No, it doesn't. The MPAA doesn't make movies - the member companies do. It's a fine line, but there are companies who are part of the MPAA (such as Universal and Disney) who rabidly attempt to curtail others' rights, and there are those who don't.
You seem to have missed any/every point by Eric Flint's Prime Palaver #8. An author is a single entity. There is no fine line. The assertion is that supporting/enjoying a product of an entity is entirely disjoint from dis-/agreeing with the politics of that entity.
Giving money to an author doesn't necessarily mean you're endorsing his political viewpoints.
And by all the same reasoning (did you apply any actual thought? the author is implicitly BOTH of those Blizzard groups...), giving money to Blizzard doesn't necessarily mean you're endorsing their political viewpoints.
The difference is, of course, that by givng money to Blizzard, you're giving money (and thereby encouraging) BOTH groups. When you give money to Blizzard, you're endorsing the actions of the people who seek to beat innocent people into submission.
Buying the game gives money to BOTH groups (or one author)? Yes. Buying the game endorses the politics of BOTH groups (or one author)? No.
Let's break it down:
Buying a game send the message, "This game is good."
Not buying a game sends the message, "This game is bad."
Not buying Warcraft 3 will not send the message, "I disagree with Blizzard's actions toward BNetD and would buy Warcraft 3 otherwise because it looks like it's a good game."
Sending Blizzard a letter that says, "I disagree with your treatment of BNetD" will send the message, "I disagree with your treatment of BNetD."
Supporting the FSF in the name of BNetD will send the message, "I support legal opposition to Blizzard's actions against BNetD".
There are two different arenas (product and political), and actions/messages in one don't bleed in any significant way into the other.... just like the relationship between an author's politics and an author's writing.
Eric Flint in Prime Palaver #8 expressed the point best: "Grow up, dammit."
Since you're probably too unmotivated to read it, let me extract a couple relevant sections:
Or, to move to American literature, I find the politics of Ernest Hemingway a lot more to my liking than the politics of William Faulkner. Yet, as a rule, I dislike the fiction of Hemingway -- I find his obsession with issues of "manhood" boring ("c'mon, Ernie, I figured this stuff out by the time I was seventeen; grow up, willya?") -- and I adore the fiction of William Faulkner.
Literature is not politics. The only time I will refuse to read the fiction writings of someone whose political views I strongly disagree with is if their actual writings are simply a thinly-disguised veneer for their political program.
...
Literature -- and popular fiction is no different, there's no Chinese wall separating the two -- is not politics. A writer as a political figure and his or her fiction are not the same thing. Their political and social views will, of course, influence their writings. But the way that influence works its way through can get extremely complex, even contradictory. And since no political viewpoint -- not even mine, as amazing as it may be -- ever captures all of human reality, you will often discover that a writer whose expressed viewpoints on political matters seems stupid or offensive to you still has something to say in his fiction which strikes a chord.
All points he makes apply directly to the Warcraft 3 / Blizzard situation. Blizzard's politics and the quality of their products are independent -- especially when you consider the people who create the games are a wholly separate group from those who make the political decisions.
And that applies to the MPAA, too. You can despise their political actions, but still appreciate the work by Sam Raimi, Stan Lee, and company; Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and company; and so on.
So by no means is it doublethink to say, "We dislike Blizzard's actions toward BNetD. In addition, we like Warcraft 3." Take your head out of that sandbox you've burried it in, and grow up.
It's the same problem we're having with Napster, Kazaa, Blizzard, etc. That information can trivially be copied, that certain "copies" of information are absolutely fundamental for a computer to work properly... these issues eat at the original preconditions to copyright.
My computer needs a copy of your information in its registers, in its L1/L2/L3 caches, in its system RAM. Software may and often does save (archive) copies to a cache on the hard drive -- admins usually appreciate this because it reduces server load. A transparent web proxy to an intranet may cache web requests for its internal clients if it has a slow outgoing connection.
Surely you shouldn't have to "opt in" the first few cases. But, it's all the same principle, caching/archiving. So, as we go out, especially to the transparent web proxy, where do you have to opt in? And what about further out, as computers become just one component in a cluster of computers? Where does broadcasting begin and caching end?
I think there has to be a lot more philosophy than ST:TNG analogies to make a sound decision about copyright ramifications to computers (see Taking the Copy Out of Copyright). It's a very broad issue, and it will siginificantly determine the way we use both information and computers/electronics in the future.
That's right. We don't know. And my point is given the way these things have worked out in the past, we have to assume we're not alone (that we're not special in the universe) until we actively prove otherwise.
Yes, you're asserting the anthropic principle, for which one interpretation is, "The parameters of the universe have consipired to support Human life if for no other reason than if they hadn't, we wouldn't be here to observe them."
And the argument you're ignoring is the Copernican principle, "We are not unqiue". Assuming the opposite ("we are unique") got astronomers trying to show lots of dumb things (earth at the center of the universe, of the solar system, planetary epicycles,...).
So, at a minimum, given the history of science, if you want to show the Earth is unique in the galaxy or the universe, you have to go out and prove it, you can't assume or assert it.
I believe the point of the article is that most of those billion stars in the Milky Way are not hospitable to carbon based life. Therefore, you would need to only count the stars on the arms of the galaxy (like earth) and then apply your hypothesis.
Aww man, you beat me to the punch. The other point of contention is his hypothesis is entirely wild. "lets say that a exact Earth analogs occur around one out of a billion stars". Bah, pick "one billion" just because it seems like a big number? Haha. It could just as well be orders of magnitudes off in either direction. One out of a million, then there could be 100 million Earths. One out of a trillion, then best-case, we're the only one.
That's kind of the whole point of the Drake Equation, to give a better sense of just how far off those estimates are. And, best-case versus worst-case assumptions plugged into the Drake equation are still many orders of magnitude appart. Which means: we just don't know. And the article gives a little more pessimism to those estimates by asserting that R ("The number of suitable stars that form in our galaxy per year") could be much, much lower than most people think.
While I agree with the premise and arguments asserted by the Lawmeme articles, I find their overall structure to be meandering and ill formed. The paper, "Taking the Copy Out of Copyright", on the other hand, is much more well written. Maybe it'd help Lawmeme if they had an editor to cut the fat and keep the articles focused.
Hrmm. But maybe that's the point of law "memes" -- constructed to seep into the general consciousness rather than provide a well-supported web of logic. Regardless, whenever I read a Lawmeme article, I get the strong sense that they'll only appeal to the already-converted ("preaching to the choir"). Which makes me think they're wasting their breath.:/
Since arguing by analogy is all the rage, senor: imagine trying to discover new, effiecient sorting algorithms by only studying the physical properties of the transistors in an Intel processor. Simple rules, complex results. And that the complex results are as much of a result of performing abstraction and generalization as they are a result of the rules themselves.
And ain't nobody here suggestin' that those 4 rules taint warth a ingestivatin'.
Just that the assertion that science will be fundamentally changed by finding those mind-bendingly simple rules is itself held at odds by the full implications of its own premise of "unintuitively complex results".
The article attributes Wolfram to saying the "algorithmic complexity" of all natural process are all equivalent. So all problems would just appear up as, say, NP-hard -- hardly a tool for distinguishing any one result from any other.
That is if the complexity you and I are referring to were even semantically equivalent. But, the complexity in the way both Wolfram and I mean is more akin to "structure". For instance, in the Game of Life, the "emergence" of, say, gliders and producers from its simple rules cannot be expressed with algorithmic complexity semantics.
And my original assertion is that I believe it's probably unlikely that there will ever be mathematics to describe that kind of complexity. Because, what we find complex or interesting in that context is merely a reflection of the bias we gain from our environment ("things that fly", "things that cycle", etc).
And the worst part is probablly you and Wolfram are both right at the same time.
... as if there's something meaningful in knowning those "4 lines of code". You can even presuppose that those rules exist and we can find them. What do you have? The entire premise is "the Wolfram worldview focuses on simple rules that generate counterintuitively complex results...".
Does there exist math to go from those simple rules to complex results? The problem is, and this part of it was as at least elluded to in the Wired article, that the complexity doesn't exist inherently in the system but in our perceptions of the system. And our definition of complexity is about as slippery as snot on teflon -- implicitly defined by our own analogies of our experiences of being human and our colored perceptions of everything in nature.
To go from "simple rules" to "complex results" seems intractible. You still may be reduced to discovering complex and interesting results in the crufty scientific way. And those 4 rules may just be sitting up on the mantle doing the only thing they can do: looking pretty.
"parallel enough". Hahaha. Okay, have a good time rebroadcasting an NFL game, because that broadcast came into your house for free. Air also comes into your house for free. That analogy seems parallel enough.
Or maybe you didn't read past those first two lines. Good job. Because, I also went on to make assertions about Blizzard as a content provider that exists outside the "I paid for it" argument.
You didn't buy it, you licensed it. The license applies restrictions to what you can do.
Your car and house anaogies aren't entirely parallel, because their cornerstone isn't intellectual property.
Consider a televised NFL game, where at the start the announcer describes your rights to the show: it's for private viewing only, and public display or redisplay of their content is strictly prohibited. Because they gathered, formatted, and ultimately presented the content, they get to control how it's used. And you didn't even pay for it, it just came into your house, like air, right? You can do anything you want with it, right? No you can't, and most people would agree with the premise of that.
Blizzard is asserting that they are a content provider and can control how and when people use their content. Just like NFL football games. I think that's where Blizzard is coming from, anyway. And in that respect, I think they have a valid point. As a content provider, they have rights for controlling their content.
But, where that NFL analogy fails, and where your analogies don't even touch (you should be noticing by now why arguing by analogy is always invalid) is the idea of interoperability and compatability. Does Blizzard have the right to limit interoperable software because it leads to possible infringement of their content rights?
My understanding of how the law ideally works: when making a new law, you have to consider its implications in the limit -- all possible implications, not just the single case you intend. Imagine the movie Bedazzled where Brenden Frasier's character always has the best intentions, but his wishes always gets distorted by technicalities or omissions. That's law making, too.
These legal issues always seem to boil down to opposing, basic rights. In this case, the right to control what I create versus the right to use what others create. One of them is going to give a little.
I think Blizzard/Vivendi is like Brenden Frasier's character. If/when they wake up in the world they wish for, they may not like what they see. I think software interoperability has a lot of power to shape our society. And that making a ruling on it based on the profits of a game company may be a little short-sighted.
Definitely some good stuff in there, but considering their last updates, not exactly "working the hell out of".:/ Is it just that it's been stabilizing? Or, are there other projects out there I haven't hit on, yet?
I tried to buy into the whole thing. I jumped through all the hoops to use the predefined function objects (plus, minus, multiplies, etc) with the non-mutating algorithms (for_each, find_each, etc) and function adapters (bind1st, bind2nd, etc).
My god, that stuff is WAY too verbose. It's almost always more straight forward and less error prone (debugging those syntax errors from the compiler messages _sucks_) to go straight for a standard for loop using the appropriate::iterator.
What exactly is it? I know the review briefly described it, but I was looking for something more detailed. Googling for "MediaXP" doesn't return any significant hits. What's up?
How does it affect me, when I haven't installed the program?
The answer to this question is painfully simple: You are connected to and attempting to use the same network. Internet users, slashdot readers especially, should appreciate the effect that(tens/hundreds of) thousands of "other people" can have on such a network.
You are blatantly ignoring the context of "How does it affect me". The intended context is: Does it directly compromise my system and my data? The context you address is: Does it affect remote resources that I'm accustom to having access to?
The article summary implies the former: direct compromise of a system. ("Even if you never touched KaZaA, your systems may be affected if someone manages to attack Brilliant Digital's update service.") If it's actually implying the latter remote resource issue, then it's irresposible reporting.
And, I agree with the first poster. There's no evidence to suggest that assuming control of Kazaa machines gives access to non-Kazaa machines.
I'd like to see a proxy for X applications in the same sense that "screen" is a proxy for terminal applications.
Something like a mock X server for the application to attach to, that then can attach or reattach to a given X server. So, if the local X server crashes you lose nothing. You just reattach the apps to the X server when it restarts.
Of course, that also allows nice things like remotely reattaching apps. Though, it won't help out for something like Unreal.
Once all your data is in a common data store and can be manipulated as such, it opens up a world of new possibilities.... we've been conditioned and trained to think of data storage in terms of files... I could see someone emailing me a project. Not some word documents, an excel spreadsheet, and a database zipped into a ZIP file; they just email me the project.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
A "file" expresses a fundamentally useful idea: a clear demarcation of data that lives independent of the host filesystem. Once you start tieing and interweaving data tightly with the host filesystem, how do you export it without a significant, altering transformation?
That is, when someone "just emailed you the project", what did you get? How much of the filesystem did or didn't come along with it? Have we openned the door for Version Hell? Also, can the data be compressed without having to know that it is?
Let's just be careful to clearly define what we want and how we get it.
A "file" lets us abstract the data from the filesystem. It is then trivial for that data to live on Ext2, Ext3, FAT16, NTFS, Juliet, in a zip, in a tar, as an email attachment, or in a pipe to an arbitrary process.
With a "common data storage", it sounds like what is really wanted is for each "object" to emit a standard, common interface. Once everything has that interface, we can wrap a database system around it to transform the data in lots of unique, interesting ways. Is there something implicit about this new abstraction that it has to live in the filesystem instead of on it (Is-A versus Has-A inheritence)? Does it require that we to throw out other, existing, useful abstractions ("files") to get it?
It sounds like an equivalent solution is to encapsulate each file in a platform independent, self-describing data structure. Then, impose the database query system on top of that. That both maintains the separation between file and filesystem provides all the features of the "common data storage".
Not just accessability. I heavily use the right-click context menu on links all the time: Open in New Window, Copy Shortcut, Save Target As. Flash takes that away. All I get is some stupid menu list of things I never use, and I'm depedent on whatever the default action is for the link. Bummer.
You know the answer. The only thing Morpheus "value added" to the standard fast track client was their revenue model of displaying advertisements. The main reason for using it, of course, was the "value not-added": spyware. The rest of the client was apparently untouched.
There's no evidence that they were/are adept enough with their old code base (if they ever even had the full code) to be able to deal with or even wrap in a trivially different protocol. If they were trying to do more than wrap advertisements around a prepackaged client, they'd recognize they had a superior protocol in FastTrack and try to stick with something very similar.
Furthermore, I don't see any reason for their treatment of Gnucleus to be any different:/.
Review misplaces priorities
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is perhaps a little disappointing.... But these features are somewhat notable omissions from Microsoft's first release; profiling JIT compilers are becoming common in the Java world, and optimizing native code compilers are becoming the norm, with considerable benefits from their use.
Stability before performance, every time.
Or he'd rather be writing, "The JIT produces fast code, but sometimes crashes."? Or, ".NET is vaporware, still three to five years on the horizon."?
The reviewer should recognize and applaud the focus of the developers. Because you know they were sitting around saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if we did this fancy optimization...". Instead, they put first things first.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil," D.E. Knuth. Learn it. Live it.
Every time a person uses a piece of software, there is a chance that they will observe a bug.
No, that is NOT a safe assumption. It is NON-OBVIOUS and the burder of proof is on you, since you're trying to support this wild assertion. Analogizing to unicorns is insufficient support.
Because, USERS of software are not a relevant measure for bug detection. Non-malicious Joe Public isn't going to stumble upon a buffer overflow if he isn't looking for it (and Malicous Joe Public isn't going to report it). It takes an experienced PROGRAMMER dealing with the CODE to find that problem. And coders will only deal with the sections of code that are relevant to their task. If it is otherwise in an old, untouched section of code, the number of eyes visiting that section of code dwindles to zero.
As a person with a math degree, you should be comfortable with the notion that there are CLASSES of bugs that cannot be detected by particular SETS of users and programmers. That is, not all bugs are created equal. Some are harder to find and fix that others.
Since we have no other information, we have to assume the worst case that there exist a set of bugs that can only be fixed by no programmer in existence. Q.E.D.
Or, a slightly less worse case, there exist a set of bugs that that can only be fixed by a very limited set of programmers (say, the original designers and those they personally educate about their code). If those programmers are not working on the pieces of code with the bugs only they can fix, the probability of those bugs being fixed is zero.
"People swarming over the code" sounds a lot more active than "Given enough eyeballs". So already you're asserting something different than the saying. Probaby if we get into it, we would come to the point where we say, okay not swarming, but a good solid code review and a lot of eyeballs. At that points, where's the magic? The eyeballs? Or the code review?
I'd assert something like the "Mythical Man-Bug". A fallicy implying there's some number of bugs to be found per person. You get enough people, you'll find all the bugs. Riiiight. Just double the number of people on your project while you're at it, you'll be done in half the time.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't. The MPAA doesn't make movies - the member companies do. It's a fine line, but there are companies who are part of the MPAA (such as Universal and Disney) who rabidly attempt to curtail others' rights, and there are those who don't.
You seem to have missed any/every point by Eric Flint's Prime Palaver #8. An author is a single entity. There is no fine line. The assertion is that supporting/enjoying a product of an entity is entirely disjoint from dis-/agreeing with the politics of that entity.
Giving money to an author doesn't necessarily mean you're endorsing his political viewpoints.
And by all the same reasoning (did you apply any actual thought? the author is implicitly BOTH of those Blizzard groups...), giving money to Blizzard doesn't necessarily mean you're endorsing their political viewpoints.
The difference is, of course, that by givng money to Blizzard, you're giving money (and thereby encouraging) BOTH groups. When you give money to Blizzard, you're endorsing the actions of the people who seek to beat innocent people into submission.
Buying the game gives money to BOTH groups (or one author)? Yes. Buying the game endorses the politics of BOTH groups (or one author)? No.
Let's break it down:
There are two different arenas (product and political), and actions/messages in one don't bleed in any significant way into the other. ... just like the relationship between an author's politics and an author's writing.
Since you're probably too unmotivated to read it, let me extract a couple relevant sections:
All points he makes apply directly to the Warcraft 3 / Blizzard situation. Blizzard's politics and the quality of their products are independent -- especially when you consider the people who create the games are a wholly separate group from those who make the political decisions.
And that applies to the MPAA, too. You can despise their political actions, but still appreciate the work by Sam Raimi, Stan Lee, and company; Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and company; and so on.
So by no means is it doublethink to say, "We dislike Blizzard's actions toward BNetD. In addition, we like Warcraft 3." Take your head out of that sandbox you've burried it in, and grow up.
It's the same problem we're having with Napster, Kazaa, Blizzard, etc. That information can trivially be copied, that certain "copies" of information are absolutely fundamental for a computer to work properly ... these issues eat at the original preconditions to copyright.
My computer needs a copy of your information in its registers, in its L1/L2/L3 caches, in its system RAM. Software may and often does save (archive) copies to a cache on the hard drive -- admins usually appreciate this because it reduces server load. A transparent web proxy to an intranet may cache web requests for its internal clients if it has a slow outgoing connection.
Surely you shouldn't have to "opt in" the first few cases. But, it's all the same principle, caching/archiving. So, as we go out, especially to the transparent web proxy, where do you have to opt in? And what about further out, as computers become just one component in a cluster of computers? Where does broadcasting begin and caching end?
I think there has to be a lot more philosophy than ST:TNG analogies to make a sound decision about copyright ramifications to computers (see Taking the Copy Out of Copyright). It's a very broad issue, and it will siginificantly determine the way we use both information and computers/electronics in the future.
That's right. We don't know. And my point is given the way these things have worked out in the past, we have to assume we're not alone (that we're not special in the universe) until we actively prove otherwise.
And the argument you're ignoring is the Copernican principle, "We are not unqiue". Assuming the opposite ("we are unique") got astronomers trying to show lots of dumb things (earth at the center of the universe, of the solar system, planetary epicycles, ...).
So, at a minimum, given the history of science, if you want to show the Earth is unique in the galaxy or the universe, you have to go out and prove it, you can't assume or assert it.
Oops, I mean "100 thousand Earths", not "100 million Earths".
Aww man, you beat me to the punch. The other point of contention is his hypothesis is entirely wild. "lets say that a exact Earth analogs occur around one out of a billion stars". Bah, pick "one billion" just because it seems like a big number? Haha. It could just as well be orders of magnitudes off in either direction. One out of a million, then there could be 100 million Earths. One out of a trillion, then best-case, we're the only one.
That's kind of the whole point of the Drake Equation, to give a better sense of just how far off those estimates are. And, best-case versus worst-case assumptions plugged into the Drake equation are still many orders of magnitude appart. Which means: we just don't know. And the article gives a little more pessimism to those estimates by asserting that R ("The number of suitable stars that form in our galaxy per year") could be much, much lower than most people think.
Hrmm. But maybe that's the point of law "memes" -- constructed to seep into the general consciousness rather than provide a well-supported web of logic. Regardless, whenever I read a Lawmeme article, I get the strong sense that they'll only appeal to the already-converted ("preaching to the choir"). Which makes me think they're wasting their breath. :/
Since arguing by analogy is all the rage, senor: imagine trying to discover new, effiecient sorting algorithms by only studying the physical properties of the transistors in an Intel processor. Simple rules, complex results. And that the complex results are as much of a result of performing abstraction and generalization as they are a result of the rules themselves.
And ain't nobody here suggestin' that those 4 rules taint warth a ingestivatin'.
Just that the assertion that science will be fundamentally changed by finding those mind-bendingly simple rules is itself held at odds by the full implications of its own premise of "unintuitively complex results".
That is if the complexity you and I are referring to were even semantically equivalent. But, the complexity in the way both Wolfram and I mean is more akin to "structure". For instance, in the Game of Life, the "emergence" of, say, gliders and producers from its simple rules cannot be expressed with algorithmic complexity semantics.
And my original assertion is that I believe it's probably unlikely that there will ever be mathematics to describe that kind of complexity. Because, what we find complex or interesting in that context is merely a reflection of the bias we gain from our environment ("things that fly", "things that cycle", etc).
... as if there's something meaningful in knowning those "4 lines of code". You can even presuppose that those rules exist and we can find them. What do you have? The entire premise is "the Wolfram worldview focuses on simple rules that generate counterintuitively complex results...".
Does there exist math to go from those simple rules to complex results? The problem is, and this part of it was as at least elluded to in the Wired article, that the complexity doesn't exist inherently in the system but in our perceptions of the system. And our definition of complexity is about as slippery as snot on teflon -- implicitly defined by our own analogies of our experiences of being human and our colored perceptions of everything in nature.
To go from "simple rules" to "complex results" seems intractible. You still may be reduced to discovering complex and interesting results in the crufty scientific way. And those 4 rules may just be sitting up on the mantle doing the only thing they can do: looking pretty.
Or maybe you didn't read past those first two lines. Good job. Because, I also went on to make assertions about Blizzard as a content provider that exists outside the "I paid for it" argument.
Your car and house anaogies aren't entirely parallel, because their cornerstone isn't intellectual property.
Consider a televised NFL game, where at the start the announcer describes your rights to the show: it's for private viewing only, and public display or redisplay of their content is strictly prohibited. Because they gathered, formatted, and ultimately presented the content, they get to control how it's used. And you didn't even pay for it, it just came into your house, like air, right? You can do anything you want with it, right? No you can't, and most people would agree with the premise of that.
Blizzard is asserting that they are a content provider and can control how and when people use their content. Just like NFL football games. I think that's where Blizzard is coming from, anyway. And in that respect, I think they have a valid point. As a content provider, they have rights for controlling their content.
But, where that NFL analogy fails, and where your analogies don't even touch (you should be noticing by now why arguing by analogy is always invalid) is the idea of interoperability and compatability. Does Blizzard have the right to limit interoperable software because it leads to possible infringement of their content rights?
My understanding of how the law ideally works: when making a new law, you have to consider its implications in the limit -- all possible implications, not just the single case you intend. Imagine the movie Bedazzled where Brenden Frasier's character always has the best intentions, but his wishes always gets distorted by technicalities or omissions. That's law making, too.
These legal issues always seem to boil down to opposing, basic rights. In this case, the right to control what I create versus the right to use what others create. One of them is going to give a little.
I think Blizzard/Vivendi is like Brenden Frasier's character. If/when they wake up in the world they wish for, they may not like what they see. I think software interoperability has a lot of power to shape our society. And that making a ruling on it based on the profits of a game company may be a little short-sighted.
- The Lambda Library for C++, last updated May 2000.
- FC++: Functional Programming in C++, last updated July 2001.
- FACT!, last updated September 2001.
Definitely some good stuff in there, but considering their last updates, not exactly "working the hell out of".I tried to buy into the whole thing. I jumped through all the hoops to use the predefined function objects (plus, minus, multiplies, etc) with the non-mutating algorithms (for_each, find_each, etc) and function adapters (bind1st, bind2nd, etc).
::iterator.
My god, that stuff is WAY too verbose. It's almost always more straight forward and less error prone (debugging those syntax errors from the compiler messages _sucks_) to go straight for a standard for loop using the appropriate
What exactly is it? I know the review briefly described it, but I was looking for something more detailed. Googling for "MediaXP" doesn't return any significant hits. What's up?
You are blatantly ignoring the context of "How does it affect me". The intended context is: Does it directly compromise my system and my data? The context you address is: Does it affect remote resources that I'm accustom to having access to?
The article summary implies the former: direct compromise of a system. ("Even if you never touched KaZaA, your systems may be affected if someone manages to attack Brilliant Digital's update service.") If it's actually implying the latter remote resource issue, then it's irresposible reporting.
And, I agree with the first poster. There's no evidence to suggest that assuming control of Kazaa machines gives access to non-Kazaa machines.
Ah, ty.
I'd like to see a proxy for X applications in the same sense that "screen" is a proxy for terminal applications.
Something like a mock X server for the application to attach to, that then can attach or reattach to a given X server. So, if the local X server crashes you lose nothing. You just reattach the apps to the X server when it restarts.
Of course, that also allows nice things like remotely reattaching apps. Though, it won't help out for something like Unreal.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
A "file" expresses a fundamentally useful idea: a clear demarcation of data that lives independent of the host filesystem. Once you start tieing and interweaving data tightly with the host filesystem, how do you export it without a significant, altering transformation?
That is, when someone "just emailed you the project", what did you get? How much of the filesystem did or didn't come along with it? Have we openned the door for Version Hell? Also, can the data be compressed without having to know that it is?
Let's just be careful to clearly define what we want and how we get it.
A "file" lets us abstract the data from the filesystem. It is then trivial for that data to live on Ext2, Ext3, FAT16, NTFS, Juliet, in a zip, in a tar, as an email attachment, or in a pipe to an arbitrary process.
With a "common data storage", it sounds like what is really wanted is for each "object" to emit a standard, common interface. Once everything has that interface, we can wrap a database system around it to transform the data in lots of unique, interesting ways. Is there something implicit about this new abstraction that it has to live in the filesystem instead of on it (Is-A versus Has-A inheritence)? Does it require that we to throw out other, existing, useful abstractions ("files") to get it?
It sounds like an equivalent solution is to encapsulate each file in a platform independent, self-describing data structure. Then, impose the database query system on top of that. That both maintains the separation between file and filesystem provides all the features of the "common data storage".
Not just accessability. I heavily use the right-click context menu on links all the time: Open in New Window, Copy Shortcut, Save Target As. Flash takes that away. All I get is some stupid menu list of things I never use, and I'm depedent on whatever the default action is for the link. Bummer.
You know the answer. The only thing Morpheus "value added" to the standard fast track client was their revenue model of displaying advertisements. The main reason for using it, of course, was the "value not-added": spyware. The rest of the client was apparently untouched.
There's no evidence that they were/are adept enough with their old code base (if they ever even had the full code) to be able to deal with or even wrap in a trivially different protocol. If they were trying to do more than wrap advertisements around a prepackaged client, they'd recognize they had a superior protocol in FastTrack and try to stick with something very similar.
Furthermore, I don't see any reason for their treatment of Gnucleus to be any different :/.
Stability before performance, every time.
Or he'd rather be writing, "The JIT produces fast code, but sometimes crashes."? Or, ".NET is vaporware, still three to five years on the horizon."?
The reviewer should recognize and applaud the focus of the developers. Because you know they were sitting around saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if we did this fancy optimization...". Instead, they put first things first.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil," D.E. Knuth. Learn it. Live it.
No, that is NOT a safe assumption. It is NON-OBVIOUS and the burder of proof is on you, since you're trying to support this wild assertion. Analogizing to unicorns is insufficient support.
Because, USERS of software are not a relevant measure for bug detection. Non-malicious Joe Public isn't going to stumble upon a buffer overflow if he isn't looking for it (and Malicous Joe Public isn't going to report it). It takes an experienced PROGRAMMER dealing with the CODE to find that problem. And coders will only deal with the sections of code that are relevant to their task. If it is otherwise in an old, untouched section of code, the number of eyes visiting that section of code dwindles to zero.
As a person with a math degree, you should be comfortable with the notion that there are CLASSES of bugs that cannot be detected by particular SETS of users and programmers. That is, not all bugs are created equal. Some are harder to find and fix that others.
Since we have no other information, we have to assume the worst case that there exist a set of bugs that can only be fixed by no programmer in existence. Q.E.D.
Or, a slightly less worse case, there exist a set of bugs that that can only be fixed by a very limited set of programmers (say, the original designers and those they personally educate about their code). If those programmers are not working on the pieces of code with the bugs only they can fix, the probability of those bugs being fixed is zero.
You can't hide bad assumptions behind statistics.
It IS absurd.
"People swarming over the code" sounds a lot more active than "Given enough eyeballs". So already you're asserting something different than the saying. Probaby if we get into it, we would come to the point where we say, okay not swarming, but a good solid code review and a lot of eyeballs. At that points, where's the magic? The eyeballs? Or the code review?
I'd assert something like the "Mythical Man-Bug". A fallicy implying there's some number of bugs to be found per person. You get enough people, you'll find all the bugs. Riiiight. Just double the number of people on your project while you're at it, you'll be done in half the time.