> A Corporation has had, in the past, essentially the same rights as an individual human. Now, however, individual rights have been taken away, yet the Corporation is free to do what it pleases
I don't disagree, but the statement is not exactly correct.
Corporations have had, in the past, essentially the same rights as an individual human. However - they have *NEVER* had the *accountability* of an individual human. Corporations cannot be held at gunpoint; they cannot be arrested; they cannot be shot; they cannot be incarcerated. Sony appears to have committed a felony. So what? Who to arrest, the shareholders? Perhaps some token corporate patsy? The solution is quite the challenge when you consider it will have zero impact on the Golden Boys' behavior; even if they get fired, they leave with a billion dollar parachute.
I'd suggest that the issue isn't corporate rights; I'd suggest that the issue is in fact one of accountability, or lack thereof. As many have said - if you or I throw together a website that uses IE exploits to silent-install malware onto a visitor's machine, we go to jail with no questions asked. If a corporation does it, though, it's "spyware".
RSS was one of the few WWW things that didn't easily allow for an exploit on IE. With these extensions, this much-needed functionality will finally be available to IE users, everywhere!
Coming Soon to a Win32 box near you... ActiveRSS.NET(SP9)
Heh, save that bad-boy if ya can... you might be able to get your money back:)
The one we had, there was a little "blip" of a burn-mark on the one side. We had no clue how it was made, until someone published something about in... Byte? Or Nibble that month. On ours, anyway, that side contained the defect; the other side was still writable.
RIAA was forced to sue itself today, as some smartass found a way to use a "sticky" mailing label that was included with one of their subpeonas, to circumvent the Sony Digital Rights Restriction kit.
Many years ago in the Apple ][ era... Lotus 1-2-3 was a great spreadsheet. They invested a huge pile of money to make certain that you could not run their program without possessing the original disk. And try as we may, we couldn't figure out how they did it... there was one sector that was funky, but it didn't make any sense.
Then, by chance, my neighbor had a nice RANA drive - and it had a 'write protect' button on the face, that you could manually toggle. We stuck a (non-working) copy into the drive to begin the arduous task of single-stepping through the code, and accidentally hit that button while doing so. The result?
Lotus fired right up!
They spent way too much money using a laser to create a specific media defect in a specific place; upon startup, the program would attempt to write to that location. If it failed, it knew it was the original. If it succeeded... then there was no defect there, and it was a copy.
All that time and god-knows-how-much-money they invested in this scheme... only to be defeated by a.01 cent piece of 'write-protect' tape. And now, Sony repeats it with the same level of hubris... that's too funny.
Actually, I heard it was that Amazon had just patented a mechanism for killing book sales through a method of collecting and distributing bad reviews...
For sony to win such a case (and I hope they would), the implications would be fantasic - it would demand that an anonymous 3rd party has more rights to your machine than you do. You know what that means?
It means I have full rights to every machine on this planet (except my own), and noone can do a damned thing about it. Electric bill too high? No problem - Sony will have proven that you have complete authority to install any software and make any modifications you wish to the power company's computing systems.
There's no way around it - the issue needs to be pressed in a criminal context, to once-and-for-all determine *exactly* who owns this machine that is sitting in front of me. And more importantly, determine who *doesn't* (including children, neighbors, wife, dog, whatever). Take this concept to the general case and it'll become clear - I hire a $6/hr temp to type some junk in. They have... exactly... what authority to consent to anything? Install anything? Do anything? And they have ability to delegate my authority to 3rd parties like Sony? No, they don't... and this is a perfect opportunity to demand a legally enforced correction of the market's abuses, by simply enforcing laws that already exist, and putting people in jail where they belong.
Somebody uses social and exploit engineering to install a pile of crap onto my machine, stealing bandwidth, storage, and cpu assets. It's legal. I do that exact same thing to a machine owned by Cray, or perhaps to this neat Sun Grid... and I go to jail for the next decade. Bullshit, the actions are the same - and they are both felonies.
If I gave you some medium that did this, EULA or not, I'd go to jail.
Compound this with the person who inerts this CD (and thereby is the party who agrees to this EULA) being a MINOR... this entire situation is complete insanity. Is there no concept of authority anymore? Any a$$hole that can sit at my keyboard is automatically a fully authorized proxy for me? In effect I have ZERO authority, and FULL accountability?
In short if the next Bagle variant contains a good EULA, it'll be perfectly legal.
Personally, I don't think the Presidential Seal is being used by the Onion. Last time I checked, the real Seal was a lot less pixelated, and had a lot more detail.
>> A PDA? It's not designed to play music or video.. how do I know I won't have to jump through hoops to get it to do either?
A PDA (even an old one, like my IPaq) isn't designed to do anything - it has exactly six buttons with no implicit function on any of them, and a large touch-sensitive region that has a near-infinite set of potential purposes. As a result, my PDA is exactly designed to play music or video - What you suggest is that Winamp (etc) are not suited for playback... when in fact, that style of UI is what made computer based music / video popular in the first place. Can an IPod compete with my IPaq for codecs? Not even close. How about the player UI? My IPaq will bury it in every case (unless you physically drop the unit and break it), because Winamp doesn't suck - nor do any of it's PPC-based clones. It's interesting to note that even today, the best music or video playback device still cannot compete with my Ipaq, which is pushing 5 years old, in terms of usabiity, flexability, expandability, and features... since it has everything you've got on a full PC. Find me a player that competes with Winamp - you cannot. Plus, you can do more than just listen or watch - you can play solitare, check mail, write junk and compile it with GCC, blah blah blah, WHILE you listen. The only advantage the new units have is durability, due to the nature of the typical PDA display. However...
>> What you can do is irrelevant to 99% of the population (who are not geeks). It's what you can do easily that's important.
I agree here. If the market convinces people that something is hard, they'll believe it. IPod sells because the aquisition of music is marketed as being trivial. Obviously, aquisition / ripping of MP3s is likewise trivial... but that fact isn't marketed, so people shy away from it. The iMac was perhaps the only real attempt at selling on this point (click,rip,burn) - and obviously Apple discovered that it was *still* perceived as tedious and technical no matter how well they automated it.
>> If what it's designed for captures my imagination, and it's presented so I feel I know how to use it, it's sold.
Key point / editorial - and I don't disagree with you - but it's sad that something needs a concrete design in order to inspire imagination, as opposed to a mildly abstracted tool. Palm was probably a small culprit in this as far as PDAs are concerned - they were the big dog on the market, and those stupid tap-regions at the base of the screen were hard-coded to exact functions. When the PPC hit the market, Palm had such a legacy market presence that people (myself included, initially) expected that to still be the case. I find that when I tell people that the buttons have no explicit meaning, they totally fail to grasp it. THAT is probably why Palm originally dedicated those tap-regions to specific functions, and THAT is probably why the PDA is such a failure - people are so dumbed down that they have no freakin Vision.
Today, Leaders of several major terrorist organizations warned that GoogleMaps could be used to aid counter-terrorsts. From the article: "The Google site contains clear aerial photos of our secret training centers, my house and surrounding tents. There are also some clear shots of our car-bomb factory, and if you zoom in really far, you can see me having sex with a camel in the back yard." Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources and the images displayed are about one to two years old, not shown in real time.
Uh, last time I checked... Cray rented clock-time on their machines for quite a penny, per second. To this day, vendors rent storage space for quite a penny, per byte. To this day, vendors meter bandwidth, per byte.
There's nothing new about this; if you or I do these things, we go to jail. These a$$holes are hiding behind a corporate.com, so they have impunity. The only thing new is the courts being forced to reconcile this discrepancy.
"When the goal is maximum performance across multiple CPU architectures, can one always assume that this is true?" is the quesiton.
"You're ignoring the fact that modern processors use pipelining architectures, " you propose.
As I said, the bulk of the posts end up saying, "any good compiler will/should"...
In other words, "No, you cannot."
But even in the case with chip-level optimizations, your point is still moot; for those processors, then it doesn't make any difference for you - call them all 1 tick. Of course, some code is more pipelinable and can be paralleled better than others... as you well know, so it still matters. That's not his question, anyway. If you read his question carefully, you'll notice the word "ALWAYS" floating around. This is a very strong qualification that you seem to have missed. Last time I checked, 8051s were still in production, not to mention the large pile of other embedded "super-micro" processors out there. Very few support pipelining or prediction, or even caching for that matter. Does my Palm Pilot support branching? How about my PocketPC? Or my generic WinCE device?
I've been reading some really good arguments in these posts about how it'll work. And the bulk of them end up saying, "any good compiler will/should"...
In other words, "No, you cannot."
Your best bet is to do (almost) what you did - compile a test case per platform, check the code - and then the part that you neglected, you need to count the clock ticks per instruction. To reinforce what one poster said - there can be a large difference between [ecx] and [ecx+edx], conceptually speaking. If it truly matters then you count the ticks for each platform, and decide if it is reasonable. 3 ticks versus 2... that's 33%. 2 ticks versus 1... that's 50%.
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> A Corporation has had, in the past, essentially the same rights as an individual human. Now, however, individual rights have been taken away, yet the Corporation is free to do what it pleases
I don't disagree, but the statement is not exactly correct.
Corporations have had, in the past, essentially the same rights as an individual human. However - they have *NEVER* had the *accountability* of an individual human. Corporations cannot be held at gunpoint; they cannot be arrested; they cannot be shot; they cannot be incarcerated. Sony appears to have committed a felony. So what? Who to arrest, the shareholders? Perhaps some token corporate patsy? The solution is quite the challenge when you consider it will have zero impact on the Golden Boys' behavior; even if they get fired, they leave with a billion dollar parachute.
I'd suggest that the issue isn't corporate rights; I'd suggest that the issue is in fact one of accountability, or lack thereof. As many have said - if you or I throw together a website that uses IE exploits to silent-install malware onto a visitor's machine, we go to jail with no questions asked. If a corporation does it, though, it's "spyware".
More to the point, why was their format "Closed" before MA walked?
RSS was one of the few WWW things that didn't easily allow for an exploit on IE. With these extensions, this much-needed functionality will finally be available to IE users, everywhere!
Coming Soon to a Win32 box near you... ActiveRSS.NET(SP9)
cellular broadband coverage is spotty at best in my area, and the damned providers charge too much per minute for the airtime. :)
Heh, save that bad-boy if ya can... you might be able to get your money back :)
The one we had, there was a little "blip" of a burn-mark on the one side. We had no clue how it was made, until someone published something about in... Byte? Or Nibble that month. On ours, anyway, that side contained the defect; the other side was still writable.
RIAA was forced to sue itself today, as some smartass found a way to use a "sticky" mailing label that was included with one of their subpeonas, to circumvent the Sony Digital Rights Restriction kit.
Oh, this is too funny.
.01 cent piece of 'write-protect' tape. And now, Sony repeats it with the same level of hubris... that's too funny.
Many years ago in the Apple ][ era... Lotus 1-2-3 was a great spreadsheet. They invested a huge pile of money to make certain that you could not run their program without possessing the original disk. And try as we may, we couldn't figure out how they did it... there was one sector that was funky, but it didn't make any sense.
Then, by chance, my neighbor had a nice RANA drive - and it had a 'write protect' button on the face, that you could manually toggle. We stuck a (non-working) copy into the drive to begin the arduous task of single-stepping through the code, and accidentally hit that button while doing so. The result?
Lotus fired right up!
They spent way too much money using a laser to create a specific media defect in a specific place; upon startup, the program would attempt to write to that location. If it failed, it knew it was the original. If it succeeded... then there was no defect there, and it was a copy.
All that time and god-knows-how-much-money they invested in this scheme... only to be defeated by a
Actually, I heard it was that Amazon had just patented a mechanism for killing book sales through a method of collecting and distributing bad reviews...
> Getting told off by the President of the United States isn't getting slapped down?
No, it isn't. Having executives prosecuted for felonies, exactly as they have earned, is getting slapped down.
If you or I did what they did, it'd be open and shut... and "getting told off" by the president would NOT be one of the things we'd suffer.
"it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures..."
ILLEGAL!
Stupid prick.
Oh god, you've spawned the next "Reality" series on Fox...
"When cows attack."
... she's really a bot.
I disagree.
For sony to win such a case (and I hope they would), the implications would be fantasic - it would demand that an anonymous 3rd party has more rights to your machine than you do. You know what that means?
It means I have full rights to every machine on this planet (except my own), and noone can do a damned thing about it. Electric bill too high? No problem - Sony will have proven that you have complete authority to install any software and make any modifications you wish to the power company's computing systems.
There's no way around it - the issue needs to be pressed in a criminal context, to once-and-for-all determine *exactly* who owns this machine that is sitting in front of me. And more importantly, determine who *doesn't* (including children, neighbors, wife, dog, whatever). Take this concept to the general case and it'll become clear - I hire a $6/hr temp to type some junk in. They have... exactly... what authority to consent to anything? Install anything? Do anything? And they have ability to delegate my authority to 3rd parties like Sony? No, they don't... and this is a perfect opportunity to demand a legally enforced correction of the market's abuses, by simply enforcing laws that already exist, and putting people in jail where they belong.
Somebody uses social and exploit engineering to install a pile of crap onto my machine, stealing bandwidth, storage, and cpu assets. It's legal. I do that exact same thing to a machine owned by Cray, or perhaps to this neat Sun Grid... and I go to jail for the next decade. Bullshit, the actions are the same - and they are both felonies.
"Complain"?
How about "demand arrests and prosecutions". This is not an issue of contract-law, any more than Sobig was.
...to call this action the FELONY that it is?
If I gave you some medium that did this, EULA or not, I'd go to jail.
Compound this with the person who inerts this CD (and thereby is the party who agrees to this EULA) being a MINOR... this entire situation is complete insanity. Is there no concept of authority anymore? Any a$$hole that can sit at my keyboard is automatically a fully authorized proxy for me? In effect I have ZERO authority, and FULL accountability?
In short if the next Bagle variant contains a good EULA, it'll be perfectly legal.
No, your ASCII video is useless against this worm onslaught.
The only way we'll get through this is when people smarten up, and start using an XML based IM.
> You could consider rewriting the sentence to "A real virus multiplies itself!" of course. ...unless you're in Soviet Russia.
Personally, I don't think the Presidential Seal is being used by the Onion. Last time I checked, the real Seal was a lot less pixelated, and had a lot more detail.
>> A PDA? It's not designed to play music or video.. how do I know I won't have to jump through hoops to get it to do either?
A PDA (even an old one, like my IPaq) isn't designed to do anything - it has exactly six buttons with no implicit function on any of them, and a large touch-sensitive region that has a near-infinite set of potential purposes. As a result, my PDA is exactly designed to play music or video - What you suggest is that Winamp (etc) are not suited for playback... when in fact, that style of UI is what made computer based music / video popular in the first place. Can an IPod compete with my IPaq for codecs? Not even close. How about the player UI? My IPaq will bury it in every case (unless you physically drop the unit and break it), because Winamp doesn't suck - nor do any of it's PPC-based clones. It's interesting to note that even today, the best music or video playback device still cannot compete with my Ipaq, which is pushing 5 years old, in terms of usabiity, flexability, expandability, and features... since it has everything you've got on a full PC. Find me a player that competes with Winamp - you cannot. Plus, you can do more than just listen or watch - you can play solitare, check mail, write junk and compile it with GCC, blah blah blah, WHILE you listen. The only advantage the new units have is durability, due to the nature of the typical PDA display. However...
>> What you can do is irrelevant to 99% of the population (who are not geeks). It's what you can do easily that's important.
I agree here. If the market convinces people that something is hard, they'll believe it. IPod sells because the aquisition of music is marketed as being trivial. Obviously, aquisition / ripping of MP3s is likewise trivial... but that fact isn't marketed, so people shy away from it. The iMac was perhaps the only real attempt at selling on this point (click,rip,burn) - and obviously Apple discovered that it was *still* perceived as tedious and technical no matter how well they automated it.
>> If what it's designed for captures my imagination, and it's presented so I feel I know how to use it, it's sold.
Key point / editorial - and I don't disagree with you - but it's sad that something needs a concrete design in order to inspire imagination, as opposed to a mildly abstracted tool. Palm was probably a small culprit in this as far as PDAs are concerned - they were the big dog on the market, and those stupid tap-regions at the base of the screen were hard-coded to exact functions. When the PPC hit the market, Palm had such a legacy market presence that people (myself included, initially) expected that to still be the case. I find that when I tell people that the buttons have no explicit meaning, they totally fail to grasp it. THAT is probably why Palm originally dedicated those tap-regions to specific functions, and THAT is probably why the PDA is such a failure - people are so dumbed down that they have no freakin Vision.
Today, Leaders of several major terrorist organizations warned that GoogleMaps could be used to aid counter-terrorsts. From the article: "The Google site contains clear aerial photos of our secret training centers, my house and surrounding tents. There are also some clear shots of our car-bomb factory, and if you zoom in really far, you can see me having sex with a camel in the back yard." Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources and the images displayed are about one to two years old, not shown in real time.
Eh, it goes both ways. Last week, a pro-GlobalWarmer said that increased solar flare activity was caused by car emissions.
Uh, last time I checked... Cray rented clock-time on their machines for quite a penny, per second. To this day, vendors rent storage space for quite a penny, per byte. To this day, vendors meter bandwidth, per byte.
There's nothing new about this; if you or I do these things, we go to jail. These a$$holes are hiding behind a corporate.com, so they have impunity. The only thing new is the courts being forced to reconcile this discrepancy.
Yes, necessarily.
"When the goal is maximum performance across multiple CPU architectures, can one always assume that this is true?" is the quesiton.
"You're ignoring the fact that modern processors use pipelining architectures, " you propose.
As I said, the bulk of the posts end up saying, "any good compiler will/should"...
In other words, "No, you cannot."
But even in the case with chip-level optimizations, your point is still moot; for those processors, then it doesn't make any difference for you - call them all 1 tick. Of course, some code is more pipelinable and can be paralleled better than others... as you well know, so it still matters. That's not his question, anyway. If you read his question carefully, you'll notice the word "ALWAYS" floating around. This is a very strong qualification that you seem to have missed. Last time I checked, 8051s were still in production, not to mention the large pile of other embedded "super-micro" processors out there. Very few support pipelining or prediction, or even caching for that matter. Does my Palm Pilot support branching? How about my PocketPC? Or my generic WinCE device?
"Always." Right?
I've been reading some really good arguments in these posts about how it'll work. And the bulk of them end up saying, "any good compiler will/should"...
In other words, "No, you cannot."
Your best bet is to do (almost) what you did - compile a test case per platform, check the code - and then the part that you neglected, you need to count the clock ticks per instruction. To reinforce what one poster said - there can be a large difference between [ecx] and [ecx+edx], conceptually speaking. If it truly matters then you count the ticks for each platform, and decide if it is reasonable. 3 ticks versus 2... that's 33%. 2 ticks versus 1... that's 50%.
Hey, I said my wife moved back and doesn't want a divorce... :)