Why do people care if the FBI can snoop what they do on-line? Are folks paranoid the FBI will find out they illegally download MP3s, software, and movies? Invasion of privacy? Bah. I could care less if the FBI sees me buy a movie from amazon.com or read the latest hockey news on nhl.com. If this is what it takes in this modern day and age for the law enforcement agencies to protect us, so be it.
This sort of thing gets easily abused. Let's say you're an unpopular professor, and the administration wants you out. You have tenure, so they dig around and find out that your daughter used the school's cell phone when she had an emergency. The administration then gets you kicked out for abusing school equipment.
Or let's say that you're surfing, and get sucked into a porn popup trap. Your company pokes around on your computer and finds the porn, then gets you forced out.
Both of these are very possible---they are examples of incidents I've heard of. Can you really say that you haven't ever done something a little wrong? Or that you don't have anything that could be misinterpreted?
What I usually use as a parallel is: Imagine that the people who built buildings or bridges were required to use commercial steen and concrete, but the specs for these materials were trade secrets. Imagine that construction firms had to use whatever material was delivered, and were not permitted to see its specs. There would be no way that anyone could calculate the effect of loads and stresses, and things would fall down under load.
This is how software is built.
Not true. You're confusing specs and design. Steel manufacturers provide specs in the form of density, strength, etc. But they don't tell you how it was forged.
Similarly, a good software API will tell you how to access the functionality, its performance characteristics, etc. They don't, and shouldn't tell you how it was implemented.
There are good reasons to see the source. This just isn't one of them.
We really should take MS to task over not providing the source code to their products - after all, when IBM first started shipping software for their mainframes, the source code came with it so that the user could customize it to their needs. Where does MS get off thinking it should be any different?
That's not a good comparison. Remember that back then software was not considered to be the point--hardware was king. Microsoft recognized that hardware would become a commodity, and positioned themselves to be there when software became the important aspect of systems.
Interestingly, MS is now being threatened by Linux, which one could argue could become the commodity OS. Lucky for MS, it doesn't look like software development is going to follow Moore's law like hardware does.
Doesn't it seem that these scientists are going out of their way to discredit creationists? While the real bible-toting creationists constantly rail about the godlessness of science and the inherent evil they see in the theory of evolution, I always thought that the scientific view would be to let the results of solid research speak for themselves. A thinking person would be able to decide for himself what to make of the whole debate.
You forget one important thing: Creationists don't do battle in the scientific literature. Instead, they turn evolution into a strawman, which they then attack in a political way. Since what (almost) happened in Kansas, I think that scientists are beginning to realize that they must find in the political arena as well.
This seems to be way too over the top for my liking. Is it necessary to drag down opposing viewpoints while making your own best case?
Also remember that this is a press release which may have been spun a bit. If you read the paper online, you'll see that there's no mention of creationists.
Certainly, creationists feel that way about what science has shown us since the days of Darwin. Is it necessary to stoop to the same tactics?
You mean Galileo, right? Let's not forget what happened in that case. As long as Creationists rely on people's prejudices and lack of knowledge to further their position, some degree of spinning is necessary if science wants to capture mindshare in the public
Science: The earth is round
Skeptic: That's ludicrous! How can people on the other side keep from falling off? How can they walk around on their hands?!
Science: People evolved from a common ancestor as Chimpanzees
Creationist: That's ludicrous! Why don't we see monkeys in classrooms? How does water evolve from ice?
By the way, I've actually had people raise those objections.
GoZilla used to be a really slick download manager. Then they were bought out by Radiate, which prompty installed spyware. Okay, I thought, I'll just use OptOut to remove the spyware and continue using it. Well, then I learned that the new version requires you to pay extra $$. Apparently the new company doesn't honor the "free upgrades" policy of the original company with which I purchased the software...
What happens when you have flocks of birds rising by the thousands getting in the way of the flight path of an airliner taking off out into Jamaica Bay?
Interestingly, the military has a "bird gun" which they use to fire dead chickens into the engines of airplanes. A friend of mine saw this thing in action, and he says that the big engines don't even hiccup for a single chicken-sized bird.
There's a pretty funny story about the French (?) borrowing the gun, and when they fired it at a windshield, the bird went straight through and embedded itself in the bulkhead in the back of the cockpit. When they asked the Americans, about it, the Americans said "Thaw out the bird first".:)
Not only was IBM under the antitrust gun, but they also failed to anticipate competition resulting from their componentization in OS 360. As a result of well-defined component interfaces, several key employees went off and started competing companies to market interchangeable alternative components.
Microsoft is not stupid. They know that opening up their protocols and interfaces could spell their doom. In fact, they made short work of Netscape by removing the interfaces between the OS and the browser. You can bet that they'll interpret the settlement in a very narrow sense in order to avoid sharing information with potential competitors.
See the book Design Rules by Baldwin and Clark for an interesting analysis of the effect of componentization on IBM. The early benefits were enormous as the company was able to market a product line of computers, and evolve the components in parallel. In the end it helped to kill them as competing companies arose. That's when the original FUD started...
Cleartype on laptops is nice. (Not enabled by default though.) I actually prefer using my laptop screen, as it's easier on the eyes.
Suspend is faster, as is booting
Multiple users can run apps at the same time.
(But for some reason you can't use offline folders with this feature.)
More stable
Built-in NAT support. (Which means you can have your VMWare guest talk through the XP machine to the outside network.)
DHCP fails over to static IP
Recently used apps listed in start menu
So I'd say you get some really nice features if you're a laptop user. I can unplug my machine at work (DHCP) and plug it in at home (static IP), and in a minute the OS figures out what happened. And my VMWare guest keeps on working just fine as well. (Too bad VMWare doesn't support suspending of the host machine...)
If you're a gamer or non-laptop user with Windows experience, the other features are mostly eye candy. However, if you're installing Windows for your grandma, you might consider XP. At first I thought the organization of the control panel was silly, but now I like the way tasks are listed separately from icons. If you think about it, most of the things in control panel should be task-oriented, not feature-oriented.
Out of these companies, how many really will *buy* this? Especially since Sourceforge is also an Opensource project?
Companies are paying to get it installed. Sure, it's open source, but that doesn't mean it's easy. As a matter of fact, at the University of Virginia we're using it to teach first-year graduate students about configuring, building, and installing Unix software. One of the pedagogical goals for their upcoming 2nd lab is "understanding poorly written documentation".:)
First they store my credit card info when I make a purchase. Next they get hacked by a russian. Then they tell me everything's okay. Then I get a $10.80 balance adjustment from Citibank for an unauthorized transaction on my credit card. Then EggHead goes bust. Then they plan to sell my personal information. Then, to top it all off, the opt-out only works if you use a mail client that the browser recognizes. ()
Can you guess which records have the strongest privacy protections in the USA? Medical records? Nope. DMV records? Nope?
Video rental records. Apparently there was a scare a few years back where a news agency was threatening to publish a list of a certain representative's video rentals. Needless to say, this made several other people in congress nervous, and they quickly passed laws barring such research.:)
Bob: We're in big trouble. That thing is going to replace 20 men with shovels.
Bill: And those twenty men with shovels already replaced 200 men with spoons
Where is Hawking getting this fear of technology? Sci-fi films aside, it will be a long time before we build something that could accidentally become self-aware. If the danger is perceived to be real, then people will build in safeguards.
When was the last time you worried that your car would start up in the garage, rev the engine, put itself in drive, and run you flat in your own living room?
"In contrast with our intellect, computers double their performance every 18 months," he tells Focus magazine.
"So the danger is real that they could develop intelligence and take over the world."
Intellect != performance. And even if it was comparable, I don't see why we should fear intelligent machines any more than we fear powerful machines.
As an undergrad physics major at Ole Miss I had the opportunity to hear his "seeded from space" collaborator, Chandra Wickramasinghe. I remember thinking to myself "Who is this guy with the shoddy research?" I only realized later that he had an international reputation, along with Hoyle.
Some highlights of his talk:
They first got the idea of seeding from space when they looked at the absorption spectrum of light coming space, and computed the average particle size to be nearly the same size as a bacterium. (hello? coincidence => correlation?)
To support his theory, he argued that cold epidemics don't usually start at one location and then spread out. Instead, colds start in different locations as you might expect if things were falling on the earth from the sky. (Never mind that colds are caused by viruses which are a lot tinier than bacteria, and the fact that we've never caught an extraterrestrial bacterium/virus plunging into our atmosphere.)
Then he put a graph up "supporting" his cold-spread argument. It looked just like a Gateway computer box--no axes, no title, no indication of what it was supposed to mean.
While discussing colds, I pointed out that the weather has an effect on the spread of colds. He replied in a most patronizing way that people had done cold studies where they dunked subjects in cold water and they didn't get colds. Well, duh. Being cold doesn't give you a cold, but being indoors around the clock might put you in closer contact with people who have colds.
Overall, the impression I have is that the theories get lots of press because they sound cool, but that there's not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. It seems like they're doing science in reverse--they have a theory and are looking for the data to support it.
Except for rare cases, the scientific establishment listens to people with good data to support their claims. I think the reason Hoyle was considered a "maverick outsider to the establishment" was because his science wasn't up to par.
Yes, and you can "easily" delete the MSN icon from your desktop, and "easily" install Netscape on your computer if you can't buy it pre-installed.
Excuse me, but aren't these the sorts of things that got MS in hot water with the DoJ? Never mind that MS is violating my copyright by including my content in their "new and improved" generated page. Didn't we already go through all this with the Deja linking fiasco? ----------------------------------------- --------------
I listened to the hearings a little and couldn't stand how MS was pulling the wool over the judges eyes. Say what you want, but Judge Jackson had a pretty good handle on the technical issues.
From what I heard, MS lawyers we trying to re-argue whether or not they did wrong. For example, the lawyer said that they didn't hurt Netscape's distribution channels because Navigator could be downloaded from anywhere in the world. HA! MS knows very well that if it comes pre-installed users won't switch. Unfortunately, the judges weren't sharp enough to catch this.
As I understand it, the findings of fact are very hard to overturn. I'd like to think that the appeals judges would do the traditional thing and accept the judgement of the lower judge on the findings of fact, but it seems by their posture that they may not. Sigh... ----------------------------------------- --------------
This article got me thinking about a conversation about hill climbing that I was having yesterday...
For those of you without CS backgrounds, hill climbing is a general strategy for finding a solution to a problem. You basically characterize the problem in terms of a set of variables that define a multi-dimensional "surface", then define some function that maps these variables to a "goodness" value. Then you tell the computer to "climb the hill" until it finds the maximum (i.e. best) solution.
Of course, the problem is that you reach local maxima--locations that are peaks, but not the highest peak. So what do you do? You can do a random restart, where you start in a new location and start climbing again, then compare the new peak to the old. Another thing you can do is perturb the existing path a little and start climbing in a new direction.
Now, what if life on earth is a big hill-climbing experiment run by mice? The mice were unhappy with the simple ocean-dominated life of the Permian period, so they arranged to have a "random restart" in the form of a meteorite. Then they weren't happy with the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, so another meteorite.
Now, we've been giving mice AIDS and cancer for years. And we've been squishing them in mousetraps as part of a concerted effort to eradicate them. How long before they decide it's time for another restart?
[Apologies to Douglas Adams...] --------------------------------------- ----------------
Sheesh. Don't buy the products? And did YOU buy a Macrovision-protected DVD player? My point is that the industry will force all the companies to play along with their rights-reducing schemes under threat of lawsuit.
The only thing I see breaking this movement is an anti-trust lawsuit against the media producers for colluding to limit consumers fair-use rights and to stifle competition from rogue hardware producers. -------------------------------------- -----------------
I try to be pretty careful when writing Perl code, because I know how easy it is to do it wrong.:) Check out the code to News Clipper: http://newsclipper.sourceforge.net/ I'm not posting this because I'm bragging. I *think* the code is pretty well structured, but I'd love someone to tear into it.:)
Some code features: automatic downloading and installation of plugins, two download techniques, web content fetching and munging, FTP of output files, logfiles, version safety, OO mixed with imperative style, a meager design document, Perl, modules, about 6000 lines of code, good comments, caching.
Slashdot Mirror
Or let's say that you're surfing, and get sucked into a porn popup trap. Your company pokes around on your computer and finds the porn, then gets you forced out.
Both of these are very possible---they are examples of incidents I've heard of. Can you really say that you haven't ever done something a little wrong? Or that you don't have anything that could be misinterpreted?
You mean it gives you a chocolate when you're (and it's) done?
I sure hope they don't try to patent this. There's plenty of prior art--When I'm in the can, I heat it up myself all the time.
[Who needs to read the articles?!]
What I usually use as a parallel is: Imagine that the people who built buildings or bridges were required to use commercial steen and concrete, but the specs for these materials were trade secrets. Imagine that construction firms had to use whatever material was delivered, and were not permitted to see its specs. There would be no way that anyone could calculate the effect of loads and stresses, and things would fall down under load.
This is how software is built.
Not true. You're confusing specs and design. Steel manufacturers provide specs in the form of density, strength, etc. But they don't tell you how it was forged.
Similarly, a good software API will tell you how to access the functionality, its performance characteristics, etc. They don't, and shouldn't tell you how it was implemented.
There are good reasons to see the source. This just isn't one of them.
Interestingly, MS is now being threatened by Linux, which one could argue could become the commodity OS. Lucky for MS, it doesn't look like software development is going to follow Moore's law like hardware does.
You forget one important thing: Creationists don't do battle in the scientific literature. Instead, they turn evolution into a strawman, which they then attack in a political way. Since what (almost) happened in Kansas, I think that scientists are beginning to realize that they must find in the political arena as well.
Also remember that this is a press release which may have been spun a bit. If you read the paper online, you'll see that there's no mention of creationists.
You mean Galileo, right? Let's not forget what happened in that case. As long as Creationists rely on people's prejudices and lack of knowledge to further their position, some degree of spinning is necessary if science wants to capture mindshare in the public
Science: The earth is round
Skeptic: That's ludicrous! How can people on the other side keep from falling off? How can they walk around on their hands?!
Science: People evolved from a common ancestor as Chimpanzees
Creationist: That's ludicrous! Why don't we see monkeys in classrooms? How does water evolve from ice?
By the way, I've actually had people raise those objections.
GoZilla used to be a really slick download manager. Then they were bought out by Radiate, which prompty installed spyware. Okay, I thought, I'll just use OptOut to remove the spyware and continue using it. Well, then I learned that the new version requires you to pay extra $$. Apparently the new company doesn't honor the "free upgrades" policy of the original company with which I purchased the software...
Interestingly, the military has a "bird gun" which they use to fire dead chickens into the engines of airplanes. A friend of mine saw this thing in action, and he says that the big engines don't even hiccup for a single chicken-sized bird.
There's a pretty funny story about the French (?) borrowing the gun, and when they fired it at a windshield, the bird went straight through and embedded itself in the bulkhead in the back of the cockpit. When they asked the Americans, about it, the Americans said "Thaw out the bird first". :)
Microsoft is not stupid. They know that opening up their protocols and interfaces could spell their doom. In fact, they made short work of Netscape by removing the interfaces between the OS and the browser. You can bet that they'll interpret the settlement in a very narrow sense in order to avoid sharing information with potential competitors.
See the book Design Rules by Baldwin and Clark for an interesting analysis of the effect of componentization on IBM. The early benefits were enormous as the company was able to market a product line of computers, and evolve the components in parallel. In the end it helped to kill them as competing companies arose. That's when the original FUD started...
Say I wanted to have a machine built to these specs. Who would I pay to do it? Can anyone recommend a shop?
So I'd say you get some really nice features if you're a laptop user. I can unplug my machine at work (DHCP) and plug it in at home (static IP), and in a minute the OS figures out what happened. And my VMWare guest keeps on working just fine as well. (Too bad VMWare doesn't support suspending of the host machine...)
If you're a gamer or non-laptop user with Windows experience, the other features are mostly eye candy. However, if you're installing Windows for your grandma, you might consider XP. At first I thought the organization of the control panel was silly, but now I like the way tasks are listed separately from icons. If you think about it, most of the things in control panel should be task-oriented, not feature-oriented.
Companies are paying to get it installed. Sure, it's open source, but that doesn't mean it's easy. As a matter of fact, at the University of Virginia we're using it to teach first-year graduate students about configuring, building, and installing Unix software. One of the pedagogical goals for their upcoming 2nd lab is "understanding poorly written documentation". :)
First they store my credit card info when I make a purchase. Next they get hacked by a russian. Then they tell me everything's okay. Then I get a $10.80 balance adjustment from Citibank for an unauthorized transaction on my credit card. Then EggHead goes bust. Then they plan to sell my personal information. Then, to top it all off, the opt-out only works if you use a mail client that the browser recognizes. ()
Sigh.
Can you guess which records have the strongest privacy protections in the USA? Medical records? Nope. DMV records? Nope?
:)
Video rental records. Apparently there was a scare a few years back where a news agency was threatening to publish a list of a certain representative's video rentals. Needless to say, this made several other people in congress nervous, and they quickly passed laws barring such research.
Bob: We're in big trouble. That thing is going to replace 20 men with shovels.
Bill: And those twenty men with shovels already replaced 200 men with spoons
Where is Hawking getting this fear of technology? Sci-fi films aside, it will be a long time before we build something that could accidentally become self-aware. If the danger is perceived to be real, then people will build in safeguards.
When was the last time you worried that your car would start up in the garage, rev the engine, put itself in drive, and run you flat in your own living room?
Intellect != performance. And even if it was comparable, I don't see why we should fear intelligent machines any more than we fear powerful machines.Some highlights of his talk:
Overall, the impression I have is that the theories get lots of press because they sound cool, but that there's not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. It seems like they're doing science in reverse--they have a theory and are looking for the data to support it.
Except for rare cases, the scientific establishment listens to people with good data to support their claims. I think the reason Hoyle was considered a "maverick outsider to the establishment" was because his science wasn't up to par.
I forget what the boot screen looks like. :)- ---------
---------------------------------------------
Excuse me, but aren't these the sorts of things that got MS in hot water with the DoJ? Never mind that MS is violating my copyright by including my content in their "new and improved" generated page. Didn't we already go through all this with the Deja linking fiasco?- --------------
----------------------------------------
From what I heard, MS lawyers we trying to re-argue whether or not they did wrong. For example, the lawyer said that they didn't hurt Netscape's distribution channels because Navigator could be downloaded from anywhere in the world. HA! MS knows very well that if it comes pre-installed users won't switch. Unfortunately, the judges weren't sharp enough to catch this.
As I understand it, the findings of fact are very hard to overturn. I'd like to think that the appeals judges would do the traditional thing and accept the judgement of the lower judge on the findings of fact, but it seems by their posture that they may not. Sigh...- --------------
----------------------------------------
For those of you without CS backgrounds, hill climbing is a general strategy for finding a solution to a problem. You basically characterize the problem in terms of a set of variables that define a multi-dimensional "surface", then define some function that maps these variables to a "goodness" value. Then you tell the computer to "climb the hill" until it finds the maximum (i.e. best) solution.
Of course, the problem is that you reach local maxima--locations that are peaks, but not the highest peak. So what do you do? You can do a random restart, where you start in a new location and start climbing again, then compare the new peak to the old. Another thing you can do is perturb the existing path a little and start climbing in a new direction.
Now, what if life on earth is a big hill-climbing experiment run by mice? The mice were unhappy with the simple ocean-dominated life of the Permian period, so they arranged to have a "random restart" in the form of a meteorite. Then they weren't happy with the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, so another meteorite.
Now, we've been giving mice AIDS and cancer for years. And we've been squishing them in mousetraps as part of a concerted effort to eradicate them. How long before they decide it's time for another restart?
[Apologies to Douglas Adams...]- ----------------
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Check out MIT Hacks.- -------
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If anyone does see a slot machine blue screen, I want a picture.- ---------------
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Sheesh. Don't buy the products? And did YOU buy a Macrovision-protected DVD player? My point is that the industry will force all the companies to play along with their rights-reducing schemes under threat of lawsuit.
- -----------------
The only thing I see breaking this movement is an anti-trust lawsuit against the media producers for colluding to limit consumers fair-use rights and to stifle competition from rogue hardware producers.
-------------------------------------
Some code features: automatic downloading and installation of plugins, two download techniques, web content fetching and munging, FTP of output files, logfiles, version safety, OO mixed with imperative style, a meager design document, Perl, modules, about 6000 lines of code, good comments, caching.
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