debug, and, with a bit of creativity, can be used to do a bloody lot. For someone who has to do a lot of quick, turnkey Windows application development, I can vouch for the legitimacy of the language. I can write 98% of the code I need in VB, debug it, package it, and deploy it very quickly, and not have to worry about killer alloc problems, whatnot. Other people may not like it, but there is certainly a sizable chunk of people who do.
VB is criticized for being a "Basic." So the English-centric language is more accessable to the novice programmer than C. This results in a greater number of novices using VB than using C, thus meaning that there are going to be a larger concentration of novices in the VB world than in the C world. It is easier to turn out compilable code in VB than C. But given a good programmer, you will get good code out of either language. It's the programmer that really matters, remember? A good programmer can pick a convenient tool and turn good stuff out of it. Not all of us live in a non-Microsoft world.
But, if we're really going to talk smack about languages, then, for the love of god, don't hold C or Javascript up as some kind of "perfect" creation. The principals of something like Squeak make for much better argument.
---- I am not a Microsoft groupie, but I'm not going to break my neck avoiding them when there are more productive and convenient ways for me to get my job done.
Not only is power generation more efficient en masse, but electric cars can also employ regenerative braking, a system in which the vehicle is slowed by the magnetic drag of the vehicle's motors, thus converting its kinetic energy, no longer wanted, into potential energy in its batteries, instead. Of course the system isn't 100% efficient (duh), but it's unspeakably better than simply throwing all that energy away by converting it into heat with break pads.
It also serves worth noting that hybrid electric vehicles can be made extremely efficient as well, even when the "hybrid" involves a traditional internal combustion engine: An engine running at a constant speed and load (or a very tight range thereof) can be fine-tuned to maximum efficiency in that target mode of operation. One of the things that makes current automotive internal combustion engines so inefficient is the wide range of conditions which they must serve.
In addition, finely-tuned engines serving an electric "drivetrain" can be made significantly smaller, simpler, and lighter-weight than their traditional counterparts, for the aforementioned reason. All in all, this makes for some dramatic increases in efficiency (I'd give figures, but I don't have my automotive engineering notes handy at the moment) without sacrificing range of travel and without completely alienating the petroleum industry.
Factor in recent advances in energy storage technology and regenerative braking, and you could have a ridiculously fuel-efficient vehicle that still ran (secondarily, primarily, or completely) on petroleum.
There was an interesting article in the March 1999 issue of Wired regarding high-performance (ie racing) electric vehicles. All of these are technologies which exist now. The only real barrier is retrofitting existing manufacturing facilities to work with a (completely) new system and getting over that intital cost hump. Until the major automakers decide that they really want to mass produce such vehicles, their costs will most likely remain prohibitive. But the automakers don't want to produce them because they cost too much now. And then there's the petroleum lobby.
There are certainly plenty of barriers, but it's feasible stuff, and worth developing, IMHO.
Really, as many others have pointed out, a big ISA card is really not an elegant way to achieve a relatively simple redirect. However, I have long dreamed of the day when I would be able to crack open my case and install something like a VNC "video" card... Think about it-- compatibility with any operating system, mad hardware acceleration with X (and, for mass-market appeal, DirectX)... Of course, we all say, why bother? Servers don't need graphics... Well, were this implemented efficiently and effectively, it could probably become quite a marketable product... Not only would this be of unspeakable utility for people managing pools of heterogeniety (some people HAVE to use NT), but it could become a cost effective method of console extension for musicians, visual artists, whatnot... There are plenty of people out there (myself included) who would REALLY LIKE to place their non-OS-specific console significantly further than six feet away from their non-OS-specific machines. Without losing video quality. However, the extension hardware currently existing to accomplish this is expensive as all hell. A server card in each machine, a standalone client box, and a switch. I mean, of course I've just completely avoided any practical design issues-- transport, security, whatnot-- but this would be quite doable, and mad wicked. Any hardware manufacturers listening out there?
Slashdot Mirror
Audio will be posted online at 10pm ET tonight, or you might be able to catch it on the radio-- it's the next to last piece in the program.
(oh yeah-- right now, it's titled "Napster." ignore that; someone was smoking crack.)
C|Net and ZDNet are reporting that the new variant not only chooses random subject lines for its email carriers, but also adds comments to its own script, in an attempt to thwart fingerprinting.
My question: who actually needs email-attached scripts to have write access to the registry and filesystem? And who thought there were enough of these people to allow such access by default?
Generally speaking, if there was no clause in the contract explicitly stating that the work done by the previous company was to be considered a "work made for hire," the previous company is considered the author, and thus, the controlling party of IP rights.
Circular 9 from the Copyright Office does a good job of explaining these issues.
From the circular:
Amen. For the love of god.
Visual Basic does what it is supposed to do and, over the years, has come to do it damn well. True, earlier revisions of the language were really weak, but it has evolved into an excellent language for rapid application development. It is quick to write, easy to debug, and, with a bit of creativity, can be used to do a bloody lot. For someone who has to do a lot of quick, turnkey Windows application development, I can vouch for the legitimacy of the language. I can write 98% of the code I need in VB, debug it, package it, and deploy it very quickly, and not have to worry about killer alloc problems, whatnot. Other people may not like it, but there is certainly a sizable chunk of people who do.
VB is criticized for being a "Basic." So the English-centric language is more accessable to the novice programmer than C. This results in a greater number of novices using VB than using C, thus meaning that there are going to be a larger concentration of novices in the VB world than in the C world. It is easier to turn out compilable code in VB than C. But given a good programmer, you will get good code out of either language. It's the programmer that really matters, remember? A good programmer can pick a convenient tool and turn good stuff out of it. Not all of us live in a non-Microsoft world.
But, if we're really going to talk smack about languages, then, for the love of god, don't hold C or Javascript up as some kind of "perfect" creation. The principals of something like Squeak make for much better argument.
----
I am not a Microsoft groupie, but I'm not going to break my neck avoiding them when there are more productive and convenient ways for me to get my job done.
I didn't see this posted already, so here goes:
ZDNet has a copy of the original WSJ Interactive article at http://www.zdnet.com/ zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2543490,00.html. It's much better than the anemic AP and CBS reports.
Not only is power generation more efficient en masse, but electric cars can also employ regenerative braking, a system in which the vehicle is slowed by the magnetic drag of the vehicle's motors, thus converting its kinetic energy, no longer wanted, into potential energy in its batteries, instead. Of course the system isn't 100% efficient (duh), but it's unspeakably better than simply throwing all that energy away by converting it into heat with break pads.
It also serves worth noting that hybrid electric vehicles can be made extremely efficient as well, even when the "hybrid" involves a traditional internal combustion engine: An engine running at a constant speed and load (or a very tight range thereof) can be fine-tuned to maximum efficiency in that target mode of operation. One of the things that makes current automotive internal combustion engines so inefficient is the wide range of conditions which they must serve.
In addition, finely-tuned engines serving an electric "drivetrain" can be made significantly smaller, simpler, and lighter-weight than their traditional counterparts, for the aforementioned reason. All in all, this makes for some dramatic increases in efficiency (I'd give figures, but I don't have my automotive engineering notes handy at the moment) without sacrificing range of travel and without completely alienating the petroleum industry.
Factor in recent advances in energy storage technology and regenerative braking, and you could have a ridiculously fuel-efficient vehicle that still ran (secondarily, primarily, or completely) on petroleum.
There was an interesting article in the March 1999 issue of Wired regarding high-performance (ie racing) electric vehicles. All of these are technologies which exist now. The only real barrier is retrofitting existing manufacturing facilities to work with a (completely) new system and getting over that intital cost hump. Until the major automakers decide that they really want to mass produce such vehicles, their costs will most likely remain prohibitive. But the automakers don't want to produce them because they cost too much now. And then there's the petroleum lobby.
There are certainly plenty of barriers, but it's feasible stuff, and worth developing, IMHO.
Really, as many others have pointed out, a big ISA card is really not an elegant way to achieve a relatively simple redirect. However, I have long dreamed of the day when I would be able to crack open my case and install something like a VNC "video" card... Think about it-- compatibility with any operating system, mad hardware acceleration with X (and, for mass-market appeal, DirectX)... Of course, we all say, why bother? Servers don't need graphics... Well, were this implemented efficiently and effectively, it could probably become quite a marketable product... Not only would this be of unspeakable utility for people managing pools of heterogeniety (some people HAVE to use NT), but it could become a cost effective method of console extension for musicians, visual artists, whatnot... There are plenty of people out there (myself included) who would REALLY LIKE to place their non-OS-specific console significantly further than six feet away from their non-OS-specific machines. Without losing video quality. However, the extension hardware currently existing to accomplish this is expensive as all hell. A server card in each machine, a standalone client box, and a switch. I mean, of course I've just completely avoided any practical design issues-- transport, security, whatnot-- but this would be quite doable, and mad wicked. Any hardware manufacturers listening out there?