But as the article says, Teoma will probably never replace Google.
In some ways, Teoma is more innovative. It's using an extension of an algorithm designed a few years ago by researchers, HITS, that actually goes beyond just searching an index based on a keyword into utilizing the idea of social networks to try to get you closer to what you want. However, this probably impacts search speeds, which I'm guessing is a lot of the reason why their searchspace is so much smaller than the ones used by more contemporary search engines like Yahoo! or Google.
People don't really dig that far with search engines, and I think Teoma's features will be wasted because of this -- most people are just using it to look up the domain for an organization rather than exhaustively researching every page they can get their hands on.
I wasn't thinking that big. I'm saying that the answer doesn't line up properly with the question.
Think about it: what kind of 'support liability' would these certifying OEMs be in for if people are pulling the binaries for free? Hell, I can drop a few bills on commercial software and the company I'm buying the software from feels no obligation to provide support; not without charging per call, at least. I'd be more comfortable if he said "We're not providing binaries because we expect to try to make money from this thing." because that's the simplest logical rationale (not necessarily correct, of course, but less likely to trip up my mind while reading it).
I'm not in any way trying to assert that he is being less than truthful, because I know very little about their business strategy or arrangements between the companies involved. I just wanted to point out that this answer didn't seem logical based on what I've seen in the industry in general and that for me this is usually a red flag to look at things more closely to ensure I understand everything that is going on.
It sounds like they're only trying to restrict things that are going to cause undue mental anguish to others, as they do in parts of Europe (mostly against pro-Nazi sentiment) and even here in the U.S. (slander/libel laws).
I understand the slippery slope argument, but it just as easily tilts the other way doesn't it? People have been known to get inflamed over certain types of speech. We need to maintain a healthy balance between a free society and a peaceful society: truly, that's what democracy is about at its heart.
A friend has one of these. As mentioned in the article, these are a lot easier to read (at the expense of battery life) and also quite a bit faster than the 3800 series. He's trying to figure out how to hack Linux into it to no avail, but Microsoft's operating system WinCE seems to work nicely for what he needs it for. It looks kind of pricey though, and personally I'd go for a Palm Pilot.
Assuming a tiny bootstrap program was created that altered the kernel and loaded it into memory on-the-fly, would either the program or the alterations need to be made public?
Too many times, I have had minor filesystem incompatibilities shifting even from one Linux kernel version to the next. But even with a perfect kernel, everything above it is constantly shifting and hopelessly complex.
For example, I am now forced to interpret MiB (Men in Black) units when I check my network interface. Did I miss a meeting? Trying to get fonts working -- perhaps one of the simplest operations in Windows next to Solitare operation, BTW -- is a two-day adventure, and don't even think about trying to operate a printer. I use Debian, and while testing Gentoo next to it I find that I am capable of burning a CD-R by using 'cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=16 -v' (have to figure out how to enable BurnFREE someday)... under Debian, I still can't get it to recognize a standard ATAPI burner!
These are the things I hope UnitedLinux can address. Give us one of everything to make support problems easier to diagnose -- one window manager (KDE), one MP3 player (XMMS), one video app (MPlayer), etc. Test everything thoroughly to guard against trojanned Open Source applications and only release upgrades a CD at a time to reduce dependency breakage. Then we'll have something to compete with Microsoft.
Here's a tip: whenever a business is trying to tell you they're doing something for your protection or to continue the high level of service you've come to expect from them, watch your ass. As an example, the following response to "Why will source be offered for free but not binaries?"
The binaries that are certified by the major ISVs and OEMs will not be made freely available for distribution by anyone. This is to limit the support liability for these companies and to ensure a high quality, consistent product around the world for support purposes.
The question itself is typical from the community that has grown to embrace Open Source, but the answer is pure PR fluff. Keep an eye out for this technique; you'll see it in play whenever cable rates go up or a business is about to make it harder for you to cash a check.
Over in Japan, I've seen the same thing they're basing these kiosks on. Essentially, they'll copy a disc from memory while you stand there, and finish the average CD in about 30 seconds (match that with a CD burner!) I don't have a golden ear, so I can't say whether the quality is better than home burning, but I don't think they're burning from MP3 but from the real disc which is probably where this claim is based. A laser printer spits out the cover art and a robotic assembly actually composes a replica of the real CD, such that after this thing gets done it gives you a shrinkwrapped CD similar to what you'd buy off of the rack. Then, it plays what is preset as the best track from the CD as it dances around the floor for a couple of minutes as an advertisement to other people in the store.
I thought it was indescribably cool. The floorspace taken up by the dancing routine is a bit wasteful, but if you figure that you can replace several racks of CDs with one of these units I think it is well worth it.
Please view this. It would appear to refute the judge's opinion, although there are other arguments for and against the validity of EULAs as contracts.
Yeah, I can't stand walking through that labyrinth either when I know precisely what I want. Running Debian still requires a decent level of functional knowledge about computers, I think, so it's rather irritating to hit an official page that claims to know better than I do whether I want the stuff on an.ISO.
OTOH, I thought the automated method of regenerating an.ISO by patching together the individual files downloaded from the mirrors into a single file, comparing the checksum of each block of that file against a rsync site with the ISO, and downloading the differences was an awesome way of conserving server bandwidth. It sounds complex, but it only adds a couple of steps over grabbing via FTP and the speed is so much better around new release time.
Did they ever get back to us on the whole EULA thing? Given that it's been a few weeks since they were going to tell us what the master plan was, I kind of feel like they're trying to put a lid on the whole deal and hoping that it'll blow over by the time the product hits the shelves. I really hope this isn't the case, as for a fleeting moment there I felt like we were being taken seriously.
They don't have their flavors of the week, but I was able to successfully demonstrate a technique I picked up off of Usenet to my (extremely cool about these sort of things) teacher a few years back. I'm hazy on the details because I haven't used an AS/400 in a while, but I remember I used RPG to dump a screen file to an unused terminal in the classroom and retrieve the fields to my account. I made sure the teacher was around and approved of the test before I ran it -- steps any prospective white hat will take to CYA -- and used one of the display files from an assignment rather than a login screen mockup so that if I hit a terminal in another building accidentally I wouldn't cause unneeded consternation.
Kind of a strange flaw. I don't know if it worked to console as well.
Another potentially disturbing area is database triggers. You can tie bits of code to a database to execute under certain conditions (adding records for example) and it will execute with the permission of the person accessing the database. Definitely something to lock down.
True... this might be something that just takes getting used to, and I'm unfairly judging the medium because I'm projecting (bad pun) my expectation that it will look like what I've grown up with. I know that the first time I played a game that ran at 60fps I felt like it was both more hyper and crisp, but once I got accustomed to it I didn't really feel like going back to my crappy computer system. This is probably the same deal.
It could be that similar forces will direct the adoption of the digital format by the theatres. The movie industry has got to prefer the digital format because they could conceivably watermark it or add other controls in the future. Maybe they'll help subsidize the cost of the projectors.
I might be the odd one out, but I actually prefer watching movies on 35mm. Maybe it's similar to some peoples' preference to recordings on vinyl as opposed to tape or CD. There's just something about digital that seems, well, off. I don't know if it's something like an almost imperceptible but consistent digital artifact in the encoding that my subconcious is picking up on or what. Maybe my mind just prefers imperfections.
I don't know how many of you are cryptobuffs, but you might remember the craze surrounding elliptic curves as a efficient-yet-complex method of obfuscating plaintext. There was a bit of controversy as to whether or not it would lead to predictability because of its nature (ellipses are round, keep in mind, and therefore there was some concern that what goes around comes around and an attacker could just walk full circle to arrive at a key).
Well, I believe that mesh routing might just give us all the pluses without most or all of the minuses. First of all, it involves routing, which if you've paid attention to the formation of the Internet you'll quickly realize is a design that will lead to redundancy and reliability. More importantly, it is a mesh, which means that one end of the key is not necessarily tied to the other end. This should cut off many of the attacks that would have a chance of success on elliptic curves by way of its nature. Meshing also implies redundancy... there may be some size and speed tradeoffs here, but you can be certain you'll get your data back out of the cryptopot.
Bruce Schneier, a luminary in the field of cryptography and author of the book Applied Cryptography, has a web site here.
One of the things that seems to come up consistently in this review is the concept that employing Linux as part of an embedded system solution will be more difficult than buying a commercial product and tailoring it. Does anybody have any real-world example where this was (or wasn't) the case?
Looking at the scenario the book presents, I'd expect to invest a good deal of time in customizing anything to fit the requirements, and it just seemed to me like Linux is far enough along that there wouldn't be a huge difference between trying to make that fit against trying to do, say, a WinCE solution.
We had a pretty thriving BBS community in our area, but naturally all the best boards were long distance. It's kind of strange to be able to access a server in Australia within seconds now without even thinking about what the line charge is going to be, or chat across five or six countries simultaneously, but there's been something lost in the transition between the boards and the Internet. I've never really felt the sense of community on a website, and nothing really seems to have the same sense of cool. Maybe I'm idealizing it, but communication over a network that wouldn't synchronize more than once every day or two seemed more fun for some reason... maybe people used to think more before posting?
Like most people, I hate spam. A lot. And like most people, I value free speech. While I initially cheered when I read the story, now I'm starting to wonder if 'opt-in' is such a good idea.
If the colonies had to 'opt-in' to the revolution, we wouldn't be a country right now.
If people had to 'opt-in' to the civil rights movement, the tyranny of oppression would never have been lifted.
If students had to 'opt-in', what school would have them past the fourth grade?
In conclusion, 'opt-in' is bad for education, for freedom, and for patriotism. Remember to fight 'opt-in' legislation wherever it raises its ugly head to cast a pall against capitalism, independence, and free speech.
Generally, having the type of cash you'd blow on a plasma screen setup precludes having the type of cash you'd blow on a place to live that happens to have a wall without holes in it (or, for that matter, food you're likely to prepare without using a microwave).
I haven't given much thought to a different model, being that I'm comfortable with the following concepts:
A) People who generate intangible products such as stories, music, movies, or computer games deserve to be rewarded for their efforts every bit as much as people who generate tangible products such as flour, furniture, or automobiles.
B) Currently, because we only put value on things that are not limitless, our best idea for having society recognize the value of intangible products (and renumerate their creators) is to set a limit on the products.
C) Who is better suited to set a limit on the products than the creators themselves?
Voila, I actually do support the concept of copyright, at least until something better comes along.
But in another attempt to spell out what I was saying: copyright does not mesh perfectly with a free market. Copyrighted products show some of the same symptoms as products churned out by a monopoly because copyright holders are assigned monopoly rights over their product. I'm stating observations. I'm not saying I'm against this. I'm not advocating the overthrow of the system.
My honest opinion, since you're the second person that seems to think I'm spouting anti-Copyright propoganda rather than just making an observation about it: I'd advocate a continuance of the current system with an affirmation of fair use rights, a restriction on the implementation of any system that could impede those rights with careful attention to preserving the material for the public domain, and a huge chopping-back of the copyright terms to something resembling fair (shorter than Jeffersonian given the relative increases in publication, duplication, and distribution technology since then). I'd recommend a separate term for software where the pace of development generally obsoletes it in 3-5 years.
A short-term monopoly encourages creation of a particular work. A long-term monopoly stagnates it, reduces the incentive to create, and harms those who have the incentive to create because nothing new is going into the pool of public works. It's a scale that needs balancing, and while it'll provide irritation to the entrenched interests it'll benefit society by prodding them to create more while adding a backlog of 70 or so years of culture into the pool for new artists and authors to draw from.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm attempting to describe why the effects of copyright on price margins mimic the effects of a monopoly on price margins in regards to the post at the very top of this thread. I'll address your post, but again it's out of the scope of my original point (copyright is a government-assigned monopoly on a particular creative work).
For a while at least our country was running on the assumption that the market itself is fit to determine what the appropriate price for a product will be. It's all well and good if you want to sell sacks of flour for $50; the market will hand you your hat when your competition is selling the same amount at $1 per sack. The idea is that (in general!) the price will never drop below the level at which the product can be produced or rise above the level at which the market can afford it.
If you are the sole producer for flour in the country, or are colluding with the Big 3 flour producers to hold the price artifically high by refusing to compete, then you are not permitting market forces to work and you (used to) run afoul of antitrust laws.
My argument is actually that you can't perfectly apply this model to copyrighted material because it is a sanctioned monopoly on the material. That's it. Anything else that you get out of these comments about my attitude towards whether or not this is appropriate is an assumption.
You're taking my point out of scope. If I want a new Metallica CD (quite the assumption, that, but run with it), my legal options are paying the price their representatives want me to pay or taking a pass. It's not like buying salt, packing material, or beer -- buying a Limp Biskit CD will not get me the material from the Metallica CD.
One thing to take into consideration in regards to this point is that, when you think about it, copyright is all about granting someone a monopoly over a particular creative work. If I don't like the pricing on the latest Metallica CD I can't just wander over and buy a competitor's version. It's a natural consequence and probably a necessary evil of copyright law, just as inflated drug prices are a consequence of patent law (you notice how quickly those drop when a patent expires?)
is that the current trend is to increase copyright terms into incredibly ridiculous territories (which I define as being longer than the human lifespan) instead of decreasing the terms, which one would think would be the natural response given the advances we've made in distribution technologies such as automated printing presses, aircraft, and the Internet. The time it takes to fairly achieve a return on creating a work has been going down dramatically, given how quickly it can be duplicated and transported to where it can be sold -- it's no longer a bunch of monks transcribing a book by hand for months, or even a hand-cranked printing press -- yet we're expected to believe that we need to ramp the restrictions up precisely because of the advances in distribution technology? I don't need someone to refute a guy that argues that taking 25 years off of the current copyright limit will unfairly hurt the industry because it's obvious he's full of it.
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways, Teoma is more innovative. It's using an extension of an algorithm designed a few years ago by researchers, HITS, that actually goes beyond just searching an index based on a keyword into utilizing the idea of social networks to try to get you closer to what you want. However, this probably impacts search speeds, which I'm guessing is a lot of the reason why their searchspace is so much smaller than the ones used by more contemporary search engines like Yahoo! or Google.
People don't really dig that far with search engines, and I think Teoma's features will be wasted because of this -- most people are just using it to look up the domain for an organization rather than exhaustively researching every page they can get their hands on.
Think about it: what kind of 'support liability' would these certifying OEMs be in for if people are pulling the binaries for free? Hell, I can drop a few bills on commercial software and the company I'm buying the software from feels no obligation to provide support; not without charging per call, at least. I'd be more comfortable if he said "We're not providing binaries because we expect to try to make money from this thing." because that's the simplest logical rationale (not necessarily correct, of course, but less likely to trip up my mind while reading it).
I'm not in any way trying to assert that he is being less than truthful, because I know very little about their business strategy or arrangements between the companies involved. I just wanted to point out that this answer didn't seem logical based on what I've seen in the industry in general and that for me this is usually a red flag to look at things more closely to ensure I understand everything that is going on.
I understand the slippery slope argument, but it just as easily tilts the other way doesn't it? People have been known to get inflamed over certain types of speech. We need to maintain a healthy balance between a free society and a peaceful society: truly, that's what democracy is about at its heart.
A friend has one of these. As mentioned in the article, these are a lot easier to read (at the expense of battery life) and also quite a bit faster than the 3800 series. He's trying to figure out how to hack Linux into it to no avail, but Microsoft's operating system WinCE seems to work nicely for what he needs it for. It looks kind of pricey though, and personally I'd go for a Palm Pilot.
Assuming a tiny bootstrap program was created that altered the kernel and loaded it into memory on-the-fly, would either the program or the alterations need to be made public?
For example, I am now forced to interpret MiB (Men in Black) units when I check my network interface. Did I miss a meeting? Trying to get fonts working -- perhaps one of the simplest operations in Windows next to Solitare operation, BTW -- is a two-day adventure, and don't even think about trying to operate a printer. I use Debian, and while testing Gentoo next to it I find that I am capable of burning a CD-R by using 'cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,0,0 speed=16 -v' (have to figure out how to enable BurnFREE someday)... under Debian, I still can't get it to recognize a standard ATAPI burner!
These are the things I hope UnitedLinux can address. Give us one of everything to make support problems easier to diagnose -- one window manager (KDE), one MP3 player (XMMS), one video app (MPlayer), etc. Test everything thoroughly to guard against trojanned Open Source applications and only release upgrades a CD at a time to reduce dependency breakage. Then we'll have something to compete with Microsoft.
The binaries that are certified by the major ISVs and OEMs will not be made freely available for distribution by anyone. This is to limit the support liability for these companies and to ensure a high quality, consistent product around the world for support purposes.
The question itself is typical from the community that has grown to embrace Open Source, but the answer is pure PR fluff. Keep an eye out for this technique; you'll see it in play whenever cable rates go up or a business is about to make it harder for you to cash a check.
I thought it was indescribably cool. The floorspace taken up by the dancing routine is a bit wasteful, but if you figure that you can replace several racks of CDs with one of these units I think it is well worth it.
Please view this. It would appear to refute the judge's opinion, although there are other arguments for and against the validity of EULAs as contracts.
OTOH, I thought the automated method of regenerating an .ISO by patching together the individual files downloaded from the mirrors into a single file, comparing the checksum of each block of that file against a rsync site with the ISO, and downloading the differences was an awesome way of conserving server bandwidth. It sounds complex, but it only adds a couple of steps over grabbing via FTP and the speed is so much better around new release time.
Did they ever get back to us on the whole EULA thing? Given that it's been a few weeks since they were going to tell us what the master plan was, I kind of feel like they're trying to put a lid on the whole deal and hoping that it'll blow over by the time the product hits the shelves. I really hope this isn't the case, as for a fleeting moment there I felt like we were being taken seriously.
Kind of a strange flaw. I don't know if it worked to console as well.
Another potentially disturbing area is database triggers. You can tie bits of code to a database to execute under certain conditions (adding records for example) and it will execute with the permission of the person accessing the database. Definitely something to lock down.
True... this might be something that just takes getting used to, and I'm unfairly judging the medium because I'm projecting (bad pun) my expectation that it will look like what I've grown up with. I know that the first time I played a game that ran at 60fps I felt like it was both more hyper and crisp, but once I got accustomed to it I didn't really feel like going back to my crappy computer system. This is probably the same deal.
It could be that similar forces will direct the adoption of the digital format by the theatres. The movie industry has got to prefer the digital format because they could conceivably watermark it or add other controls in the future. Maybe they'll help subsidize the cost of the projectors.
I might be the odd one out, but I actually prefer watching movies on 35mm. Maybe it's similar to some peoples' preference to recordings on vinyl as opposed to tape or CD. There's just something about digital that seems, well, off. I don't know if it's something like an almost imperceptible but consistent digital artifact in the encoding that my subconcious is picking up on or what. Maybe my mind just prefers imperfections.
Well, I believe that mesh routing might just give us all the pluses without most or all of the minuses. First of all, it involves routing, which if you've paid attention to the formation of the Internet you'll quickly realize is a design that will lead to redundancy and reliability. More importantly, it is a mesh, which means that one end of the key is not necessarily tied to the other end. This should cut off many of the attacks that would have a chance of success on elliptic curves by way of its nature. Meshing also implies redundancy... there may be some size and speed tradeoffs here, but you can be certain you'll get your data back out of the cryptopot.
Bruce Schneier, a luminary in the field of cryptography and author of the book Applied Cryptography, has a web site here.
Looking at the scenario the book presents, I'd expect to invest a good deal of time in customizing anything to fit the requirements, and it just seemed to me like Linux is far enough along that there wouldn't be a huge difference between trying to make that fit against trying to do, say, a WinCE solution.
We had a pretty thriving BBS community in our area, but naturally all the best boards were long distance. It's kind of strange to be able to access a server in Australia within seconds now without even thinking about what the line charge is going to be, or chat across five or six countries simultaneously, but there's been something lost in the transition between the boards and the Internet. I've never really felt the sense of community on a website, and nothing really seems to have the same sense of cool. Maybe I'm idealizing it, but communication over a network that wouldn't synchronize more than once every day or two seemed more fun for some reason... maybe people used to think more before posting?
If the colonies had to 'opt-in' to the revolution, we wouldn't be a country right now.
If people had to 'opt-in' to the civil rights movement, the tyranny of oppression would never have been lifted.
If students had to 'opt-in', what school would have them past the fourth grade?
In conclusion, 'opt-in' is bad for education, for freedom, and for patriotism. Remember to fight 'opt-in' legislation wherever it raises its ugly head to cast a pall against capitalism, independence, and free speech.
Sincerely,
The DMA^W^WA Concerned Citizen
Generally, having the type of cash you'd blow on a plasma screen setup precludes having the type of cash you'd blow on a place to live that happens to have a wall without holes in it (or, for that matter, food you're likely to prepare without using a microwave).
A) People who generate intangible products such as stories, music, movies, or computer games deserve to be rewarded for their efforts every bit as much as people who generate tangible products such as flour, furniture, or automobiles.
B) Currently, because we only put value on things that are not limitless, our best idea for having society recognize the value of intangible products (and renumerate their creators) is to set a limit on the products.
C) Who is better suited to set a limit on the products than the creators themselves?
Voila, I actually do support the concept of copyright, at least until something better comes along.
But in another attempt to spell out what I was saying: copyright does not mesh perfectly with a free market. Copyrighted products show some of the same symptoms as products churned out by a monopoly because copyright holders are assigned monopoly rights over their product. I'm stating observations. I'm not saying I'm against this. I'm not advocating the overthrow of the system.
My honest opinion, since you're the second person that seems to think I'm spouting anti-Copyright propoganda rather than just making an observation about it: I'd advocate a continuance of the current system with an affirmation of fair use rights, a restriction on the implementation of any system that could impede those rights with careful attention to preserving the material for the public domain, and a huge chopping-back of the copyright terms to something resembling fair (shorter than Jeffersonian given the relative increases in publication, duplication, and distribution technology since then). I'd recommend a separate term for software where the pace of development generally obsoletes it in 3-5 years.
A short-term monopoly encourages creation of a particular work. A long-term monopoly stagnates it, reduces the incentive to create, and harms those who have the incentive to create because nothing new is going into the pool of public works. It's a scale that needs balancing, and while it'll provide irritation to the entrenched interests it'll benefit society by prodding them to create more while adding a backlog of 70 or so years of culture into the pool for new artists and authors to draw from.
For a while at least our country was running on the assumption that the market itself is fit to determine what the appropriate price for a product will be. It's all well and good if you want to sell sacks of flour for $50; the market will hand you your hat when your competition is selling the same amount at $1 per sack. The idea is that (in general!) the price will never drop below the level at which the product can be produced or rise above the level at which the market can afford it.
If you are the sole producer for flour in the country, or are colluding with the Big 3 flour producers to hold the price artifically high by refusing to compete, then you are not permitting market forces to work and you (used to) run afoul of antitrust laws.
My argument is actually that you can't perfectly apply this model to copyrighted material because it is a sanctioned monopoly on the material. That's it. Anything else that you get out of these comments about my attitude towards whether or not this is appropriate is an assumption.
You're taking my point out of scope. If I want a new Metallica CD (quite the assumption, that, but run with it), my legal options are paying the price their representatives want me to pay or taking a pass. It's not like buying salt, packing material, or beer -- buying a Limp Biskit CD will not get me the material from the Metallica CD.
At least patents expire.
is that the current trend is to increase copyright terms into incredibly ridiculous territories (which I define as being longer than the human lifespan) instead of decreasing the terms, which one would think would be the natural response given the advances we've made in distribution technologies such as automated printing presses, aircraft, and the Internet. The time it takes to fairly achieve a return on creating a work has been going down dramatically, given how quickly it can be duplicated and transported to where it can be sold -- it's no longer a bunch of monks transcribing a book by hand for months, or even a hand-cranked printing press -- yet we're expected to believe that we need to ramp the restrictions up precisely because of the advances in distribution technology? I don't need someone to refute a guy that argues that taking 25 years off of the current copyright limit will unfairly hurt the industry because it's obvious he's full of it.