Every time I see these stories in Slashdot and elsewhere, absolutely 100% of the replies are along the lines of "SCO is nuts, they have no chance, they just want to pump up their stock and cash out, etc etc". Sometimes I see things like "I'm a lawyer and I think they have no grounds but wierd things can happen in the legal system."
On the other hand their stock did go up so either the investors are idiots or we're missing something. Any time I'm discussing a topic like this with a group of people all of whom I agree with, I get a bit worried... What are we not hearing?
Is there *anybody* who knows about the case and is *not* on SCO's payroll who thinks there's some merit and SCO might not be thrown out of court, and might even win? If so I'd really like to see a posting from them.
I once wrote an X11 program (or was it X10 - it was a *long* time ago) that would open their display and then randomly warp their mouse position - it would jiggle for a few seconds, then stop for a while, then start again, etc. Everybody would pick up their mouse and look at the bottom. What were they expecting to see, a bug stuck in the wheel or something? You could emulate a lot of hardware malfunctions... Make keys randomly repeat, play disturbing grinding noises from the speakers, etc.
I don't know if there's much point to adding more foreshadowing to episodes 4-6. I guess when my 3 year old gets old enough to watch Star Wars (since the secret is already out of the bag for everybody older) there will be episodes 1-6 available on DVD and he'll just watch them straight through, and there will be no suspense about who Luke's father is. In any case they should have numbered the first ones episodes 1-3 anyway since even though they are 4-6 chronologically, they come first in a dramatic sense and should be watched first by any newcomer.
What a curmudgeon. Even EP1 had some good in it (Darth Maul's fight scenes, and the pod racing was fun even though it's hard to admit that out loud). In EP2 the chase scene through Coruscant was good and Christopher Lee added a definite amount of class. Yeah, everything else was dumb. But if you only watch good movies and only eat the best cuisine and only hang out with 100% non-obnoxious people your life will be pretty boring. Well, that's my philosophy at least...
Why would Vader care about the droids anyway? Some dopey mechanical friends from his childhood - they were probably beneath his notice by Episodes 4-6. Maybe he thought "Hmm, I guess Obi-Wan has my old droids. Whatever." But we couldn't exactly read the thoughtful look on his face when that occurred to him.
I already have a regular car (a minivan that gets 20-25 MPG) and I was thinking of getting a second car - a Hybrid - for trips when I don't need so much space, just around the city, etc. I guess I would get twice the gas mileage, but to build the car in the first place, some energy has to get invested.
I am wondering if anybody has an idea how much this is in terms of gallons of gas. E.g. the equivalent energy to make a new hybrid car might be 1000 gallons of gas, and if I drive 12000 miles per year, I would be using 480 gallons less of gas than if I used my other car, so in ~2 years I would be ahead resource-wise. But if it takes the equivalent of 10,000 gallons of gas I would never break even.
I don't know how one would measure this - you'd have to consider the power used by the auto assembly plant, the power needed to mine and refine the raw materials, etc. But I bet somebody has made some reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculations....
If we don't confuse the two it's because we're music nerds rather than computer nerds. Everybody knows about Apple computers, but who knows what the Beatles' record company is called? 90% of the people you ask would probably say "I dunno, Beatles Records?"
Anyway, I can't imagine how Apple selling iPods or iTunes confuses music buyers. Wouldn't they have to make some kind of halfway plausible handwaving argument about money they are losing to get anything in a lawsuit?
Re:64bit performance gains...
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I don't know if there is an average application... Text editing has never needed it and never will, and scientific codes have needed it for the past 10 years. We are *way* past the point where the latest and greatest CPUs are any use to the average person (unless they play games I guess)
Re:Opcode depreciation
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Ha ha. he meant deprecation. I get that one wrong myself
Well, just think of predicting things 30 or so years into the future - for the average person when his or her children are at the same age.
In 1970, who predicted that computers and ubiquitous electronics would be such a huge part of the lives of many people? (As you say there are some who don't have them but they are like naked people, having little or no influence on society:-)
In 1940 who predicted the rise of Disco? (sorry)
In 1910 who predicted the huge geopolitical changes brought about by the world wars?
Well, maybe it takes a historian to answer those questions. I just think it's interesting how often people try to predict the future despite all evidence that they will be wrong...
Let me ask this - 20 or 50 years ago, how many people were trying to predict what things would be like in 2000, and how many of them were way off base? Of the people who were right, did anybody pay special attention to them at the time? People like this guy who make these predictions are almost certainly going to be wrong, although nobody can say why until the future happens... Why worry about this sort of thing when it's probably not going to happen that way.
I'm not up on the physics, but I think that the fact that our universe is made of mostly matter implies that there must have been some asymmetry in the early period after the big bang. This has been discovered: see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info/ 20020 723/sine2b.html
So maybe if you looked hard enough at the light from an anti-galaxy you could tell the difference - some miniscule difference in the emission spectrum or something.
Good point - I have always wondered, though, why the Axis weren't able to break that. It can't be *that* hard to find somebody who speaks Navajo who is willing to cooperate for a price, and a linguist who knows what the language is.
But still, the point is valid that there's a place for STO (security through obscurity) and also for STME (security through many eyes). It's like travelling to a foreign country where there are different common diseases than you are used to. Do you try to not drink the water (STO) or just eat what the locals eat and get sick and gain immunity?
Maybe the best solution is to hire a bunch of white hat crackers (sounds like Colonel Sanders, doesn't it?) and swear them to secrecy and then give them the source and see what they can do. Best of both worlds.
The buzzword for what you're talking about is Security Through Obscurity. The problem is that it will keep away the casual hackers and script kiddies so you will have many fewer attacks, but to a determined attacker (think of Bletchly Park in WW2 attacking the Enigma) if there are any weaknesses, they will most likely be found and you will not know about it until it's too late. The KGB (or whatever the enemy is these days) doesn't brag about their exploits on IRC.
Right, then somebody implements a bad encryption scheme and because it's closed source nobody sees it and breaks it, and the DoD or other users fool themselves into thinking it's secure, until a foreign government breaks it and reads all our coded communications for years... (Or whatever it is that these people are afraid of). I'd much rather trust something like PGP that everybody can read and understand and crackers (black and white hatted) can do their worst at. Otherwise you are just buying a false set of security.
[Sorry, playing the devil's advocate a bit here] Say there is sloppy non-buffer-checking code in a drawing application (I don't know if there are any in a particular program so I won't be specific). The kind of code that would lead to a vulnerability if it were in an internet server. This program doesn't run setuid and doesn't listen to any sockets and the only way the overrun could be exploited is for the user to do it himself. Tell me how this is a security problem.
I know this will be an unpopular statement... But security is important only for programs that are accessible via the internet. Who cares if an application like gimp (to pick a name at random) has code like
char buf[20]; GetUserInput("Input the number of seconds since you last ate something", buf);
when the only person who has access to that vulnerability is the user himself? I bet 95% of all the useful programs out there fall into this category. It's a waste of time to put an ultra-secure lock on the door between the kitchen and dining room...
It's because these theories are so far out that you could only prove or disprove them on paper. The idea of advanced extraterrestrials may be easy to prove (although hard to disprove), which is why millions of dollars a year are being spent on SETI. Nobody calls UFO believers lunatics because they believe in UFO's, but when they make broad claims based on nonexistent evidence they are (rightly) called lacking in scientific rigour.
Computers will be Artificially Intelligent and we'll explain to them what we want in English or Chinese or whatever. They will just do it and not be able to explain to us how they did it, any more than we can explain how vision works by introspecting. They will reproduce by downloading versions of themselves, greatly simplified and hybridized with other AI's by some kind of sexual reproduction, into bare hardware.
Maybe that's a dumb idea but 100 years from now it won't seem any dumber than anything else that we could come up with. It's like asking Babbage what he thought computer languagues would be like in the future....
To everybody who says "I never have problems installing linux", let me point out that this doesn't mean that nobody has problems. I don't have problems either (most of the time) but obviously some people do. Rather than acting all defensive and saying "Microsoft sucks too" why not see if anything can be done to improve things?
Also it doesn't make sense to say "what do you expect for free". If I pay RedHat or SuSE for a distribution I expect a certain level of quality. I wouldn't blame the authors of the individual GPL'ed packages, but I would blame the distribution people who let packages get on their CD without adequate QA.
To the distributors that the author specifically mentions, I hope you are taking advantage of this free QA. Either she is lying about the problems she had (what would be the point of that) or these problems really happened. If they did they should be fixed. Bugs are bugs.
The conclusion of the article is that Linux isn't ready for the mass market. If you disagree, fine, but don't claim it's perfect or more stable than Windows and therefore the whole article is BS.
Netrek was based on Xtrek, which was developed at UC Berkeley in the late 80's. That in turn was based on trek82 by Dave Davis. There seems to be a good history at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~netrek/history/Timel ine.html
I spent many hours playing xtrek in 86-87 when when I was supposed to be working on my research...
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I see these stories in Slashdot and elsewhere, absolutely 100% of the replies are along the lines of "SCO is nuts, they have no chance, they just want to pump up their stock and cash out, etc etc". Sometimes I see things like "I'm a lawyer and I think they have no grounds but wierd things can happen in the legal system."
On the other hand their stock did go up so either the investors are idiots or we're missing something. Any time I'm discussing a topic like this with a group of people all of whom I agree with, I get a bit worried... What are we not hearing?
Is there *anybody* who knows about the case and is *not* on SCO's payroll who thinks there's some merit and SCO might not be thrown out of court, and might even win? If so I'd really like to see a posting from them.
Wow, that song is my favorite all-time Leonard Nimoy recording...
I once wrote an X11 program (or was it X10 - it was a *long* time ago) that would open their display and then randomly warp their mouse position - it would jiggle for a few seconds, then stop for a while, then start again, etc. Everybody would pick up their mouse and look at the bottom. What were they expecting to see, a bug stuck in the wheel or something? You could emulate a lot of hardware malfunctions... Make keys randomly repeat, play disturbing grinding noises from the speakers, etc.
I don't know if there's much point to adding more foreshadowing to episodes 4-6. I guess when my 3 year old gets old enough to watch Star Wars (since the secret is already out of the bag for everybody older) there will be episodes 1-6 available on DVD and he'll just watch them straight through, and there will be no suspense about who Luke's father is. In any case they should have numbered the first ones episodes 1-3 anyway since even though they are 4-6 chronologically, they come first in a dramatic sense and should be watched first by any newcomer.
That key would be really useful by a group of Arthurian knights...
That's the one you use to type the "logical but operator" in C
What a curmudgeon. Even EP1 had some good in it (Darth Maul's fight scenes, and the pod racing was fun even though it's hard to admit that out loud). In EP2 the chase scene through Coruscant was good and Christopher Lee added a definite amount of class. Yeah, everything else was dumb. But if you only watch good movies and only eat the best cuisine and only hang out with 100% non-obnoxious people your life will be pretty boring. Well, that's my philosophy at least...
Why would Vader care about the droids anyway? Some dopey mechanical friends from his childhood - they were probably beneath his notice by Episodes 4-6. Maybe he thought "Hmm, I guess Obi-Wan has my old droids. Whatever." But we couldn't exactly read the thoughtful look on his face when that occurred to him.
I already have a regular car (a minivan that gets 20-25 MPG) and I was thinking of getting a second car - a Hybrid - for trips when I don't need so much space, just around the city, etc. I guess I would get twice the gas mileage, but to build the car in the first place, some energy has to get invested.
....
I am wondering if anybody has an idea how much this is in terms of gallons of gas. E.g. the equivalent energy to make a new hybrid car might be 1000 gallons of gas, and if I drive 12000 miles per year, I would be using 480 gallons less of gas than if I used my other car, so in ~2 years I would be ahead resource-wise. But if it takes the equivalent of 10,000 gallons of gas I would never break even.
I don't know how one would measure this - you'd have to consider the power used by the auto assembly plant, the power needed to mine and refine the raw materials, etc. But I bet somebody has made some reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculations
If we don't confuse the two it's because we're music nerds rather than computer nerds. Everybody knows about Apple computers, but who knows what the Beatles' record company is called? 90% of the people you ask would probably say "I dunno, Beatles Records?"
Anyway, I can't imagine how Apple selling iPods or iTunes confuses music buyers. Wouldn't they have to make some kind of halfway plausible handwaving argument about money they are losing to get anything in a lawsuit?
I don't know if there is an average application... Text editing has never needed it and never will, and scientific codes have needed it for the past 10 years. We are *way* past the point where the latest and greatest CPUs are any use to the average person (unless they play games I guess)
Ha ha. he meant deprecation. I get that one wrong myself
Well, just think of predicting things 30 or so years into the future - for the average person when his or her children are at the same age.
:-)
In 1970, who predicted that computers and ubiquitous electronics would be such a huge part of the lives of many people? (As you say there are some who don't have them but they are like naked people, having little or no influence on society
In 1940 who predicted the rise of Disco? (sorry)
In 1910 who predicted the huge geopolitical changes brought about by the world wars?
Well, maybe it takes a historian to answer those questions. I just think it's interesting how often people try to predict the future despite all evidence that they will be wrong...
Let me ask this - 20 or 50 years ago, how many people were trying to predict what things would be like in 2000, and how many of them were way off base? Of the people who were right, did anybody pay special attention to them at the time? People like this guy who make these predictions are almost certainly going to be wrong, although nobody can say why until the future happens... Why worry about this sort of thing when it's probably not going to happen that way.
I'm not up on the physics, but I think that the fact that our universe is made of mostly matter implies that there must have been some asymmetry in the early period after the big bang. This has been discovered: see/ 20020 723/sine2b.html
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/slac/media-info
So maybe if you looked hard enough at the light from an anti-galaxy you could tell the difference - some miniscule difference in the emission spectrum or something.
Good point - I have always wondered, though, why the Axis weren't able to break that. It can't be *that* hard to find somebody who speaks Navajo who is willing to cooperate for a price, and a linguist who knows what the language is.
But still, the point is valid that there's a place for STO (security through obscurity) and also for STME (security through many eyes). It's like travelling to a foreign country where there are different common diseases than you are used to. Do you try to not drink the water (STO) or just eat what the locals eat and get sick and gain immunity?
Maybe the best solution is to hire a bunch of white hat crackers (sounds like Colonel Sanders, doesn't it?) and swear them to secrecy and then give them the source and see what they can do. Best of both worlds.
The buzzword for what you're talking about is Security Through Obscurity. The problem is that it will keep away the casual hackers and script kiddies so you will have many fewer attacks, but to a determined attacker (think of Bletchly Park in WW2 attacking the Enigma) if there are any weaknesses, they will most likely be found and you will not know about it until it's too late. The KGB (or whatever the enemy is these days) doesn't brag about their exploits on IRC.
Right, then somebody implements a bad encryption scheme and because it's closed source nobody sees it and breaks it, and the DoD or other users fool themselves into thinking it's secure, until a foreign government breaks it and reads all our coded communications for years... (Or whatever it is that these people are afraid of). I'd much rather trust something like PGP that everybody can read and understand and crackers (black and white hatted) can do their worst at. Otherwise you are just buying a false set of security.
Okay, what's the URL for AI story?
[Sorry, playing the devil's advocate a bit here] Say there is sloppy non-buffer-checking code in a drawing application (I don't know if there are any in a particular program so I won't be specific). The kind of code that would lead to a vulnerability if it were in an internet server. This program doesn't run setuid and doesn't listen to any sockets and the only way the overrun could be exploited is for the user to do it himself. Tell me how this is a security problem.
I know this will be an unpopular statement... But security is important only for programs that are accessible via the internet. Who cares if an application like gimp (to pick a name at random) has code like
char buf[20];
GetUserInput("Input the number of seconds since you last ate something", buf);
when the only person who has access to that vulnerability is the user himself? I bet 95% of all the useful programs out there fall into this category. It's a waste of time to put an ultra-secure lock on the door between the kitchen and dining room...
It's because these theories are so far out that you could only prove or disprove them on paper. The idea of advanced extraterrestrials may be easy to prove (although hard to disprove), which is why millions of dollars a year are being spent on SETI. Nobody calls UFO believers lunatics because they believe in UFO's, but when they make broad claims based on nonexistent evidence they are (rightly) called lacking in scientific rigour.
Computers will be Artificially Intelligent and we'll explain to them what we want in English or Chinese or whatever. They will just do it and not be able to explain to us how they did it, any more than we can explain how vision works by introspecting. They will reproduce by downloading versions of themselves, greatly simplified and hybridized with other AI's by some kind of sexual reproduction, into bare hardware.
Maybe that's a dumb idea but 100 years from now it won't seem any dumber than anything else that we could come up with. It's like asking Babbage what he thought computer languagues would be like in the future....
To everybody who says "I never have problems installing linux", let me point out that this doesn't mean that nobody has problems. I don't have problems either (most of the time) but obviously some people do. Rather than acting all defensive and saying "Microsoft sucks too" why not see if anything can be done to improve things?
Also it doesn't make sense to say "what do you expect for free". If I pay RedHat or SuSE for a distribution I expect a certain level of quality. I wouldn't blame the authors of the individual GPL'ed packages, but I would blame the distribution people who let packages get on their CD without adequate QA.
To the distributors that the author specifically mentions, I hope you are taking advantage of this free QA. Either she is lying about the problems she had (what would be the point of that) or these problems really happened. If they did they should be fixed. Bugs are bugs.
The conclusion of the article is that Linux isn't ready for the mass market. If you disagree, fine, but don't claim it's perfect or more stable than Windows and therefore the whole article is BS.
Netrek was based on Xtrek, which was developed at UC Berkeley in the late 80's. That in turn was based on trek82 by Dave Davis. There seems to be a good history at http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~netrek/history/Timel ine.html
I spent many hours playing xtrek in 86-87 when when I was supposed to be working on my research...