As many have pointed out, XML can be compressed just as Flash can, although the compression is left as an "transfer encoding" (on the HTTP level) rather than being an explicit part of the data format.
Some suggests that compressed SVG would be bulkier than an equivalent compressed binary format file. Here some Information Theory is useful. It turns out that every type of "message" sent has a certain minimum average size. For example, to send an integer randomly selected from [1,256], you need to use at least 8 bits on average.
An ideal compressor should shrink every file to its "best" size. In fact, this often almost happens. Reversible transformations applied to a file, such as binary->text or text->binary tend to merly change the resulting compressed size with some constant overhead.
In the light of that, one could even argue that to create "efficient" binary formats is to confuse the different stages a message is transfered in. You are in effect applying an ad-hoc compression algorithm, when you could/should leave that to the later pass of an universal data compressor.
But the point is, compressed SVGs will not turn out significantly larger than binary formats with compression, just because the original data was in a different for. It is the content (that is, the picture you are transmitting) that matters.
And yes, they can tell if it's encrypted, because encryption, or at least good encryption, does obey a certain statistical pattern
It is easy to munch some large corpus to gather statistics, then use a markov-chain system to output "pseudo-English". One fun program that does this is JWZ's DadaDodo, but there are more sofisticated versions too. It is not difficult to feed an encrypted message into this system instead of the normal random-number source, to generate an "English" message with the same entropy as the original (encrypted) one. (after all, the cyphertext is supposed to approximate random noise). Then the receiver can reconstruct the cyphertext, provided s/he had access to the same corpus that was used to generate the statistics.
Of course, it is still easy to tell that the output is not genuine English - if you are a human. If the sender uses the most sophisticated models of English known, however, it will not be possible to automatically differentiate this messages from normal unencrypted email. (Of course, some care has to be taken to keep the corpus secret, etc, etc...).
I have in fact read about PGP hacks that does this. The reason they are not used more often is probably because, as other posters has pointed out, there is currently no harrasment of crypto-users.
one question i've always had about the movie... Where'd the dude get the dove from?
As far as I can tell, he brings it with him when he runs up to the roof. Rather cliche, eh?
I happen to have come across some etext version of the screenplay and script. The former gives:
EXT. THE SECOND ROOF (A LITTLE LATER)
Batty is crumpled in a different position. It's light- er now and Batty's eyes are staring into infinity... almost lifelessly. A pigeon flutters down and perches on his shoulder. Batty doesn't stir.
Deckard is watching motionless.
The pigeon flies off.
Batty doesn't move. Alive or dead?
The script condenses/modifies that into:
[Deckard does some amazing climbing, then jumps to next building. Roy follows, after tossing a bird.]
I was always of the opinion that he was a replicant, because 'Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep' makes it much clearer
As far as I can tell, the novel makes it quite clear that he is not an android. It is discussed explicitly, and at long last he takes his own Voigt-Kampff test which turns out negative. Perhaps even more significant, he is able to join and find peace with Mercer, which is supposed to be the property that seperates humans from androids.
The experience of being human is clearly an important theme of Do Androids Dream, and I think if Deckard-in-the-book had not been human, that would have altered its message substantially. The movie, of course, is quite different from the book, and Deckard-in-the-movie being a replicant is perhaps the largest difference.
It is rumored (or more?) that the USA has lasers that can fry satelites.
More.:)
The US has the cleverly named MIRACL (Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser), which was recently involved in a (controversial) test, where it fried some poor old satelite.
Am I the only one who thinks these design decisions seem awfully similar to what MS choose to do for backwards copatability with DOS? We now, once again, has a filesystem which is sort of compatible but loses information (compare long file NAM~1s). We have "special" directories which the user "should" not look into.
We even have the very same double-root kludge: the underlying os (DOS/unix) expects one structure, and the user another, so we have a "real" root which users are not supposed to know about, and then the friendly/usr/lib/desktop, no doubt.
And programs are supposed to move to a "package" model for un/installation, like the "add/remove program" item in the Control Panel. I predict it will take five years for Apple, too, to get that trick to work.
This is not to say that the problem could have been solved much better (although I personally think they should have discarded much more of the Unix side of the system -- they have no obligation to be backwards-compatible there!). But the net result is a less elegant system than any of the ingredients (MacOS, Unix, NeXt) that went into the brew. This makes MacOS X a much less interesting OS alternative for me.
I was under the impression that only the part that acutally creates and makes available copies of a copyrighted work does something wrong. In particular, I have a vague recollection of a newspaper article that stated that a person that creates pirated CDs can be sued, but that it is not illegal to accept CDs from him. (This was in Sweden, but copyright legislation should be the same everywhere).
If that is the case, then lists of people who has downloaded supposedly pirated content would be completely useless. Only a list of people who has served such content would be of interest (like the list that was presented in the Napster case).
The intent is not to fight over terminology, but simply to make do with the limited number of terms in the English language
...
The categories identified here--donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored--seem to exhaust the economic possibilities; they provide precise and accurate terminology, more useful in practice than the catch-all term of free software.
...
[RMS uses]the universal appeal of this word, derived from centuries of mankind's struggle for freedom in the usual (political and moral) sense of the term, to defend the authors' own agenda, based on a narrow and controversial notion of freedom. This distortion--the hijacking for private purposes of a word that holds such a sacred aura for most people--is highly unethical.
It is worth mentioning that we, in a sense, have already observed a still more "distant" "object", namely Big Bang. Of course, since it filled the entire universe, it is visible in all directions, and it is redshifted to the microwaves that were first noted in the 60s.
I am surprised by the inferences people make above a person's literary taste based only on age and gender (or, even worse, only gender). It should be clear that the reading within an agegroup varies tremendously. (For example,a friend of mine mentioned that she read Achebe's Things Fall Apart when she was nine years old). I find that I read a lot of the books mentioned here as "unsuitable for 13-ys olds" when I was at that age, and enjoyed them.
Someone mentioned that one should flip through a book before giving it to someone, which seems like a fairly natural thing to do if you view books as something more than intellectual-looking table decorations. If you think a certin book would make the perfect gift solely because it was mentioned at Slashdot, perhaps you would be better served by buying a new sweater.
Finally, I find it quite hillarious that so many people marked books as unsuitable for a 13-ys old because of "explicit sex". As far as I recall, that began to become one of my favourite literary themes somewhere around that age.:)
Here is the letter I wrote them. I'm not sure what email address you should use for this sort of things; anyone?
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 18:50:02 +0100 From: Vilhelm Sjöberg To: help@google.com, press@google.com Subject: Concerning the Patent on PageRank. X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you, since it has been called to my attention (through the recent Slashdot article) that you are applying for a patent for the PageRank measure. I urge you to reconsider this decision. If you feel that that is impossible, at least consider granting use of this technology to everyone, without licensing fees.
When I first learnt about Google I was excited, not only about the remarkably high-quality results it returned, but equally much about the fresh attitude exhibited in for example the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine". Quotes like
"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm."
gave an impression of a company which took true "community responsablity" (to use a marketing word): rather than being content with some market share, you aimed to improve the state of the art in web searchers. The academic background seemed to vouch for a free dissemination of information, following a tradition much older than IPOs and Market Relations.
With its connections with the academic domain, Google would be clearly aware of the damages patents on algorithms has done to the level of technology used in many fields. Research itself might not be hampered (since the academic study of an invention is not covered by patents), but its adoption in everyday life is critically hampered.
The clearest example of this is in the field of data compression, where algorithms like PPM (which has existed for decades) remain unused due to patent problems. Some more current algorithms _were_ in fact adopted, for example Ross Williams' variations on Ziv-Lempel coding which were implemented by GNU, only to be forced to withdraw. Instead, the commercial field remains dominated by LZ77 (Zip, Gzip), or LZ78 (compress). Imagine if Ziv and Lempel also had patented their results; then we would still be using per-symbol huffman coding like the Unix utility pack(3).
The Google founders should be well aware how new inventions in this area must depend on older; indeed the paper mentioned above itself acknowledges this when it describes the PageRank:
"Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page."
Patenting the PageRank would frustrate further development in text searching and block its actual adoption, in the same way that would have been the case if the "Academic citation literature" had been covered by patents.
By filing for patent of PageRank, Google has chosen Profit over Progress. If more users become disillusioned like I have, you might find you will gain neither.
Sincerely Yours, Vilhelm Sjöberg
-- -Vilhelm Sjöberg "355/113 -- not the famous number, vilhelm@home.se but an incredibly good imitation!"
As acrtually bought win95 back in, er, 1995, I happen to own a 30-page booklet entitled "Limited Warranty". The interesting section follows:
NO LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTAL DAMAGES --- TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT ALLOWABLE BY LAW, MISCROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY OTHER DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, OR OTHER PECUNIARY LOSS) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THIS MICROSOFT PRODUCT, EVEN IF MICROSOFT HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN ANY CASE, MISCROSOFT'S ENTIRE LIABILITY UNDER ANY PROVISION OF THES AGREEMENT SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT ACTUALLY PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE.
While i don't understand why the movie industry insists on this, I do understand that it's their right to determine proper usage, because they paid for it's creation and hence, it's their property.
But there in lies the rub. It is not clear that there is indeed a human right to control what happens to content after it is produced. In particular, no freedom of the producer seems restricted by people copying the work, and disallowing copying certainly is a restriction of the consumer's freedom.
Rather, defences of intellectual property seems to boil down to ecconomic arguments. There, I think RMS's argument is very relevant - copyright should be seen as a contract between the public and the producer, and the very fact that the people wants to create copies demonstrates that the contract should be rewritten!
In the end, I think the DVD in particular and media-industry in general shows a clear crisis of democracy in western countries, especially the US. A small group of rich capitalist, through their lobbying groups, have the control over these issues - not the voters. Consequently, they are able enrich themselves at the expense of people in general. And they are able to use the institutions of the state (police and courts) against those who oppose them!
> Would you give Neuromancer to a 15 year old to read?
At least I was less then fifteen years old when I first read it, and I appreciated it. The recievers book taste is probably more important than his/her age.
>"Linux" to me means the software that I use most.
That is indeed RMS' point: the name "Linux" is terribly misused. That in turn hurts, amongst others, FSF -- which is why the GNU/Linux war started in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
As many have pointed out, XML can be compressed just as Flash can, although the compression is left as an "transfer encoding" (on the HTTP level) rather than being an explicit part of the data format.
Some suggests that compressed SVG would be bulkier than an equivalent compressed binary format file. Here some Information Theory is useful. It turns out that every type of "message" sent has a certain minimum average size. For example, to send an integer randomly selected from [1,256], you need to use at least 8 bits on average.
An ideal compressor should shrink every file to its "best" size. In fact, this often almost happens. Reversible transformations applied to a file, such as binary->text or text->binary tend to merly change the resulting compressed size with some constant overhead.
In the light of that, one could even argue that to create "efficient" binary formats is to confuse the different stages a message is transfered in. You are in effect applying an ad-hoc compression algorithm, when you could/should leave that to the later pass of an universal data compressor.
But the point is, compressed SVGs will not turn out significantly larger than binary formats with compression, just because the original data was in a different for. It is the content (that is, the picture you are transmitting) that matters.
'If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?'
A Red-Black one, definitely. :-)
I suppose it's telling that a post that suggests there might be more to life than cool technology gets upmodded as "funny". :)
And yes, they can tell if it's encrypted, because encryption, or at least good encryption, does obey a certain statistical pattern
It is easy to munch some large corpus to gather statistics, then use a markov-chain system to output "pseudo-English". One fun program that does this is JWZ's DadaDodo, but there are more sofisticated versions too. It is not difficult to feed an encrypted message into this system instead of the normal random-number source, to generate an "English" message with the same entropy as the original (encrypted) one. (after all, the cyphertext is supposed to approximate random noise). Then the receiver can reconstruct the cyphertext, provided s/he had access to the same corpus that was used to generate the statistics.
Of course, it is still easy to tell that the output is not genuine English - if you are a human. If the sender uses the most sophisticated models of English known, however, it will not be possible to automatically differentiate this messages from normal unencrypted email. (Of course, some care has to be taken to keep the corpus secret, etc, etc...).
I have in fact read about PGP hacks that does this. The reason they are not used more often is probably because, as other posters has pointed out, there is currently no harrasment of crypto-users.
one question i've always had about the movie... Where'd the dude get the dove from?
As far as I can tell, he brings it with him when he runs up to the roof. Rather cliche, eh?
I happen to have come across some etext version of the screenplay and script. The former gives:
The script condenses/modifies that into:
I was always of the opinion that he was a replicant, because 'Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep' makes it much clearer
As far as I can tell, the novel makes it quite clear that he is not an android. It is discussed explicitly, and at long last he takes his own Voigt-Kampff test which turns out negative. Perhaps even more significant, he is able to join and find peace with Mercer, which is supposed to be the property that seperates humans from androids.
The experience of being human is clearly an important theme of Do Androids Dream, and I think if Deckard-in-the-book had not been human, that would have altered its message substantially. The movie, of course, is quite different from the book, and Deckard-in-the-movie being a replicant is perhaps the largest difference.
It is rumored (or more?) that the USA has lasers that can fry satelites.
More. :)
The US has the cleverly named MIRACL (Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser), which was recently involved in a (controversial) test, where it fried some poor old satelite.
Am I the only one who thinks these design decisions seem awfully similar to what MS choose to do for backwards copatability with DOS? We now, once again, has a filesystem which is sort of compatible but loses information (compare long file NAM~1s). We have "special" directories which the user "should" not look into.
/usr/lib/desktop, no doubt.
We even have the very same double-root kludge: the underlying os (DOS/unix) expects one structure, and the user another, so we have a "real" root which users are not supposed to know about, and then the friendly
And programs are supposed to move to a "package" model for un/installation, like the "add/remove program" item in the Control Panel. I predict it will take five years for Apple, too, to get that trick to work.
This is not to say that the problem could have been solved much better (although I personally think they should have discarded much more of the Unix side of the system -- they have no obligation to be backwards-compatible there!). But the net result is a less elegant system than any of the ingredients (MacOS, Unix, NeXt) that went into the brew. This makes MacOS X a much less interesting OS alternative for me.
I was under the impression that only the part that acutally creates and makes available copies of a copyrighted work does something wrong. In particular, I have a vague recollection of a newspaper article that stated that a person that creates pirated CDs can be sued, but that it is not illegal to accept CDs from him. (This was in Sweden, but copyright legislation should be the same everywhere).
If that is the case, then lists of people who has downloaded supposedly pirated content would be completely useless. Only a list of people who has served such content would be of interest (like the list that was presented in the Napster case).
I found the following escalation amusing:
The intent is not to fight over terminology, but simply to make do with the limited number of terms in the English language
...
The categories identified here--donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored--seem to exhaust the economic possibilities; they provide precise and accurate terminology, more useful in practice than the catch-all term of free software.
...
[RMS uses]the universal appeal of this word, derived from centuries of mankind's struggle for freedom in the usual (political and moral) sense of the term, to defend the authors' own agenda, based on a narrow and controversial notion of freedom. This distortion--the hijacking for private purposes of a word that holds such a sacred aura for most people--is highly unethical.
What happened to the days when you just download the setup EXE, run it, and the software was installed???
For that matter, what happened to the days you simply downloaded the program you wanted as an EXE file? :)
It is worth mentioning that we, in a sense, have already observed a still more "distant" "object", namely Big Bang. Of course, since it filled the entire universe, it is visible in all directions, and it is redshifted to the microwaves that were first noted in the 60s.
Indeed.
I am surprised by the inferences people make above a person's literary taste based only on age and gender (or, even worse, only gender). It should be clear that the reading within an agegroup varies tremendously. (For example,a friend of mine mentioned that she read Achebe's Things Fall Apart when she was nine years old). I find that I read a lot of the books mentioned here as "unsuitable for 13-ys olds" when I was at that age, and enjoyed them.
Someone mentioned that one should flip through a book before giving it to someone, which seems like a fairly natural thing to do if you view books as something more than intellectual-looking table decorations. If you think a certin book would make the perfect gift solely because it was mentioned at Slashdot, perhaps you would be better served by buying a new sweater.
Finally, I find it quite hillarious that so many people marked books as unsuitable for a 13-ys old because of "explicit sex". As far as I recall, that began to become one of my favourite literary themes somewhere around that age. :)
Also, as far as I know, Alpha won't run x86 code because it uses a different architecture. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
But neither will the IA-66?
Here is the letter I wrote them. I'm not sure what email address you should use for this sort of things; anyone?
Date: Mon, 27 Dec 1999 18:50:02 +0100
From: Vilhelm Sjöberg
To: help@google.com, press@google.com
Subject: Concerning the Patent on PageRank.
X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you, since it has been called to my attention (through the
recent Slashdot article) that you are applying for a patent for the PageRank
measure. I urge you to reconsider this decision. If you feel that that is
impossible, at least consider granting use of this technology to everyone,
without licensing fees.
When I first learnt about Google I was excited, not only about the remarkably
high-quality results it returned, but equally much about the fresh attitude
exhibited in for example the paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual
Web Search Engine". Quotes like
"Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with
little publication of technical details. This causes search engine
technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented.
With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and
understanding into the academic realm."
gave an impression of a company which took true "community responsablity" (to
use a marketing word): rather than being content with some market share, you
aimed to improve the state of the art in web searchers. The academic
background seemed to vouch for a free dissemination of information, following
a tradition much older than IPOs and Market Relations.
With its connections with the academic domain, Google would be clearly aware
of the damages patents on algorithms has done to the level of technology used
in many fields. Research itself might not be hampered (since the academic
study of an invention is not covered by patents), but its adoption in everyday
life is critically hampered.
The clearest example of this is in the field of data compression, where
algorithms like PPM (which has existed for decades) remain unused due to
patent problems. Some more current algorithms _were_ in fact adopted, for
example Ross Williams' variations on Ziv-Lempel coding which were implemented
by GNU, only to be forced to withdraw. Instead, the commercial field remains
dominated by LZ77 (Zip, Gzip), or LZ78 (compress). Imagine if Ziv and Lempel
also had patented their results; then we would still be using per-symbol
huffman coding like the Unix utility pack(3).
The Google founders should be well aware how new inventions in this area must
depend on older; indeed the paper mentioned above itself acknowledges this when
it describes the PageRank:
"Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by
counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some
approximation of a page's importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea
by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the
number of links on a page."
Patenting the PageRank would frustrate further development in text searching
and block its actual adoption, in the same way that would have been the case
if the "Academic citation literature" had been covered by patents.
By filing for patent of PageRank, Google has chosen Profit over Progress. If
more users become disillusioned like I have, you might find you will gain
neither.
Sincerely Yours,
Vilhelm Sjöberg
--
-Vilhelm Sjöberg "355/113 -- not the famous number,
vilhelm@home.se but an incredibly good imitation!"
As acrtually bought win95 back in, er, 1995, I happen to own a 30-page booklet entitled "Limited Warranty". The interesting section follows:
NO LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTAL DAMAGES --- TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT ALLOWABLE BY LAW, MISCROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY OTHER DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, OR OTHER PECUNIARY LOSS) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THIS MICROSOFT PRODUCT, EVEN IF MICROSOFT HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN ANY CASE, MISCROSOFT'S ENTIRE LIABILITY UNDER ANY PROVISION OF THES AGREEMENT SHALL BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT ACTUALLY PAID FOR THE SOFTWARE.
While i don't understand why the movie industry insists on this, I do understand that it's their right to determine proper usage, because they paid for it's creation and hence, it's their property.
But there in lies the rub. It is not clear that there is indeed a human right to control what happens to content after it is produced. In particular, no freedom of the producer seems restricted by people copying the work, and disallowing copying certainly is a restriction of the consumer's freedom.
Rather, defences of intellectual property seems to boil down to ecconomic arguments. There, I think RMS's argument is very relevant - copyright should be seen as a contract between the public and the producer, and the very fact that the people wants to create copies demonstrates that the contract should be rewritten!
In the end, I think the DVD in particular and media-industry in general shows a clear crisis of democracy in western countries, especially the US. A small group of rich capitalist, through their lobbying groups, have the control over these issues - not the voters. Consequently, they are able enrich themselves at the expense of people in general. And they are able to use the institutions of the state (police and courts) against those who oppose them!
> Would you give Neuromancer to a 15 year old to read?
At least I was less then fifteen years old when I first read it, and I appreciated it. The recievers book taste is probably more important than his/her age.
In the JC statement quoted, he says this should prevent 'another gldoom episode'. Any idea what this was?
AAAAAAARGHH! I'm blind!
:)
>"Linux" to me means the software that I use most.
That is indeed RMS' point: the name "Linux" is terribly misused. That in turn hurts, amongst others, FSF -- which is why the GNU/Linux war started in the first place.