File system blocks do not have to be the same size as physical device sectors. A filesystem can be written to combine both physical sector location as well as byte location within that sector when determining where to start a file. Or so I hear.
Were I writing the summary, I probably would have bothered to include that info. It's just good journalism.
Who must be new here? You want good journalism, this ain't the place to find it. For my money, if you aren't paying enough attention to the FSF/GPL3/Stallman to know the background here, I don't think the summary should have to explain this all to you in detail. That's why you should RTFA.
Even if not very many people have access to it in the code, the number of people in government who have access to the information needed to take advantage of such a backdoor would have to be very limited as well. They would either have to provide decryption services (requiring notifying everyone of this capability, but not requiring sharing the technique) or they would have to disseminate the backdoor technique. Either way the story would get out.
I've read it several times myself and it might say what it was intended to say, but I think it's still overly vague at this point. So either you're wrong and it's not "perfectly clear" or my reading comprehension is substantially impaired.
As for specific people mouthing off, if I had to choose whose opinion to trust on this stuff, Torvalds would be at the bottom of the list. On the other hand, the FSF (to which I contribute monetarily) is also responsible for the GFDL, which I think showed some very bad judgement with its whole invariant appendix aspect (and I don't think I'm alone in thinking that). So the idea that the FSF would not only make a perfect judgement call here, but also draft the document in exactly the best way the first time out... unlikely.
Patents were not introduced to allow a brain trust to think up thousands of ways to make a doorknob so they can sit back and demand royalties from companies that actually produce products for and item they have never built.
Why not? Certainly it's better to get some really good doorknob designers in a room and have them think up some great doorknobs than it is to force every door company in the world to have to reinvent the doorknob?
The problem here is that ATT has waited until their doorknob was used in every house built for several years before deciding to press their case.
The real problem, then, is that GPL3 as drafted needs a lot of work wrt the DRM language because there seems to be no clear consensus about what those sections actually mean. I mean, I personally dislike DRM and Treacherous Computing as much as any good Slashbot out there, but even still I'm not sure I like these DRM clauses in the GPL3 because they seem overly vague on a lot of points.
The funny thing is that Google's owners and employees are probably the least concerned with their profits.
The shareholders who are buying and selling this rapidly moving stock are the owners. It would appear from the change in stock price that a considerable number of these owners were concerned with profits.
I think the reason people think the web is the whole internet is more a function of the name "internet explorer" being misleading than anything else. I don't have a problem with the word "explorer", but they didn't call it the "world wide web explorer" did they? As for Netscape, "Navigator" might be a bit vague, but it doesn't imply that it is for the whole internet now does it? Not only that, Navigator was bundled with email, chat, newsreaders, and all kinds of other stuff at some point, no? Isn't slimming down the Mozilla monster to just doing web browser the whole raison d'etre for Firefox? So, in fact, if Netscape had called it "Internet Navigator" they would have been more correct than Microsoft was in naming IE as they did.
In any case, the GGP's point was that MS used safe, sensible names and that Linux names were ridiculous. This is clearly not the case. A great number of MS' names have been and still are nonsensical. They are only acceptable in the same way that Google is acceptable now because they are the clear market leader. At least on the Linux side a lot of the names are clever acronyms or abbreviations of some sort.
That kind of person who does "a hundred other typical things" on the internet is in a tiny majority.
Nonsense. The vast majority of internet-connected users use the internet for mail. A significant portion also use it for IM. There is a web browser out there (Mozilla) that supports these two functions (unless you want to split hairs and insist that IM and IRC are not the same thing). In any case, the nomenclature "internet explorer" is misleadingly broad. It should be called "web browser" since that is all it does.
Er, I mean, you forgot: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Visio,.NET, C#, and for a non-MS example, Acrobat.
Plus, Internet Explorer is a complete misnomer. It's a web page viewer. Let me know when it can do email, nntp, ssh, sftp/scp, or any of a hundred other typical things you do on the internet.
As for Linux, most of those applications are sensibly presented in Gnome (and probably in KDE, too).
Meanwhile, the execs are moving to diversify their wealth away from Google stock, because they are smart guys.
To be fair, a dollar just doesn't go as far as it used to either.:)
I don't think it really matters whether you pay this as salary or as stock options, except that some accountant or finance major did the math and figured out which one was the biggest net positive to Google and to the people involved (i.e. which one was most advantageous from a tax perspective).
Count on there being additional options awarded as the execs need more to sell (without selling off so much it looks like they are bailing entirely).
There ought to be no government libraries. If people want libraries, they can build them and provide for them on a voluntary basis and choose the rules based on their whims.
Sounds to me like someone maybe doesn't understand the role that libraries are intended to play in a democracy as a storehouse for information that people need to fully participate in said democracy. As long as we're going to have some form of government, I'm all for libraries.
Now if you had simply said "There ought to be no government." I might be more inclined to agree.
FTFA: While reformatting illustrations submitted in the wrong format, Dr. Rossner realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of Photoshop's image-changing tools to misrepresent the original data.
Because all the sharp scientists think misrepresenting experimental data is an integral part of the scientific method. Sorry, but most scientists are not brilliant Einsteins. They are guys trying to make a living and there is significant pressure to get published and the design/conduct "successful" experiments, right? That's going to lead to pressure to fudge the results. Maybe not all the way to outright fraud, but to where it makes the outcome of any given project look a lot more conclusive than it really was.
I hate being interrupted with phone calls, emails, people dropping by, and I don't like being responsible for what other people do.
What programmer likes being interrupted? None of them. But with you for a manager, at least I'd have a sympathetic ear towards non-random meeting schedule times and perhaps an office environment that minimized interruptions. Do you know what kind of loyalty you could get out of your coding team by simply understanding the work they do, how they do it, and what would make their lives better?
To be an effective manager/leader, you need to be able to deal with people and you need to be organized. For some reason, they see Programming Manager as the Next Step above writing code, when, in fact, they should be looking at people in project management. They have the skills necessary and the experience.
I agree. Yes, a good manager needs to be able to deal with people. And some level of organization is necessary, maybe. But you have to find people who have experience in the technical area in question and who can deal with people and be somewhat organized. Then assign the team an external project manager to keep track of the project stuff. But the decisions need to be made by someone who understands the technical issues involved. Otherwise you end up with managers who are really good for playing Buzzword Bingo, and maybe are really nice folks, but who really don't know how to decide between two competing suggested solutions to a technical problem because they have no clue what they're employees are even talking about half the time.
It seems to me that patents are more or less intended as a reward for risk taking.
If anything, cases like this clearly demonstrate how patents discourage risk taking. Given that we've heard about patents on things like hyperlinks, one-click shopping, and other fairly obvious "inventions" I'd say the risk of being sued for patent infringement is a major chill factor when it comes to putting out a product. The only people who are really safe from this risk are companies that either have their own expensive, wide-ranging arsenals of patents (mutually assured destruction) or who get really lucky violating a patent and make enough money up front to simply pay off the patent holder when they get sued (as RIM will do here if the patents aren't simply invalidated at some point).
Why would I ever want to invest a huge amount of money/time into creating something new, when the next person can just start where I was?
Why? Because the empirical evidence strongly supports the idea that having a patent is largely irrelevant when it comes to capitalizing on the invention described therein. Patents and copyrights should properly be seen as an experiment where the hypothesis was not proven.
I find it both ironic and hypocritical that the community here is constantly bashing corporate America; that is, until Microsoft makes certain corporations pay to make get their system-critical software tested and verified. Oh, then we're all sad for those poor corporations that have to pay $500 a year.
I don't think anyone here is crying a river over nVidia having to pay a fee and get a certification or do anything like that. I believe what we are concerned about is that this gives users decreasingly fewer "rights" on their very own hardware using software they paid for.
Maybe if they took the same attitude that they do with your required History or Govt. elective, where it's "this is not rocket science" and "we gotta get everyone through this", more teens would be receptive to it.
What about the converse, instead of lowering the bar or coddling in the sciences, why not simply raise the bar and the expectations across the board?
quite a bit of spam is sent from compromised systems, the quantity of spam sent is an indicator that many, many systems are compromised (if MS is claiming to have solved the problem, I think they should solve it by reducing the number of compromised machines--their OS is used on a significant number of compromised machines, I believe);
some of us prefer to receive all of our mail and filter it at the client, when one receives hundreds of spam a day, it can take quite a while to both download the mail and sort through it;
much spam contains a forged "From:" header, and is often sent to guessed email addresses resulting in bounces, also some idiots have set up spam detection that uses challenge/response or sends a return message indicating the message was rejected for being spam, but due to the forged From address these bounce messages get sent to third parties who happen to own the return address, this lowers the effectiveness of true bounce messages because they may get lost in the noise of "false" bounces (this is solvable by making some sort of sent mail-bounce message comparison, I suppose, but that seems like an implementation nightmare.
Nonsense. Copyright law does not mention possession except as it relates to intent to distribute. If you have evidence to the contrary please present it, because otherwise I think you're just making stuff up.
You waded pretty deep to get down to my post that you responded to.
Not really. That's about when I stopped wading. I still hadn't seen any comments about the topic at that point and you expressed an opinion that I don't share, so I did want to point out that not all of us think dupes are a big deal.
Things are not getting worse. When this country was started slavery was normal and women couldn't vote. Along the way the federal government has done all sorts of wacky stuff. The fact that the Supreme Court sided with Roosevelt on the matter of imprisoning American citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps shows that this isn't just an executive branch issue, either. Recent cases that some of us consider highly questionable include Kelo and Raich. But those are nothing compared to Dred Scott.
So here we are in 2006, at a time when we're afraid because the government might find out we were looking at naughty pictures on the internet? Not too many decades ago these naughty pictures were difficult to obtain and carried not only significant legal risk, but also a heavy social stigma. And things are getting worse? Probably not.
Doesn't mean we should be thrilled that the Bush administration is doing this, but so far all they've done is ask politely for the data, right? Last time I checked, there is no such thing as client/server privilege that requires MSN, Yahoo, or any other search engine to keep this information secret. That Google said "no" is darn cool. Can't wait to see how this plays out.
I've never once cared about the dupes on this site and I don't think eliminating them will improve the site one bit. In fact, the first two times they posted this story I either: 1) missed it completely, or 2) wasn't taken in by the headline/summary... but this time I was interested in what people had to say about the topic. Instead I'm wading through a bunch of irrelevant noise about how the article is a triple play.
Slashdot Mirror
File system blocks do not have to be the same size as physical device sectors. A filesystem can be written to combine both physical sector location as well as byte location within that sector when determining where to start a file. Or so I hear.
Thank you. Some of us aren't new here, but we need to be reminded.
Were I writing the summary, I probably would have bothered to include that info. It's just good journalism.
Who must be new here? You want good journalism, this ain't the place to find it. For my money, if you aren't paying enough attention to the FSF/GPL3/Stallman to know the background here, I don't think the summary should have to explain this all to you in detail. That's why you should RTFA.
Uh, yes. And maybe we should point out that the sky is blue, as well... in case someone wanders in and is confused about this issue.
Even if not very many people have access to it in the code, the number of people in government who have access to the information needed to take advantage of such a backdoor would have to be very limited as well. They would either have to provide decryption services (requiring notifying everyone of this capability, but not requiring sharing the technique) or they would have to disseminate the backdoor technique. Either way the story would get out.
As for specific people mouthing off, if I had to choose whose opinion to trust on this stuff, Torvalds would be at the bottom of the list. On the other hand, the FSF (to which I contribute monetarily) is also responsible for the GFDL, which I think showed some very bad judgement with its whole invariant appendix aspect (and I don't think I'm alone in thinking that). So the idea that the FSF would not only make a perfect judgement call here, but also draft the document in exactly the best way the first time out... unlikely.
Why not? Certainly it's better to get some really good doorknob designers in a room and have them think up some great doorknobs than it is to force every door company in the world to have to reinvent the doorknob?
The problem here is that ATT has waited until their doorknob was used in every house built for several years before deciding to press their case.
The real problem, then, is that GPL3 as drafted needs a lot of work wrt the DRM language because there seems to be no clear consensus about what those sections actually mean. I mean, I personally dislike DRM and Treacherous Computing as much as any good Slashbot out there, but even still I'm not sure I like these DRM clauses in the GPL3 because they seem overly vague on a lot of points.
The shareholders who are buying and selling this rapidly moving stock are the owners. It would appear from the change in stock price that a considerable number of these owners were concerned with profits.
I think the reason people think the web is the whole internet is more a function of the name "internet explorer" being misleading than anything else. I don't have a problem with the word "explorer", but they didn't call it the "world wide web explorer" did they? As for Netscape, "Navigator" might be a bit vague, but it doesn't imply that it is for the whole internet now does it? Not only that, Navigator was bundled with email, chat, newsreaders, and all kinds of other stuff at some point, no? Isn't slimming down the Mozilla monster to just doing web browser the whole raison d'etre for Firefox? So, in fact, if Netscape had called it "Internet Navigator" they would have been more correct than Microsoft was in naming IE as they did.
In any case, the GGP's point was that MS used safe, sensible names and that Linux names were ridiculous. This is clearly not the case. A great number of MS' names have been and still are nonsensical. They are only acceptable in the same way that Google is acceptable now because they are the clear market leader. At least on the Linux side a lot of the names are clever acronyms or abbreviations of some sort.
Nonsense. The vast majority of internet-connected users use the internet for mail. A significant portion also use it for IM. There is a web browser out there (Mozilla) that supports these two functions (unless you want to split hairs and insist that IM and IRC are not the same thing). In any case, the nomenclature "internet explorer" is misleadingly broad. It should be called "web browser" since that is all it does.
Er, I mean, you forgot: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Visio, .NET, C#, and for a non-MS example, Acrobat.
Plus, Internet Explorer is a complete misnomer. It's a web page viewer. Let me know when it can do email, nntp, ssh, sftp/scp, or any of a hundred other typical things you do on the internet.
As for Linux, most of those applications are sensibly presented in Gnome (and probably in KDE, too).
To be fair, a dollar just doesn't go as far as it used to either. :)
I don't think it really matters whether you pay this as salary or as stock options, except that some accountant or finance major did the math and figured out which one was the biggest net positive to Google and to the people involved (i.e. which one was most advantageous from a tax perspective).
Count on there being additional options awarded as the execs need more to sell (without selling off so much it looks like they are bailing entirely).
Sounds to me like someone maybe doesn't understand the role that libraries are intended to play in a democracy as a storehouse for information that people need to fully participate in said democracy. As long as we're going to have some form of government, I'm all for libraries.
Now if you had simply said "There ought to be no government." I might be more inclined to agree.
Because all the sharp scientists think misrepresenting experimental data is an integral part of the scientific method. Sorry, but most scientists are not brilliant Einsteins. They are guys trying to make a living and there is significant pressure to get published and the design/conduct "successful" experiments, right? That's going to lead to pressure to fudge the results. Maybe not all the way to outright fraud, but to where it makes the outcome of any given project look a lot more conclusive than it really was.
What programmer likes being interrupted? None of them. But with you for a manager, at least I'd have a sympathetic ear towards non-random meeting schedule times and perhaps an office environment that minimized interruptions. Do you know what kind of loyalty you could get out of your coding team by simply understanding the work they do, how they do it, and what would make their lives better?
To be an effective manager/leader, you need to be able to deal with people and you need to be organized. For some reason, they see Programming Manager as the Next Step above writing code, when, in fact, they should be looking at people in project management. They have the skills necessary and the experience.
I agree. Yes, a good manager needs to be able to deal with people. And some level of organization is necessary, maybe. But you have to find people who have experience in the technical area in question and who can deal with people and be somewhat organized. Then assign the team an external project manager to keep track of the project stuff. But the decisions need to be made by someone who understands the technical issues involved. Otherwise you end up with managers who are really good for playing Buzzword Bingo, and maybe are really nice folks, but who really don't know how to decide between two competing suggested solutions to a technical problem because they have no clue what they're employees are even talking about half the time.
If anything, cases like this clearly demonstrate how patents discourage risk taking. Given that we've heard about patents on things like hyperlinks, one-click shopping, and other fairly obvious "inventions" I'd say the risk of being sued for patent infringement is a major chill factor when it comes to putting out a product. The only people who are really safe from this risk are companies that either have their own expensive, wide-ranging arsenals of patents (mutually assured destruction) or who get really lucky violating a patent and make enough money up front to simply pay off the patent holder when they get sued (as RIM will do here if the patents aren't simply invalidated at some point).
Why would I ever want to invest a huge amount of money/time into creating something new, when the next person can just start where I was?
Why? Because the empirical evidence strongly supports the idea that having a patent is largely irrelevant when it comes to capitalizing on the invention described therein. Patents and copyrights should properly be seen as an experiment where the hypothesis was not proven.
I don't think anyone here is crying a river over nVidia having to pay a fee and get a certification or do anything like that. I believe what we are concerned about is that this gives users decreasingly fewer "rights" on their very own hardware using software they paid for.
What about the converse, instead of lowering the bar or coddling in the sciences, why not simply raise the bar and the expectations across the board?
Ah, thanks. Another thing I wasn't thinking about.
Nonsense. Copyright law does not mention possession except as it relates to intent to distribute. If you have evidence to the contrary please present it, because otherwise I think you're just making stuff up.
You waded pretty deep to get down to my post that you responded to.
Not really. That's about when I stopped wading. I still hadn't seen any comments about the topic at that point and you expressed an opinion that I don't share, so I did want to point out that not all of us think dupes are a big deal.
So here we are in 2006, at a time when we're afraid because the government might find out we were looking at naughty pictures on the internet? Not too many decades ago these naughty pictures were difficult to obtain and carried not only significant legal risk, but also a heavy social stigma. And things are getting worse? Probably not.
Doesn't mean we should be thrilled that the Bush administration is doing this, but so far all they've done is ask politely for the data, right? Last time I checked, there is no such thing as client/server privilege that requires MSN, Yahoo, or any other search engine to keep this information secret. That Google said "no" is darn cool. Can't wait to see how this plays out.
I've never once cared about the dupes on this site and I don't think eliminating them will improve the site one bit. In fact, the first two times they posted this story I either: 1) missed it completely, or 2) wasn't taken in by the headline/summary... but this time I was interested in what people had to say about the topic. Instead I'm wading through a bunch of irrelevant noise about how the article is a triple play.