Of course the adoption of a dying OS (BSD) by a dying computer company (Apple) was a well calculated plan to use double negatives to become a living force in the computer market once again... or would that simply make them undead?
Trying posting to Freshmeat and see what sort of response you get.
Based on past writings, disciples of Ed Yourdon might contribute. The question is how. It's already recently been proven that the waterfall methodology may not work. Maybe we can make thermite from left over Jolt cola cans (powdered aluminum) and iron oxide (rusted brillo).
Whatever... Based on SCO's current popularity, it sounds like it'd be a very popular open source project.
For instance, we are pretty sure that N Korea is ruled by as much of a maniac as Iraq
C'mon, calling the current ruler of Iraq (George Bush) a maniac is out of line and borders on subversion.
(In other news, karl and the gang are approaching the borders of a hard freeze, will soon start beta testing their provisional replacement, and hopefully release a new form of collaborative democracy on the world before too long!)
The number of bovines that had to die for that production (both in the hides that Gates and Balmer wore as well as the uncountable Longhorn burgers) is hard to fathom.
At least they didn't have Steve Balmer playing Trinity.
I had a problem similar to this hit me. Back in the early eighties I made a beta recording of a community theatre production of A Midsummers Nights Dream because my sister was on the stage.
In the mid nineties, the beta tape player could no longer play this tape. I paid a fair amount of money for someone to copy this tape over to VHS for me. Maybe they did it because they thought my work was so professional (yeah, right) Maybe they did it just out of the habit on all of their transfers (more likely) Maybe they just thought better safe than sorry. Whatever the reason I believe that in this transfer they added an undesired Macrovision syncing protection to my transferred tape. Of course I didn't discover this addition until 2001 well after my original beta tape is gone as well as the company that did the transfer.
It's not like I can go to Best Buy and get the Athens Georgia 1983 spring production on DVD, but if I try to go to Best Buy to get something to copy my tape for my sister or preserve it for later years I'm treated like a criminal. "No Sir. It's illegal to sell Macrovision breaking products in this country." I know that's bullcrud but what should I expect from Best Buy.
Based on my experiences with trying to circumvent copy protection most people consider "trivial" I don't look forward to higher end crap like these flags.
Btw, if anyone knows of a good product to use to circumvent Macrovision that even an idiot like me could use, I'd very much appreciate a recommendation.
If the interpretation of "derivative works" for Hollywood was defined in the same way that SCO wants Linux classified as derivative of Unix, then Hollywood stands to make a mint for doing absolutely nothing.
It's not as if SCO is a jackal trying to nip at Hollywood, there are jackals on both sides of this court case. Perhaps Hollywood will act innocent and put up a marginal defense, but they stand to gain much if SCO loses
BTW to all major corporations, your codenames sucks usually. Whistler, Longhorn, Applebred??? Try something better. I think it was Transmeta who used "Titan" or the like? Now that's nice.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments are very welcome.
Not sure if it was intended but the names listed in your SIG might make more appropriate names for Windows releases
Offtopic - Win95 (Gui niceties rather than OS stability)
Inflammatory - Win98 (exacerbation of instability)
Inappropriate - WinME (enough said)
Illegal - Windows2000 (post-monopoly ruling)
Offensive - WinXP (the huge cost of the playskool GUI)
Of course that naturally leads to speculation about what Windows Longhorn would be better codenamed as. Some options from the slash moderation system...
Troll - Ideal for pissing off Mac and Linux zealots
Overrated - a minor upgrade with major marketing
Informative - major drm lockdowns for MS, FBI, and NSA.
Funny - results of revolutionary research and development
Of course since the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft's Justice Department has been redefining terrorist as his trump card to get almost any law passed or any court precedent re-interpreted.
I wouldn't be at all suprised to hear that people who check out library books are "terrorists" so I'm not suprised to hear the word bandied about in platform war diatribes whether it was valid before the Bush ][: "Minax" administration or not.
Push the Mac now, it's deficiencies are where Linux excels. What do I mean?
Well, the Mac is secure. Has Microsoft office. Has a comfortable interface for an Windows user. And has a nice set of commercial documentation, trainers, and administrators to sustain people from a grandmother to a reasonable sized business with modest IT staff.
At some point in the future, Linux will offer a competitive alternative (even if arguably they don't do so today). And it will be a much easier to argue for co-existence with Macs or even complete replacement of them with Linux boxes.
Whatever IT staff there is that have trained on the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X won't feel threatened by Linux. The Accounting department will smile that they can keep using the same hardware (with YellowDog Linux) and buy replacement x86 boxes as replacements.
When's the time to push for the transition from Mac to Linux? Basically, whenever one finds the needed tools (be it office suite or whatever) along with a usable interface. That could be today, the next budget cycle, or the next time Apple pushes for a major costly upgrade. In the meantime, keep users and administrators away from lotus eating* on the Windows platform and you'll have a much easier time coexisting or transitioning from Apple in the future.
(*a reference to the Oddessey rather than the software company acquired by IBM)
While many people will be able to "get by" with older versions of 10.x (Cheetah, Puma, and Jaguar). I think that the raft of new features Apple has put in to Panther (10.3) will make most software developers insist on Panther as a minimum requirement for their users.
Many of the trendy UI widgets you see in Apple's iApps are now "standard" in Panther. The new features in the table view alone will greatly simplify developer code. Add to that a compelling new controller layer that allows developers to ditch most of their boring MVC glue code for only a slight speed penalty and things are looking much simpler if a developer just says "Minimum Requirement: 10.3 Panther or higher".
There are some great new features in the system for end users (Expose', Better Finder, modest speed bump*), but in the end I think it's the developers who will compel the mom & dad crowd to move to Panther.
(*Incidentally, I don't think the speed bump will feel as big to most people as the bump from Puma to Jaguar felt. Some frames have been dropped from some UI animations so it feels like they're popping out faster for example, but in some cases (like the new controller layer) things are actually going to slow down.)
Many tech companies are proud of the claim that We eat our own dog food.
It's seems likely to me that Motorolla did not want to use it's own semiconductors in it's communications business. But doing so would, in essence, be a vote of no confidence in their own semiconductor business.
By spinning off their semi-conductor biz and framing it as a move to meet demands from other customers, they are able to ditch their processors without outright killing their semiconductor business.
If the spinoff does poorly, they'll quietly kill it later. If it does well, they'll either start using their products again or sell it off for a big profit.
It's sad to see Motorolla leaving the chip business though.:-(
I served in a leading capacity on a university government (and I don't mean to compare the governing of a university to the governing of a state or country).
Sometimes they were changes that were meant to protect everyone from new regulations. Sometimes they were changes to cut costs or eliminate incredible redundancy from systems that had evolved over decades.
It was very difficult to get certain groups, people, and factions of the governed to change. Sometimes they were being asked to give up a privilege, power, or money that they wanted to keep. Sometimes they were just ingrained in having done something the same way for years and "didn't want to".
I found that incentives were the best way to make the governed swallow such bitter pills. Certain incentives cost a lot of money (printing brochures, sending people to seminars, etc), but making software and giving it to people willing to change their bueracracy was a very cheap way I could get things done.
"Keeping track of all those forms is a nightmare, but here's some software specially designed for this task. You can have it for free if you'll just change over to this new way of bookkeeping."
The first taste of this software was always hard and usually involved handing over cash or help to transition the information. Later on, annual upgrades to the look and feel or new features made it trivial to force new regulations on the goverened. In most cases, unless this were a regulation being forced on us by the government, these were just voluntary upgrades and people could go on using older versions and keep whatever privilege/power/money they had. Eventually though, after two or three "upgrades" they'd find something compelling to force them to come back in line.
Because of it's cheap cost to create and it's high value to others being given the software, there was no other incentive that was as economically powerful.
But back to the Dean campaign. It's great that he's giving away his software. It's great for standardization that he's making it GPL. But what makes me uncomfortable is that by cutting out custom software that I was the only vendor of in the government, I'm would lose a lot of power to force others to do things the way I want. I have to go back to governing by fiat "You'll do it my way and I won't accept any other" than by these software incentives because people will be able to download software for their particular governence area on the web.
Of course these are marketing numbers from a marketing report, so I find it ironic that Windows Server is on the increase with such an awful marketing message.
"Do More With Less"
Since the competeition is free, the slogan can't be talking about price so what does the "less" apply to? Quality is the only thing that comes to my mind. In other words, MS is saying "Hey, our product really IS inferior, but you should make more use of it."
They certainly won't be nailed for false advertising, but I find it hard to believe anyone who sees this ad would buy the software at all.
Apple has been hinting of late that it's becoming more uncomfortable with seeding pre-release software to developers. Routinely, leaks of the new features and builds in the latest versions of the software make it to the mac rumor sites within hours of being made available in the seed channels.
Of course the argument was that it was a necessary evil to put up with this stuff because the feedback that Apple received from developers (both in quality and quantity) helped catch glaring bugs.
10.2.8 news has been rampant through the rumor channels for a LONG time. Now that it's finally out, there are quick glaring holes that cause the recall of the update and lots of bad publicity for Apple.
I certainly hope Apple doesn't get paranoid about the release of new software to paying seed developers, but this is just another reason that the scale may be tipping toward the paranoid, closed-testing route than the limited open-seeding way it is today.
The Balance of Collaboration
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Do you find solo work (such as American Gods) to be more productive or pleasant for you than collaborative work (such as Good Omens)?
The graphic novel medium relies strongly on collaboration. Not only with artists and editors, but also to a limited extent with marketers, trademark lawyers, and even the "past continuity" of what others before you have written. Your persistence in this field seems like it could get to be almost hellish unless you drew very solid boundaries with your collaborators or you really enjoyed such chaos.
As a freelance programmer I struggle trying to find the appropriate balance of collaboration to satisfy and motivate. While your work is in a completely different field, I'm curious what thoughts, anecdotes, or advice you might have on keeping collaboration in balance.
"make it a criminal offense to share information and tools online which could be used by malicious hackers and virus writers."
On the positive side, couldn't this also be applied to Windows, IE, and Outlook? Ignoring the buffer overflows (which all software has) these programs have been developing, promoting, and expanding the viral capabilities since at least 1998.
After all, there's more documentable evidence of Microsoft staunchly keeping an "open" envrionment to incubate and inspire malicious hackers much more so than the white hat hackers simply exchanging exploit documentation.
The problem with patenting software is because there is so little tangible form that the patent takes.
With software patents, the court doesn't seem clear at all about what constitutes the "form" of the item being patented. It's not restricted to an instruction by instruction implementation. It's not limited to the particular computer language it's submitted in. It's down to the point of being so vague that now even just an abstract idea of something is enough to patent the item. It's to the point that one can patent an idea rather than an implementation.
At least with razor blades and railroad car hitches, it was clear that no one was patenting the "idea" of "trimming hair on the human body" or "connecting railroad cars". The limits of their legal footing are clear. If I saw a way to make a cheaper, better, a meaningfully different item to cut human hair I can see where I might conflict with the Gillette company today. If I don't, then I can apply for protection of my implementation.
In the world of software patents, the original patent has much more power. Everything that claims to do what the original patent does (no matter the implementation) conflicts with the first patent. In addition, if I come up with an intellectually better implementation, and the idea has already been "patented" by an older method, I don't want to try to patent or in any way reveal my methods because they won't get protection. The only way I can keep them is with closed source, trade secret methods.
It would be hard to implement software patents based on implementation ("He wrote his patent in C? We'll write ours in Intel Assembly!") because it would be trivial to create an implementation of the same logic in another form. But the answer is not to allow patenting of ideas which appears to be what software patents have evolved into.
First, I want to say that it is fantastic that both Linus and Alan saw the importance of getting involved in this issue. It is very politically important after the disaster with "software" patents we've had in the United States.
And I normally don't publicly criticize anyone about the mechanics of their message because I spent my time playing Dungeons & Dragons in high school rather than paying attention to grammar and spelling, but I really wish that they had run this by a 12th level grammarian with +2 red pencil before widespread open publication. I think that the letter itself will have a large impact, but I wish it were just a bit more refined.
Addressing the letter to "the Honourable Pat Cox" but opening with a salutation of Mr. instead of President. Leaving out definite articles. Using a mixture of technological, legal, and political terminology but not spelling out or giving background on the different terminologies. Not saying it's wrong or unclear, but just that it might have benefitted from a bit more clarity.
I am really proud of the Linux leaders for doing something so important and inspiring. If not to the leaders of the European parliament then to me at least. I just wish I had no reservations about the form it takes.
Billy Gibson has suggested that "cyberspace" would be the (first and) last enduring word with the prefix "cyber" in it. Just like everything that was cool used to be "electro-" whatever. After a while, it was just assumed that new devices were electronic. Now it's just assumed that new devices have computers in them. "Cyber" is meaningless and anachronistic.
So if Sid & Marty Kroft ever make a come-back what could they possibly rename their Batman & Robin knockoff show ElectroWoman & DynoGirl?
Your post has just scuttled "CyberWoman and InterGirl" as possiblities, and Saturday morning censors would never approve "FreeWoman & OpenGirl".
God forbid they go "WindowsWoman & XpGirl" but that sounds better than "PowerWoman & iMacGirl".
I really didn't need to start worrying about issues like this on a Monday.
One technology department I'm familiar with had its budget slashed incredibly. Basically, by some pointy haired boss using a CDW catalog and his HP 12c to project the figures.
The IT staff were in a panic. Supplying WinTel machines as budgeted wouldn't allow funding for many server side technologies and pet projects. Moreover this didn't go over well with the IT staff who would have to be responsible for maintaining and securing these machines. They weren't Linux savvy yet and if they were being honest, most had come to depend on GUI-driven, point-and-click tools to help them in their maintenance chores.
As they were assembling their rationalizations to take back to management, some extremely clever in-house developers on the IT staff, came up with an open-source solution to deploy:
* Come up with standard Linux install images
* Develop tools on Macs to maintain these images
When the IT staff realized that with this method they weren't in danger of losing their own ease of use, they started coming up with their own justifications for this plan.
* Good to have IT staff on higher-security platform
* Unauthorized users easier to id due to distinctive design
* Wider compatability than Windows or Linux alone
The voiceless masses have been fairly receptive to the new plan (or at least not coordinated enough to voice a strong opposition). Key executives were allowed to be exempt from the Linux standards, but they were encouraged to use Macs with MS products rather than full Wintel machines (to be as "standard" as possible).
The use of friendly maintenance tools on Macs (which used tech friendly technologies under the hood for the geeks) was the key to overcoming the general IT fear of Linux. It's not certain if IT will keep using Macs down the road once this irrational fear is gone, but it was very important to get the ball rolling at all.
I'm curious if the Eolas patent could be applied against Apple's Safari browser.
A plugin architecture is part of the Objective-C based dynamic runtime environment that Safari's GUI is built upon. It sounds like just the act of developing a web browser with Cocoa will put you in jeopardy of violating this patent unless you go out of your way to sabotage the underlying plugin architecture.
Hmmm... perhaps the fact that Apple offers WebKit services embeddable in any Cocoa application may make these email readers, help viewers, blog readers, and html authoring products targets of Eolas due as well.
As a casual consumer of software, I strongly agree with all the points the writer made in his article.
Unfortunately, his emboldened bullet points are all in present tense. In other words, a professional researcher or journalist trained in the art of quick-reading may interpret things as rights we currently have.
A more attention grabbing set of bullet points would use "should" and "should not" more.
Hashing and compression aren't really my thing so maybe someone could clarify my understanding.
I was under the impression that hashes are not reversible like compression algorithm's are, but that they try to add as much chaos between slightly different variations of the original. (The same way the telephone company racks up money by having area codes be very distant from each other; a typo in the area code probably means big bucks for a wrong number)
My spreadsheet of 1997 budget information could produce the same hash as a RIP of Meeco's Star Wars disco theme remix, but it would be unlikely to produce a hash similar to my 1996 budget information (which is practically the same other than 1996 being 1997). None of these would ever compress to the same result using a loss-less compression scheme (or they might be in for a surprise when they uncompressed their Mecco track).
Producing a unique result for each file is what a compression algorithm does. If a hash were truly unique and reversible then you'd have a compression algorithm, right?
Now to make this relevant to this case...
Could someone make a MP3 from MD5 generator? It'd create an MP3 with the goal of having exactly the same MD5 hash as the original song. Admittedly it'd probably sound like a confusion of radio static and Husker Du. Not anyone's cup of tea to listen to probably, but it might wind up being just the sort of edge case to make MD5 hashes insufficient evidence in court (especially if the defendent had a nose ring). If this isn't possible, then perhaps it could make a JPG from MD5 generator? Visual noise is much more appealing to many than auible noise and probably easier to create.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the adoption of a dying OS (BSD) by a dying computer company (Apple) was a well calculated plan to use double negatives to become a living force in the computer market once again ... or would that simply make them undead?
Any zombie hunters or grammar police out there?
Based on past writings, disciples of Ed Yourdon might contribute. The question is how. It's already recently been proven that the waterfall methodology may not work. Maybe we can make thermite from left over Jolt cola cans (powdered aluminum) and iron oxide (rusted brillo).
Whatever... Based on SCO's current popularity, it sounds like it'd be a very popular open source project.
(In other news, karl and the gang are approaching the borders of a hard freeze, will soon start beta testing their provisional replacement, and hopefully release a new form of collaborative democracy on the world before too long!)
The number of bovines that had to die for that production (both in the hides that Gates and Balmer wore as well as the uncountable Longhorn burgers) is hard to fathom.
At least they didn't have Steve Balmer playing Trinity.
In the mid nineties, the beta tape player could no longer play this tape. I paid a fair amount of money for someone to copy this tape over to VHS for me. Maybe they did it because they thought my work was so professional (yeah, right) Maybe they did it just out of the habit on all of their transfers (more likely) Maybe they just thought better safe than sorry. Whatever the reason I believe that in this transfer they added an undesired Macrovision syncing protection to my transferred tape. Of course I didn't discover this addition until 2001 well after my original beta tape is gone as well as the company that did the transfer.
It's not like I can go to Best Buy and get the Athens Georgia 1983 spring production on DVD, but if I try to go to Best Buy to get something to copy my tape for my sister or preserve it for later years I'm treated like a criminal. "No Sir. It's illegal to sell Macrovision breaking products in this country." I know that's bullcrud but what should I expect from Best Buy.
Based on my experiences with trying to circumvent copy protection most people consider "trivial" I don't look forward to higher end crap like these flags.
Btw, if anyone knows of a good product to use to circumvent Macrovision that even an idiot like me could use, I'd very much appreciate a recommendation.
If the interpretation of "derivative works" for Hollywood was defined in the same way that SCO wants Linux classified as derivative of Unix, then Hollywood stands to make a mint for doing absolutely nothing.
It's not as if SCO is a jackal trying to nip at Hollywood, there are jackals on both sides of this court case. Perhaps Hollywood will act innocent and put up a marginal defense, but they stand to gain much if SCO loses
- Offtopic - Win95 (Gui niceties rather than OS stability)
- Inflammatory - Win98 (exacerbation of instability)
- Inappropriate - WinME (enough said)
- Illegal - Windows2000 (post-monopoly ruling)
- Offensive - WinXP (the huge cost of the playskool GUI)
Of course that naturally leads to speculation about what Windows Longhorn would be better codenamed as. Some options from the slash moderation system...Coctothorpe must be the correct interpretation of C#
Of course since the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft's Justice Department has been redefining terrorist as his trump card to get almost any law passed or any court precedent re-interpreted.
I wouldn't be at all suprised to hear that people who check out library books are "terrorists" so I'm not suprised to hear the word bandied about in platform war diatribes whether it was valid before the Bush ][: "Minax" administration or not.
Push the Mac now, it's deficiencies are where Linux excels. What do I mean?
Well, the Mac is secure. Has Microsoft office. Has a comfortable interface for an Windows user. And has a nice set of commercial documentation, trainers, and administrators to sustain people from a grandmother to a reasonable sized business with modest IT staff.
At some point in the future, Linux will offer a competitive alternative (even if arguably they don't do so today). And it will be a much easier to argue for co-existence with Macs or even complete replacement of them with Linux boxes.
Whatever IT staff there is that have trained on the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X won't feel threatened by Linux. The Accounting department will smile that they can keep using the same hardware (with YellowDog Linux) and buy replacement x86 boxes as replacements.
When's the time to push for the transition from Mac to Linux? Basically, whenever one finds the needed tools (be it office suite or whatever) along with a usable interface. That could be today, the next budget cycle, or the next time Apple pushes for a major costly upgrade. In the meantime, keep users and administrators away from lotus eating* on the Windows platform and you'll have a much easier time coexisting or transitioning from Apple in the future.
(*a reference to the Oddessey rather than the software company acquired by IBM)
While many people will be able to "get by" with older versions of 10.x (Cheetah, Puma, and Jaguar). I think that the raft of new features Apple has put in to Panther (10.3) will make most software developers insist on Panther as a minimum requirement for their users.
Many of the trendy UI widgets you see in Apple's iApps are now "standard" in Panther. The new features in the table view alone will greatly simplify developer code. Add to that a compelling new controller layer that allows developers to ditch most of their boring MVC glue code for only a slight speed penalty and things are looking much simpler if a developer just says "Minimum Requirement: 10.3 Panther or higher".
There are some great new features in the system for end users (Expose', Better Finder, modest speed bump*), but in the end I think it's the developers who will compel the mom & dad crowd to move to Panther.
(*Incidentally, I don't think the speed bump will feel as big to most people as the bump from Puma to Jaguar felt. Some frames have been dropped from some UI animations so it feels like they're popping out faster for example, but in some cases (like the new controller layer) things are actually going to slow down.)
It's seems likely to me that Motorolla did not want to use it's own semiconductors in it's communications business. But doing so would, in essence, be a vote of no confidence in their own semiconductor business.
By spinning off their semi-conductor biz and framing it as a move to meet demands from other customers, they are able to ditch their processors without outright killing their semiconductor business.
If the spinoff does poorly, they'll quietly kill it later. If it does well, they'll either start using their products again or sell it off for a big profit.
It's sad to see Motorolla leaving the chip business though. :-(
I served in a leading capacity on a university government (and I don't mean to compare the governing of a university to the governing of a state or country).
Sometimes they were changes that were meant to protect everyone from new regulations. Sometimes they were changes to cut costs or eliminate incredible redundancy from systems that had evolved over decades.
It was very difficult to get certain groups, people, and factions of the governed to change. Sometimes they were being asked to give up a privilege, power, or money that they wanted to keep. Sometimes they were just ingrained in having done something the same way for years and "didn't want to".
I found that incentives were the best way to make the governed swallow such bitter pills. Certain incentives cost a lot of money (printing brochures, sending people to seminars, etc), but making software and giving it to people willing to change their bueracracy was a very cheap way I could get things done.
"Keeping track of all those forms is a nightmare, but here's some software specially designed for this task. You can have it for free if you'll just change over to this new way of bookkeeping."
The first taste of this software was always hard and usually involved handing over cash or help to transition the information. Later on, annual upgrades to the look and feel or new features made it trivial to force new regulations on the goverened. In most cases, unless this were a regulation being forced on us by the government, these were just voluntary upgrades and people could go on using older versions and keep whatever privilege/power/money they had. Eventually though, after two or three "upgrades" they'd find something compelling to force them to come back in line.
Because of it's cheap cost to create and it's high value to others being given the software, there was no other incentive that was as economically powerful.
But back to the Dean campaign. It's great that he's giving away his software. It's great for standardization that he's making it GPL. But what makes me uncomfortable is that by cutting out custom software that I was the only vendor of in the government, I'm would lose a lot of power to force others to do things the way I want. I have to go back to governing by fiat "You'll do it my way and I won't accept any other" than by these software incentives because people will be able to download software for their particular governence area on the web.
Sorry, but I take this as a bittersweet change.
Of course these are marketing numbers from a marketing report, so I find it ironic that Windows Server is on the increase with such an awful marketing message.
"Do More With Less"
Since the competeition is free, the slogan can't be talking about price so what does the "less" apply to? Quality is the only thing that comes to my mind. In other words, MS is saying "Hey, our product really IS inferior, but you should make more use of it."
They certainly won't be nailed for false advertising, but I find it hard to believe anyone who sees this ad would buy the software at all.
Apple has been hinting of late that it's becoming more uncomfortable with seeding pre-release software to developers. Routinely, leaks of the new features and builds in the latest versions of the software make it to the mac rumor sites within hours of being made available in the seed channels.
Of course the argument was that it was a necessary evil to put up with this stuff because the feedback that Apple received from developers (both in quality and quantity) helped catch glaring bugs.
10.2.8 news has been rampant through the rumor channels for a LONG time. Now that it's finally out, there are quick glaring holes that cause the recall of the update and lots of bad publicity for Apple.
I certainly hope Apple doesn't get paranoid about the release of new software to paying seed developers, but this is just another reason that the scale may be tipping toward the paranoid, closed-testing route than the limited open-seeding way it is today.
Do you find solo work (such as American Gods) to be more productive or pleasant for you than collaborative work (such as Good Omens)?
The graphic novel medium relies strongly on collaboration. Not only with artists and editors, but also to a limited extent with marketers, trademark lawyers, and even the "past continuity" of what others before you have written. Your persistence in this field seems like it could get to be almost hellish unless you drew very solid boundaries with your collaborators or you really enjoyed such chaos.
As a freelance programmer I struggle trying to find the appropriate balance of collaboration to satisfy and motivate. While your work is in a completely different field, I'm curious what thoughts, anecdotes, or advice you might have on keeping collaboration in balance.
"make it a criminal offense to share information and tools online which could be used by malicious hackers and virus writers."
On the positive side, couldn't this also be applied to Windows, IE, and Outlook? Ignoring the buffer overflows (which all software has) these programs have been developing, promoting, and expanding the viral capabilities since at least 1998.
After all, there's more documentable evidence of Microsoft staunchly keeping an "open" envrionment to incubate and inspire malicious hackers much more so than the white hat hackers simply exchanging exploit documentation.
The problem with patenting software is because there is so little tangible form that the patent takes.
With software patents, the court doesn't seem clear at all about what constitutes the "form" of the item being patented. It's not restricted to an instruction by instruction implementation. It's not limited to the particular computer language it's submitted in. It's down to the point of being so vague that now even just an abstract idea of something is enough to patent the item. It's to the point that one can patent an idea rather than an implementation.
At least with razor blades and railroad car hitches, it was clear that no one was patenting the "idea" of "trimming hair on the human body" or "connecting railroad cars". The limits of their legal footing are clear. If I saw a way to make a cheaper, better, a meaningfully different item to cut human hair I can see where I might conflict with the Gillette company today. If I don't, then I can apply for protection of my implementation.
In the world of software patents, the original patent has much more power. Everything that claims to do what the original patent does (no matter the implementation) conflicts with the first patent. In addition, if I come up with an intellectually better implementation, and the idea has already been "patented" by an older method, I don't want to try to patent or in any way reveal my methods because they won't get protection. The only way I can keep them is with closed source, trade secret methods.
It would be hard to implement software patents based on implementation ("He wrote his patent in C? We'll write ours in Intel Assembly!") because it would be trivial to create an implementation of the same logic in another form. But the answer is not to allow patenting of ideas which appears to be what software patents have evolved into.
First, I want to say that it is fantastic that both Linus and Alan saw the importance of getting involved in this issue. It is very politically important after the disaster with "software" patents we've had in the United States.
And I normally don't publicly criticize anyone about the mechanics of their message because I spent my time playing Dungeons & Dragons in high school rather than paying attention to grammar and spelling, but I really wish that they had run this by a 12th level grammarian with +2 red pencil before widespread open publication. I think that the letter itself will have a large impact, but I wish it were just a bit more refined.
Addressing the letter to "the Honourable Pat Cox" but opening with a salutation of Mr. instead of President.
Leaving out definite articles. Using a mixture of technological, legal, and political terminology but not spelling out or giving background on the different terminologies. Not saying it's wrong or unclear, but just that it might have benefitted from a bit more clarity.
I am really proud of the Linux leaders for doing something so important and inspiring. If not to the leaders of the European parliament then to me at least. I just wish I had no reservations about the form it takes.
So if Sid & Marty Kroft ever make a come-back what could they possibly rename their Batman & Robin knockoff show ElectroWoman & DynoGirl?
Your post has just scuttled "CyberWoman and InterGirl" as possiblities, and Saturday morning censors would never approve "FreeWoman & OpenGirl".
God forbid they go "WindowsWoman & XpGirl" but that sounds better than "PowerWoman & iMacGirl".
I really didn't need to start worrying about issues like this on a Monday.
One technology department I'm familiar with had its budget slashed incredibly. Basically, by some pointy haired boss using a CDW catalog and his HP 12c to project the figures.
The IT staff were in a panic. Supplying WinTel machines as budgeted wouldn't allow funding for many server side technologies and pet projects. Moreover this didn't go over well with the IT staff who would have to be responsible for maintaining and securing these machines. They weren't Linux savvy yet and if they were being honest, most had come to depend on GUI-driven, point-and-click tools to help them in their maintenance chores.
As they were assembling their rationalizations to take back to management, some extremely clever in-house developers on the IT staff, came up with an open-source solution to deploy:
* Come up with standard Linux install images
* Develop tools on Macs to maintain these images
When the IT staff realized that with this method they weren't in danger of losing their own ease of use, they started coming up with their own justifications for this plan.
* Good to have IT staff on higher-security platform
* Unauthorized users easier to id due to distinctive design
* Wider compatability than Windows or Linux alone
The voiceless masses have been fairly receptive to the new plan (or at least not coordinated enough to voice a strong opposition). Key executives were allowed to be exempt from the Linux standards, but they were encouraged to use Macs with MS products rather than full Wintel machines (to be as "standard" as possible).
The use of friendly maintenance tools on Macs (which used tech friendly technologies under the hood for the geeks) was the key to overcoming the general IT fear of Linux. It's not certain if IT will keep using Macs down the road once this irrational fear is gone, but it was very important to get the ball rolling at all.
I'm curious if the Eolas patent could be applied against Apple's Safari browser.
A plugin architecture is part of the Objective-C based dynamic runtime environment that Safari's GUI is built upon. It sounds like just the act of developing a web browser with Cocoa will put you in jeopardy of violating this patent unless you go out of your way to sabotage the underlying plugin architecture.
Hmmm... perhaps the fact that Apple offers WebKit services embeddable in any Cocoa application may make these email readers, help viewers, blog readers, and html authoring products targets of Eolas due as well.
As a casual consumer of software, I strongly agree with all the points the writer made in his article.
Unfortunately, his emboldened bullet points are all in present tense. In other words, a professional researcher or journalist trained in the art of quick-reading may interpret things as rights we currently have.
A more attention grabbing set of bullet points would use "should" and "should not" more.
Indeed, as the old joke goes "It's turtles all the way down!" :-D
Hashing and compression aren't really my thing so maybe someone could clarify my understanding.
I was under the impression that hashes are not reversible like compression algorithm's are, but that they try to add as much chaos between slightly different variations of the original. (The same way the telephone company racks up money by having area codes be very distant from each other; a typo in the area code probably means big bucks for a wrong number)
My spreadsheet of 1997 budget information could produce the same hash as a RIP of Meeco's Star Wars disco theme remix, but it would be unlikely to produce a hash similar to my 1996 budget information (which is practically the same other than 1996 being 1997). None of these would ever compress to the same result using a loss-less compression scheme (or they might be in for a surprise when they uncompressed their Mecco track).
Producing a unique result for each file is what a compression algorithm does. If a hash were truly unique and reversible then you'd have a compression algorithm, right?
Now to make this relevant to this case...
Could someone make a MP3 from MD5 generator? It'd create an MP3 with the goal of having exactly the same MD5 hash as the original song. Admittedly it'd probably sound like a confusion of radio static and Husker Du. Not anyone's cup of tea to listen to probably, but it might wind up being just the sort of edge case to make MD5 hashes insufficient evidence in court (especially if the defendent had a nose ring). If this isn't possible, then perhaps it could make a JPG from MD5 generator? Visual noise is much more appealing to many than auible noise and probably easier to create.