But if you look at it in linear time, and not in compressed (geological) time, the exponential curve looks more and more linear.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If you compress time linearly, it's still an exponential curve, no matter how flat it looks. (Any differentiable function locally resembles a line, but that doesn't mean it's linear.)
The whole point of geological time is that evolution happens very slowly by the standard of a human lifetime. The Cambrian explosion was, in fact, pretty fast. You expected, maybe, something like the New Kids on the Block Explosion?
It's a new trend, run everything on port 80 so your network admin has less to worry about, but that whole concept is a steaming pile of shit.
So true.
It's taken many years to build up the many layers of network security we have. One of the main reason SOAP is so easy to use is that it drills a hole right through all those layers. In other words, SOAP is easy because it encourages you to ignore everything that makes remote applications hard -- like security.
As an example of just how wacky the everything-on-port-80 idea is, and how dangerous, consider this idea I heard from Bruce Schneier: implement IP over SOAP: have a SOAP service listening at two endpoints for IP packets, and forward those packets over SOAP to the other endpoint. Then make one of those endpoints the default gateway for packets into the otherwise-secure network at the other end....
They are a company; their business is making money, not being cool (except to the extend that being cool helps business).
They are publicly traded, so they have a legal obligation to their stockholders to do their best to make money, even at the expense of being cool.
Making money means pursuing every strategy available to them to its fullest extent, and taking advantage of whatever the law, the world, and circumstance gives them.
Sometimes this means doing cool things, like open-sourcing the core of their new OS.
Sometimes the means doing crappy things, like abusing an overinflated body of intellectual property law.
Of course, if they really do put the brakes on PNG (and let's wait to hear all sides of the story), and if that hurts their business (e.g. it hurts their good standing with their customers and developers), they won't do it. So maybe sending them a polite but firm e-mail asking for an explanation isn't a bad idea.
Apple introduced a function called "CopyDeepMask" into their API in... I'm not sure... certainly by System 7, maybe by 6. I'm pretty sure I was looking at that call in 1991, and maybe even 1990. Is 1992 the filing date, or the date they claim invention? Does it matter it pattent law?
For some non-Apple prior art, when was the first version of Photoshop released? Alpha compositing is its bread and butter, and I'm pretty sure even the earliest versions let you turn an image into a selection.
Alan Cox's stand on the changelog is clearly not only a matter of personal protection, but a political statement. He has chosen an issue that is tremendously important to Linux, free software, and software developers everywhere, and certainly it's right for him to be pursuing it.
But is the Linux kernel the right forum for politics? Do you feel that it's a bad idea to involve the kernel in politics -- a slippery slope in which the software itself becomes a political pawn? Or would you say that the kernel -- and all software -- has already become a political pawn, and Cox's actions are entirely justified given that free software's existence is under increasing threat?
What? The record companies actually relinquished any control of anything? You're kidding. What's the catch?
The RIAA's large-scale actions of recent years -- first and foremost the DMCA! -- have been designed not so much with an eye to profit as an eye to control. They are a very powerful cartel, and they'd like to keep it that way -- even at the expense of immediate profits.
So what's the catch here? Could it be that they're suddenly worried about anti-trust action? Were the two artists' unions involved actually that effective?
If the unions were effective, it might be worthwhile to start making the anti-DMCA case to them. The kinds of controls on copyright the DMCA creates are ultimately to the benefit only of the copyright holder -- which, in the case of most recordings, is the record company and not the artist. Although it appears to benefit artists by protecting their work, the DMCA actually takes music out of the hands of musicians.
It would be a long, difficult, argument, but perhaps it's time to start making it. I'm a musician, and I'm convinced; I think others could be as well. If the artists' unions can pull off a deal like that, they might also be able to pull the rug out from under the **AA's run on the constitution.
Microsoft's messages are "if you don't give in, the economy will be ruined" "because, MS dominance is the one thing that can save the tech industry".
Yeah, absolutely. But I'm thinking of the step from rhetoric to concrete threats. It's one thing for the baseball owners to say, "The Twins are in trouble." But it's another thing for them to actually start axing teams.
Microsoft doesn't just talk trash -- they walk the talk. Think, for example, of how they threatened to make Windows processor-independent by porting NT to Alpha when Intel fell out of line.
Up until now, their threats to the government and the public -- like the ones you mentioned -- have only been rhetorical. But I expect to see them threatening to, say, move Microsoft to another country, or change licensing so as to hurt government agencies, or....well, who knows -- I'm not as clever as they are, and I can't see it coming.
I'm hazy on the subject, but I believe that there is no constitutional right to lawyer-client privacy. I'm under the impression that, like therapist confidentiality, it's mostly a matter of common consensus -- the bar association and the government have simply agreed to uphold this as a tradition. IIRC, there was some great contoversy last year when the bar association decided to relax its policy to allow lawyers to step forward with privileged information which presented a clear and direct threat to the safety of others.
Is my understanding correct? Is there any consitutional protection, or protection in federal law, of attorney-client privilege?
Is it time to propose a new consitutional amendment?
Actually, this a useful comparison. The Twins issue is all about coercsion: St. Paul voters (bless them) decided a few years ago not to fund a new stadium for the Twins with tax dollars. There was a lot of bucking and hawing, but the public's message consistently was, "We want the Twins, but we don't want our taxes to fund them." Here's a great feature from Minnesota Public Radio about the whole history of the issue.
A few days ago, the major league basball owners voted to eliminate two teams. It's front-page headlines here. Here's the catch: they've announced that they'll eliminate two, but not which ones. They're basically trying to whip up a lot of public sentiment, and daring the various cities with struggling teams to outdo each other in tax subsidies. It's a disgustingly coersive power play.
And I expect to see the same from Microsoft. If -- we could only wish! -- the court threatens a remedy that will actually have any effect, they'll start dangling their carrots and tying their heroines to the railroad tracks. They already do this in their rhetoric with these far-fetched missives about the economy, freedom, and Technological Progress.
But I expect to see some concretely coersive tactics from Microsoft aimed at the government and the public as a whole, similar to what the baseball owners just did. What will they be? I don't know. But I expect it -- Microsoft is the slyest bunch of bastards on the planet when it comes to business strategy. Any theories?
I am sure that others will have more specific helpful advice, but the fundamental principle is simple. It's the same way you learn to program -- or play the piano, or dance the watusi -- passionate curiousity and reckless experimentation. Education and experience are both very valuable, but both of these are offshoots of a self-driven desire for knowledge.
So, install Linux on a partition (I imagine you probably have already). Network your apartment/house/dorm room. Set up a web server and host your friends' sites. Set up a firewall. Follow the security updates for the software you have installed. Put a free database on it and write some useless but entertaining CGI on it. Translate the code into Java, Perl, and PHP just for kicks. Get excited, and the rest will follow.
Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.
Congress has the power to enact copyright law only for the purpose of promoting intellectual progress, not for the purpose of protecting profitability. Companies are free to try to profit through copyright, but congress should not and cannot protect that profitability by extending copyright law. That is my point.
You write: Sharing of copyrighted sound files without the express permission of the copyright holder, even without the DMCA, is certainly illegal...Trying to hide from this fact and claim that Congress doesn't have the power to make that type of infringing illegal is only going to get you ignored by the public, the legislators, and the courts.
You're reading my argument a bit recklessly. I agree that Napster was a party to infringement. And I certainly agree that congress has the power to make some forms of copying illegal. But what we are seeing in these file sharing cases are complaints like: "This software will put us out of business" and "our copyright interests supercede the interest of the advancement of technology".
These arguments are exactly what the constitution does not provide for. The constitution's responses are: "Tough shit!" and "No it doesn't."
The DMCA, whatever it is, is not copyright law under the scope of the constitution.
I used to work at Minnesota Public Radio, which was (and still is) a very fine place. They have the resources (people and money) to maintain a very nice web site -- but they're still public radio, and they're very cost-conscious.
In spite of that, they were very resistant for a long time to free software for exactly the reasons you mentioned. But my boss was a good listener, and when her technical people kept telling her that free was viable, she started to listen. Our sysadmin, in particular, was very persistent -- not rude, just persistent. One day I said to her, "This is the 90s. Half the best software is free." Later, I heard her quoting that to VPs.
And the ideas started to take effect. We switched from Netscape Enterprise Server to Apache, from Webtrends to analog, and my old co-workers tell me there may be some Linux boxes going into production. As the executives saw free software succeeding, they were willing to make the switch. There's a lot of inertia, sure, but execs are generally smart people. Stick with it. Little by little, if they're worth their salt, they'll listen.
It really helps to get a high-profile success with free software. If you're making the case in your company, look for an opportunity to base a project in free software, and make sure it succeeds. This is the most effective argument you can make.
It's worth remembering in all of this that the US constitution grants congress a limited power to enact copyright law. Any such law must be design for the promotion of "science and the useful arts". The constitution does not grant congress any power of any kind to use copyright law to defend the profitability of corporations, or guarantee them that their business models will remain unchanged by technology.
So, ask yourselves, does file sharing -- the exchange of information on a scale far exceeding anything we have seen in human history -- promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Does de facto control by coporations of the technology which makes this exchange possible promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
I'm just an old-school style computer guy, but is fan noise really that big of a deal?
I don't think it has anything to do with being "old-school style" -- apparently you're just not a musician! Those of us who do musical work with our machines half the time and have hyper-sensitive ears the rest of the time find fans quite irritating.
Doesn't the fans in the power supply make more noise, anyway?
Not in my laptop!:) It's soooo close to silent, but darn, if I could just squeeze it down a few more decibels....
I remember seeing years ago on public television somebody demonstrating this amazing liquid which, I believe, was called "chlorinert". It looked and behaved more or less like water, but it was completely nonconductive. The guy demostrated by plugging in a lamp, submerging it in the liquid, and screwing in a bulb while it was submerged. It was pretty amazing.
They mentioned its possible application to CPU cooling in supercomputers -- the idea was that you would actually submerge whole circuit boards in the liquid, while pumping it through a conventional refrigeration unit. Heat sinks be damned!
Apparently it never caught on, though -- I can't find anything about it online. Even mighty google just says, "Did you mean 'chlorine'?" I think it was incredibly expensive; perhaps that's the reason.
Now would be a good time for the attorney generals to hear from the technologically literate. Do you have an opinion on the Microsoft case? Let them know! Here are their names and numbers:
California: Bill Lockyer, 800-952-5225 Connecticut: Richard Blumenthal, 860-808-5318 District of Columbia: Robert Rigsby, 202-727-6248 Florida: Bob Butterworth, 850-487-1963 Illinois: Jim Ryan, 217-782-1090 Iowa: Tom Miller, 515-281-5164 Kansas: Carla J. Stovall, 785-296-2215 Kentucky: A. B. Chandler III, 502-696-5300 Louisiana: Richard Ieyoub, 225-342-7876 Maryland: J. Joseph Curran, Jr., 410-576-6300 Massachusetts: Tom Reilly, 617-727-2200 Michigan: Jennifer M. Granholm, 517-373-1110 Minnesota: Mike Hatch, 651-296-3353 New York: Eliot Spitzer, 518-474-7330 or 716-853-8400 or 212-416-8000 North Carolina: Roy Cooper, 919-716-6400 Ohio: Betty D. Montgomery, 614-466-4320 Utah: Mark Shurtleff, 801-538-1326 West Virginia: Darrell V. McGraw, Jr., 304-558-2021 Wisconsin: James E. Dyle, 608-266-1221
I believe he was referring to the fact that Microsoft is being forced to remove the JVM
As I understand it, this is not quite right. Microsoft is not being forced to remove a JVM because they never had one in the first place. There were selling something which was like Java, and largely compatible with it, but broke the standard in a number of respects. So the thing that came with IE was not Java, but Microsoft was calling it "Java" anyway. Since that's Sun's trademark, Sun demanded they stop.
I don't think anybody is stopping them from bundling Sun's JVM, or even their own implementation of a true JVM which implements Sun's Java standards. Help me out, folks, am I wrong here?
If you're in Minnesota, your attorney general is Mike Hatch. His office is 651-296-3353. The person who answered was very courteous, and happy to hear my opinion.
The companion web site of the book (at www.web-redesign.com) fails to validate as standard HTML when tested by validator.w3.org. What else needs to be said?
That it's a clear, well-organized, visually pleasing, fairly low-chartjunk site. W3C validation is a good thing, but it is not the defining standard of what makes a good site. Most sites that I've seen with the "W3C Validated" sticker are messy, ugly, unnavigable sites that have "geek with no design skill" written all over them.
So yes, standards compliance is a good thing. But I think the point of the book was making a web site that actually succeeds with real people, not validators. There own site seems to be a decent example. That's what else needs to be said.
In college, I did a project in which I attempted to evolve programs for Core Wars, in which two programs running in a virtual machine language basically attempt to overwrite each other's memory space.
My algorithm started with random programs and pitted them against each other in the Core Wars arena. The fitness function was simple: programs that beat other programs got higher ratings. Top-rated programs would "breed", and all programs would mutate. The hope was that after time, successful warriors would evolve.
And, lo and behold, they did! My algorithm "evolved" some simple bombers -- not nearly as good as what a human would write, but amazing considering I put no knowledge about strategy into the algorithm, and started with random core wars code.
Ah, but (there's always a but) I found that there was no significant correlation between how successful a warrior was and how many generations of crossover went into it. In other words, the genetic algorithm did no better than an algorithm which simply selected lots of random programs and kept the ones that work. So actually, my result was not very impressive at all -- I was basically doing a brute force random search for programs, and happened to find a few.
Others might get much better results with different languages, because Core Wars machine code does not lend itself to crossover (i.e. it's had to merge two Core Wars programs into a better program). Functional languages do a bit better with this. But I really doubt that Genetic Algorithms will prove useful in the near future for generating any sort of code that wouldn't be trivially easy for a human to write.
I got lost in all the parlimentary process. The Senate voted for it with no expiration date; the house passed it, but with a presidential and subsequent congressional renewal clause in case of "unforseen abuses" (or forseen abuses, for that matter).
I believe this final version passed with a (four-year?) expiration date, but I'm not sure I got that right.
Does anybody have a definitive answer on this? (And no, "I heard X and Y" does not count. I'm talking about a link to and quote from a factually reputable news source.) If there is a time limit, what are the parameters?
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet)
Actually, it may very well be illegal. Their control of the market makes their actions subject to antitrust constraints that most of us are not under. It's not clear whether this is a violation of monopoly power...but it might well be. So no, I don't think it's fair to say for sure that it's not illegal.
I'm not making an argument about whether anti-trust law is fair, or about whether MS will face legal action because of this. I'm just saying that, for a company which has been convicted of breaking this law in the past, they seem very unconcerned about breaking it in the future.
If I were a Microsoft stockholder, I wouldn't be happy. It doesn't seem to me that getting repeatedly smacked down by the world's most powerful government is likely to increase shareholder value.
Votes tallied with MS Election.NET next term?
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But if you look at it in linear time, and not in compressed (geological) time, the exponential curve looks more and more linear.
That doesn't make any sense at all. If you compress time linearly, it's still an exponential curve, no matter how flat it looks. (Any differentiable function locally resembles a line, but that doesn't mean it's linear.)
The whole point of geological time is that evolution happens very slowly by the standard of a human lifetime. The Cambrian explosion was, in fact, pretty fast. You expected, maybe, something like the New Kids on the Block Explosion?
!@#^$% math abuse...
It's a new trend, run everything on port 80 so your network admin has less to worry about, but that whole concept is a steaming pile of shit.
So true.
It's taken many years to build up the many layers of network security we have. One of the main reason SOAP is so easy to use is that it drills a hole right through all those layers. In other words, SOAP is easy because it encourages you to ignore everything that makes remote applications hard -- like security.
As an example of just how wacky the everything-on-port-80 idea is, and how dangerous, consider this idea I heard from Bruce Schneier: implement IP over SOAP: have a SOAP service listening at two endpoints for IP packets, and forward those packets over SOAP to the other endpoint. Then make one of those endpoints the default gateway for packets into the otherwise-secure network at the other end....
Just ponder that.
- They are a company; their business is making money, not being cool (except to the extend that being cool helps business).
- They are publicly traded, so they have a legal obligation to their stockholders to do their best to make money, even at the expense of being cool.
- Making money means pursuing every strategy available to them to its fullest extent, and taking advantage of whatever the law, the world, and circumstance gives them.
- Sometimes this means doing cool things, like open-sourcing the core of their new OS.
- Sometimes the means doing crappy things, like abusing an overinflated body of intellectual property law.
Of course, if they really do put the brakes on PNG (and let's wait to hear all sides of the story), and if that hurts their business (e.g. it hurts their good standing with their customers and developers), they won't do it. So maybe sending them a polite but firm e-mail asking for an explanation isn't a bad idea.Apple introduced a function called "CopyDeepMask" into their API in ... I'm not sure ... certainly by System 7, maybe by 6. I'm pretty sure I was looking at that call in 1991, and maybe even 1990. Is 1992 the filing date, or the date they claim invention? Does it matter it pattent law?
For some non-Apple prior art, when was the first version of Photoshop released? Alpha compositing is its bread and butter, and I'm pretty sure even the earliest versions let you turn an image into a selection.
Alan Cox's stand on the changelog is clearly not only a matter of personal protection, but a political statement. He has chosen an issue that is tremendously important to Linux, free software, and software developers everywhere, and certainly it's right for him to be pursuing it.
But is the Linux kernel the right forum for politics? Do you feel that it's a bad idea to involve the kernel in politics -- a slippery slope in which the software itself becomes a political pawn? Or would you say that the kernel -- and all software -- has already become a political pawn, and Cox's actions are entirely justified given that free software's existence is under increasing threat?
What? The record companies actually relinquished any control of anything? You're kidding. What's the catch?
The RIAA's large-scale actions of recent years -- first and foremost the DMCA! -- have been designed not so much with an eye to profit as an eye to control. They are a very powerful cartel, and they'd like to keep it that way -- even at the expense of immediate profits.
So what's the catch here? Could it be that they're suddenly worried about anti-trust action? Were the two artists' unions involved actually that effective?
If the unions were effective, it might be worthwhile to start making the anti-DMCA case to them. The kinds of controls on copyright the DMCA creates are ultimately to the benefit only of the copyright holder -- which, in the case of most recordings, is the record company and not the artist. Although it appears to benefit artists by protecting their work, the DMCA actually takes music out of the hands of musicians.
It would be a long, difficult, argument, but perhaps it's time to start making it. I'm a musician, and I'm convinced; I think others could be as well. If the artists' unions can pull off a deal like that, they might also be able to pull the rug out from under the **AA's run on the constitution.
Microsoft's messages are "if you don't give in, the economy will be ruined" "because, MS dominance is the one thing that can save the tech industry".
Yeah, absolutely. But I'm thinking of the step from rhetoric to concrete threats. It's one thing for the baseball owners to say, "The Twins are in trouble." But it's another thing for them to actually start axing teams.
Microsoft doesn't just talk trash -- they walk the talk. Think, for example, of how they threatened to make Windows processor-independent by porting NT to Alpha when Intel fell out of line.
Up until now, their threats to the government and the public -- like the ones you mentioned -- have only been rhetorical. But I expect to see them threatening to, say, move Microsoft to another country, or change licensing so as to hurt government agencies, or....well, who knows -- I'm not as clever as they are, and I can't see it coming.
I'm hazy on the subject, but I believe that there is no constitutional right to lawyer-client privacy. I'm under the impression that, like therapist confidentiality, it's mostly a matter of common consensus -- the bar association and the government have simply agreed to uphold this as a tradition. IIRC, there was some great contoversy last year when the bar association decided to relax its policy to allow lawyers to step forward with privileged information which presented a clear and direct threat to the safety of others.
Is my understanding correct? Is there any consitutional protection, or protection in federal law, of attorney-client privilege?
Is it time to propose a new consitutional amendment?
Actually, this a useful comparison. The Twins issue is all about coercsion: St. Paul voters (bless them) decided a few years ago not to fund a new stadium for the Twins with tax dollars. There was a lot of bucking and hawing, but the public's message consistently was, "We want the Twins, but we don't want our taxes to fund them." Here's a great feature from Minnesota Public Radio about the whole history of the issue.
A few days ago, the major league basball owners voted to eliminate two teams. It's front-page headlines here. Here's the catch: they've announced that they'll eliminate two, but not which ones. They're basically trying to whip up a lot of public sentiment, and daring the various cities with struggling teams to outdo each other in tax subsidies. It's a disgustingly coersive power play.
And I expect to see the same from Microsoft. If -- we could only wish! -- the court threatens a remedy that will actually have any effect, they'll start dangling their carrots and tying their heroines to the railroad tracks. They already do this in their rhetoric with these far-fetched missives about the economy, freedom, and Technological Progress.
But I expect to see some concretely coersive tactics from Microsoft aimed at the government and the public as a whole, similar to what the baseball owners just did. What will they be? I don't know. But I expect it -- Microsoft is the slyest bunch of bastards on the planet when it comes to business strategy. Any theories?
I am sure that others will have more specific helpful advice, but the fundamental principle is simple. It's the same way you learn to program -- or play the piano, or dance the watusi -- passionate curiousity and reckless experimentation. Education and experience are both very valuable, but both of these are offshoots of a self-driven desire for knowledge.
So, install Linux on a partition (I imagine you probably have already). Network your apartment/house/dorm room. Set up a web server and host your friends' sites. Set up a firewall. Follow the security updates for the software you have installed. Put a free database on it and write some useless but entertaining CGI on it. Translate the code into Java, Perl, and PHP just for kicks. Get excited, and the rest will follow.
Read it carefully:
Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.
Congress has the power to enact copyright law only for the purpose of promoting intellectual progress, not for the purpose of protecting profitability. Companies are free to try to profit through copyright, but congress should not and cannot protect that profitability by extending copyright law. That is my point.
You write: Sharing of copyrighted sound files without the express permission of the copyright holder, even without the DMCA, is certainly illegal...Trying to hide from this fact and claim that Congress doesn't have the power to make that type of infringing illegal is only going to get you ignored by the public, the legislators, and the courts.
You're reading my argument a bit recklessly. I agree that Napster was a party to infringement. And I certainly agree that congress has the power to make some forms of copying illegal. But what we are seeing in these file sharing cases are complaints like: "This software will put us out of business" and "our copyright interests supercede the interest of the advancement of technology".
These arguments are exactly what the constitution does not provide for. The constitution's responses are: "Tough shit!" and "No it doesn't."
The DMCA, whatever it is, is not copyright law under the scope of the constitution.
I used to work at Minnesota Public Radio, which was (and still is) a very fine place. They have the resources (people and money) to maintain a very nice web site -- but they're still public radio, and they're very cost-conscious.
In spite of that, they were very resistant for a long time to free software for exactly the reasons you mentioned. But my boss was a good listener, and when her technical people kept telling her that free was viable, she started to listen. Our sysadmin, in particular, was very persistent -- not rude, just persistent. One day I said to her, "This is the 90s. Half the best software is free." Later, I heard her quoting that to VPs.
And the ideas started to take effect. We switched from Netscape Enterprise Server to Apache, from Webtrends to analog, and my old co-workers tell me there may be some Linux boxes going into production. As the executives saw free software succeeding, they were willing to make the switch. There's a lot of inertia, sure, but execs are generally smart people. Stick with it. Little by little, if they're worth their salt, they'll listen.
It really helps to get a high-profile success with free software. If you're making the case in your company, look for an opportunity to base a project in free software, and make sure it succeeds. This is the most effective argument you can make.
It's worth remembering in all of this that the US constitution grants congress a limited power to enact copyright law. Any such law must be design for the promotion of "science and the useful arts". The constitution does not grant congress any power of any kind to use copyright law to defend the profitability of corporations, or guarantee them that their business models will remain unchanged by technology.
So, ask yourselves, does file sharing -- the exchange of information on a scale far exceeding anything we have seen in human history -- promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Does de facto control by coporations of the technology which makes this exchange possible promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
I'm just an old-school style computer guy, but is fan noise really that big of a deal?
:) It's soooo close to silent, but darn, if I could just squeeze it down a few more decibels....
I don't think it has anything to do with being "old-school style" -- apparently you're just not a musician! Those of us who do musical work with our machines half the time and have hyper-sensitive ears the rest of the time find fans quite irritating.
Doesn't the fans in the power supply make more noise, anyway?
Not in my laptop!
I remember seeing years ago on public television somebody demonstrating this amazing liquid which, I believe, was called "chlorinert". It looked and behaved more or less like water, but it was completely nonconductive. The guy demostrated by plugging in a lamp, submerging it in the liquid, and screwing in a bulb while it was submerged. It was pretty amazing.
They mentioned its possible application to CPU cooling in supercomputers -- the idea was that you would actually submerge whole circuit boards in the liquid, while pumping it through a conventional refrigeration unit. Heat sinks be damned!
Apparently it never caught on, though -- I can't find anything about it online. Even mighty google just says, "Did you mean 'chlorine'?" I think it was incredibly expensive; perhaps that's the reason.
This discussion reminds me of my favorite Winston Chruchill quote. Somebody corrected him on his ending a sentence with a preposition. He replied:
"That is exactly the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."
Now would be a good time for the attorney generals to hear from the technologically literate. Do you have an opinion on the Microsoft case? Let them know! Here are their names and numbers:
California: Bill Lockyer, 800-952-5225
Connecticut: Richard Blumenthal, 860-808-5318
District of Columbia: Robert Rigsby, 202-727-6248
Florida: Bob Butterworth, 850-487-1963
Illinois: Jim Ryan, 217-782-1090
Iowa: Tom Miller, 515-281-5164
Kansas: Carla J. Stovall, 785-296-2215
Kentucky: A. B. Chandler III, 502-696-5300
Louisiana: Richard Ieyoub, 225-342-7876
Maryland: J. Joseph Curran, Jr., 410-576-6300
Massachusetts: Tom Reilly, 617-727-2200
Michigan: Jennifer M. Granholm, 517-373-1110
Minnesota: Mike Hatch, 651-296-3353
New York: Eliot Spitzer, 518-474-7330 or 716-853-8400 or 212-416-8000
North Carolina: Roy Cooper, 919-716-6400
Ohio: Betty D. Montgomery, 614-466-4320
Utah: Mark Shurtleff, 801-538-1326
West Virginia: Darrell V. McGraw, Jr., 304-558-2021
Wisconsin: James E. Dyle, 608-266-1221
I believe he was referring to the fact that Microsoft is being forced to remove the JVM
As I understand it, this is not quite right. Microsoft is not being forced to remove a JVM because they never had one in the first place. There were selling something which was like Java, and largely compatible with it, but broke the standard in a number of respects. So the thing that came with IE was not Java, but Microsoft was calling it "Java" anyway. Since that's Sun's trademark, Sun demanded they stop.
I don't think anybody is stopping them from bundling Sun's JVM, or even their own implementation of a true JVM which implements Sun's Java standards. Help me out, folks, am I wrong here?
Yes, call!!
If you're in Minnesota, your attorney general is Mike Hatch. His office is 651-296-3353. The person who answered was very courteous, and happy to hear my opinion.
The companion web site of the book (at www.web-redesign.com) fails to validate as standard HTML when tested by validator.w3.org. What else needs to be said?
That it's a clear, well-organized, visually pleasing, fairly low-chartjunk site. W3C validation is a good thing, but it is not the defining standard of what makes a good site. Most sites that I've seen with the "W3C Validated" sticker are messy, ugly, unnavigable sites that have "geek with no design skill" written all over them.
So yes, standards compliance is a good thing. But I think the point of the book was making a web site that actually succeeds with real people, not validators. There own site seems to be a decent example. That's what else needs to be said.
Beats me why Apple did this...
I believe it was deprecated in favor of curl, which I'm told is more robust anyway. It has the same basic syntax:
curl url
In college, I did a project in which I attempted to evolve programs for Core Wars, in which two programs running in a virtual machine language basically attempt to overwrite each other's memory space.
My algorithm started with random programs and pitted them against each other in the Core Wars arena. The fitness function was simple: programs that beat other programs got higher ratings. Top-rated programs would "breed", and all programs would mutate. The hope was that after time, successful warriors would evolve.
And, lo and behold, they did! My algorithm "evolved" some simple bombers -- not nearly as good as what a human would write, but amazing considering I put no knowledge about strategy into the algorithm, and started with random core wars code.
Ah, but (there's always a but) I found that there was no significant correlation between how successful a warrior was and how many generations of crossover went into it. In other words, the genetic algorithm did no better than an algorithm which simply selected lots of random programs and kept the ones that work. So actually, my result was not very impressive at all -- I was basically doing a brute force random search for programs, and happened to find a few.
Others might get much better results with different languages, because Core Wars machine code does not lend itself to crossover (i.e. it's had to merge two Core Wars programs into a better program). Functional languages do a bit better with this. But I really doubt that Genetic Algorithms will prove useful in the near future for generating any sort of code that wouldn't be trivially easy for a human to write.
I got lost in all the parlimentary process. The Senate voted for it with no expiration date; the house passed it, but with a presidential and subsequent congressional renewal clause in case of "unforseen abuses" (or forseen abuses, for that matter).
I believe this final version passed with a (four-year?) expiration date, but I'm not sure I got that right.
Does anybody have a definitive answer on this? (And no, "I heard X and Y" does not count. I'm talking about a link to and quote from a factually reputable news source.) If there is a time limit, what are the parameters?
Yeah, it's self-serving and perhaps borderline unethical. But it's not illegal (yet)
Actually, it may very well be illegal. Their control of the market makes their actions subject to antitrust constraints that most of us are not under. It's not clear whether this is a violation of monopoly power...but it might well be. So no, I don't think it's fair to say for sure that it's not illegal.
I'm not making an argument about whether anti-trust law is fair, or about whether MS will face legal action because of this. I'm just saying that, for a company which has been convicted of breaking this law in the past, they seem very unconcerned about breaking it in the future.
If I were a Microsoft stockholder, I wouldn't be happy. It doesn't seem to me that getting repeatedly smacked down by the world's most powerful government is likely to increase shareholder value.
...And probably cast by it as well.