In Seattle ("The San Francisco of the Northwest") the latest grafitti craze (no, not Grafitti (tm)) is "NoMorePrisons.net" spray-painted on sidewalks. To me this is the perfect undeniable proof that grafitti can be a positive act. I saw the grafitti, I bought the book, and though I just read it yesterday I literally think it's changed my life.
I don't know how annoying the SF labels are. I do know that spray paint on sidewalk will wear off in a few months, and that it has a hell of a lot less negative impact on my quality of life than a lot of billboards (or worse, TV screens in airports). I'd much rather give the right to spam my environment over to those who care (yes, that includes sidewalk evangelists) rather than those who just have more money than I do.
Nice philosophy. Good point: in the long run, hobbyists are good for you. However, metaphor will get you only so far. If they're losing money on every box, the long run isn't going to matter very much.
It's more as if you got your car free from the gas company, and then converted to solar.
Complain all you want if you think that trapping the consumer into your service is sneaky or unfair. But don't claim they should just suck it up and sell the thing for 99 bucks. Without the expectation of future ISP income, that price is just impossible.
On a more general level - I don't think the above is a horrible comment, but I don't think it deserves a 4. It's really easy to say "but I have a right to do that", much harder to work out the implications. <controversy intent="thought-provoking"> Everyone has a right to have as many kids as they can support. That gives the human race the right to reproduce itself down to pathetic subsistence. </controversy>
802.11 is like a wireless lan. It replaces the built-in ethernet cables of your office with plugged-in base-stations. When you connect, you have to do all the same old configuration you had to do to access your lan. Although of course a smart sysadmin will do more than this, the average 802.11 system relies heavily on up-front security: you're either in or you're out, just like with a lan.
Bluetooth is like a replacement for all the other cables under your desk - the Palm cradle, the keyboard, the doohickey to connect to your digital camera, the printer cable, the cable to your external modem and the 20 foot phone cord out the back of that. It's low-power enough not to need either side plugged in, and the use-model specific interoperability profiles (comm port replacement, input device, ppp, OBEX, printer) mean that (ideally) you'll be able to walk up to an unfamiliar device and actually use it without too much set-up. Each device will enforce its own security.
It's still an open question whether BT will deliver on its promise. However, BT and 802.11 are not direct competitors. You wouldn't dream of using an 802.11 keyboard to type from across the room, just like you wouldn't dream of replacing all the ethernet cables in your office with bluetooth.
If I were the judge, you'd win with this one. To me, it seems pretty obvious that this is what happened. After all, I got to pictures of transexuals in my first 4 clicks from that page. True, it was just the trannys' faces, but still: such people are dirty and evil and should hide their faces in shame.
This proposal, as you've delineated it, makes no reference to the purpose of the email (ie, advertising, political, business/educational/research communication, social/amusement communication). Some edge cases:
-a teacher (who, for whatever reason, can't set up a bona fide distribution list) sending to all students in a class
-a school sending to all students or a business to all employees (again, no distribution list)
-an internet bookseller sending to all previous customers who haven't opted out
-your semi-friend who always sends you the latest hilarious joke or factoid ("dark side of the moon is the soundtrack for wizard of oz!" "there's this new virus you can get just from reading email!")
-the person who once recieved an email also addressed to you who forwards a petition to 10 people (under the limit by itself, yet unbeknowst to her, far more than those 10 people have received the petition)
possible solution: an x-prior-relationship tag that the teacher, the school, the employer (and yes, sadly, spAmazon.com) can all include in lieu of the x-distribution tag. Your ignorant friend probably includes the wrong tag, because they only forward it to 8 people; oh well, what kind of person would sue their friend? As for the ignorant possibly-annoying propagandist, they couldn't legally include either tag, but you probably won't sue them either.
...
1) you can always positive filter grandma and anyone else who routinely comes in on the spam list. My suggestion is to set up macros (or have a client with a button to make it easy) so that you can positively filter any spam-triggered legit mail. Over time this will work.
Even better idea: your spambot bounces spam with a message "if you want to get through to me, better include this tag" with grampa-ese directions for typing it in to the message body. When you get email with the tag in the message body rather than the header, your email client gives you a dialog with a nice button to positive-filter that person so the problem doesn't happen again.
IMO, the smartest thing that this guy does is not to create a new DeCSS. It's his offer to find another better job for the human spiders who are actually crawling the web as hit men for the MPAA. They have to read the page to determine if it's actionable; and by reading the page, he gets a chance to hire them away. Imagine if everyone the MPAA can hire for this job quits after a week:).
Unfortunately, this may be TOO smart of him. IANAL, but I suspect that the offer to hire someone away merely as a predatory attack on the business that employs them (and not in order to gain their skills) may be illegal under some kind of racketeering statute.
Of course, if a real lawyer were to reply to this message with a professional opinion in the affirmative, he/she might be doing the MPAA's dirty work for them and helping get this poor fellow sued (criminally, not civilly!) when that's exactly what he was trying to avoid.
Do you want to reject all email from anyone who hasn't upgraded their mailer? This tag would take, at a minimum, several years to percolate through to gramma's-outlook-client. There are still significant numbers of people out there running 6-year-old browsers (last time I hit Kinko's they had Netscape 4.07), why would email clients update any faster?
Then, of course, you get into chicken-and-egg problems. Who's going to bother programming this feature in their new mail client if it has NO POSSIBLE VALUE to users for at least a couple years?
I merely raise these issues so that all the experienced social engineers out there can solve them. IMO, this is a great idea.
Man, isn't anyone here old enough to remember schoolhouse rock? This isn't a law, it's just a law-to-be. Which means, for you that live in CO, you should read the bill and let your rep know what you think.
(Even you young 'uns should remember the simpsons episode: "I'm an amendment-to-be, yes an amendment to be..." child:"But couldn't we just pass a law against those dirty hippies burning the flag?" amendment:"Actually, the constitution forbids that. But if we change the constitution..." child:"We can pass any crazy law we want! Hooray!")
One of the things that struck me when I was reading "Digital Typography" is the intensive study that you did, especially in the area of math typesetting. When I was writing papers, using math formulas in TeX, I just typed in the commands and out came the math and it looked pretty good to me. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it definitely struck me how much attention you paid to the best mathematics typesetting of past centuries.
I do strongly think that people, when they start throwing computers at something, they think that it's a whole new ballgame, so why should they study the past. I think that is a terrible mistake. But also, I love to read historical source materials, so I couldn't resist. I had a good excuse to study these things, and the more I looked at it, the more interesting it was. But I don't think responsible computer scientists should be unaware of hundreds of years of history that went before us. So that was just a natural thing to approach it that way, for me. I noticed, for example, that in the proprietary software market for publishing, that systems are only today acquiring features that have existed in TeX for a long time, for example whole-paragraph optimization. There's a big to-do about Adobe InDesign, which finally...
They finally implemented the TeX algorithm. Did they implement the TeX algorithm?
Yeah, that's what they said. Did you talk to the people?
I met three of four of them at the ATYPI meeting in Boston in October, but that was after I had heard about it, that some friends had found this in the documentation. Another similar issue is TrueType fonts. TrueType fonts have this property of including instructions, computer programs effectively, in the font, to do hinting.
Well, I never met Elias or whatever. Sampo Kaasila?
I don't know. I know enough about TrueType to know that it's a very intelligent design, that is similar to Metafont except that it strips out everything that's slow. So the way the hinting is done is by program, certainly. Of course, it came out maybe ten years after Metafont, so probably something got through somehow.
There was the F3 font that Folio was making, if I can remember the name, what the people in industry called it. Some of the people that I had worked with on Metafont went into making font designs that were similar to TrueType, but have not been successful. There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part derivative work of what was in Metafont.
I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines, which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to specify things.
The quadratic has the great advantage that there's a real cheap way to render them. You can make hardware to draw a quadratic spline lickety-split. It's all Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can describe a quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the value of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel, and when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which way to move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the mathematics is really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding thing for a cubic is six times as complicated, and it has extra very strange effects in it because cubic curves can have cusps in them that are hidden. They can have places where the function will be plus on both sides of the cubic, instead of plus on one side and minus on the other.
The algorithm that's like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out that you can be in something that looks like a very innocuous curve, but mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's sort of like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look like there's any reason to do so. The bottom line is that the quadratic curves that TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware implementations, in parallel. The question is whether that matters of course, now that CPU's are a zillion times faster.
But for rendering, Metafont was very very slow by comparison, although I'm amazed at how fast it goes now. Still, it has to be an order of magnitude better, and certainly that was a factor in getting TrueType adopted at the time that it was, because machines weren't that fast then. So TrueType was an intelligently chosen subset, but certainly all the ideas I've ever heard of about TrueType were, I believe, well known in the early '60s. Back to this issue of preserving the past. I was reading some papers of Edsger Dijkstra. For a while, he used handwritten manuscripts and then a typewriter to actually distribute the work. And, his notation became much more typewriter-like, that he would use an underlined A or a boldfaced A instead of the traditional \forall symbol.
I've gotten some of his handwritten notes, but I don't remember the typewritten ones. I was looking at the proceedings of the Marktoberdorf summer school in '90, where there were a couple of papers by him and his group. In any case, it occurred to me that TeX has made the traditional mathematical notations so accessible to practicing computer scientists, students, researchers, etc. It's very likely that if there hadn't been something like TeX, in other words if mathematical typesetting had remained strictly in the domain of book publishers, and people who did publishing as their profession, it's likely that the standard notations in computer science would have become much more typewriter-like, kind of ASCII-ized.
Swissair one-one-one is declaring pan pan pan smoke in the cockpit
You should look into Oulipo, a literary movement dedicated to the idea that arbitrary constraints are actually a path to greater (more fundamental) creativity. Haiku are an earlier form of the same idea. Both have significant natural hacker appeal (although neither counts English as its native language).
In other words, python R0012, perl sucks, bee-otch.
The DOS attack is destructive with no productive benefit. It's a pointless and criminal way of saying "Hey, lookee here!" about a bunch of compromised hosts running the masters and daemons.
So I guess the grey-hat response to this black-hat action would be to write more interesting things to put on "owned" systems. Just imagine if, instead of taking down yahoo, your local script kiddie could send the seti@home score of his favorite alias through the roof in just hours. That way, he's still providing the service (calling attention to security holes) without the stupid brute-force collateral damage to Yahoo et al.
I'm kidding about seti@home. But seriously: isn't there something more productive you could do with a distributed network of "owned" systems? Something that would appeal to the script kiddie mentality without fucking things up too badly? Taggers can graduate to real grafitti artworks; where's the upward path for the script kiddie?
I suspect that the answer would have something to do with w4rez or MP3's. (Run Napster instead of trin00 on all the compromised hosts). I'm not endorsing copyright violation here, just saying that it would be a lot better than just crashing shit.
Enough about the global financial crisis that will occur when intel's failed business plan leads its stock, the NASDAQ, and the global financial system into ruin.
This is/.. We want the skinny on Transmeta!
Although it is believed that Transmeta initially intended and believed that Crusoe would outperform a similarly clocked PIII, Crusoe fell well short of this. Performance is so poor, that when Transmeta publicly introduced the Crusoe, the company described the performance of its new VLIW processor with a set of bizarre benchmarks....
Why is the Crusoe falling so far short of initial performance expectations? Again, as with the Itanium, the problem can be trace to VLIW. This design philosophy, especially for general purpose CPUs, is in its infancy, so no one has experience to set truly credible performance expectations.
Does this mean that the Crusoe is already a non-factor? Yes, and no. Yes, and Transmeta has already conceded this, the Crusoe will not be a player on desktops anytime soon. But in the portable market, Crusoe has a chance at success. With this greatly diversifying market, Crusoe's low power consumption is attractive by providing reasonable performance where battery life is paramount. It has the potential to be successful in Web tablets and low-priced, long battery-life notebooks.
The key to Crusoe's success will be if Transmeta can rapidly reduce the price of the 700MHz version to below $100 (it was announced at over $300).
What do you folks think? Is Crusoe a disappointment? Do you think that the do-it-in-software transmeta philosophy will pay off in prices as well as power?
I hate to rain on your metaphor, but if it holds out things look bad for Transmeta. Detroit ended up fighting back against little efficient Japanese cars with big gas-guzzling SUV's, convincing people that yes, they really do need the kitchen sink on the road. (Also, these beasts get all the attention because margins are higher).
If your metaphor holds, then all Intel has to do is a) continue to invent new multimedia instruction sets; and b) hope that a software company that lives on such feeping creatures remains dominant. Transmeta wouldn't be able to keep up.
Of course, as someone who will soon be running my laptop on pure solar power, I hope that this doesn't happen...
I'm surprised nobody else has commented on the obvious here. Sure, maybe dynamically recompiling is awesome. But doing it twice at once isn't. Just imagine your Crusoe chip screaming in agony as the code-morphing tries to profile and recompile code that is being dynamically recompiled by the JIT compiler. And how do you fix that?
By abstracting your two smarty-pants recompilers into a "hardware" and an "interpreter" layer, you've removed any way for them to talk to each other or even really be aware of the other's existence. The problem's not theoretically impossible, but the practical advantages of keeping your abstractions clean make me worry about the hopes for Crusoe web-pads (which would presumably run a lot of Java).
Remeber that ad with the naked woman holding a Palm V? She was "Kate Hunter, Dancer", and she supposedly used her palm to enter to-do's involving legwarmers. There's a bit of a story about that ad.
The first I heard of that ad was an email to all Palm employees giving us a "heads up" that it would soon be coming out. They told us what publications it would run in (things like "Yahoo: Internet life", "Business Week", and "Golf Digest"; all of them magazines with a more or less male demographic). They also told us what to say if we met someone who was offended by it. Apparently, as employees, we weren't allowed to be offended by it ourselves. We were to say things like "The model wasn't really naked during the photo shoot" (as if a naked woman in a room with a camera is more immoral than running a national ad campaign which objectifies women), "This ad was approved by a team of female executives" (as if women never harm other women), and "The message is the beauty of the female form" (look, girls, it's OK, we're saying that you're pretty. Can you say pretty?).
A lot of people were unhappy with that email. If you're so worried that the ad is going to offend people, why do you run it? People flamed back at whatever marketing stiff sent the email, there was discussion in the hallways.
So marketing spammed us all two more times. They essentially repeated the same points, but they had one new point to make that topped it all: They hadn't meant to give the impression that the naked woman Palm ad was the only ad in this campaign. The Simply Palm campaign is a series of ads. In this ad, there's a naked woman, but in other ads use "other beautiful objects, such as a motorcycle and a designer chair" to sell the palm.
That's right, that's a direct quote: "other beautiful objects".
I guess whoever wrote that email has been in a hole since the 60's, to be so ignorant of feminist thought; they certainly haven't ever heard of the word "objectification".
Then later, of course, there was the "Simply Porn" side of the controversy, where 3Com's bonehead lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to a website that had parodies of the Palm ad.
What does this have to do with gaming ads? Well, for one thing, I think the remarkable idiocy showed by marketing throughout this saga argues against the idea that they have any special handle on what "objectively" sells product. Running sexist ads doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sexist. Second, I think that this shows that the ridiculous sexism and objectification shown in gaming mags really does matter; it has a way of bleeding over into more mainstream ads for technology products.
Disclaimer: I no longer work for 3com as an employee, but this was not the reason I quit. Since Palm has reorganized and is soon splitting off from 3Com, I have no reason to believe that the boneheads responsible for "simply palm" are still around. I'm one of the most boycott-happy people I know, and I wouldn't scruple to buy a Palm V at this point. If you read this and work for Palm, you probably recognize me. If so, please do not forward this comment around within Palm. I'm not ashamed of telling the truth, but if the legal department got word that I'd revealed "company-confidential email", I might get in trouble. Palm marketing might have a few IQ points over 3Com marketing, but lawyers are still lawyers.
Quakers don't dress funny (that's Puritans) or abhor sex (that's Shakers, and strangely they all died out). Quakerism is just another protestant sect (though in my unbiased opinion the coolest one - they have a real concern for equality and social justice).
I know some pretty randy quakers, but AFAIK there aren't too many Puritans left around these days.
That's an excellent metaphor. First I just wanted to point out some facts about what happened in Seattle, then I wanted to show a different side of the metaphor which I think is more relevant to etoys vs. kiddies.
Here is what I saw in Seattle, as a legal observer, a protestor, and a member of Food Not Bombs (a significant non-destructive Seattle anarchist group):
The "black bloc" who broke windows numbered at least 40-50. Not all of these people broke windows, but all were collaborating in this action. In terms of "provoking government over-reaction" - it may have been intended that way but the tear gas had been used at least an hour prior to the first broken window. (It's my belief that government overreaction, which despite the chaos on Tuesday really kicked in on Wednesday, was more a factor of Clinton's presence; the Secret Service's "if things go bad Wednesday, we have to have crushing superiority and readiness for ruthless tactics" philosophy became a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
The Etoy thing is not about provoking overreaction though. To my mind the more pertinent aspect of the metaphor is the black bloc's belief that their actions were necessary to get media coverage, and that even negative coverage served to spread their message. I'm sure that some script kiddies feel the same way. And when major media gets the story totally wrong, as in this case, it only fuels their attitude. "Their gonna twist the story anyway, at least this way they won't ignore it." IMO a counter-productive attitude, but certainly one I can sympathize with.
(Wouldn't it be nice if etoys sued CNN for indirectly encouraging the DoS attacks through their biased coverage?:)
Is this a troll? Replying to an anti-buzzword message with 5 buzzwords (and another 5 pieces of managementese)...
If you don't want to be modded down, guy, better at least give us links for that stuff. I'm just a real programmer, not a CS wonk, and I haven't even heard of half of your buzzwords.
But be careful. BN also sells its prime shelf space to the highest bidder, drowns publishers in returned books, caves to would-be censors, and engages in monopolistic and price-fixing practices. See this article for more info.
However, we're veering off topic. Point is, if you like having bookstores around, think twice before you buy books over the internet.
Recommendations? From who? The brain-dead zombies...
I'm really sorry to hear that. In my experience, most people working at independent bookstores do so out of a love for books. If you're in a city, I'm sure that you could shop around and find a better one.
I have no desire to meet people
Sorry, I meant, "to set up meetings with friends". That way, if one of you is late you've got something fun to do.
I'll take service.
That's your choice. Fatbrain gives you service without the patents.
The internet is a great place to buy commodities. It's a great place to buy specialty items whose audience is way too small to support a store in your town. It is the worst place to buy books.
A bricks-and-mortar bookstore is more than just a place where you exchange money for dead trees. It is a place to browse, a place where you can get good recommendations, a place to meet people, a place that hosts book-signings and book groups and maybe other meetings. As Amazon and the soulless book chains (BN, borders, etc.) kill that off, we are losing a precious resource.
If you want to get some faraway friend a gift certificate for a book, go to booksense.com, the website for independent bookstores. (US site - sorry, I realize the world is bigger.)
Calvino's IOAWNAT is one of his books where he is most influenced by OuLiPo, a French literature movement dedicated to writing works that conform to playful (often mathematical) constraints. Calvino is one of the more approachable examples of Oulipan literature, and certainly bears a lot of exploration in his own right, but if you want to go deeper there's lots of room. Try Harry Matthews, the only English-language member of the core group; his oulipo compendium will give you lots of further leads.
Another recommendation (which you're probably aware of as a slashdotter): Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon series
Slashdot Mirror
In Seattle ("The San Francisco of the Northwest") the latest grafitti craze (no, not Grafitti (tm)) is "NoMorePrisons.net" spray-painted on sidewalks. To me this is the perfect undeniable proof that grafitti can be a positive act. I saw the grafitti, I bought the book, and though I just read it yesterday I literally think it's changed my life.
I don't know how annoying the SF labels are. I do know that spray paint on sidewalk will wear off in a few months, and that it has a hell of a lot less negative impact on my quality of life than a lot of billboards (or worse, TV screens in airports). I'd much rather give the right to spam my environment over to those who care (yes, that includes sidewalk evangelists) rather than those who just have more money than I do.
Nice philosophy. Good point: in the long run, hobbyists are good for you. However, metaphor will get you only so far. If they're losing money on every box, the long run isn't going to matter very much.
It's more as if you got your car free from the gas company, and then converted to solar.
Complain all you want if you think that trapping the consumer into your service is sneaky or unfair. But don't claim they should just suck it up and sell the thing for 99 bucks. Without the expectation of future ISP income, that price is just impossible.
On a more general level - I don't think the above is a horrible comment, but I don't think it deserves a 4. It's really easy to say "but I have a right to do that", much harder to work out the implications. <controversy intent="thought-provoking"> Everyone has a right to have as many kids as they can support. That gives the human race the right to reproduce itself down to pathetic subsistence. </controversy>
I can't download the files because my host is misconfigured - you can't do a reverse dns on my IP address.
If they won't let you download the files without checking who you are first, what do you think they're doing with the web log data?
(sending this quick before the fbi DOS'es my machine...)
802.11 is like a wireless lan. It replaces the built-in ethernet cables of your office with plugged-in base-stations. When you connect, you have to do all the same old configuration you had to do to access your lan. Although of course a smart sysadmin will do more than this, the average 802.11 system relies heavily on up-front security: you're either in or you're out, just like with a lan.
Bluetooth is like a replacement for all the other cables under your desk - the Palm cradle, the keyboard, the doohickey to connect to your digital camera, the printer cable, the cable to your external modem and the 20 foot phone cord out the back of that. It's low-power enough not to need either side plugged in, and the use-model specific interoperability profiles (comm port replacement, input device, ppp, OBEX, printer) mean that (ideally) you'll be able to walk up to an unfamiliar device and actually use it without too much set-up. Each device will enforce its own security.
It's still an open question whether BT will deliver on its promise. However, BT and 802.11 are not direct competitors. You wouldn't dream of using an 802.11 keyboard to type from across the room, just like you wouldn't dream of replacing all the ethernet cables in your office with bluetooth.
If I were the judge, you'd win with this one. To me, it seems pretty obvious that this is what happened. After all, I got to pictures of transexuals in my first 4 clicks from that page. True, it was just the trannys' faces, but still: such people are dirty and evil and should hide their faces in shame.
This proposal, as you've delineated it, makes no reference to the purpose of the email (ie, advertising, political, business/educational/research communication, social/amusement communication). Some edge cases:
-a teacher (who, for whatever reason, can't set up a bona fide distribution list) sending to all students in a class
-a school sending to all students or a business to all employees (again, no distribution list)
-an internet bookseller sending to all previous customers who haven't opted out
-your semi-friend who always sends you the latest hilarious joke or factoid ("dark side of the moon is the soundtrack for wizard of oz!" "there's this new virus you can get just from reading email!")
-the person who once recieved an email also addressed to you who forwards a petition to 10 people (under the limit by itself, yet unbeknowst to her, far more than those 10 people have received the petition)
possible solution: an x-prior-relationship tag that the teacher, the school, the employer (and yes, sadly, spAmazon.com) can all include in lieu of the x-distribution tag. Your ignorant friend probably includes the wrong tag, because they only forward it to 8 people; oh well, what kind of person would sue their friend? As for the ignorant possibly-annoying propagandist, they couldn't legally include either tag, but you probably won't sue them either.
...
1) you can always positive filter grandma and anyone else who routinely comes in on the spam list. My suggestion is to set up macros (or have a client with a button to make it easy) so that you can positively filter any spam-triggered legit mail. Over time this will work.
Even better idea: your spambot bounces spam with a message "if you want to get through to me, better include this tag" with grampa-ese directions for typing it in to the message body. When you get email with the tag in the message body rather than the header, your email client gives you a dialog with a nice button to positive-filter that person so the problem doesn't happen again.
IMO, the smartest thing that this guy does is not to create a new DeCSS. It's his offer to find another better job for the human spiders who are actually crawling the web as hit men for the MPAA. They have to read the page to determine if it's actionable; and by reading the page, he gets a chance to hire them away. Imagine if everyone the MPAA can hire for this job quits after a week :).
Unfortunately, this may be TOO smart of him. IANAL, but I suspect that the offer to hire someone away merely as a predatory attack on the business that employs them (and not in order to gain their skills) may be illegal under some kind of racketeering statute.
Of course, if a real lawyer were to reply to this message with a professional opinion in the affirmative, he/she might be doing the MPAA's dirty work for them and helping get this poor fellow sued (criminally, not civilly!) when that's exactly what he was trying to avoid.
Do you want to reject all email from anyone who hasn't upgraded their mailer? This tag would take, at a minimum, several years to percolate through to gramma's-outlook-client. There are still significant numbers of people out there running 6-year-old browsers (last time I hit Kinko's they had Netscape 4.07), why would email clients update any faster?
Then, of course, you get into chicken-and-egg problems. Who's going to bother programming this feature in their new mail client if it has NO POSSIBLE VALUE to users for at least a couple years?
I merely raise these issues so that all the experienced social engineers out there can solve them. IMO, this is a great idea.
As it turned out, the company running this program was a huge marketer and spammer.
Sounds plausible... a little too plausible for me to accept it without a credited source. Where did you hear this?
Paid for by the Committee to Recognize Net-Legends.
Man, isn't anyone here old enough to remember schoolhouse rock? This isn't a law, it's just a law-to-be. Which means, for you that live in CO, you should read the bill and let your rep know what you think.
(Even you young 'uns should remember the simpsons episode: "I'm an amendment-to-be, yes an amendment to be..." child:"But couldn't we just pass a law against those dirty hippies burning the flag?" amendment:"Actually, the constitution forbids that. But if we change the constitution..." child:"We can pass any crazy law we want! Hooray!")
One of the things that struck me when I was reading "Digital Typography" is the intensive study that you did, especially in the area of math typesetting. When I was writing papers, using math formulas in TeX, I just typed in the commands and out came the math and it looked pretty good to me. It shouldn't have been surprising, but it definitely struck me how much attention you paid to the best mathematics typesetting of past centuries.
I do strongly think that people, when they start throwing computers at something, they think that it's a whole new ballgame, so why should they study the past. I think that is a terrible mistake. But also, I love to read historical source materials, so I couldn't resist. I had a good excuse to study these things, and the more I looked at it, the more interesting it was. But I don't think responsible computer scientists should be unaware of hundreds of years of history that went before us. So that was just a natural thing to approach it that way, for me.
I noticed, for example, that in the proprietary software market for publishing, that systems are only today acquiring features that have existed in TeX for a long time, for example whole-paragraph optimization. There's a big to-do about Adobe InDesign, which finally...
They finally implemented the TeX algorithm.
Did they implement the TeX algorithm?
Yeah, that's what they said.
Did you talk to the people?
I met three of four of them at the ATYPI meeting in Boston in October, but that was after I had heard about it, that some friends had found this in the documentation.
Another similar issue is TrueType fonts. TrueType fonts have this property of including instructions, computer programs effectively, in the font, to do hinting.
Well, I never met Elias or whatever.
Sampo Kaasila?
I don't know. I know enough about TrueType to know that it's a very intelligent design, that is similar to Metafont except that it strips out everything that's slow. So the way the hinting is done is by program, certainly. Of course, it came out maybe ten years after Metafont, so probably something got through somehow.
There was the F3 font that Folio was making, if I can remember the name, what the people in industry called it. Some of the people that I had worked with on Metafont went into making font designs that were similar to TrueType, but have not been successful.
There's a fairly major controversy with TrueType right now, that there a number of patents that are owned now by Apple. It's kind of interesting to me that that is the case even though it's for the most part derivative work of what was in Metafont.
I've been very unhappy with the way patents are handled. But the more I look at it, the more I decide that it's a waste of time. I mean, my life is too short to fight with that, so I've just been staying away. But I know that the ideas for rendering... The main thing is that TrueType uses only quadratic splines, and that Type1 fonts use cubic splines, which allow you to get by with a lot fewer points where you have to specify things.
The quadratic has the great advantage that there's a real cheap way to render them. You can make hardware to draw a quadratic spline lickety-split. It's all Greek mathematics, the conic sections. You can describe a quadratic spline by a quadratic equation (x, y) so that the value of f(x, y) is positive on one side of the curve and negative on the other side. And then you can just follow along pixel by pixel, and when x changes by one and y changes by one, you can see which way to move to draw the curve in the optimal way. And the mathematics is really simple for a quadratic. The corresponding thing for a cubic is six times as complicated, and it has extra very strange effects in it because cubic curves can have cusps in them that are hidden. They can have places where the function will be plus on both sides of the cubic, instead of plus on one side and minus on the other.
The algorithm that's like the quadratic one, but for cubics, turns out that you can be in something that looks like a very innocuous curve, but mathematically you're passing a singular point. That's sort of like a dividing by zero even though it doesn't look like there's any reason to do so. The bottom line is that the quadratic curves that TrueType uses allow extremely fast hardware implementations, in parallel.
The question is whether that matters of course, now that CPU's are a zillion times faster.
But for rendering, Metafont was very very slow by comparison, although I'm amazed at how fast it goes now. Still, it has to be an order of magnitude better, and certainly that was a factor in getting TrueType adopted at the time that it was, because machines weren't that fast then. So TrueType was an intelligently chosen subset, but certainly all the ideas I've ever heard of about TrueType were, I believe, well known in the early '60s.
Back to this issue of preserving the past. I was reading some papers of Edsger Dijkstra. For a while, he used handwritten manuscripts and then a typewriter to actually distribute the work. And, his notation became much more typewriter-like, that he would use an underlined A or a boldfaced A instead of the traditional \forall symbol.
I've gotten some of his handwritten notes, but I don't remember the typewritten ones.
I was looking at the proceedings of the Marktoberdorf summer school in '90, where there were a couple of papers by him and his group. In any case, it occurred to me that TeX has made the traditional mathematical notations so accessible to practicing computer scientists, students, researchers, etc. It's very likely that if there hadn't been something like TeX, in other words if mathematical typesetting had remained strictly in the domain of book publishers, and people who did publishing as their profession, it's likely that the standard notations in computer science would have become much more typewriter-like, kind of ASCII-ized.
That's interesting.
Swissair one-one-one
is declaring pan pan pan
smoke in the cockpit
You should look into Oulipo, a literary movement dedicated to the idea that arbitrary constraints are actually a path to greater (more fundamental) creativity. Haiku are an earlier form of the same idea. Both have significant natural hacker appeal (although neither counts English as its native language).
In other words, python R0012, perl sucks, bee-otch.
And mod this comment down to 1 while you're at it.
This is a serious attack, it deserves to be heard and responded to, I'm willing to give up a karma point for that.
The DOS attack is destructive with no productive benefit. It's a pointless and criminal way of saying "Hey, lookee here!" about a bunch of compromised hosts running the masters and daemons.
So I guess the grey-hat response to this black-hat action would be to write more interesting things to put on "owned" systems. Just imagine if, instead of taking down yahoo, your local script kiddie could send the seti@home score of his favorite alias through the roof in just hours. That way, he's still providing the service (calling attention to security holes) without the stupid brute-force collateral damage to Yahoo et al.
I'm kidding about seti@home. But seriously: isn't there something more productive you could do with a distributed network of "owned" systems? Something that would appeal to the script kiddie mentality without fucking things up too badly? Taggers can graduate to real grafitti artworks; where's the upward path for the script kiddie?
I suspect that the answer would have something to do with w4rez or MP3's. (Run Napster instead of trin00 on all the compromised hosts). I'm not endorsing copyright violation here, just saying that it would be a lot better than just crashing shit.
Enough about the global financial crisis that will occur when intel's failed business plan leads its stock, the NASDAQ, and the global financial system into ruin.
/.. We want the skinny on Transmeta!
This is
Although it is believed that Transmeta initially intended and believed that Crusoe would outperform a similarly clocked PIII, Crusoe fell well short of this. Performance is so poor, that when Transmeta publicly introduced the Crusoe, the company described the performance of its new VLIW processor with a set of bizarre benchmarks....
Why is the Crusoe falling so far short of initial performance expectations? Again, as with the Itanium, the problem can be trace to VLIW. This design philosophy, especially for general purpose CPUs, is in its infancy, so no one has experience to set truly credible performance expectations.
Does this mean that the Crusoe is already a non-factor? Yes, and no. Yes, and Transmeta has already conceded this, the Crusoe will not be a player on desktops anytime soon. But in the portable market, Crusoe has a chance at success. With this greatly diversifying market, Crusoe's low power consumption is attractive by providing reasonable performance where battery life is paramount. It has the potential to be successful in Web tablets and low-priced, long battery-life notebooks.
The key to Crusoe's success will be if Transmeta can rapidly reduce the price of the 700MHz version to below $100 (it was announced at over $300).
What do you folks think? Is Crusoe a disappointment? Do you think that the do-it-in-software transmeta philosophy will pay off in prices as well as power?
I hate to rain on your metaphor, but if it holds out things look bad for Transmeta. Detroit ended up fighting back against little efficient Japanese cars with big gas-guzzling SUV's, convincing people that yes, they really do need the kitchen sink on the road. (Also, these beasts get all the attention because margins are higher).
If your metaphor holds, then all Intel has to do is a) continue to invent new multimedia instruction sets; and b) hope that a software company that lives on such feeping creatures remains dominant. Transmeta wouldn't be able to keep up.
Of course, as someone who will soon be running my laptop on pure solar power, I hope that this doesn't happen...
I'm surprised nobody else has commented on the obvious here. Sure, maybe dynamically recompiling is awesome. But doing it twice at once isn't. Just imagine your Crusoe chip screaming in agony as the code-morphing tries to profile and recompile code that is being dynamically recompiled by the JIT compiler. And how do you fix that?
By abstracting your two smarty-pants recompilers into a "hardware" and an "interpreter" layer, you've removed any way for them to talk to each other or even really be aware of the other's existence. The problem's not theoretically impossible, but the practical advantages of keeping your abstractions clean make me worry about the hopes for Crusoe web-pads (which would presumably run a lot of Java).
Remeber that ad with the naked woman holding a Palm V? She was "Kate Hunter, Dancer", and she supposedly used her palm to enter to-do's involving legwarmers. There's a bit of a story about that ad.
The first I heard of that ad was an email to all Palm employees giving us a "heads up" that it would soon be coming out. They told us what publications it would run in (things like "Yahoo: Internet life", "Business Week", and "Golf Digest"; all of them magazines with a more or less male demographic). They also told us what to say if we met someone who was offended by it. Apparently, as employees, we weren't allowed to be offended by it ourselves. We were to say things like "The model wasn't really naked during the photo shoot" (as if a naked woman in a room with a camera is more immoral than running a national ad campaign which objectifies women), "This ad was approved by a team of female executives" (as if women never harm other women), and "The message is the beauty of the female form" (look, girls, it's OK, we're saying that you're pretty. Can you say pretty?).
A lot of people were unhappy with that email. If you're so worried that the ad is going to offend people, why do you run it? People flamed back at whatever marketing stiff sent the email, there was discussion in the hallways.
So marketing spammed us all two more times. They essentially repeated the same points, but they had one new point to make that topped it all: They hadn't meant to give the impression that the naked woman Palm ad was the only ad in this campaign. The Simply Palm campaign is a series of ads. In this ad, there's a naked woman, but in other ads use "other beautiful objects, such as a motorcycle and a designer chair" to sell the palm.
That's right, that's a direct quote: "other beautiful objects".
I guess whoever wrote that email has been in a hole since the 60's, to be so ignorant of feminist thought; they certainly haven't ever heard of the word "objectification".
Then later, of course, there was the "Simply Porn" side of the controversy, where 3Com's bonehead lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to a website that had parodies of the Palm ad.
What does this have to do with gaming ads? Well, for one thing, I think the remarkable idiocy showed by marketing throughout this saga argues against the idea that they have any special handle on what "objectively" sells product. Running sexist ads doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sexist. Second, I think that this shows that the ridiculous sexism and objectification shown in gaming mags really does matter; it has a way of bleeding over into more mainstream ads for technology products.
Disclaimer: I no longer work for 3com as an employee, but this was not the reason I quit. Since Palm has reorganized and is soon splitting off from 3Com, I have no reason to believe that the boneheads responsible for "simply palm" are still around. I'm one of the most boycott-happy people I know, and I wouldn't scruple to buy a Palm V at this point. If you read this and work for Palm, you probably recognize me. If so, please do not forward this comment around within Palm. I'm not ashamed of telling the truth, but if the legal department got word that I'd revealed "company-confidential email", I might get in trouble. Palm marketing might have a few IQ points over 3Com marketing, but lawyers are still lawyers.
Quakers don't dress funny (that's Puritans) or abhor sex (that's Shakers, and strangely they all died out). Quakerism is just another protestant sect (though in my unbiased opinion the coolest one - they have a real concern for equality and social justice).
I know some pretty randy quakers, but AFAIK there aren't too many Puritans left around these days.
That's an excellent metaphor. First I just wanted to point out some facts about what happened in Seattle, then I wanted to show a different side of the metaphor which I think is more relevant to etoys vs. kiddies.
:)
Here is what I saw in Seattle, as a legal observer, a protestor, and a member of Food Not Bombs (a significant non-destructive Seattle anarchist group):
The "black bloc" who broke windows numbered at least 40-50. Not all of these people broke windows, but all were collaborating in this action. In terms of "provoking government over-reaction" - it may have been intended that way but the tear gas had been used at least an hour prior to the first broken window. (It's my belief that government overreaction, which despite the chaos on Tuesday really kicked in on Wednesday, was more a factor of Clinton's presence; the Secret Service's "if things go bad Wednesday, we have to have crushing superiority and readiness for ruthless tactics" philosophy became a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
The Etoy thing is not about provoking overreaction though. To my mind the more pertinent aspect of the metaphor is the black bloc's belief that their actions were necessary to get media coverage, and that even negative coverage served to spread their message. I'm sure that some script kiddies feel the same way. And when major media gets the story totally wrong, as in this case, it only fuels their attitude. "Their gonna twist the story anyway, at least this way they won't ignore it." IMO a counter-productive attitude, but certainly one I can sympathize with.
(Wouldn't it be nice if etoys sued CNN for indirectly encouraging the DoS attacks through their biased coverage?
Is this a troll? Replying to an anti-buzzword message with 5 buzzwords (and another 5 pieces of managementese)...
If you don't want to be modded down, guy, better at least give us links for that stuff. I'm just a real programmer, not a CS wonk, and I haven't even heard of half of your buzzwords.
You're right, BN definitely has its good points.
But be careful. BN also sells its prime shelf space to the highest bidder, drowns publishers in returned books, caves to would-be censors, and engages in monopolistic and price-fixing practices. See this article for more info.
However, we're veering off topic. Point is, if you like having bookstores around, think twice before you buy books over the internet.
Recommendations? From who? The brain-dead zombies...
I'm really sorry to hear that. In my experience, most people working at independent bookstores do so out of a love for books. If you're in a city, I'm sure that you could shop around and find a better one.
I have no desire to meet people
Sorry, I meant, "to set up meetings with friends". That way, if one of you is late you've got something fun to do.
I'll take service.
That's your choice. Fatbrain gives you service without the patents.
The internet is a great place to buy commodities. It's a great place to buy specialty items whose audience is way too small to support a store in your town. It is the worst place to buy books.
A bricks-and-mortar bookstore is more than just a place where you exchange money for dead trees. It is a place to browse, a place where you can get good recommendations, a place to meet people, a place that hosts book-signings and book groups and maybe other meetings. As Amazon and the soulless book chains (BN, borders, etc.) kill that off, we are losing a precious resource.
If you want to get some faraway friend a gift certificate for a book, go to booksense.com, the website for independent bookstores. (US site - sorry, I realize the world is bigger.)
Calvino's IOAWNAT is one of his books where he is most influenced by OuLiPo, a French literature movement dedicated to writing works that conform to playful (often mathematical) constraints. Calvino is one of the more approachable examples of Oulipan literature, and certainly bears a lot of exploration in his own right, but if you want to go deeper there's lots of room. Try Harry Matthews, the only English-language member of the core group; his oulipo compendium will give you lots of further leads.
Another recommendation (which you're probably aware of as a slashdotter): Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon series