Okay, now I'm a little concerned. Smuggling a bomb on an airplane is a very difficult thing to do. What ISN'T hard it shipping a crate of electronics equipment designed to give off a wide spectrum of high energy radio waves.
What's stopping a terrorist from cargo shipping an electronics system designed to take down one of the older planes? How would the airlines respond with a threat to turn on such a device? Would they even believe it?
I think it would be insane to move a company the size of Microsoft to a new state, much less a new country. 20,000 employees is an awful lot of U-Hauls.
What isn't so silly is if the company gets split up. Take a smaller chunk and move it to BC. There's a great advantage to having lots of small "divisions" all over the world rather than one giant software factory. They are:
- The illusion of being less large - Can respond more to local software markets - No one government authority has control over the entire company
But I'm biased, I live in Vancouver and write software - all those extra jobs would probably increase the competitive pressure on the employers.
: I cannot for the life of me understand why Slashdot keeps hyping these products, when Sony has shown very clearly that they are never going to make a music player that has even heard of
... people still argue over Windows CE versus Palm. I own a Casio E-100 (WinCE), Palm IIIx, and a IBM WorkPad Z50. Each one has positive and negative points.
They ALL make fine tools for keeping track of personal data and doing simple tasks. This is why you bought one, right?
Okay, so a search takes a little longer on the Casio than the Palm. It'll take you longer to reply to this post than the extra time you'll spend doing 1000 searches. The Palm doesn't play MP3s, which I find convenient, but it's smaller and cheaper. And so on and so on.
In the end, get the one that fits how *YOU* will use it and stop trying to justify your purchase publicly. Just enjoy your gizmo and think, no matter how slow the search is, it sure beats hunting though paper.
One could argue Coca-Cola is almost a trade name for something containing cocaine. It's obvious that coke is a synonym for cocaine, just like 'tater and potato.
I hope I didn't give the Tater Tots people any ideas.
The interesting thing was I used extrans, and a is one of the supported links. Right now the box definitely shows as "Extrans (html tags to text)", and if this isn't bold I think Rob has a bug to fix.
You have been able to get the source for CE for a long time. An "evaulation" version of the Windows CE source comes with our MSDN disks. Of course, you still have to license it if you want to do anything with it, but the souce *IS* already available and has been for at least a year.
If you really want a true open source OS for your Windows CE machine, take a look at <a href="http://www.linuce.org">LinuxCE</a>. A port of BSD is also up and running on the same devices.
What I'd really like to see is a meta-compression format that has some heuristic to identify the type of file, and use the appropriate (optimal) algorithm. I know most modern compression programs do something like this already, (like RAR and its multimedia compression) but it's still neat. The few bits to identify the compression methods can be well worth it...
Yikes! Tell your brain "It's okay, you only thought it was a good idea".
The TIFF image format does exactly this, which is why nobody uses it. The problem with a meta-format is that it can never be completely implemented by anybody. So user Joe downloads all of Project Gutenberg in a the tiny 500 kb file compressed by meta-zip, only to discover he doesn't have the GutenSquash codec. he then has to go hunt down the codec and install it, exactly as if he had to download and install a whole new compression tool.
The problem can be reduced by having an auto-download feature like Windows Media, but the basic problem is the standard format is really just a standard container for unstandard things.
Also, with fewer compression methods out there you stand a much better chance of finding something that can decompress your thesis 10 years from now.
Fighting the Good Fight would have consumed a huge amount of their resources, resources they could put towards expanding the market. Once the market is large enough, the large TV networks will have no choice but to adopt the new medium.
The reasons MPAA/RIA are fighting a losing battle against MP3 is because MP3 is already too much a part of our lives. iCraveTV is making the right move doing the same, even if it means humbily backing away from a challenge.
But you pay the same price as you would coding a C++ program - many lines of tedious coding, to get the less performance than perl can crank out of a program 10% the size. The gain must match the pain. Java's pain is equivalent to C++ - the gain is equivalent to VB. Where is the advantage?
If typing is your bottleneck when engineering software, you've got troubles. Program in APL if you must have the minimum text size. The facets I wre referring to was simplicity of design, elegance, etc.
<i>You mean like trying to figure out which Java classes are synchronized and which aren't?</i>
I agree there is no easy way to know which classes are multithreading safe and which aren't. The general convention has been to document it with the class (javadoc-style comments), but almost every language has the issue as well.
<i> > It is almost difficult to make a Java program that is difficult to understand
<br>That comment is idiocy, and you know it. </i> I'm serious. You <b>can</b> write crap code in Java, but it will still not be difficult to understand. Certainly much easier than C or C++ with pointer indirction and math, overloaded operators, etc. If I look at Java code, even if it's ugly, I usually still have a pretty good idea what's going on.
There are some decent arguments in there. However, you're arguing the wrong points. That language wasn't design to be either fast or feature-rich.
Speed of execution isn't always important. There is such a thing as "fast enough". Often the speed at which a developer can write an application is more important than the speed at which it runs.
Feature-rich is another pitfall. Yes, generic programming, multiple inheritence and operator overloading are things that can be beneficial sometimes. But it also means it is harder to understand what is really going on. Is [] just an array or is an overloaded operator that makes some non-obvious assumptions? With MI if I hadd something to one of the base class, what happens - especially if there are conflicting names?
Consider this: It is almost difficult to make a Java program that is difficult to understand, unless the design is really, really bad.
It isn't surprising there are 65,000 defects in a major software system. Very few people want to actually ENGINEER software and would much rather just Program it.
Programming a system, without Engineering it, works well for certain types of evolving systems. Linux, web sites and prototypes change to quickly to Engineer, but trying to "just type in the code" for a major, static system like the autopilot for a aircraft is murder.
So what I'm saying is, as long as we Program a system and then expect to "freeze" it there will always be orders of magnitudes more bugs than we would like. If we keep insisting on not Engineering software there are only two solutions to making Programmed software more robust:
1) Fix it yourself, as in the Open Source model 2) Pay someone else to fix it, which usually means bying the next "upgrade" cleverly disguised as N-3 bug fixes and 3 new features.
Engineered software costs more to build but costs far less in the longer term. Just look as far as the nearest book on software engineering.
So the question is, why do we tolerate 65,000 bugs? Do we feel responsibly for not paying them enough to fix it? Do we feel bad we can't edit the source for them? Or are we just ashamed we keep buying their crap even if it isn't what we, as Consumers, want?
The basic design is wrong. There is zero mention on Intels web site about how many watts a Mobile Pentium II consumes for a reason (except in standby and deep sleep modes).
Heat is another reason. Who wants to hold a 110 degree device in your hand all day? Nice sweaty palms.
I think someone fighting that in course would win unless the same laws were actually passed in Canada. An agreement that's simply "You must follow country Xs laws" wouldn't hold up. If it did then almost any law could be made enforcable instantly by just making a lose "agreement" to a country with a similar law.
You might be right, but I'd like some more evidence. Anybody got a useful link?
Either way, I think it would be worth it to bend this particular law - civil disobedience and all that.
What would happen if someone wrote a short document on how to decrypt the DVDs? It wouldn't be source code and it wouldn't be software.
It could still be considered publishing a trade secret, but given the lawyers left the source code in the open for two weeks likely means that it's no longer a trade secret.
It could also still be considered circumventing the copy protection, but what do I care? I'm in Canada.
It would also have the benefit of not being derived from another player where there is a license to agree to.
The Linux kernel doesn't use the BIOS directly. I think the kernel probes a few data structures behind it's back, but as far as I know only LILO uses the BIOS functionality.
Do you regret distributing your work? While I'm sure you must feel proud for standing by your beliefs, is the impact on your life harsh enough that you wish you have never cracked the encryption?
I'm sure everybody here is very glad you did, but we don't have to live under such scruitiny. Thanks for keeping up the fight for what's good.
There is already a project to port Linux to devices which currently run Windows CE. They have already made excellent progress and Linux now boots on several MIPS and SH3 handhelds, such as the Casio E-100 and IBM WorkPad Z50.
Excuse me, but can't they just copy the freakin' data!? Give Kevin his data back, and brute force it later. If there's anything dangerous in there, they'll know about it later. It's been a lot of years and most of the computers he hacked are gone.
How much of a chance is there of being some sort of dangerous data? Credit card lists? Incriminating files? They might have legal grounds to keep the original (evidence in a criminal case), but it can very easily be argued he can have a copy because the original evidence is not modified in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, now I'm a little concerned. Smuggling a bomb on an airplane is a very difficult thing to do. What ISN'T hard it shipping a crate of electronics equipment designed to give off a wide spectrum of high energy radio waves.
What's stopping a terrorist from cargo shipping an electronics system designed to take down one of the older planes? How would the airlines respond with a threat to turn on such a device? Would they even believe it?
I think it would be insane to move a company the size of Microsoft to a new state, much less a new country. 20,000 employees is an awful lot of U-Hauls.
What isn't so silly is if the company gets split up. Take a smaller chunk and move it to BC. There's a great advantage to having lots of small "divisions" all over the world rather than one giant software factory. They are:
- The illusion of being less large
- Can respond more to local software markets
- No one government authority has control over the entire company
But I'm biased, I live in Vancouver and write software - all those extra jobs would probably increase the competitive pressure on the employers.
Besides MemoryStick, don't forget MiniDiscs.
:-)
: I cannot for the life of me understand why Slashdot keeps hyping these products, when Sony has shown very clearly that they are never going to make a music player that has even heard of
Three words: CmdrTaco, Vaio, Aibo
... people still argue over Windows CE versus Palm. I own a Casio E-100 (WinCE), Palm IIIx, and a IBM WorkPad Z50. Each one has positive and negative points.
They ALL make fine tools for keeping track of personal data and doing simple tasks. This is why you bought one, right?
Okay, so a search takes a little longer on the Casio than the Palm. It'll take you longer to reply to this post than the extra time you'll spend doing 1000 searches. The Palm doesn't play MP3s, which I find convenient, but it's smaller and cheaper. And so on and so on.
In the end, get the one that fits how *YOU* will use it and stop trying to justify your purchase publicly. Just enjoy your gizmo and think, no matter how slow the search is, it sure beats hunting though paper.
It's ironic, don't you think?
Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine
One could argue Coca-Cola is almost a trade name for something containing cocaine. It's obvious that coke is a synonym for cocaine, just like 'tater and potato.
I hope I didn't give the Tater Tots people any ideas.
The interesting thing was I used extrans, and a is one of the supported links. Right now the box definitely shows as "Extrans (html tags to text)", and if this isn't bold I think Rob has a bug to fix.
You are correct. My type-o. I suck.
You have been able to get the source for CE for a long time. An "evaulation" version of the Windows CE source comes with our MSDN disks. Of course, you still have to license it if you want to do anything with it, but the souce *IS* already available and has been for at least a year.
If you really want a true open source OS for your Windows CE machine, take a look at <a href="http://www.linuce.org">LinuxCE</a>. A port of BSD is also up and running on the same devices.
Successive versions of the program would, of course, implement more algorithms.
Of course. This is mostly what new relases are about. The problem is that gzip hasn't had one in quite a while.
I completely agree, as long as the point is better algorithms, and not just more.
What I'd really like to see is a meta-compression format that has some heuristic to identify the type of file, and use the appropriate (optimal) algorithm. I know most modern compression programs do something like this already, (like RAR and its multimedia compression) but it's still neat. The few bits to identify the compression methods can be well worth it...
Yikes! Tell your brain "It's okay, you only thought it was a good idea".
The TIFF image format does exactly this, which is why nobody uses it. The problem with a meta-format is that it can never be completely implemented by anybody. So user Joe downloads all of Project Gutenberg in a the tiny 500 kb file compressed by meta-zip, only to discover he doesn't have the GutenSquash codec. he then has to go hunt down the codec and install it, exactly as if he had to download and install a whole new compression tool.
The problem can be reduced by having an auto-download feature like Windows Media, but the basic problem is the standard format is really just a standard container for unstandard things.
Also, with fewer compression methods out there you stand a much better chance of finding something that can decompress your thesis 10 years from now.
iCraveTV did a very wise thing here.
Fighting the Good Fight would have consumed a huge amount of their resources, resources they could put towards expanding the market. Once the market is large enough, the large TV networks will have no choice but to adopt the new medium.
The reasons MPAA/RIA are fighting a losing battle against MP3 is because MP3 is already too much a part of our lives. iCraveTV is making the right move doing the same, even if it means humbily backing away from a challenge.
Code length is directly proportional to costs and errors. This has been a well understood engineering principle for decades.
No, <b>complexity</b> is proportional to cost and errors. Longer code does not mean more complex, and often times the reverse is true.
But you pay the same price as you would coding a C++ program - many lines of tedious coding, to get the less performance than perl can crank out of a program 10% the size. The gain must match the pain. Java's pain is equivalent to C++ - the gain is equivalent to VB. Where is the advantage?
If typing is your bottleneck when engineering software, you've got troubles. Program in APL if you must have the minimum text size. The facets I wre referring to was simplicity of design, elegance, etc.
<i>You mean like trying to figure out which Java classes are synchronized and which aren't?</i>
I agree there is no easy way to know which classes are multithreading safe and which aren't. The general convention has been to document it with the class (javadoc-style comments), but almost every language has the issue as well.
<i>
> It is almost difficult to make a Java program that is difficult to understand
<br>That comment is idiocy, and you know it.
</i>
I'm serious. You <b>can</b> write crap code in Java, but it will still not be difficult to understand. Certainly much easier than C or C++ with pointer indirction and math, overloaded operators, etc. If I look at Java code, even if it's ugly, I usually still have a pretty good idea what's going on.
There are some decent arguments in there. However, you're arguing the wrong points. That language wasn't design to be either fast or feature-rich.
Speed of execution isn't always important. There is such a thing as "fast enough". Often the speed at which a developer can write an application is more important than the speed at which it runs.
Feature-rich is another pitfall. Yes, generic programming, multiple inheritence and operator overloading are things that can be beneficial sometimes. But it also means it is harder to understand what is really going on. Is [] just an array or is an overloaded operator that makes some non-obvious assumptions? With MI if I hadd something to one of the base class, what happens - especially if there are conflicting names?
Consider this: It is almost difficult to make a Java program that is difficult to understand, unless the design is really, really bad.
It isn't surprising there are 65,000 defects in a major software system. Very few people want to actually ENGINEER software and would much rather just Program it.
Programming a system, without Engineering it, works well for certain types of evolving systems. Linux, web sites and prototypes change to quickly to Engineer, but trying to "just type in the code" for a major, static system like the autopilot for a aircraft is murder.
So what I'm saying is, as long as we Program a system and then expect to "freeze" it there will always be orders of magnitudes more bugs than we would like. If we keep insisting on not Engineering software there are only two solutions to making Programmed software more robust:
1) Fix it yourself, as in the Open Source model
2) Pay someone else to fix it, which usually means bying the next "upgrade" cleverly disguised as N-3 bug fixes and 3 new features.
Engineered software costs more to build but costs far less in the longer term. Just look as far as the nearest book on software engineering.
So the question is, why do we tolerate 65,000 bugs? Do we feel responsibly for not paying them enough to fix it? Do we feel bad we can't edit the source for them? Or are we just ashamed we keep buying their crap even if it isn't what we, as Consumers, want?
The basic design is wrong. There is zero mention on Intels web site about how many watts a Mobile Pentium II consumes for a reason (except in standby and deep sleep modes).
Heat is another reason. Who wants to hold a 110 degree device in your hand all day? Nice sweaty palms.
I don't think there is any practical way to put a Pentium-derived processor into a palm-sized computer.
I should care, but I don't.
I think someone fighting that in course would win unless the same laws were actually passed in Canada. An agreement that's simply "You must follow country Xs laws" wouldn't hold up. If it did then almost any law could be made enforcable instantly by just making a lose "agreement" to a country with a similar law.
You might be right, but I'd like some more evidence. Anybody got a useful link?
Either way, I think it would be worth it to bend this particular law - civil disobedience and all that.
What would happen if someone wrote a short document on how to decrypt the DVDs? It wouldn't be source code and it wouldn't be software.
It could still be considered publishing a trade secret, but given the lawyers left the source code in the open for two weeks likely means that it's no longer a trade secret.
It could also still be considered circumventing the copy protection, but what do I care? I'm in Canada.
It would also have the benefit of not being derived from another player where there is a license to agree to.
Any takers?
Ahhhh, good point. Yes, that would definitely suck. Excuse me while I copyright the speed of light and trademark 'c'.
Collections of facts are ALREADY copyrighted and always have been. Even collections of uncopyright material are themselved copyrighted.
For example, an encyclopedia, collection of recipies and a CD-ROM containing the files of Project Gutenberg are all copyright.
The Linux kernel doesn't use the BIOS directly. I think the kernel probes a few data structures behind it's back, but as far as I know only LILO uses the BIOS functionality.
Do you regret distributing your work? While I'm sure you must feel proud for standing by your beliefs, is the impact on your life harsh enough that you wish you have never cracked the encryption?
I'm sure everybody here is very glad you did, but we don't have to live under such scruitiny. Thanks for keeping up the fight for what's good.
There is already a project to port Linux to devices which currently run Windows CE. They have already made excellent progress and Linux now boots on several MIPS and SH3 handhelds, such as the Casio E-100 and IBM WorkPad Z50.
See the Linux CE Project.
Excuse me, but can't they just copy the freakin' data!? Give Kevin his data back, and brute force it later. If there's anything dangerous in there, they'll know about it later. It's been a lot of years and most of the computers he hacked are gone.
How much of a chance is there of being some sort of dangerous data? Credit card lists? Incriminating files? They might have legal grounds to keep the original (evidence in a criminal case), but it can very easily be argued he can have a copy because the original evidence is not modified in any way.