It's kind of a technicality really, having to do with how sinusoidal functions can be expressed as sum of exponentials with imaginary arguments
cos(x)=(1/2)(exp(j*x)+exp(-j*x))
The propagating wave is after all a sinusoidal function: it has the form cos(x-2*pi*f*t) where f is the frequency and t the time.
What we are doing when dealing with the maths behind electromagnetic fields is mostly playing with the sinus argument, or (it's the same) with the exponential's argument.
If the exponentials' arguments in the above example are pure imaginary, they will represent a wave that is constant in amplitude. If they are pure-real, it will just be some field that decreases exponentially along the X direction.
So the imaginary numbers are just a mean to simplify the maths behind trigonometric functions.
Keep in mind this is an oversimplified example. With EMF you have to account for multiple overlapping fields, propagation directions, and other amenities along these lines (which seem simple but have quite a messy math behind their backs). The point is, the imaginary numbers are not related to the waves' amplitude, but to a mathematical semplification of the function explaining how they propagate.
About the power: there _is_ power flowing, just not in the direction you'd expect (let's try ascii art)
<-|^ --|| --|| --|| ->|| --| ^-- direction of the energy propagation ^---- interface ^^^^^^incoming and reflected wave
There could be transmission if the propagated energy moved forwards, but it doesn't: it propagates "sideways". So you can see some power, it just doesn't come from where you'd expect it to.
Because the EMF in the "forward" part of the interface does not propagate. In mathematical terms, its propagation coefficient is pure-real (you have to have an imaginary part to have propagation). It is definitely there, but it is maintained by the waves propagating in the other direction (parallel to the interface).
Short answer: evanescent waves can't carry information because thery convey no power.
Long answer (I'll try to keep it simple): when a beam of EMW (electro-magnetic waves) hits the interface between two materials, it gets partially reflected (and thus returns to the side where it came from), and partially refracted (that is, "goes forward"). Think of the effect you have when you look at a stick through the water's surface. How much of the incoming power is reflected and how much is refracted depends on the two materials involved. We're mainly interested in the refraction part at this point, and particularly at the angle the EMW beam has with the interface surface. Under certain conditions, the propagation angle of the refracted ("forward") beam with the perpendicular to the interface's surface is bigger than the one of the incoming beam. If we increase the incoming beam's angle, so does the "forward" beam's, until it is completely parallel to the interface. At this angle ("critical angle") the physics of the whole setup change abruptly, and all the incoming power gets reflected. But some kind of EMF is still present in the "forward" part of the interface, generating some field patterns named "evanescent waves". Those waves don't carry power "forward" (because it's all being reflected), but _can_ carry power along the interface. This effect has also been studied for long-distance communications using the earth-to-air interface as a carrier.
I disagree that there wouln't be need for a new standard. As it was said by Jim, the advantage of wavelets is not so much compression (which is slightly better) but in format flexibility (and that's what I wish). As to the fact that the standard will be hurt by IP inclusion. DAMN RIGHT it will be hurt. The fact itself that somebody should discuss and decide whether to adopt it is detrimental to the standard, because it removes attention from the proposed standard's important part (its features) in favor of giving it to "political" considerations. This isn't to say that IP-parts shouldn't be allowed. It's just that they must be add-ons, not required to encode, view or maniipulate the stored data. But they could be useful (in some kind of tagged format) to allow specific additions to the image format, such as tags, layers, or whatever. Think of it kind of the kodak-photocd format: you have the image, and then you have extra info about it.
This said, I only have a cursory knowledge of JP2K, so what I'm suggesting might already be there.
I've got one even more radical mean to disseminate stolen intellectual material. It's called "mail", and (oh, the injustice of it all!) in many countries of the world it's even supported financially by governments, and it doesn't even need a computer to be used! And there are even laws preventing the fine policemen to open every package to look for stolen goods! Do you have an idea of how much intellectual material transits each day illegally by mail? Copied audio cassettes, videos, song texts! But this is not the last word. This "mail" will meet the end of the buffalo, and it will be always too late. It's even possible to have mail completely anonymous, which is not guarranteed by the US constitution, and it makes our marketing guys' life so much harder... This travesty has to end!
The day these bozos will get a clue will be one happy day indeed...
From what I understand, the S{t,m}art Center basically is a RealPlayer that stays resident (eating up RAM), so that when you open a RM clip it doesn't have to be loaded from disk, resulting in a (2 to 3 seconds) faster startup. All in all, a worthless piece of junk.
I downloaded RealPlayer 7 today. It is annoying indeed, because I also got (unwanted) Real Jukebox and Download Daemon, and (almost unwanted) Net2Phone. The bad part is that the installer doesn't ask whether I wish to install those, nor it asks the installation paths and other stuff. Besides, the installer _IS_ bugged, as it doesn't take into account nationalized versions of Wind-Blows which change the "My Documents" directory name. Spent 15 minutes to disable all that stuff, all reporting back to real networks, special offers and everything. Not a real incentive to installing the software.. but then again, normal "luzers" won't care about that stuff and will be happily spammed.
Still, I'm a bit pissed off at this attitude. It's almost as bad as our favourite pun-target, with their "oh, and if you buy our word processor, we'll also slip under your nose a few (sometimes not-entirely-compatible) fixes to your OS".
Besides, Microsoft wouldn't be able to produce the Windows source code even if they wanted. Remember that it failed to do so with Windows 95 in the Caldera/DR-Dos case.
No, your reasoning is flawed, and I'll demonstrate it with a counter-example: Netscape. Netscape is still alive and kicking, despite not having an OS to use as a cash cow or as a springboard, and Netscape _is_ giving away the browser for free (and I doubt AOL or anyone else would have bought it if it was just a money-drain). So the Internet-M$ could have very well given off the browser for free, leveraging maybe on some other sector (better integration with IIS, Portals or whatever else).
I think you might overvalue a trial's value in non-anglosaxon countries. Under English-derived law (is it called common law?) a court precedent has an high value in defining what a lawsuit's setting will be. A court ruling can also overthrow a law, I understand (I am no lawyer, so I might be completely wrong).
Under Roman-law derived judicial systems, a precedent's value is a lot lower than that. I'll take Italy's judicial system as an example: there are three levels of ordinary justice: ordinary, appeal and supreme court, plus a constitutional court which only deals with law-related rulings. Justice courts (including the supreme court) can not overhrow a law, but only interpret it. At most, they can raise an incostitutionality objection ask for a judgment from the constitional court - unconstitutional and contradictory laws are canceled by the constitutional court. Precedents are only set at the supreme court level: while earlier judgements at the ordinary and appeal levels might be taken into account in rare cases (mostly dealing with new laws or new developments of science or technology which are not covered by the law), their value is almost none any at all.
I'm not saying that in Japan the situation is like under Roman Right, just that you might be assuming that their judicial model is the same as in the US. It might be, or it might be something completely different, and thus a ruling in the case you cite might have no value in setting a precedent.
Cowboy BeBop is being aired in Italy by - you'd never guess - MTV. Prime time, even. Alexander, Peter Chung of Aeon Flux fame together with Studio Mad House (Night Warriors is the only title coming to mind, but there's much more) ended last Thursday (MTV, Prime time).
Uhm.. wouln't want to nitpick, but Germany is kind of forbidden from having an army by the (US-imposed) clauses after the end of WWII.
But let's return on topic: IMO geographic size doesn't matter really, what matters more is the populace of a state: Italy (I am italian) has 1/6 of the USA populace, France has more (but I don't remember how much). But then Sweden, with "only" 6 million inhabitants, is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and Norway and Finland should measure on the same scale (I remember a guy named Linus Torvalds to be finnish).
In this case, I believe this regulatory behavior to be the result of an historic governamental paranoia, which leads from time to time to witch hunts.
I don't think that there can be ambiguities about macros and script viruses. While the form might be the same, a script can be enabled to act or not, depending on how it is attached and quoted.
Thus a macro virus is (IMO, but it makes sense) speech when it is quoted or attached in such a way that makes it inactive, while it its functional "face" prevails when it is put in condition to act, especially when it is encoded in such a way to be hidden from the user.
But there are also a lot of users for which this does not make ANY sense: those paying internet connectivity by the minute for instance.
You lose the ability to do segmented downloads, and so you have to stay N hours online. Then there's a quirk to the Net when you're at 90%, and you're off from step 0 again.
Or you're an university student with dialup connectivity at home. What's better, spending N hours online at home or just downloading the package at the Uni, put it on a ZIP disk or whatever and then install it at home?
Or maybe you don't have any Windows computer in your university lab, and so you can't download IE and take it home because the only installer is for windwows (don't laugh, it happened to me).
Or, again, you are at home with dialup and wish to install the software on 2 computers. Instant 6-8 hours online.
Should I continue? The point is clear: there are cases where installers are just a plain bad idea (not always, but still producers should leave the choice).
Usually free licenses are given for free as a demo, and because of that reason they explicitly have a termination date, and explicitly state that they can be terminated at any moment at the licenser's whim. Those kind of licenses are quite a lot, and they are presumably very frequent in literature (I am no lawyer, but I guess that the companies seeing their demo versions being used in production environments could have been quite a few along the years).
About the validity of the GPL: I don't see what's the difference between it and a shrink-wrap-type license. So the DMCA (may it rot in hell) could for once be turned in our favor, adding weight to it.
About the revokability of the GPL: if (as stated by the DMCA) the GPL (being a shrink-wrap-type license) is fully binding, and since it doesn't have a termination clause (the only termination condition covers the case when the license's terms are violated), the copyright holder can do absolutely nothing to terminate it. Maybe it would be a good thing(TM) if the case was taken to court: it would be a field testing of the GPL, allowing the FSF to come up with a more enforceable version if it didn't hold.
IMVVHO CyberPatrol could be maybe sued for false advertisement or something similar, because its new release blocks the cphack sites under every category.
They're the same people that can't have a positive attitude if their life depends on it, and in my opinion they scrounge off a community (any community, not just this one) rather than being a part of it.
I've never been interested in Jason's work before, and frankly right now I don't really care about what he's done or what he'd be able to do. What I see is a (freshly-formed) family going through a hard time, and I think I see a community responsive to their ordeals.
Those of us that can't be positive about this (or anything else, for that matter) can just go cower in their little hole, I don't care.
Jason, Cassie, hang on. You won't be alone in facing this.
Because the Un*x programmers usually have security among their concerns, and in a pretty high position at that. So you usually get apps that are security-conscious in the first place, and that get fixed ASAP when some exploit appears.
In some very limited situations NetBEUI still makes sense. For instance in an office with 2-3 PCs that want to share printer and files, and don't have any Net access. In that case the configuration overhead can be more significant than the cost of using that crappy protocol. In fact, in this scenario, I'd use netbeui. Not in any other, really.
2-3 years ago Microsoft released a version of Internet Explorer (3, I believe) for Solaris and HP-UX. I have _NEVER_ seen a slower program. It looked like they had re-implemented the entire Windows (3.X) OS (including the sucky cursors) inside a Solaris process.
Seriously, porting Office to Un*x is a serious challenge. Between the N-thousand Windows APIs and the alleged undocumented ones, I believe it should be rewritten mostly from scratch...
Europe is rightfully pissed off, I might add (yes, I am european, as you might guess). The point you seem to be missing is that the echelon is outside Europe's control, and this pisses me off greatly (well, it just adds to the fact that being spied upon pisses me off a great deal too). Let's put this thing in another perspective: while you probably occasionally check your back lawn to keep it clean and tidy, wouldn't you be pissed if your neighbor pointed some hidden surveillance camera to your lawn without telling you, without asking for your permission, without being accountable, and possibly selling videos of your lifemate sunbathing nude to his friends in the neighborhood? Because this is exactly what echelon does.
Uhm, I heard it a bit different actually (from people who have worked for and with Microsoft).
I've heard that most MS employees are so caught in their own hype and (InTheirOp) rightful superiority, that they're almost impossible to deal with for those other MS employees who don't believe in that male bovine organic waste.
For this reason I (yes, I am looking for a job) didn't even apply at Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of a technicality really, having to do with how sinusoidal functions can be expressed as sum of exponentials with imaginary arguments
cos(x)=(1/2)(exp(j*x)+exp(-j*x))
The propagating wave is after all a sinusoidal function: it has the form
cos(x-2*pi*f*t)
where f is the frequency and t the time.
What we are doing when dealing with the maths behind electromagnetic fields is mostly playing with the sinus argument, or (it's the same) with the exponential's argument.
If the exponentials' arguments in the above example are pure imaginary, they will represent a wave that is constant in amplitude. If they are pure-real, it will just be some field that decreases exponentially along the X direction.
So the imaginary numbers are just a mean to simplify the maths behind trigonometric functions.
Keep in mind this is an oversimplified example. With EMF you have to account for multiple overlapping fields, propagation directions, and other amenities along these lines (which seem simple but have quite a messy math behind their backs). The point is, the imaginary numbers are not related to the waves' amplitude, but to a mathematical semplification of the function explaining how they propagate.
About the power: there _is_ power flowing, just not in the direction you'd expect (let's try ascii art)
<-|^
--||
--||
--||
->||
--|
^-- direction of the energy propagation
^---- interface
^^^^^^incoming and reflected wave
There could be transmission if the propagated energy moved forwards, but it doesn't: it propagates "sideways". So you can see some power, it just doesn't come from where you'd expect it to.
Because the EMF in the "forward" part of the interface does not propagate. In mathematical terms, its propagation coefficient is pure-real (you have to have an imaginary part to have propagation). It is definitely there, but it is maintained by the waves propagating in the other direction (parallel to the interface).
Short answer: evanescent waves can't carry information because thery convey no power.
Long answer (I'll try to keep it simple): when a beam of EMW (electro-magnetic waves) hits the interface between two materials, it gets partially reflected (and thus returns to the side where it came from), and partially refracted (that is, "goes forward"). Think of the effect you have when you look at a stick through the water's surface. How much of the incoming power is reflected and how much is refracted depends on the two materials involved.
We're mainly interested in the refraction part at this point, and particularly at the angle the EMW beam has with the interface surface. Under certain conditions, the propagation angle of the refracted ("forward") beam with the perpendicular to the interface's surface is bigger than the one of the incoming beam. If we increase the incoming beam's angle, so does the "forward" beam's, until it is completely parallel to the interface. At this angle ("critical angle") the physics of the whole setup change abruptly, and all the incoming power gets reflected. But some kind of EMF is still present in the "forward" part of the interface, generating some field patterns named "evanescent waves".
Those waves don't carry power "forward" (because it's all being reflected), but _can_ carry power along the interface.
This effect has also been studied for long-distance communications using the earth-to-air interface as a carrier.
I disagree that there wouln't be need for a new standard. As it was said by Jim, the advantage of wavelets is not so much compression (which is slightly better) but in format flexibility (and that's what I wish).
As to the fact that the standard will be hurt by IP inclusion. DAMN RIGHT it will be hurt. The fact itself that somebody should discuss and decide whether to adopt it is detrimental to the standard, because it removes attention from the proposed standard's important part (its features) in favor of giving it to "political" considerations.
This isn't to say that IP-parts shouldn't be allowed. It's just that they must be add-ons, not required to encode, view or maniipulate the stored data. But they could be useful (in some kind of tagged format) to allow specific additions to the image format, such as tags, layers, or whatever. Think of it kind of the kodak-photocd format: you have the image, and then you have extra info about it.
This said, I only have a cursory knowledge of JP2K, so what I'm suggesting might already be there.
I've got one even more radical mean to disseminate stolen intellectual material. It's called "mail", and (oh, the injustice of it all!) in many countries of the world it's even supported financially by governments, and it doesn't even need a computer to be used! And there are even laws preventing the fine policemen to open every package to look for stolen goods!
Do you have an idea of how much intellectual material transits each day illegally by mail? Copied audio cassettes, videos, song texts!
But this is not the last word. This "mail" will meet the end of the buffalo, and it will be always too late. It's even possible to have mail completely anonymous, which is not guarranteed by the US constitution, and it makes our marketing guys' life so much harder... This travesty has to end!
The day these bozos will get a clue will be one happy day indeed...
Roxen (www.roxen.com, distributed under GPL) could be able to handle both Servlets and WAP.
I have never tested those capabilities though.
But then, nothing would remain of the software Giant (well, maybe Sales...)
From what I understand, the S{t,m}art Center basically is a RealPlayer that stays resident (eating up RAM), so that when you open a RM clip it doesn't have to be loaded from disk, resulting in a (2 to 3 seconds) faster startup.
All in all, a worthless piece of junk.
I downloaded RealPlayer 7 today. It is annoying indeed, because I also got (unwanted) Real Jukebox and Download Daemon, and (almost unwanted) Net2Phone. The bad part is that the installer doesn't ask whether I wish to install those, nor it asks the installation paths and other stuff. Besides, the installer _IS_ bugged, as it doesn't take into account nationalized versions of Wind-Blows which change the "My Documents" directory name.
Spent 15 minutes to disable all that stuff, all reporting back to real networks, special offers and everything.
Not a real incentive to installing the software.. but then again, normal "luzers" won't care about that stuff and will be happily spammed.
Still, I'm a bit pissed off at this attitude. It's almost as bad as our favourite pun-target, with their "oh, and if you buy our word processor, we'll also slip under your nose a few (sometimes not-entirely-compatible) fixes to your OS".
Besides, Microsoft wouldn't be able to produce the Windows source code even if they wanted. Remember that it failed to do so with Windows 95 in the Caldera/DR-Dos case.
No, your reasoning is flawed, and I'll demonstrate it with a counter-example: Netscape.
Netscape is still alive and kicking, despite not having an OS to use as a cash cow or as a springboard, and Netscape _is_ giving away the browser for free (and I doubt AOL or anyone else would have bought it if it was just a money-drain).
So the Internet-M$ could have very well given off the browser for free, leveraging maybe on some other sector (better integration with IIS, Portals or whatever else).
I think you might overvalue a trial's value in non-anglosaxon countries.
Under English-derived law (is it called common law?) a court precedent has an high value in defining what a lawsuit's setting will be. A court ruling can also overthrow a law, I understand (I am no lawyer, so I might be completely wrong).
Under Roman-law derived judicial systems, a precedent's value is a lot lower than that.
I'll take Italy's judicial system as an example: there are three levels of ordinary justice: ordinary, appeal and supreme court, plus a constitutional court which only deals with law-related rulings. Justice courts (including the supreme court) can not overhrow a law, but only interpret it. At most, they can raise an incostitutionality objection ask for a judgment from the constitional court - unconstitutional and contradictory laws are canceled by the constitutional court. Precedents are only set at the supreme court level: while earlier judgements at the ordinary and appeal levels might be taken into account in rare cases (mostly dealing with new laws or new developments of science or technology which are not covered by the law), their value is almost none any at all.
I'm not saying that in Japan the situation is like under Roman Right, just that you might be assuming that their judicial model is the same as in the US.
It might be, or it might be something completely different, and thus a ruling in the case you cite might have no value in setting a precedent.
Cowboy BeBop is being aired in Italy by - you'd never guess - MTV. Prime time, even.
Alexander, Peter Chung of Aeon Flux fame together with Studio Mad House (Night Warriors is the only title coming to mind, but there's much more) ended last Thursday (MTV, Prime time).
In fact, that Batman is a c -production between US, Japanese and Korean studios.
Uhm.. wouln't want to nitpick, but Germany is kind of forbidden from having an army by the (US-imposed) clauses after the end of WWII.
But let's return on topic: IMO geographic size doesn't matter really, what matters more is the populace of a state: Italy (I am italian) has 1/6 of the USA populace, France has more (but I don't remember how much). But then Sweden, with "only" 6 million inhabitants, is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and Norway and Finland should measure on the same scale (I remember a guy named Linus Torvalds to be finnish).
In this case, I believe this regulatory behavior to be the result of an historic governamental paranoia, which leads from time to time to witch hunts.
I don't think that there can be ambiguities about macros and script viruses. While the form might be the same, a script can be enabled to act or not, depending on how it is attached and quoted.
Thus a macro virus is (IMO, but it makes sense) speech when it is quoted or attached in such a way that makes it inactive, while it its functional "face" prevails when it is put in condition to act, especially when it is encoded in such a way to be hidden from the user.
But there are also a lot of users for which this does not make ANY sense: those paying internet connectivity by the minute for instance.
You lose the ability to do segmented downloads, and so you have to stay N hours online. Then there's a quirk to the Net when you're at 90%, and you're off from step 0 again.
Or you're an university student with dialup connectivity at home. What's better, spending N hours online at home or just downloading the package at the Uni, put it on a ZIP disk or whatever and then install it at home?
Or maybe you don't have any Windows computer in your university lab, and so you can't download IE and take it home because the only installer is for windwows (don't laugh, it happened to me).
Or, again, you are at home with dialup and wish to install the software on 2 computers. Instant 6-8 hours online.
Should I continue? The point is clear: there are cases where installers are just a plain bad idea (not always, but still producers should leave the choice).
It's not clear to me what that "generally" means.
Usually free licenses are given for free as a demo, and because of that reason they explicitly have a termination date, and explicitly state that they can be terminated at any moment at the licenser's whim.
Those kind of licenses are quite a lot, and they are presumably very frequent in literature (I am no lawyer, but I guess that the companies seeing their demo versions being used in production environments could have been quite a few along the years).
About the validity of the GPL: I don't see what's the difference between it and a shrink-wrap-type license. So the DMCA (may it rot in hell) could for once be turned in our favor, adding weight to it.
About the revokability of the GPL: if (as stated by the DMCA) the GPL (being a shrink-wrap-type license) is fully binding, and since it doesn't have a termination clause (the only termination condition covers the case when the license's terms are violated), the copyright holder can do absolutely nothing to terminate it. Maybe it would be a good thing(TM) if the case was taken to court: it would be a field testing of the GPL, allowing the FSF to come up with a more enforceable version if it didn't hold.
IMVVHO CyberPatrol could be maybe sued for false advertisement or something similar, because its new release blocks the cphack sites under every category.
There are jerks in every community.
They're the same people that can't have a positive attitude if their life depends on it, and in my opinion they scrounge off a community (any community, not just this one) rather than being a part of it.
I've never been interested in Jason's work before, and frankly right now I don't really care about what he's done or what he'd be able to do. What I see is a (freshly-formed) family going through a hard time, and I think I see a community responsive to their ordeals.
Those of us that can't be positive about this (or anything else, for that matter) can just go cower in their little hole, I don't care.
Jason, Cassie, hang on. You won't be alone in facing this.
Because they're also lazy (it's a good thing sometimes...)?
Buffer overflows have always existed, in all kinds of software. But you can go hunting them (see OpenBSD).
Because the Un*x programmers usually have security among their concerns, and in a pretty high position at that.
So you usually get apps that are security-conscious in the first place, and that get fixed ASAP when some exploit appears.
In some very limited situations NetBEUI still makes sense. For instance in an office with 2-3 PCs that want to share printer and files, and don't have any Net access.
In that case the configuration overhead can be more significant than the cost of using that crappy protocol. In fact, in this scenario, I'd use netbeui. Not in any other, really.
2-3 years ago Microsoft released a version of Internet Explorer (3, I believe) for Solaris and HP-UX. I have _NEVER_ seen a slower program. It looked like they had re-implemented the entire Windows (3.X) OS (including the sucky cursors) inside a Solaris process.
Seriously, porting Office to Un*x is a serious challenge. Between the N-thousand Windows APIs and the alleged undocumented ones, I believe it should be rewritten mostly from scratch...
I'll wait and see, but won't hold my breath.
Europe is rightfully pissed off, I might add (yes, I am european, as you might guess).
The point you seem to be missing is that the echelon is outside Europe's control, and this pisses me off greatly (well, it just adds to the fact that being spied upon pisses me off a great deal too).
Let's put this thing in another perspective: while you probably occasionally check your back lawn to keep it clean and tidy, wouldn't you be pissed if your neighbor pointed some hidden surveillance camera to your lawn without telling you, without asking for your permission, without being accountable, and possibly selling videos of your lifemate sunbathing nude to his friends in the neighborhood? Because this is exactly what echelon does.
Uhm, I heard it a bit different actually (from people who have worked for and with Microsoft).
I've heard that most MS employees are so caught in their own hype and (InTheirOp) rightful superiority, that they're almost impossible to deal with for those other MS employees who don't believe in that male bovine organic waste.
For this reason I (yes, I am looking for a job) didn't even apply at Microsoft.