Actually, I just took a class in Outlook Engineering, we concentrated a lot on the public's fear of Outlook facilities. The public is completely ill-informed when it comes to anything Outlook. [...] Everyone always talks about the Loveletter happening again: The damage released to the public from loveletter was less than the virus the public got from other sources [...]. I think the government needs to develop a program to educate people on exactly how safe Outlook is-Microsoft is 80% powered by it, but we haven't built a Innovation in 10 years because the public is ignorant.
Just a little snippage and 3 search&replace. The analogy I want to make is that the loveletter disaster showed how things can go wrong because of human stupidity if complex systems are involved. MS's arguments are similar to that of nuclear industry and in both cases we see that looking at the security of one standalone system doesn't cut it. Not to defend Microsoft, but to get infected by that loveletter thingy people had to ignore warning signs (blalbla "this attachment may contain..."). Sure, the people involved in the nuclear industry are much better educated to do their job, but they also are humans. And in contrast to the spreading of a simple vb-virus you don't need 10.000.000 idiots to create a disaster, you need just a handful at the right place - and such disaster may really deserve its name.
Sorry to reply to myself, IANAL so YMMV for the following disclaimer:
This link is presented for educational purposes only. You are not allowed to read or copy the information contained in the targeted site. The sole purpose of this link is to demonstrate the fact that the content of mircosofts pdf is visible in a forum on microsoft's msn-community sites for at least 5 hours now.
I hope I'm being redundant, the post-comment page needed 10 minutes to load, but I have to post that. Sorry, no link so try to past it: http://content.communities.msn.com/isapi/fetch.d ll?action=get_message&ID_Community=Compute rsAndTheInternet&ID_Message=149&LastModified=95804 6877000
And they have an account on sourceforge, although there main usefull thing there is the mailing-list archive. Oh and cvs is there, but I didn't test it.
1) They think there needs to be someone between "the customer" and Linux, and they want to be one of those people. Conclusion: Either an SCO Linux distribution, or a "strategic partnership" relationship with an established distribution. So does IBM 2) It seems they realize that the raw OS space is going or gone - points for that. They can't just come out and say it with new versions of Unixware et al on the way, but it does seem they're starting to get a glimpse of the forest. So does IBM 3) They're thinking "value-add" - stuff that runs on top of Linux that provide services not normally provided by a stock distribution. I can't think of anything in this space not already served by a good existing Free app (webserver? LDAP server?) or someone with huge market share (Oracle?) but perhaps the end-goal is systems integration. Middleware, so does IBM.
I know IBM isn't the one and all, but if that's their whole plan for the future then good luck SCO. I say they should drop that plan.
They have to compete against IBM, every bigger linux disitributor under the sun and even companies like VA and others. If I would have to choose between SGI and SCO, I would bet on SGI - if they survive the next 2-4 years without bigger trouble there are good chances for them in security and graphics for linux. OTOH SCO's plan doesn't seem very original and they still seem NOT to get the development speed of open source.
There may be people/organizations willing to stand up against that. It may well be an attempt of microsoft to "poison" the samba programmers (and other parties) with knowledge about that protocol, making sure that they cannot even attempt to reverse engineer it because know MS will always be able to diz them for breaking that license. It might be the best to attack this strategy now and technical games togetger with legalese might help with that.
How about changing the/.-article slightly, just the editors comment. From
Remember: If you are going to e-mail them, or respond in there, respond in a calm, intelligent manner, refuting the points they make without flaming - we all represent the Open Source Community.
to
Attention, if you click on this link you already have done what zdnet wants you to do. Take a deep breath instead and contemplate if you really want to read magazines with articles like that. And remember the quality of this article next time you plan to surf over to zdnet.
Not with linux (just drop lilo in the boot sector of your root partition) but this proggie was the only help in getting winnt installed. Fucking nt wasn't able to find it's partition after installation. I installed the boot manager (text version) and everything worked fine. I even recommend this program to people over a warezed partition magic, it's very coool. And the author doesn't ever bother about _any_ license, plain freeware with source - how laissez-faire is that. And you have the option to install it on it's own bootdisk, no need for msdos etc.
Sorry for my long text, but I think partion manager is the most overlooked program on the internet.
Oh man, coming from germany, ohh the similarities: 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9 exactly the same here, it's just that we had ISDN before. Because the german telecom pushes it down the throat of everyone who doesn't close his mouth fast enough. Guess they had renewed their infrastructure fast and ISDN is the default for every household internally (i.e. analog ist just "castrated" isdn).
It's a shame, our governments are still protecting the monopolists because they still hold shares.
- ok, dtag has 768k down, BUT only 128k up, which imposes exactly the same "load" on the line as BT's offering - That 1.5 gigabits may be caused by bad drugs, but there's no way to compress anything. - the costs are actually higher than the BT-offering, as there ain't no flatline - Drivers: No you don't need proprietrary device drivers, but you need the PPP over Ethernet Protocol - which is non-proprietary and easy, but try to use beos with that. And - naturally they gave a f*ck about non windows os's and their joke of a windows driver (winpoet) is only used by people who actually have to. No official win2000/macos/linux support.
Just as in the US, the Netherlands etc., these phone companies are required to open up ADSL to multiple ISPs. That's why they come up with dreadful schemes such as NAT, PPTP, PPPoE.
Source IP Routing would do that job too, without the enduser noticing anything. I assume it wouldn't fit in their infrastructure as well as pppoe and friends. esp. pppoe is designed with that in mind - but nevertheless it's a hack.
A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
Uh, from my expierence this not the way to go. Having studied mathematics I got the impression that complex concepts need some time, I remember a professor saying about the tensorproduct that "you don't understand it, you get used to it" and consequently always introduces that concept to first grade students. This should apply to other fields too. And my feeling is that I get some more insight into some things even without actually looking at them/thinking about them. There seems to be a mechanism somewhere back in our brain which put structure into knowledge, but this thingy is not very fast.
The problems will come when a company modifies GPL'd software and releases it under their own license but denies using GPL'd sources. This could be difficult to prove and will take legal recources.
Granted, it may be difficult to find that out, but if you found enough signs of a copyright breach it shouldn't be too hard. Just drag them to court, show the judge your evidence and get him to order the offending company to open up their source to the court. Then the judge could consult an expert under NDA, who would find out the truth.
You're completely right in your rambling agains copyright violation and your view of the hippocracy (sp?) on slashdot about that, but I think you ask the wrong question:
Now eventually when everyone and their mother has broadband and has access to cheap MP3 players (or other digital sound dplayers), where will the music industry as it currently exists be?
You take existing copyright law, show how it can easily be circumvented by using digital media and argue that this is bad because it will destroy the music industry. Let's not talk about changing the current situation by suing and enforcing current law or even tightening existing law in order to set legality against possibilty and social reality. Let's not bitch about the possible death of an industry which would become obsolet by technological advances. Let's ask ourself: Why should I care for the record industry? What advantages/disadvanteges may we face without them? Nobody of the "bookwriters guild" thought about suing Gutenberg, nobody considered to put the makers of the early automobiles into jail because otherwise the coach industry would get out of business. I am aware that my examples lack the fact that Gutenberg/automobile makers didn't violate existing laws (AFAIK), but also nobody thought about proposing laws making their business illegal. OTOH there are many examples in every country about laws being changed/abandoned because they just didn't fit the social reality anymore (women rights come to mind, the whole recent radio hubbub in the US).
So just because a business is at risk I don't see why it's mandatory to keep the status quo at all costs.
yeah, and than sun approaches the os-part and asks the to add star office on the cd. They even could *offer* the os-branch money to get them to do that - just for a giggle. OS-branch declines, sun informs the shareholders, shareholders sue managers, end of game. Or a consortium of SuSe, Redhad, Caldera asks for the license to port office to linux (god forbid) - same game.
No, they may be able to do some cooperation but in the end they can be pressured to work against each other. Each of the split entities will have a very strong competition which sharpened their profile in their struggle against the former microsoft. The OS and the applications branch will have *zero* cost competitors, that'll get interesting.
Thanks for your information. And about the "thought-quantum" connection I absolutely agree. And IMO it's not really philosophy, it's more like trying to explain the meaning of equations to someone who is not able to understand the mathematical meaning - trying to find analogies which seems nearly impossible in that (microscopic) world.
This is offtopic, but one philosophical interesting aspect is the question whether quantum mechanics is the fundamental reason why it's possible to talk about free will (it destroyed the idea of Laplace's demon).
I'll try to explain (sort of) this concerning the simplest form of Quantum Mechanics, the non-relativistical Quantum Equation from Schrödinger.
Around 1900 (actually before that) physicist got a recognized a problem in explaining the results of certain experiement. Emission of alpha-particels observed by Rutherford, black-body radiation (http://ars-www.uchicago.edu/~grier/p236/blackbody /blackbody.html), and Compton-Effect. In short, to explain these (the last two) natural phenomenoms physicists had to think of light as particels to explain some non-continuos behavior of energy exchange. Planck postulated that energy exchange happens in "packets" i.e. quantums and introduced the Planck-constant. He postulated the the "blackbody" emits energy (in form of radiation) as integer multiples of h*w (where h is this constant and w is the wave frequence).
Einstein worked to explain the photoelectric effect (this is what he got his nobel prize for, not relativity) and postulated that light is formed of photons to explain some non-continuosity (sp??) in the way electrons absorb energy when being "hit" by light. But as we all know, light interferes, which cannot be explained if we assume "particles". There we have the so called wave/particle duality where we cannot decide for one or the other, because every decision would lead to contradictions. The same kind of "quantums" is a problem when trying to explain the spectrum of atoms. Why does a certain atoms only emit light in certain frequencies? (Bohr) So the need emerged to find a theory which is (mathematically) "nice" in explaining as much as possible in a very compact way - not a different rule for every experiment. The idea is to find a theory which describes matter _and_ radiation in one equation. Enter Schroedinger. He wrote down the Schroedinger equation which allows to explain each and every experiment which I mentioned before. It's important here to get the meaning of "explain" - it means "able to calculate the outcome before acutally doing the experiment". You have to understand the scale of the given problems it's atomic/subatomic, it's a complete different "world" than for instance Galilei's experiments. "Unfortunately" a consequence of that equation is that very small particles do not act as macroscopic things. You cannot tell the position of an electron like that of a golf ball, that means it simply does not exist as an entity before you "look" at it. Einstein had big problems with that (like you), IIRC he said "natura non saltat" which means somethink like "nature doesn't jump" and assumed some "hidden variables", which means that Schroedingers theory just isn't complete enough and lacks some more variables to make exact calculations instead of probabilities possible again. As far as I know (which isn't alot) it was proofed that either these hidden variables don't exist or they change with space, i.e. their value depends whether you are on moon or on earth. That's even more unacceptable for physicists.
To finally answer your question, similar to relativity theory quantum mechanics today is a well accepted reality. It just leads to the conclusion that very small particles are something completly different from macroscopic things and therefore we cannot expect them to act as such.
While seeking for the right translations I stumped accross this link: http://www.geocities.com/hotquanta/ which you might consult.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a little snippage and 3 search&replace.
The analogy I want to make is that the loveletter disaster showed how things can go wrong because of human stupidity if complex systems are involved. MS's arguments are similar to that of nuclear industry and in both cases we see that looking at the security of one standalone system doesn't cut it. Not to defend Microsoft, but to get infected by that loveletter thingy people had to ignore warning signs (blalbla "this attachment may contain
Sure, the people involved in the nuclear industry are much better educated to do their job, but they also are humans. And in contrast to the spreading of a simple vb-virus you don't need 10.000.000 idiots to create a disaster, you need just a handful at the right place - and such disaster may really deserve its name.
Sorry to reply to myself, IANAL so YMMV for the following disclaimer:
This link is presented for educational purposes only. You are not allowed to read or copy the information contained in the targeted site. The sole purpose of this link is to demonstrate the fact that the content of mircosofts pdf is visible in a forum on microsoft's msn-community sites for at least 5 hours now.
You must have Java-Script enabled, try this
I hope I'm being redundant, the post-comment page needed 10 minutes to load, but I have to post that.d ll?action=get_message&ID_Community=Compute rsAndTheInternet&ID_Message=149&LastModified=95804 6877000
Sorry, no link so try to past it:
http://content.communities.msn.com/isapi/fetch.
Guess what it is.
And they have an account on sourceforge, although there main usefull thing there is the mailing-list archive. Oh and cvs is there, but I didn't test it.
i think it is pretty serious to delete porn and mp3z
It deleted the porn but copied the mp3s.
...
Clearly, a woman.
1) They think there needs to be someone between "the customer" and Linux, and they want to be one of those people. Conclusion: Either an SCO Linux distribution, or a "strategic partnership" relationship with an established distribution.
So does IBM
2) It seems they realize that the raw OS space is going or gone - points for that. They can't just come out and say it with new versions of Unixware et al on the way, but it does seem they're starting to get a glimpse of the forest.
So does IBM
3) They're thinking "value-add" - stuff that runs on top of Linux that provide services not normally provided by a stock distribution. I can't think of anything in this space not already served by a good existing Free app (webserver? LDAP server?) or someone with huge market share (Oracle?) but perhaps the end-goal is systems integration.
Middleware, so does IBM.
I know IBM isn't the one and all, but if that's their whole plan for the future then good luck SCO. I say they should drop that plan.
They have to compete against IBM, every bigger linux disitributor under the sun and even companies like VA and others.
If I would have to choose between SGI and SCO, I would bet on SGI - if they survive the next 2-4 years without bigger trouble there are good chances for them in security and graphics for linux. OTOH SCO's plan doesn't seem very original and they still seem NOT to get the development speed of open source.
There may be people/organizations willing to stand up against that. It may well be an attempt of microsoft to "poison" the samba programmers (and other parties) with knowledge about that protocol, making sure that they cannot even attempt to reverse engineer it because know MS will always be able to diz them for breaking that license.
It might be the best to attack this strategy now and technical games togetger with legalese might help with that.
There is a open source cab-lib out there, works under linux. Perhaps it can handle the file, so my suggestion is:
uncap dirty_microsoft_file.exe | pdf2txt | grep 3 -v "agree" > sanitized_text_file.txt
voila
Fromto
whois lyrics.mguk.ru ...
Query: lyrics.mguk.ru
Registry: whois.ripn.net
Results:
domain: MGUK.RU
type: CORPORATE
descr: Corporate domain for Moscow State Univercity of Commerce
I guess he is talking about the software for loading up your code to the robot. Perhaps even some kind of IDE, NOT the robot's code.
I thought of weeks or months, not hours per day.
Not with linux (just drop lilo in the boot sector of your root partition) but this proggie was the only help in getting winnt installed. Fucking nt wasn't able to find it's partition after installation. I installed the boot manager (text version) and everything worked fine.
I even recommend this program to people over a warezed partition magic, it's very coool. And the author doesn't ever bother about _any_ license, plain freeware with source - how laissez-faire is that.
And you have the option to install it on it's own bootdisk, no need for msdos etc.
Sorry for my long text, but I think partion manager is the most overlooked program on the internet.
Oh man, coming from germany, ohh the similarities:
1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9 exactly the same here, it's just that we had ISDN before. Because the german telecom pushes it down the throat of everyone who doesn't close his mouth fast enough. Guess they had renewed their infrastructure fast and ISDN is the default for every household internally (i.e. analog ist just "castrated" isdn).
It's a shame, our governments are still protecting the monopolists because they still hold shares.
Small correction:
- ok, dtag has 768k down, BUT only 128k up, which imposes exactly the same "load" on the line as BT's offering
- That 1.5 gigabits may be caused by bad drugs, but there's no way to compress anything.
- the costs are actually higher than the BT-offering, as there ain't no flatline
- Drivers: No you don't need proprietrary device drivers, but you need the PPP over Ethernet Protocol - which is non-proprietary and easy, but try to use beos with that.
And - naturally they gave a f*ck about non windows os's and their joke of a windows driver (winpoet) is only used by people who actually have to. No official win2000/macos/linux support.
Just as in the US, the Netherlands etc., these phone companies are required to open up ADSL to multiple ISPs. That's why they come up with dreadful schemes such as NAT, PPTP, PPPoE.
Source IP Routing would do that job too, without the enduser noticing anything. I assume it wouldn't fit in their infrastructure as well as pppoe and friends. esp. pppoe is designed with that in mind - but nevertheless it's a hack.
A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
Uh, from my expierence this not the way to go. Having studied mathematics I got the impression that complex concepts need some time, I remember a professor saying about the tensorproduct that "you don't understand it, you get used to it" and consequently always introduces that concept to first grade students.
This should apply to other fields too.
And my feeling is that I get some more insight into some things even without actually looking at them/thinking about them. There seems to be a mechanism somewhere back in our brain which put structure into knowledge, but this thingy is not very fast.
The problems will come when a company modifies GPL'd software and releases it under their own license but denies using GPL'd sources. This could be difficult to prove and will take legal recources.
Granted, it may be difficult to find that out, but if you found enough signs of a copyright breach it shouldn't be too hard.
Just drag them to court, show the judge your evidence and get him to order the offending company to open up their source to the court. Then the judge could consult an expert under NDA, who would find out the truth.
You're completely right in your rambling agains copyright violation and your view of the hippocracy (sp?) on slashdot about that, but I think you ask the wrong question:
Now eventually when everyone and their mother has broadband and has access to cheap MP3 players (or other digital sound dplayers), where will the music industry as it currently exists be?
You take existing copyright law, show how it can easily be circumvented by using digital media and argue that this is bad because it will destroy the music industry.
Let's not talk about changing the current situation by suing and enforcing current law or even tightening existing law in order to set legality against possibilty and social reality. Let's not bitch about the possible death of an industry which would become obsolet by technological advances.
Let's ask ourself: Why should I care for the record industry? What advantages/disadvanteges may we face without them?
Nobody of the "bookwriters guild" thought about suing Gutenberg, nobody considered to put the makers of the early automobiles into jail because otherwise the coach industry would get out of business.
I am aware that my examples lack the fact that Gutenberg/automobile makers didn't violate existing laws (AFAIK), but also nobody thought about proposing laws making their business illegal.
OTOH there are many examples in every country about laws being changed/abandoned because they just didn't fit the social reality anymore (women rights come to mind, the whole recent radio hubbub in the US).
So just because a business is at risk I don't see why it's mandatory to keep the status quo at all costs.
yeah, s/T&L/hardware T&L/ I thougt that was clear
AFAIK all OpenGL games do support T&L by design. The problem was that DirectX6 lacked the function calls for T&L and OpenGL had them from start.
yeah, and than sun approaches the os-part and asks the to add star office on the cd. They even could *offer* the os-branch money to get them to do that - just for a giggle.
OS-branch declines, sun informs the shareholders, shareholders sue managers, end of game.
Or a consortium of SuSe, Redhad, Caldera asks for the license to port office to linux (god forbid) - same game.
No, they may be able to do some cooperation but in the end they can be pressured to work against each other. Each of the split entities will have a very strong competition which sharpened their profile in their struggle against the former microsoft. The OS and the applications branch will have *zero* cost competitors, that'll get interesting.
Thanks for your information.
And about the "thought-quantum" connection I absolutely agree. And IMO it's not really philosophy, it's more like trying to explain the meaning of equations to someone who is not able to understand the mathematical meaning - trying to find analogies which seems nearly impossible in that (microscopic) world.
This is offtopic, but one philosophical interesting aspect is the question whether quantum mechanics is the fundamental reason why it's possible to talk about free will (it destroyed the idea of Laplace's demon).
I'll try to explain (sort of) this concerning the simplest form of Quantum Mechanics, the non-relativistical Quantum Equation from Schrödinger.
y /blackbody.html), and Compton-Effect.
Around 1900 (actually before that) physicist got a recognized a problem in explaining the results of certain experiement. Emission of alpha-particels observed by Rutherford, black-body radiation (http://ars-www.uchicago.edu/~grier/p236/blackbod
In short, to explain these (the last two) natural phenomenoms physicists had to think of light as particels to explain some non-continuos behavior of energy exchange. Planck postulated that energy exchange happens in "packets" i.e. quantums and introduced the Planck-constant. He postulated the the "blackbody" emits energy (in form of radiation) as integer multiples of h*w (where h is this constant and w is the wave frequence).
Einstein worked to explain the photoelectric effect (this is what he got his nobel prize for, not relativity) and postulated that light is formed of photons to explain some non-continuosity (sp??) in the way electrons absorb energy when being "hit" by light.
But as we all know, light interferes, which cannot be explained if we assume "particles".
There we have the so called wave/particle duality where we cannot decide for one or the other, because every decision would lead to contradictions.
The same kind of "quantums" is a problem when trying to explain the spectrum of atoms. Why does a certain atoms only emit light in certain frequencies? (Bohr)
So the need emerged to find a theory which is (mathematically) "nice" in explaining as much as possible in a very compact way - not a different rule for every experiment.
The idea is to find a theory which describes matter _and_ radiation in one equation.
Enter Schroedinger. He wrote down the Schroedinger equation which allows to explain each and every experiment which I mentioned before. It's important here to get the meaning of "explain" - it means "able to calculate the outcome before acutally doing the experiment".
You have to understand the scale of the given problems it's atomic/subatomic, it's a complete different "world" than for instance Galilei's experiments.
"Unfortunately" a consequence of that equation is that very small particles do not act as macroscopic things. You cannot tell the position of an electron like that of a golf ball, that means it simply does not exist as an entity before you "look" at it.
Einstein had big problems with that (like you), IIRC he said "natura non saltat" which means somethink like "nature doesn't jump" and assumed some "hidden variables", which means that Schroedingers theory just isn't complete enough and lacks some more variables to make exact calculations instead of probabilities possible again. As far as I know (which isn't alot) it was proofed that either these hidden variables don't exist or they change with space, i.e. their value depends whether you are on moon or on earth. That's even more unacceptable for physicists.
To finally answer your question, similar to relativity theory quantum mechanics today is a well accepted reality. It just leads to the conclusion that very small particles are something completly different from macroscopic things and therefore we cannot expect them to act as such.
While seeking for the right translations I stumped accross this link: http://www.geocities.com/hotquanta/ which you might consult.