This is the Wall Street Journal reporting this. If they say it's a rumor, it's a rumor. In this case, they don't. In all the years I've read the WSJ, they've never been wrong on this sort of thing.
Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a DVD. The word 2001 is huge (if you have a huge display) but "A Space Odyssey" is barely legible-- even on the 80-inch picture from my projector. I, for one, am waiting for (1) an HD replacement for DVDs to take hold, and (2) prices to come down on HD projectors. I've been waiting for five years so far, and I expect to wait another five years. But this is a step in the right direction.
Encrypt away, they'll subpoena the email, you're right. Then they'll subpoena the passphrase. If you don't comply with the subpoena for the passphrase, they'll obtain a search warrant, and find where you wrote it down, admit it, its in a card in your wallet, or in some pass store software, isn't it? Then they'll use good old fashioned forensics to decrypt the shadow cache and drag a list of passwords on your server out in the open.
And finally, if that doesn't work, they'll throw you in jail for contempt of court until such time as you do remember your passphrase.
That depends. Here in the United States, if you are the defendant, they can't subpoena you-- those are for third parties such as Google. They need a search warrant. And while they can search for a password that's written down, you can't be forced to tell them the password, thanks to the Fifth Amendment.
As a writer, I'd like to be paid for my work. I'd rather not make it easy for people to redistribute my work without compensating me.
There's an economic theory that says that for most authors of most books, the number of people who would be willing to pay for your work if they knew about it but who are unlikely to ever discover it is huge. So huge that any mechanism to get the word out-- including ones that could replace most sales-- pays for itself by increasing the audience.
For example, if you have a book with a potential audience of 10 million people, but you are (like most) a relatively unknown author, in most cases you'll end up selling only a few thousand copies-- if you're lucky-- unless you get a big name to back you up. If you give the book away online to everyone, 75% of readers might end up never buying it, but you may boost your readership five or tenfold, as well as boosting people's awareness of you.
Keep in mind that people like print editions of books. It's hard to find a professional programmer who doesn't have a copy of the Programming Perl book, even though the man pages include every word of that book.
I'm not just whistling in the wind. My book can be purchased on Amazon or you can download PDFs of each chapter.
IBM is mostly a consulting firm, which is a fancy kind of temp agency. A programmer at Microsoft or Google writes some code once, gets paid once, and the company can glean profits from it indefinately. As soon as an IBM consultant goes home, IBM stops getting paid.
Microsoft and Google have little more than fixed costs, so once they pay off the initial development cost, it's pure profit. IBM will never have such a good earnings-to-revenue or earnings-to-employee ratio as long as they rely on consulting. The big money is (and always will be) in consulting, but not the big profits.
Serious C/C++ systems programmers write their own malloc and systems software.
I guess I'm just a silly C/C++ programmer.:-) Seriously, though, in the last two weeks I've started on two C projects, after having worked nearly exclusively Java for the last four years:
A telephony application, where talking to the ISDN card is done through C, since it's the least buggy API. I'm going to use C just to bridge between the card and Java; the business logic is done in Java, so that I can reuse four years worth of code that accurately models our business.
An xscreensaver module I'm hacking on in my free time that maps the maze screensaver onto a rotating 3D torus.
In both cases I'm using C not because it is the best language for the problem, but because of external constraints. I suspect that most C/C++ programmers are in this situation. Hardly anyone writes desktop applications in Java or other garbage-collected languages. And if you write command-line accessible apps for Linux, C is still the language of choice, if for no other reason than to reduce dependencies.
In fact, I'd wager that 99% of Linux applictions on any of the major distros are written in C or C++ but don't use custom malloc implementations.
There has been some work to prevent the use of fake fingers in biometric devices. One I have read about is checking the resistance of the object placed on the scanner to be sure it matches the known resistance of skin. Resistance can be forged of course, but it is an extra layer in the system.
Uh, no. They are going to put intel chips inside their machines. They will still use openfirmware, and not a pc bios, and still allow the os to only run on their proprietary machines. x86 != PC
Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors do not use Open Firmware. Although many parts
of the IO registry are present and work as expected, information that is provided by Open Firmware
on a Macintosh using a PowerPC microprocessor (such as a complete device tree) is not available in
the IO registry on a Macintosh using an Intel microprocessor.
Unless you're doing a video conference with some hot starlet, I do not see the point of this. Do you really want to see your out of state co-workers in high def?! How would that add to the meeting?
That depends on how many people are at the meeting. When you have more than half a dozen people around a conference table, it can be hard to get more than a few dozen pixels devoted to each person's face.
So it seems Stallman has a very good point here. Can you imagine trying to, say, re-implement DirectX if Microsoft suddenly wasn't going to let you code using it? I don't know if this is a comparable task, but it's the only thing I can think of in my terms....
s/DirectX/Visual Basic/
Funny, this isn't as far fetched as it seems.
OK, I think its safe to disregard this product and the person calling it that. Whenever something is described as an XKiller, it never kills product X and such claims are usually FUD or just hype.
Except of course for Mozilla, the Mosaic killer. That was the code name, the commercial name was Netscape.
Actually, the reason he works so slowly is because you didn't just design the Creator, you made a Creator interface and CreatorImpl class, which needs to be created by a CreatorFactory. But since you made the CreatorFactory an interface and CreatorFactoryImpl is an abstract class, you need a DefaultCreatorFactoryImpl subclass which reads the initialization parameters for the Creator, including the full class name (org.apache.commons.religion.deterministic.singleO rigin.creator.Creator$DefaultCreatorImpl,
not to be confused with the common misspelling org.apache.commons.religion.deterministic.singleOr igin.creator.Creator.DefaultCreatorImpl).
Try calling it SVN, and pronounce it ess-vee-en. If that isn't enough, claim you've got a "demo license" of it, rather than telling them it's open source. Weirdly, most companies I've worked at which had problems with open source had no trouble with developers using demo versions of things indefinitely.
Is there any way of telling which sets do this? This is certainly something I'd like to know before I dropped that kind of cash.
Yes. Go to a showroom and look at the displays. If you see some that have greater vertical resolution than the non-HD models, there you go. If you can't see a difference, then it doesn't make a difference.
If there is a difference you can't see but could learn to see, don't learn; it will not bring you joy, it will only make you miserable or annoying. Long ago I learned to see the FFT distortion in JPEG and MPEG images. Has it made me happy? No. I end up making the JPEGs on my website bigger than everyone else's so I won't see wrinkles on people's faces that are apparently invisible to everyone else. And I can't stand to watch satellite television on a big screen TV because of the annoying compression artifacts.
You know what's most interesting to me about this article? The fact that it's written by a guy who is clearly not actually very expert on things Apple.
He's not exactly a novice. He does mention that zapping the PRAM three times is supposed to do extra things, but claims that might be superstition-- he does mention that he hasn't had to do that on a "modern machine," I don't know exactly what that means, but I suspect the last time he zapped the PRAM was when his G3 tower was high-end.
A little background about Seebs: he's been on Usenet since junior high (the mid-1980s), which in this case means using Unix on a VAX. He's used Macs for decades, though his primary machine has typically run Unix. (Even though OS X is BSDish, he still does a lot on straight FreeBSD.) And lately he's been doing a lot of embedded work. For the record, I'm the one who gave him the news about the Mac Mini, and I did have my pinky in the side of my mouth and called it mini-mac.
In most parts of the world, Origin of Species hasn't been controversial for well over a century.
That's mainly because 2/3 of the world is covered in ocean, and the giant squid don't read. Seriously, how do you define "most parts of the world?" By population? By area? By number of countries, with EU members counted separately?
The way I see it, there isn't a "most of the world" with a reliable split. The best I can do is to split it as follows:
The United States, which is divided between religious fundamentalism and a more secular world view. In large part, this is a rural/urban split, with the suburbs as the current battleground.
Western Europe, Canada and Australia, strongly in the secular camp.
Mexico, Central America, and South America; former European colonies, which have a variety of conservative Christian belefs (frequently Catholic), often merged with indigenous beliefs. On topics such as gay marriage, they are strongly conservative.
Africa, former European colonie and home to countless Christian and Moslem missionaries over the years. Like most of the Americas, lots of conservative Christianity, often mixed with indigenous beliefs. But with more Moslems.
The Middle East. Very Moslem, very conservative.
Southeast Asia. Lots of Buddhists, relatively little Christianity. Beyond that, as far as I can tell every country is distinct. Some have lots of Moslems. Some are secular, others less so.
Eastern Europe. Mostly secular from what I know, but every country is different.
Other. This isn't a complete list, but it gets at most of the populated parts of the world.
Depending on how you want to weight each region, you might find that Origin is controversial to most of the world, or you might not.
Actually, the biggest disadvantage of a front projector is that they are only good in dim to dark rooms. The white screen necessary to reflect the projected light also reflects all the other light in the room. Perhaps if Sony's ChromaVue screen becomes readily available, this will change.
Have you seen a projector in the last 8 years? The 1000+ lument projector technology that every dot-com salesman packed on the plane is now under $1000. As for ChromaVue, which is a brand name for pigment which absorbs everything but a projector's red, green and blue, an equivalent product exists called Screen Goo. That's a grey paint, and the reviews I've seen of it claim that it beats the pants off of most screens. It's pricy for paint, but a fraction of the cost of a normal screen.
I've had a projector for over five years now. When I got it, 600 lumens was the standard. That one you do need a dark room for, especially if you like your 80-inch display. A few years later, 1000 lumens was affordable. I just picked up a MacWarehouse catalog and their cheapest projector is 1200 lumens for $990.
Thats just the thing. Corporations are legally entitled to all the rights of people. That is what makes them so powerful.
(Disclaimer: IANAL.)
That's not entirely true. Corporations have the right to enter into contracts as people. They like to pretend to have other rights, such as freedom of speech. As I understand it, the NRA tried to get a radio station last year to bypass restrictions on their speech-- that is, the tried to join the constitutionally protected press.
Despite the corporate personhood implied by Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), corporations have not been allowed to vote or excercize similar rights.
If you honestly believe that corporations have all the rights of a person, try to get married to a corporate entity. If Starbucks spurns you, try a non-profit entity such as the ACLU.
Striping the data makes it hard to use, but not particularly hard to decypher, if someone is just interested in the gyst of the message. In fact, with a few heuristics (e.g. assume that the most important data is alphanumeric text) it may be possible to pull out a whole lot.
With two key drives (or two disks of any kind) it's possible to do perfect (uncrackable) encryption pretty easily using a one-time pad. You fill one key drive with random bits (the pad). The second drive contains the XOR of your data with the pad. (XOR=eXclusive OR, a fundamental binary operator.) With both key drives, you can read your data. With only one, you just get random bits.
A nice thing about the one-time pad is that it is easy to extend. Add another pad, and you just XOR against another pad. Then you require all three to read the data. The only disadvantage to a one-time pad is that it requires the secure transmission of the pad, which must be at least as large as the secret message. The Amazon.coms of the world can't afford to mail you a CD-ROM of random bits just so you can order online from them.
slightly OT, but when Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, he assumed that humanoid AI would be developed with robots in mind.
Right now, there's a lot of cutting-edge AI research going into video game opponents. Knowing how popular code re-use is these days, we might be lucky if we get robots which don't default to KILL THE HUMANS.
Hmmm... Roomba does make me nervous, as does the old Microsoft Barney plush robot...
You really don't want to damage your wrists. if you are a programmer.
Especially after you've been married for a few years.
No kidding. Babies may weigh less than 10 pounds at birth, but they get big fast. If you think typing is hard on your wrists, try holding a crying baby for two hours at a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the Wall Street Journal reporting this. If they say it's a rumor, it's a rumor. In this case, they don't. In all the years I've read the WSJ, they've never been wrong on this sort of thing.
...just threaten to standardize on ODF.
That is the message other states should take from this.
Try watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on a DVD. The word 2001 is huge (if you have a huge display) but "A Space Odyssey" is barely legible-- even on the 80-inch picture from my projector. I, for one, am waiting for (1) an HD replacement for DVDs to take hold, and (2) prices to come down on HD projectors. I've been waiting for five years so far, and I expect to wait another five years. But this is a step in the right direction.
Encrypt away, they'll subpoena the email, you're right. Then they'll subpoena the passphrase. If you don't comply with the subpoena for the passphrase, they'll obtain a search warrant, and find where you wrote it down, admit it, its in a card in your wallet, or in some pass store software, isn't it? Then they'll use good old fashioned forensics to decrypt the shadow cache and drag a list of passwords on your server out in the open.
And finally, if that doesn't work, they'll throw you in jail for contempt of court until such time as you do remember your passphrase.
That depends. Here in the United States, if you are the defendant, they can't subpoena you-- those are for third parties such as Google. They need a search warrant. And while they can search for a password that's written down, you can't be forced to tell them the password, thanks to the Fifth Amendment.
There's an economic theory that says that for most authors of most books, the number of people who would be willing to pay for your work if they knew about it but who are unlikely to ever discover it is huge. So huge that any mechanism to get the word out-- including ones that could replace most sales-- pays for itself by increasing the audience.
For example, if you have a book with a potential audience of 10 million people, but you are (like most) a relatively unknown author, in most cases you'll end up selling only a few thousand copies-- if you're lucky-- unless you get a big name to back you up. If you give the book away online to everyone, 75% of readers might end up never buying it, but you may boost your readership five or tenfold, as well as boosting people's awareness of you.
Keep in mind that people like print editions of books. It's hard to find a professional programmer who doesn't have a copy of the Programming Perl book, even though the man pages include every word of that book.
I'm not just whistling in the wind. My book can be purchased on Amazon or you can download
PDFs of each chapter.
IBM is mostly a consulting firm, which is a fancy kind of temp agency. A programmer at Microsoft or Google writes some code once, gets paid once, and the company can glean profits from it indefinately. As soon as an IBM consultant goes home, IBM stops getting paid.
Microsoft and Google have little more than fixed costs, so once they pay off the initial development cost, it's pure profit. IBM will never have such a good earnings-to-revenue or earnings-to-employee ratio as long as they rely on consulting. The big money is (and always will be) in consulting, but not the big profits.
Of course Google and Microsoft are working together. When you've got a famous name like Michael Jordan on the roster, who wouldn't be enthusiastic!
Maybe I should change my name before I write a grant proposal...
In both cases I'm using C not because it is the best language for the problem, but because of external constraints. I suspect that most C/C++ programmers are in this situation. Hardly anyone writes desktop applications in Java or other garbage-collected languages. And if you write command-line accessible apps for Linux, C is still the language of choice, if for no other reason than to reduce dependencies.
In fact, I'd wager that 99% of Linux applictions on any of the major distros are written in C or C++ but don't use custom malloc implementations.
Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated.
(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
That depends on how many people are at the meeting. When you have more than half a dozen people around a conference table, it can be hard to get more than a few dozen pixels devoted to each person's face.
Funny, this isn't as far fetched as it seems.
Actually, the reason he works so slowly is because you didn't just design the Creator, you made a Creator interface and CreatorImpl class, which needs to be created by a CreatorFactory. But since you made the CreatorFactory an interface and CreatorFactoryImpl is an abstract class, you need a DefaultCreatorFactoryImpl subclass which reads the initialization parameters for the Creator, including the full class name (org.apache.commons.religion.deterministic.singleO rigin.creator.Creator$DefaultCreatorImpl,
not to be confused with the common misspelling org.apache.commons.religion.deterministic.singleOr igin.creator.Creator.DefaultCreatorImpl).
Try calling it SVN, and pronounce it ess-vee-en. If that isn't enough, claim you've got a "demo license" of it, rather than telling them it's open source. Weirdly, most companies I've worked at which had problems with open source had no trouble with developers using demo versions of things indefinitely.
If there is a difference you can't see but could learn to see, don't learn; it will not bring you joy, it will only make you miserable or annoying. Long ago I learned to see the FFT distortion in JPEG and MPEG images. Has it made me happy? No. I end up making the JPEGs on my website bigger than everyone else's so I won't see wrinkles on people's faces that are apparently invisible to everyone else. And I can't stand to watch satellite television on a big screen TV because of the annoying compression artifacts.
He's not exactly a novice. He does mention that zapping the PRAM three times is supposed to do extra things, but claims that might be superstition-- he does mention that he hasn't had to do that on a "modern machine," I don't know exactly what that means, but I suspect the last time he zapped the PRAM was when his G3 tower was high-end.
A little background about Seebs: he's been on Usenet since junior high (the mid-1980s), which in this case means using Unix on a VAX. He's used Macs for decades, though his primary machine has typically run Unix. (Even though OS X is BSDish, he still does a lot on straight FreeBSD.) And lately he's been doing a lot of embedded work. For the record, I'm the one who gave him the news about the Mac Mini, and I did have my pinky in the side of my mouth and called it mini-mac.
The way I see it, there isn't a "most of the world" with a reliable split. The best I can do is to split it as follows:
Depending on how you want to weight each region, you might find that Origin is controversial to most of the world, or you might not.
Okay, so maybe Google is the first company NOT BASED IN MINNESOTA to do this.
Have you seen a projector in the last 8 years? The 1000+ lument projector technology that every dot-com salesman packed on the plane is now under $1000. As for ChromaVue, which is a brand name for pigment which absorbs everything but a projector's red, green and blue, an equivalent product exists called
Screen Goo. That's a grey paint, and the reviews I've seen of it claim that it beats the pants off of most screens. It's pricy for paint, but a fraction of the cost of a normal screen.
I've had a projector for over five years now. When I got it, 600 lumens was the standard. That one you do need a dark room for, especially if you like your 80-inch display. A few years later, 1000 lumens was affordable. I just picked up a MacWarehouse catalog and their cheapest projector is 1200 lumens for $990.
(Disclaimer: IANAL.)
That's not entirely true. Corporations have the right to enter into contracts as people. They like to pretend to have other rights, such as freedom of speech. As I understand it, the NRA tried to get a radio station last year to bypass restrictions on their speech-- that is, the tried to join the constitutionally protected press.
Despite the corporate personhood implied by Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), corporations have not been allowed to vote or excercize similar rights.
If you honestly believe that corporations have all the rights of a person, try to get married to a corporate entity. If Starbucks spurns you, try a non-profit entity such as the ACLU.
*Cough* VMS *Cough*
Striping the data makes it hard to use, but not particularly hard to decypher, if someone is just interested in the gyst of the message. In fact, with a few heuristics (e.g. assume that the most important data is alphanumeric text) it may be possible to pull out a whole lot.
With two key drives (or two disks of any kind) it's possible to do perfect (uncrackable) encryption pretty easily using a one-time pad. You fill one key drive with random bits (the pad). The second drive contains the XOR of your data with the pad. (XOR=eXclusive OR, a fundamental binary operator.) With both key drives, you can read your data. With only one, you just get random bits.
A nice thing about the one-time pad is that it is easy to extend. Add another pad, and you just XOR against another pad. Then you require all three to read the data. The only disadvantage to a one-time pad is that it requires the secure transmission of the pad, which must be at least as large as the secret message. The Amazon.coms of the world can't afford to mail you a CD-ROM of random bits just so you can order online from them.
slightly OT, but when Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, he assumed that humanoid AI would be developed with robots in mind.
Right now, there's a lot of cutting-edge AI research going into video game opponents. Knowing how popular code re-use is these days, we might be lucky if we get robots which don't default to KILL THE HUMANS.
Hmmm... Roomba does make me nervous, as does the old Microsoft Barney plush robot...
No kidding. Babies may weigh less than 10 pounds at birth, but they get big fast. If you think typing is hard on your wrists, try holding a crying baby for two hours at a stretch.