Dude, if you can't be bothered to back up your own arguments, why should I pay any attention to you?
Damned if I know, friend. I guess only the folks who are curious and inquisitive will bother to look it up, and the complacent conservative majority will ride along like they always have believing whatever's easiest.
osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
Let's total it up in my household, and setting aside OS upgrades that came with hardware.
OS X: Three used copies of 10.2.6, to upgrade old OS 9 Macs to OS X (3 * $49). Total: $147.
Windows: Four clearance copies of Windows 2000 Professional ($79 + 3 * $29) to upgrade from Windows 95/98. Total: $136.
Looks like Windows is cheaper. Now, let's see, if I want to upgrade further...
OS X: Family pack of Leopard: Total: $199.
Vista: I can't figure out what versions I'd have to get, and Microsoft even makes it hard to find out what it costs, but I'm guessing that'll be $500 to $1000 for three desktops and one laptop.
I guess I'm sticking to Windows 2000. It's not a hard decision.
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
Don't knock it. If we've already hit Peak Oil we'll need that century to come up with something else.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes.
I agree. The balance has been in favor of nuclear power all along.
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists.
Nope. I blame the Department of Defence. Particularly the Navy.
Sometimes, people don't know what the government is doing, and it is best kept that way.
Can you elaborate on the circumstances where this is true?
Now, people have a way of leaking and releasing VERY SENSITIVE information on a global scale ANONYMOUSLY.
Are you sure that this is really a new capability? Are you sure that they are really able to do this anonymously? How do you know that this wasn't possible already, and how do you know that this site isn't actually a cover for a government operation?
You haven't heard of it because it's like something from the '80s, with sim-city style 2-d orthogonal projections, and is targeted towards young kids.
Can my child's Habbo Coins or 'Furni' be stolen?
Not if your child keeps their password secret. Someone else needs to know their password to check into the hotel as them and take their 'furni' or spend their Habbo Credits. Unfortunately, there are always some children who try to trick others into giving out their passwords, or who won't play fair. However, if your child keeps their password secret and uses the safe trading window as instructed, their account and items will remain safe.
[...]
Every conversation in the hotel passes through the Bobba Filter before it appears on the screen. This filters out swearing, racist and sexist terms and other words unsuitable for children. It also filters out email addresses and phone numbers so that they can't be given out. The filter covers Habbo names and missions, as well as room names and descriptions. The filters are updated on a daily basis and contain many hundreds of words and terms.
I wonder if there's any possible network abuse (spamming, sending death threats, any of the 4 horsemen (terrorist|drugdealer|kidnapper|childpornographer), etc) that might make people question the sense in not having a person accountable for a node's actions.
This isn't about anonymity, this is about due process. There's no question but that the RIAA will be able to get the necessary paperwork together, they just won't be able to shortcut things and use a bunch of J. Doe papers on a fishing expedition to get the university to do their work for them.
Spamming is an interesting case. There are indeed a lot of people who are happy to claim an ISP is selling "pink tickets" to spammers when they won't identify the source of a spam to any random Richard Tracy, but if, in practice, they are able to respond to the spam and keep the spam they source under control it doesn't matter how they do it. When we came up with the Usenet II rules we looked at this situation, and decided that we didn't need to be able to unmask the source of spam, we just needed to hold the site responsible for preventing it. We didn't specify how they did it, we just made spam control a requirement.
So while I agree that someone has to be accountable, you don't need to be able to terrorize people with a few public examples of ruined lives. The university may be the appropriate place to draw the line... but I suspect the RIAA doesn't want to follow through on that because universities tend to be harder to intimidate than young college students with entry-level incomes and half-finished degrees.
Having known people that worked in the very IT department that received these letters i can say they obviously know who it was.
It doesn't matter whether the IT people know, it matters whether they're following an appropriate policy on the disclosure of information about the students. Lawyers and PIs on TV sweet-talk (I mean, social engineer) information out of bureaucrats all the time, and in the context of the TV show you're identifying with the investigator and you approve of the result. In the context of real life this kind of stuff can get the bureaucrats into all kinds of hot water... including legal hot water.
And it doesn't matter whether the organization or individual trying to get personal information is a "good" guy or a "bad" guy. And it doesn't matter whether the target of the investigation is a "good" guy or a "bad" guy. It's inappropriate for colleges (or for libraries, or bookstores, or grocery stores, or banks, or any other organization) to promiscuously reveal private information.
In fact, I think it might be worthwhile seeing if there's legal recourse for the people whose information has been inappropriately revealed in pervious cases. A new kind of class action suit.
At least one company [Google] seems to show an interest in using the patent system to build a niche for itself.
You admit that you can't create any kind of causal link between Google's patent portfolio and their business model, and if you're going to argue that it's not their active use of the technologies that they have invented but the fact that they've patented them that has made them successful, you know perfectly well what kind of response you'll get.
it is hard to prove that a strategic tool, such as software patents, have real benefits. But, it is also hard to prove that they do not have real benefits.
It's not necessary to prove they don't have benefits. The damage they have caused over the years is undeniable: I can list several patents that have caused increased costs for (and even, through submarine patents, killed) actual products I've used, from the Hayes modem patent, through the XOR cursor and the GIF patents, to Unistroke. Unless there are real, substantial, and provable benefits from software patents what possible justification for the ongoing damage and uncertainty they cause?
If they were actually useful you'd be able to come up with dozens, without difficulty. The fact that you've got nothing but handwaving and innuendo is enough to prove my case.
I'm not talking about something like deBergerac's fantasies: Wells and Verne were writing the same kind of fiction as Heinlein and Bradbury, and they weren't isolated cases like deBergerac or Swift: Stephenson, Twain, and others all dabbled in the same pond.
Science Fiction is grounded in the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't born in the 20th century. Hell, even teh pulps didn't originate in the '20s, they were already popular by the mid 1800s. Radio wasn't responsible for creating it, any more than it created... it was a rising tide that raised all genres of "adventure" fiction, but they were launched in Atlantic Monthly and all the Boys Adventure style magazines before Radio existed.
If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
Really?
Yeh, I know a lot of people who were working on mil-spec stuff back in the '80s and earlier, and their battlefield and avionic firmware was using languages and systems developed specifically for military use. Some of them were even dismissive of ADA. I think using C++ would have started a rebellion.
I seem to recall a battleship that got stalled a few years back...
Yeh, an experimental one. After that fiasco, they went ahead into production?
Every group, genre, industry sector, what have you, has a noisy minority. There were similar complaints when NPD pulled their handheld market share figures, but it didn't have an impact on their decision.
If the noisy minority is big enough to have this effect, that's significant.
SF is technology marketing. It started as the "articles" in radio parts catalog "technoporn",
Perhaps an unnecessarily jaundiced view, given that popular authors like Wells and Verne had already published quite a few of the novels that created the genre before there was such a thing as radio.:)
Theoretically, at least, it's much more efficient to send the same content to many people at the same time. If everyone in the neighborhood gets the same show at the same time, then they share the bandwidth. If they were all streaming the same content over the Internet you'd find yourself with a smaller remaining share of the total bandwidth for whatever you want to do.
Where the cut-off is, I don't know, but I rather suspect it would take more bandwidth over the last mile than we have now to make it work. Until we have universal fiber from the head-end to the house, we're stuck with the broadcast model.
I don't have mod points or I'd have used them on that article.
We're moving closer and closer to the universal invisible media network that's been a staple of SF for decades (the earliest story containing a recognizable world computer network that I've been able to find is Murray Leinster's A Logic named Joe currently available online from Baen Books). As early as 1975 the universal media net was a central part of John Brunner's seminal Shockwave Rider and the much-delayed Dr. Adder by K W Jeter that would have beaten it into print if it hadn't squicked the editors... and later by the novels of William Gibson and Vernor Vinge and others...
And don't dismiss this idea just because it's "science fiction". SF writers are perpetually trolling academia and acting as a channel between academia, industry, and the public: SF is the "glue logic" between technology and culture. The notion of the universal media net became popular in SF because it was becoming seen as inevitable and (usually) desirable by the people who were, one way or another, making it happen. While SF is often radically wrong in detail, and many popular SF visions will never come true, when you can watch them happening around you it's definitely time to pay attention.
Is the military so stupid they're actually using Windows-based software (or software running ANY consumer OS for that matter) in battlefields? If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
Also, what's the threat? "This was reportedly the case during Israel's incursion into South Lebanon last year, where Hezbollah hackers were allegedly able to monitor IDF communications, giving the guerrillas a leg up in attacking Israeli armor." sounds like ordinary signals intelligence. You don't fight that with firewalls and antivirus software, you fight it with encryption and electronic countermeasures like dummy sources to fight tracking and traffic analysis.
NPD has played this game of teasing segments of the software industry with figures before... a few years back it was handhelds, and for a little while you could watch Palm and Microsoft and Sharp and the rest fight it out... but when they pulled the numbers there wasn't a peep.
Gamers, however, they're big business, and a noisy one. They don't go quietly away when you say "no".
In the '70s there were those who believed that copyright protection was inappropriate for software, even questioning its basic need
I'm sure there were, but speaking as someone who was actually writing software in that era I can assure you they were such a tiny part of the dialog that they can be ignored. This was also the era in which patent protection for software was first seriously discussed, and when Bell Labs donated what turned out to be the first US software patent (the UNIX setuid bit) into the public domain a lot of people expected that to be the end of it.
Arguing, or merely asserting, that only one perspective has any merit does not demonstrate any attemt to weigh these benefits and drawbacks
I've been watching THAT argument go back and forth since the '70s as well. But that one's quite a different case.
We've been arguing the alleged benefits and manifest drawbacks of software patents in detail for 30 years now. In those 30 years there has not been ONE single example provided by any of the people promoting software patents of any software patent providing ANY benefit in "advancing the arts and sciences". Not one. This isn't a matter of a few people taking a contrary approach in the face of a new technology, this is the result of decades of hard experience and solid reasoned arguments that have made predictions about the effects of software patents that have repeatedly and consistently been borne out in fact.
Not only are software patents a disaster, the ways in which they have proven to be a disaster are precisely the ways that they were predicted to in the '70s when they first showed up on the radar screen.
If there's any dogma here, it's on the side of the people promoting software patents, not the ones fighting them. Look at you: the best response you can give me to a challenge like that is to tell me that I'm being "dogmatic", because you have nothing but faith in your position to stand against case after case where software patents have been nothing but a barrier to progress.
Patent protection for software is as inherently inappropriate as patent protection for genes. Patent protection for software only happened AFTER software became suddenly a big deal, the software industry has grown in spite of patent encumbrance, and I have yet to see a case where patent protection for software has "advanced the arts and sciences".
Once you realize this, then it becomes clear why NEU is being demonized. It's because they are acting like a demon.
The iPhone/iPod Touch SDK is Darwin and some OS X components that are shared with OS X. Only Darwin is actually open source. Apple and/or AT&T are antagonistic to opening up the iPhone, and so you're running a risk depending on its remaining accessible when you need access to it, or remaining unchanged... the proprietary stance of the iPhone means that it's really only useful for open source applications.
Android has a corresponding API: Linux and the open source components underneath Android. Unlike the iPhone, you will always be able to get the corresponding source for your specific phone's kernel and the rest of the stack. Unless a carrier goes to unlikely lengths to Tivoize their phones this means that you have a good chance of having a long-term stable API, and unless there's licensing hurdles this makes it much more attractive for commercial developers.
In addition, the Android code base should run on the OpenMoko hardware very quickly. OpenMoko should be able to pick up most of the Android components and simultaneously maintain their own APIs.
This is a much more interesting platform than the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, if you can't be bothered to back up your own arguments, why should I pay any attention to you?
Damned if I know, friend. I guess only the folks who are curious and inquisitive will bother to look it up, and the complacent conservative majority will ride along like they always have believing whatever's easiest.
osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
Let's total it up in my household, and setting aside OS upgrades that came with hardware.
OS X: Three used copies of 10.2.6, to upgrade old OS 9 Macs to OS X (3 * $49). Total: $147.
Windows: Four clearance copies of Windows 2000 Professional ($79 + 3 * $29) to upgrade from Windows 95/98. Total: $136.
Looks like Windows is cheaper. Now, let's see, if I want to upgrade further...
OS X: Family pack of Leopard: Total: $199.
Vista: I can't figure out what versions I'd have to get, and Microsoft even makes it hard to find out what it costs, but I'm guessing that'll be $500 to $1000 for three desktops and one laptop.
I guess I'm sticking to Windows 2000. It's not a hard decision.
And note that the supply of fissionable fuels isn't all that big. So in a century or so we'll have all the fallout of nuclear power (pardon the pun) and be back where we started.
Don't knock it. If we've already hit Peak Oil we'll need that century to come up with something else.
I don't think the dangers-versus-benefits balance has made much of a shift in the favor of nukes.
I agree. The balance has been in favor of nuclear power all along.
Nuclear true believers (Jerry? You there?) like to blame the failure of their beloved technology on technically illiterate hippies and knee-jerk pacifists.
Nope. I blame the Department of Defence. Particularly the Navy.
You want to know why? Google for it yourself.
Sometimes, people don't know what the government is doing, and it is best kept that way.
Can you elaborate on the circumstances where this is true?
Now, people have a way of leaking and releasing VERY SENSITIVE information on a global scale ANONYMOUSLY.
Are you sure that this is really a new capability? Are you sure that they are really able to do this anonymously? How do you know that this wasn't possible already, and how do you know that this site isn't actually a cover for a government operation?
Why would anyone pay $5900 in real money for furniture in a computer game?
I don't think anyone paid that much individually, but it's amazing how much people will pay for furniture in another computer game...
Beach Club Starter Set - US$39.89
Black Leather by Xen Living Room Set - US$31.56
I wonder if there's any possible network abuse (spamming, sending death threats, any of the 4 horsemen (terrorist|drugdealer|kidnapper|childpornographer), etc) that might make people question the sense in not having a person accountable for a node's actions.
This isn't about anonymity, this is about due process. There's no question but that the RIAA will be able to get the necessary paperwork together, they just won't be able to shortcut things and use a bunch of J. Doe papers on a fishing expedition to get the university to do their work for them.
Spamming is an interesting case. There are indeed a lot of people who are happy to claim an ISP is selling "pink tickets" to spammers when they won't identify the source of a spam to any random Richard Tracy, but if, in practice, they are able to respond to the spam and keep the spam they source under control it doesn't matter how they do it. When we came up with the Usenet II rules we looked at this situation, and decided that we didn't need to be able to unmask the source of spam, we just needed to hold the site responsible for preventing it. We didn't specify how they did it, we just made spam control a requirement.
So while I agree that someone has to be accountable, you don't need to be able to terrorize people with a few public examples of ruined lives. The university may be the appropriate place to draw the line... but I suspect the RIAA doesn't want to follow through on that because universities tend to be harder to intimidate than young college students with entry-level incomes and half-finished degrees.
Having known people that worked in the very IT department that received these letters i can say they obviously know who it was.
It doesn't matter whether the IT people know, it matters whether they're following an appropriate policy on the disclosure of information about the students. Lawyers and PIs on TV sweet-talk (I mean, social engineer) information out of bureaucrats all the time, and in the context of the TV show you're identifying with the investigator and you approve of the result. In the context of real life this kind of stuff can get the bureaucrats into all kinds of hot water... including legal hot water.
And it doesn't matter whether the organization or individual trying to get personal information is a "good" guy or a "bad" guy. And it doesn't matter whether the target of the investigation is a "good" guy or a "bad" guy. It's inappropriate for colleges (or for libraries, or bookstores, or grocery stores, or banks, or any other organization) to promiscuously reveal private information.
In fact, I think it might be worthwhile seeing if there's legal recourse for the people whose information has been inappropriately revealed in pervious cases. A new kind of class action suit.
At least one company [Google] seems to show an interest in using the patent system to build a niche for itself.
You admit that you can't create any kind of causal link between Google's patent portfolio and their business model, and if you're going to argue that it's not their active use of the technologies that they have invented but the fact that they've patented them that has made them successful, you know perfectly well what kind of response you'll get.
it is hard to prove that a strategic tool, such as software patents, have real benefits. But, it is also hard to prove that they do not have real benefits.
It's not necessary to prove they don't have benefits. The damage they have caused over the years is undeniable: I can list several patents that have caused increased costs for (and even, through submarine patents, killed) actual products I've used, from the Hayes modem patent, through the XOR cursor and the GIF patents, to Unistroke. Unless there are real, substantial, and provable benefits from software patents what possible justification for the ongoing damage and uncertainty they cause?
If they were actually useful you'd be able to come up with dozens, without difficulty. The fact that you've got nothing but handwaving and innuendo is enough to prove my case.
I'm not talking about something like deBergerac's fantasies: Wells and Verne were writing the same kind of fiction as Heinlein and Bradbury, and they weren't isolated cases like deBergerac or Swift: Stephenson, Twain, and others all dabbled in the same pond.
... it was a rising tide that raised all genres of "adventure" fiction, but they were launched in Atlantic Monthly and all the Boys Adventure style magazines before Radio existed.
Science Fiction is grounded in the Industrial Revolution, it wasn't born in the 20th century. Hell, even teh pulps didn't originate in the '20s, they were already popular by the mid 1800s. Radio wasn't responsible for creating it, any more than it created
If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
...
Really?
Yeh, I know a lot of people who were working on mil-spec stuff back in the '80s and earlier, and their battlefield and avionic firmware was using languages and systems developed specifically for military use. Some of them were even dismissive of ADA. I think using C++ would have started a rebellion.
I seem to recall a battleship that got stalled a few years back
Yeh, an experimental one. After that fiasco, they went ahead into production?
Not really. They've released teasers and pulled them before, and didn't get the kind of response this decision raised.
Every group, genre, industry sector, what have you, has a noisy minority. There were similar complaints when NPD pulled their handheld market share figures, but it didn't have an impact on their decision.
If the noisy minority is big enough to have this effect, that's significant.
SF is technology marketing. It started as the "articles" in radio parts catalog "technoporn",
:)
Perhaps an unnecessarily jaundiced view, given that popular authors like Wells and Verne had already published quite a few of the novels that created the genre before there was such a thing as radio.
Theoretically, at least, it's much more efficient to send the same content to many people at the same time. If everyone in the neighborhood gets the same show at the same time, then they share the bandwidth. If they were all streaming the same content over the Internet you'd find yourself with a smaller remaining share of the total bandwidth for whatever you want to do.
Where the cut-off is, I don't know, but I rather suspect it would take more bandwidth over the last mile than we have now to make it work. Until we have universal fiber from the head-end to the house, we're stuck with the broadcast model.
I don't have mod points or I'd have used them on that article.
We're moving closer and closer to the universal invisible media network that's been a staple of SF for decades (the earliest story containing a recognizable world computer network that I've been able to find is Murray Leinster's A Logic named Joe currently available online from Baen Books). As early as 1975 the universal media net was a central part of John Brunner's seminal Shockwave Rider and the much-delayed Dr. Adder by K W Jeter that would have beaten it into print if it hadn't squicked the editors... and later by the novels of William Gibson and Vernor Vinge and others...
And don't dismiss this idea just because it's "science fiction". SF writers are perpetually trolling academia and acting as a channel between academia, industry, and the public: SF is the "glue logic" between technology and culture. The notion of the universal media net became popular in SF because it was becoming seen as inevitable and (usually) desirable by the people who were, one way or another, making it happen. While SF is often radically wrong in detail, and many popular SF visions will never come true, when you can watch them happening around you it's definitely time to pay attention.
... but they seem to have lost their "clean hands" advantage here.
Is the military so stupid they're actually using Windows-based software (or software running ANY consumer OS for that matter) in battlefields? If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
Also, what's the threat? "This was reportedly the case during Israel's incursion into South Lebanon last year, where Hezbollah hackers were allegedly able to monitor IDF communications, giving the guerrillas a leg up in attacking Israeli armor." sounds like ordinary signals intelligence. You don't fight that with firewalls and antivirus software, you fight it with encryption and electronic countermeasures like dummy sources to fight tracking and traffic analysis.
NPD has played this game of teasing segments of the software industry with figures before... a few years back it was handhelds, and for a little while you could watch Palm and Microsoft and Sharp and the rest fight it out... but when they pulled the numbers there wasn't a peep.
Gamers, however, they're big business, and a noisy one. They don't go quietly away when you say "no".
In the '70s there were those who believed that copyright protection was inappropriate for software, even questioning its basic need
I'm sure there were, but speaking as someone who was actually writing software in that era I can assure you they were such a tiny part of the dialog that they can be ignored. This was also the era in which patent protection for software was first seriously discussed, and when Bell Labs donated what turned out to be the first US software patent (the UNIX setuid bit) into the public domain a lot of people expected that to be the end of it.
Arguing, or merely asserting, that only one perspective has any merit does not demonstrate any attemt to weigh these benefits and drawbacks
I've been watching THAT argument go back and forth since the '70s as well. But that one's quite a different case.
We've been arguing the alleged benefits and manifest drawbacks of software patents in detail for 30 years now. In those 30 years there has not been ONE single example provided by any of the people promoting software patents of any software patent providing ANY benefit in "advancing the arts and sciences". Not one. This isn't a matter of a few people taking a contrary approach in the face of a new technology, this is the result of decades of hard experience and solid reasoned arguments that have made predictions about the effects of software patents that have repeatedly and consistently been borne out in fact.
Not only are software patents a disaster, the ways in which they have proven to be a disaster are precisely the ways that they were predicted to in the '70s when they first showed up on the radar screen.
If there's any dogma here, it's on the side of the people promoting software patents, not the ones fighting them. Look at you: the best response you can give me to a challenge like that is to tell me that I'm being "dogmatic", because you have nothing but faith in your position to stand against case after case where software patents have been nothing but a barrier to progress.
From what I've seen, Linux has yet to give ground to any competitor anywhere it's made incursions.
Handhelds. Zaurus was a big flashy incursion and now Linux on handhelds has all but become invisible again.
Possibly the gphone will change that.
Please do not expect all of us to march in step.
have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?
If they're not good enough for Vista they're not good enough for XP. They *might* be running Windows 2000.
Patent protection for software is as inherently inappropriate as patent protection for genes. Patent protection for software only happened AFTER software became suddenly a big deal, the software industry has grown in spite of patent encumbrance, and I have yet to see a case where patent protection for software has "advanced the arts and sciences".
Once you realize this, then it becomes clear why NEU is being demonized. It's because they are acting like a demon.
The iPhone/iPod Touch SDK is Darwin and some OS X components that are shared with OS X. Only Darwin is actually open source. Apple and/or AT&T are antagonistic to opening up the iPhone, and so you're running a risk depending on its remaining accessible when you need access to it, or remaining unchanged... the proprietary stance of the iPhone means that it's really only useful for open source applications.
Android has a corresponding API: Linux and the open source components underneath Android. Unlike the iPhone, you will always be able to get the corresponding source for your specific phone's kernel and the rest of the stack. Unless a carrier goes to unlikely lengths to Tivoize their phones this means that you have a good chance of having a long-term stable API, and unless there's licensing hurdles this makes it much more attractive for commercial developers.
In addition, the Android code base should run on the OpenMoko hardware very quickly. OpenMoko should be able to pick up most of the Android components and simultaneously maintain their own APIs.
This is a much more interesting platform than the iPhone.