... the scientist... said it was 'one of many' missing links to the evolution of land animals from fish, but certainly not the only one.
Yup. Much of the reason this one gets so much attention is that it is nearly complete. Other than not knowing how long its tail was (and what color its skin was;-), a fairly accurate reconstruction is possible. This is more useful than a pile of fragments of different individuals who may have lived centuries apart.
Plus, it's a species that wasn't known before. That's always useful information.
You might want to do that today. A few months ago, a fellow told those of us at a local Users Group meeting why his employer had just banned sending Word docs in email.
It seems that a VP had made the common decision that a certain missive of his was of interest to everyone in the company. The fellows down in the computer room couldn't read it on their linux boxes, so they did the obvious thing: The fed it to the strings(1) command. They saw the text of his message, poorly formatted but readable. However, scattered through it were pieces of another document - a list of the salaries of all the top people in the company.
You can probably imagine the effect. Finally, they got through to the PHBs that no, the solution wasn't to ban linux. The same thing can be done on Windows by knowledgeable users. The solution was to understand what went wrong. The fact is that Word, like most word-processor apps, often "deletes" stuff by simply marking it as deleted, and then recycles the space as needed. So a Word doc can contain fragments of any previous doc that you've had loaded into Word on your machine.
The idea finally got through to them that when you email a Word doc, you could be including "deleted" copies of lots of other docs that you've worked with recently. If you send the doc to someone outside your organization, you're sending them the "deleted" but not recycled text along with what you see on your screen. Anyone with a text-extraction program can read all that text, including the "deleted" text.
So they banned Word docs from email. If I were in charge of email at a company, I'd do the same for any word-processor doc.
And I'd seriously consider banning HTML for the same reason. Yeah, you can read the source, and see all the text and stuff inside a tag. But how often does anyone do that, except us folks who edit their HTML with a plain-text editor? I often look at the source to HTML pages, and I sometimes see things hidden there that I don't think the senders expected me to see.
Listen you selfish malcontent, letting you put whatever the hell you want on the company computers potentionally puts the company and its directors at risk.
Heh. My favorite story along this line was a couple years back, when my part of a project was imlementing the SNMP server. I'd learned of some new SNMP testing software that was available for download. But the company had some strict security rules about installing "untested" outside software. The admins reviewed my request for the testing software, and denied it.
So I went to work, built the server, and wrote a lot of my own tests (which I handed over to the QA people, since they didn't know much about SNMP). Finally we had our first release to send to the customers.
And guess what? All of the first customers had copies of that test suite that I'd been denied. They all ran it. And my code failed several tests.
There were the usual recriminations, but I persisted in simply saying "Hey, I asked for that test suite, and you told me I couldn't have it. How soon can I get it?" Messages went up and down and all around the management heirarchy, and I switched to saying "The customers are still rejecting our package because my stuff does't pass tests, and you're still denying me access to the tests."
When I finally got ahold of the test suite, a month or so later, it took me between 2 and 3 days to fix all the problems. If I'd been permitted to use the test suite from the beginning, even those days would have been saved, because my code would have passed the tests from the start. But their blocking my access to the test suite delayed our delivery by at least a month, and damaged our rep with the customers.
I've never had problems with wanting to install P2P or pr0n. (I do those on my home machine.;-) But I have had serious problems with wanting to install stuff that would help me do my job. And I attribute those problems to management listening to the arguments that I've been reading here. It doesn't bother me that they don't understand the technical details of what I'm developing. But it does bother me that the "security" people's advice seems to be to ignore my suggestions about what tools will help me do my job right.
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
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Sun's Open Source DRM
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Completely false. iTunes is completely locked down and PROHIBITS EVERYTHING, everything other than playing the files using the predefinded and restricted software on the predefined and restricted players in the predefined and restricted manner.
Well, they don't seem to do a very good job of it.
A while ago, just for yuks, I copied my the iTunes directory from my Mac to a web directory on my linux and FreeBSD web servers. I then downloaded the MP3 files to various machines, and sent the URLs to a few friends for testing on their machines.
All the downloaded MP3 files played just fine in all of our MP3 players. So whatever scheme they used to make them unplayable doesn't seem to be very effective.
I deleted all the extra copies after a while, of coure, since they were just cluttering up my disk. I don't know what the other guys did with them. It was just a test to see what we had to do to "violate" the DRM, and the answer turned out to be "Nothing at all."
Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.
And I do suspect that the "magic fairy dust" characterization might be accurate. Anyone know what it takes to make iTunes MP3s not work when you copy them to a non-Mac, non-MS system?;-)
they are a very frequent advertiser here on Slashdot which should have been mentioned.
Why? Unless you've been browsing/. with a text reader for the past 6 months, it's obvious.
Huh? I've been reading/. with mozilla, and I've never noticed their name.
Of course, it may have something to do with the fact that I told mozilla to ignore all images from slashdot.org. I do occasionally try other browsers, but I keep coming back to the ones that can turn off images on a per-site basis.
So much for the effectiveness of that advertising.
Yeah; that helps a lot. That, combined with the "social computing" meme and all the talk of collaboration, tells us how it'll work:
You take your photos of yourself and various friends, and put them online with Web 2.0 tools. I and a million others do the same. Then those photos are picked up by the collaboration tools, that combine you and me (and a few others and their pets) in interesting pornographic poses.
That's just the simple case, of course. The more advanced Web 2. sites will pick up the videos that we've put online, and combine them, making all of us porn stars.
Ofcourse, the web is different. The part that listens on the network there is on the remote machine, not on the local machine.
This is probably yet another case where we're faced with a running battle against non-techies who don't understand the terminology and seem intent on corrupting it. And it's not just the confusion of thinking that a server is remote while a client is local; lots of people think that a "server" is a piece of hardware. I've even seen this in computer-industry managers, and I've had to try to correct them as gently as I can. But I don't use their mis-definitions; I teach them the meaning of the technica terms.
But there's no reason for us to acquiesce in any revision of the definition. We should just do as scientists and engineers have been doing for centuries: There's a technically-correct definition. If you don't understand it or misuse it, you simply discredit yourself in any tech setting. We should make it clear to novices that the position relative to a human is not part of the definition, and if you insist that it is, you will merely exclude yourself from serious discussion.
For another common example, consider that physicists have never gone along with the popular reversal of the term "quantum" to mean something very big, as in the media's "quantum leap". To maintain credibility in physicist circles, you have to understand and use their definition (and you'll probably say "quantum jump";-).
There are zillions of other examples. Possibly the funniest is the way that computer geeks continue to use "hacker" as a term of honor, despite the media's attempts to twist it into a criminal term.
X was overkill for the hardware early windows ran on. Remember, in the days of windows 1.0, a 286 with 1 megabyte of ram was a beefy machine. By the time windows 3.0 was out (the first version that mattered), people were still predominately using 386's with 4 megs of ram.
Jim Gettys has commented that the machines he (and a few friends) built X on were vaxen with no more than 2 MB of memory. He has also expressed mild dismay at the bloat in current X releases. One of his projects is to help get X running on the growing flock of linux PDAs, which requires trimming it back down to something with a much smaller footstep. Current PDAs usually have much more memory than the machines that he built X on. But identifying and trimming the bloat is a time-consuming process; experienced programmers know how much easier it is to add code that to remove code.
In any case, when MS Windows first came out, X Windows would have easily fit in the memory limits. X's size couldn't have been MS's reason for rejecting it. Much more likely is the theory that they wanted something that they could own, and they couldn't own X Windows. This is believable, because it's consistent with MS's general history.
So why persue science and medicine at all? why make discoveries? why create art? why listen to music? why start a family? Why not just spend our entire lives cloistered and worshipping this divine being who gives our life its only true meaning?
Why not, indeed. It appears that neither God (if He/She exists) nor Ma Nature (aka the evolutionary process) really cares much what you do. Both refuse to hand you any information about themselves, saying in effect that you're on your own and free to live your life as you wish.
There is a widespread belief that God will punish you if you don't properly worship Him (or Her). But we have many conflicting claims on just how this worship is to be performed, and most of those claims include punishment if you pick the wrong style of worship. So the sensible approach might be to not worship at all, under what might be called a "reverse Pascal's Wager": It's better to suffer the mild punishment of being a noncommitted believer than to deal with the much greater punishment of having picked the wrong worship style.
And, of course, if Ma Nature (aka...) is really the one in charge, you won't be punished at all no matter how you act. She doesn't care how you live your life or if you die without descendants. She'll just continue to work with the ones who do produce offspring, and forget that you existed. She also doesn't care whether you worship Her or not, and won't punish you either way.
[I]t wasn't until CERN in 1991 that the idea of a global network was even brought up.
Um, I distinctly recall that in the early 1980s, I routinely accessed Internet sites in Europe. Granted, the cross-Atlantic routes were few and at times flakey, but they existed. In particular, I recall using ftp in 1983 to download TNC (The Newcastle Connection) source from the U of Newcastle upon Tyne. If you dig into the archives, you'll find that such uses were definitely part of the intent of the Internet designers, going back into the 1970s well before the term "internet" was invented.
By 1991, the international nature of the Internet was well established. Perhaps what you're thinking of is that it was about then that the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser came into existence. This was a major new development, true, but it was hardly the first intercontinental use of the Internet. It was just the latest "killer app" in a long list of Internet apps.
And if you confuse the WWW with the Internet here on/., we're gonna really make fun of you...
It's not just your fancypantsart.com site that's a problem here. Part of the history of "porn on the internet" has been the repeated closing down of sites, mailing lists and other fora that deal with subjects like breast cancer, sexually-transmitted diseases, contraception, abortion, etc. There are ongoing battles to keep the religious nuts from attacking nearly anything medical.
I was reminded recently of how far back this goes, when I ran across an article on the history of medicine in the Middle East. One of the writer's theses was that part of what put an end to the initial flowering of scientific and medical research was the Islamic ban on any images of the human body. This puts a severe limit on how far you can go with medical texts. It's a conventional explanation of why, though the Arabs were ahead of Europe in medical knowledge 1000 years ago, the Europeans eventually caught up and passed them. You really can't have good medical texts without lots of images. There was also resistance to medical texts in Europe for a long time, due to all the "pornographic" images. But eventually this was ended and medical texts were made exceptions from the porn laws, to everyone's benefit.
Sorry, but the only way you can really eliminate "porn" is by eliminating most educational material that deals with the human body. It's not just computers that can't distinguish them. History shows that human society and its laws can't easily tell them apart, either.
How does this stack up against the $100 laptop, in terms of helping the developing world?"
Rather than presenting them as alternatives or competitors, I'd suggest viewing them as "better together than alone".
The major purpose of the $100 laptop is as an educational tool for people without access to libraries or other information sources. Without a disk, it's mainly a network terminal. To function as one requires network connectivity, which is rare in most of the developed countries, and nearly nonexistent in most of the developing world.
The $100 laptops are to include a wireless "mesh" network capability, so they can use each other as relays to reach the Net. But somewhere in the vicinity, they'll need a real connection to the Net. This is where a good, cheap "PC" could come in handy. If it could function as a hub and gateway for a flock of the $100 gadgets (for which we need a short name), it could help greatly in the effort.
But one thing that I suspect from reading the article is that this may not be the intent. TFA has no mention of the software that Intel's new PC will include. This makes me suspect that they intend to deliver it with MS Windows. And since the $100 laptop is a competitor (non-Intel hardware, linux and OSS software), the PC will be designed to make the $100 "toys" look and work as bad as possible.
So I suspect that this is an anti-Negroponte marketing tool, not a serious contribution to the effort to bring information to more of the world. I'd love to be proven wrong, but frankly, Intel's track record isn't encouraging.
Of course, if we could sneak in a CD or DVD with Koppix or Ubuntu with lots of server software, it could really enable the "kiosk" owner as a local network provider.
Maybe we should suggest delivering it with software like this, and see how Intel reacts. This might tell us whether they're trying to be part of the problem or part of the solution.
But that blonde joke only goes a few hops before repeating. Has anyone reached a loop point in "The Cure for Information Overload"? I went about 20 hops (I'm waiting for some rice to finish cooking;-), and I didn't hit any repeats. Google says there are 235 matches for that phrase, but they probably didn't do the scan in the past 24 hours. Whoever organized (?) this one seems to have recruited a lot of people willing to extend the chain.
You see the same thing with statistics on "teen pregnancy".
I like to innocently ask something like "What's the problem with a 19-year-old married woman becoming pregnant?". Invariably this gets a "That's not what we meant" reaction. But 19 is clearly a "teen" year.
It also turns out that as you eliminate the higher "teen" ages, the rate of "teen pregnancy" drops rapidly. But somehow, you never see this mentioned in the articles on the topic.
My favorite Apple CS story is about when I got my Airport Extreme, and an Apple-recommended printer to lug into it. We have two Powerbooks here, and neither of them could find the printer following the (meager) instructions that it came with. So, after a lot of frustrating failures, I called Apple for help.
The fellow that I talked to started off by wanting to make sure that my Internet connection was working properly. This was curious, because it had nothing to do with the problem; I should have been able to use the printer even without an Internet connection. In fact, that would have been the logical aproach to isolate the problem (and in fact would have worked). But I went along, to see what he knew that I didn't.
I was walked through the process of rebooting the Airport and my Powerbook. But when he got to the gateway, a linux box, I balked when he told me to reboot it. This was clearly far beyond any reasonable act; better would have been to disconnect it from and internal LAN (and that would have also worked, it turned out).
He got rather miffed at my refusal to reboot a machine that was outside the scope of the problem. His response was, in essense, to tell me that Apple doesn't support the Airport in the presence of "unauthorized" computers. If I wanted help, I'd have to shut down all non-Apple equipment, and give the Airport a direct connection to the Internet.
I finally gave up, and tackled the problem myself. I eventually pinned it down: Unbeknownst to me (because it wasn't mentioned in any documentation I could find), the Airport was running a DHCP server, and its address range overlapped that of the LAN's DHCP server (the linux box). When I found this, I changed them to not overlap, and the printer suddenly worked. None of this required rebooting anything.
This might just be a personal problem, except for something that I didn't mention to the CS guy: Part of what I was doing on my home network was testing stuff for the people I was working for. I wrote a report of this "support" incident, making special note of Apple's unwillingness to support their Airport in a mixed-vendor environment. This had an immediate effect: Apple was dropped from the list of acceptable vendors for their network. Like most companies with offices in several states, they had a rather mixed combination of computing stuff, and the ability to play nice with the others was high on their list of desirable features.
Although they had a lot of Windows boxes, and a few Macs, they went with RedHat linux rather than Macs for their net's infrastructure, with a few Cisco boxes in the obvious places. And a mixture of wireless things, all chosen partly because they were linux-friendly, and none from Apple.
So by blowing me off as they did, Apple lost at least one significant corporate customer.
I might add that it wasn't just this one incident that eliminated them from consideration. But everyone did agree that they were significantlly better than Microsoft.
Doing your testing from a "home" site can be a useful thing for a company to do. You learn a lot of things that you can't learn from a salesman. I recommend it.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to learn how to access that printer from our linux and Windows boxes. It's suppose to "just work". Yeah, right.
That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)
Heh. Just the sort of know-nothingness that Apple (and MS) depend on to keep you in their thrall.
If you wanna know how it works and how to get it to do what you want, well, you gotta learn how it works. You must look behind the public mask, grasshopper, and see the reality throuth the lens of the CLI. You must learn to call things by their True Names, which can't be spoken by the mouse.
So the solution is obvious: every Diebold electronic voting machine is to be guarded by a member of that state's National Guard, with orders to kill anyone who attempts to touch the machine.
It wouldn't help. Google for "voting machine infrared port", which gets about 800,000 hits right now. It seems that at least some Diebold machines come with an IR port. This makes it possible for someone with a laptop or handheld to connect to the machine from across the room. No actual physical contact is needed.
Actually, I wonder why they do this. An IR port uses an externally-visible "antenna". With wi-fi the port can be internal, without anything visible to give away its presence. And it wouldn't need line-of-sight access, either, so it would be a lot harder to detect.
Preventing on-the-fly tampering with electronic voting equipment could be rather difficult.
Why does Diebold design these machines in such a way that they *CAN* be hacked?
Um, maybe because that's what they're being paid to do?
Remember back before the 2004 election, when Diebold's CEO sent a message to Ohio's registered Republicans promising to deliver their state for George Bush. They delivered on that promise, too.
There are lots of us who suspect that if Kerry's crowd had offered Diebold a better deal, Kerry would have won.
One reliable rule of thumb for elections is that every candidate has people who are trying hard to find ways to bias the vote counts for their candidate. The candidates themselves may not know any of the details, but you're naive to think this isn't being attempted by most of the parties in all the marginal precincts.
One of the best ways to get your candidate elected is to cut a deal with the people who supply the vote-recording hardware. If it's paper, you can put in an order for pre-marked ballots and a way to sneak them into the pipeline. If voting is electronic, you arrange for some special software that can be invoked in some subtle way that nobody will notice.
Anyone who pushes for secret, unauditable software in voting equiment should automatically be assumed corrupt and in the pay of one or more candidates. And Diebold has made it quite clear that this is exactly what they're in the business for.
What's interesting is that they're so brazen about it. It's as if they're saying "Suckers! We're running this so-called election, and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it"
As another programmer, I find that I agree with you.
I did a quick check of my email for the past couple months. I found that it easily divides into "personal" and "professional". In the personal class, 90% of my email is from/to people who live within 200 miles (300 km) of where I am (Boston, Massachusetts, USA). In the professional class, about 2/3 is from/to people outside North America.
I think my professional-type email is distributed around the world in about the same ratio as the incidence of internet access, and national borders are essentially irrelevant. My personal email is essentially the same, since the national border a few hundred miles north is also irrelevant, and I have more correspondents in Quebec or Ontario than Alabama, Texas or Oregon.
Of course, for some of the professional-type email, I have no idea where in the world they are. I could find out, but for the purposes of this message, it's not worth the effort.
You and I would like to return to an earlier time where competition and meritocracy were the norm, but sadly this just isn't the case any more.
And it never was. Look up the history of the phrase "robber baron". Look up the history of the companies that were given "crown charters" to develop the Americas.
Government intertwined with big business is the historic norm. We fight against it sporadically, and have some partial success. Then we move back toward the norm.
Vista slips largely because keeping things backward compatible makes things more complex.
More complex than what?
If this statement were true, then linux should have a much worse problem of backward compatibility. After all, it implements the POSIX standard, which dates from the early 1980s. That's a lot more "backward" than anything that Gates and Ballmer have to worry about.
But somehow, I don't think that POSIX compliance is considered much of a drag on innovation in the linux world. Rather, it's a base that supports innovation in a time-tested fashion.
If there is infringement, regardless of MS's motives, they are justified in taking action to protect their patent rights.
Possibly. But they might also be reasonably worried about the result of an actual court case. It's entirely possible that if they were to sue over linux permitting such things as double clicks or nested scrolling (which they also have a patent on), the courts just might laugh and throw out the patents.
Like atomic weapons, patents such as these are primarily useful as threats and PR tools. Actually using them in a legal action could easily end their usefulness.
We might note here that the mere use of the phrase "missing link" pretty much discredits the writer in scientific circles. This is one of the many phrases that gets you classified as clueless, either a journalist or a creationist.
A common observation is that the "evolutionary gap" idea is a traditional red herring. If you find a fossil that fits in a gap, you haven't filled the gap. You have replaced the gap with two gaps. Trying to fill in all the holes in the fossil record is about as sensible as trying to fill in the gaps in a list of real numbers by adding new numbers to the list.
You can't win the pseudo-debate with the creationists this way. All you can do is give them another gap that "science hasn't filled". Anyone who thinks that filling a gap is significant just doesn't understand how the whole process works.
From a scientific point of view, this is potentially an interesting fossil. It may tell us a bit more about our own primate ancestry. Or maybe not; maybe it will turn out to be a close relative of fossils already found. We'll see.
Ya, fiscal conservatives have finally started asking why and when the Republican party switched from being fiscally conservative to morally conservative with a nose for PORK PORK PORK PORK PORK.
And if they'd bother to read the sacred book that they make such a fuss over, they'd find that it flatly forbids the consumption of pork.
If I was IBM,... I'd just wait until they called for a bug to be fixed, or wanted a feature. Then I'd negotiate a mutually-agreeable price for the work, and sign a contract.
Note that this is pretty much a description of how "Free Software" works. And lots of commercial operations work this way. Thus, you can download Adobe's Acrobat reader for free. But if you want to get the version with all the bells and whistles (i.e., a full PDF editor), you'll have to pay.
It's traditionally known as a "loss leader". AKA the "drug dealer" strategy: Give them a free sample. When they get addicted to your introductory gift, they'll pay you for the better versions.
Of course, if you work for Microsoft, it's all communism, and Must Be Stopped. Except when they do it (see Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player).
Slashdot Mirror
... the scientist ... said it was 'one of many' missing links to the evolution of land animals from fish, but certainly not the only one.
;-), a fairly accurate reconstruction is possible. This is more useful than a pile of fragments of different individuals who may have lived centuries apart.
Yup. Much of the reason this one gets so much attention is that it is nearly complete. Other than not knowing how long its tail was (and what color its skin was
Plus, it's a species that wasn't known before. That's always useful information.
.DOC restrictions? Well, I'd draw the line there.
You might want to do that today. A few months ago, a fellow told those of us at a local Users Group meeting why his employer had just banned sending Word docs in email.
It seems that a VP had made the common decision that a certain missive of his was of interest to everyone in the company. The fellows down in the computer room couldn't read it on their linux boxes, so they did the obvious thing: The fed it to the strings(1) command. They saw the text of his message, poorly formatted but readable. However, scattered through it were pieces of another document - a list of the salaries of all the top people in the company.
You can probably imagine the effect. Finally, they got through to the PHBs that no, the solution wasn't to ban linux. The same thing can be done on Windows by knowledgeable users. The solution was to understand what went wrong. The fact is that Word, like most word-processor apps, often "deletes" stuff by simply marking it as deleted, and then recycles the space as needed. So a Word doc can contain fragments of any previous doc that you've had loaded into Word on your machine.
The idea finally got through to them that when you email a Word doc, you could be including "deleted" copies of lots of other docs that you've worked with recently. If you send the doc to someone outside your organization, you're sending them the "deleted" but not recycled text along with what you see on your screen. Anyone with a text-extraction program can read all that text, including the "deleted" text.
So they banned Word docs from email. If I were in charge of email at a company, I'd do the same for any word-processor doc.
And I'd seriously consider banning HTML for the same reason. Yeah, you can read the source, and see all the text and stuff inside a tag. But how often does anyone do that, except us folks who edit their HTML with a plain-text editor? I often look at the source to HTML pages, and I sometimes see things hidden there that I don't think the senders expected me to see.
Listen you selfish malcontent, letting you put whatever the hell you want on the company computers potentionally puts the company and its directors at risk.
;-) But I have had serious problems with wanting to install stuff that would help me do my job. And I attribute those problems to management listening to the arguments that I've been reading here. It doesn't bother me that they don't understand the technical details of what I'm developing. But it does bother me that the "security" people's advice seems to be to ignore my suggestions about what tools will help me do my job right.
Heh. My favorite story along this line was a couple years back, when my part of a project was imlementing the SNMP server. I'd learned of some new SNMP testing software that was available for download. But the company had some strict security rules about installing "untested" outside software. The admins reviewed my request for the testing software, and denied it.
So I went to work, built the server, and wrote a lot of my own tests (which I handed over to the QA people, since they didn't know much about SNMP). Finally we had our first release to send to the customers.
And guess what? All of the first customers had copies of that test suite that I'd been denied. They all ran it. And my code failed several tests.
There were the usual recriminations, but I persisted in simply saying "Hey, I asked for that test suite, and you told me I couldn't have it. How soon can I get it?" Messages went up and down and all around the management heirarchy, and I switched to saying "The customers are still rejecting our package because my stuff does't pass tests, and you're still denying me access to the tests."
When I finally got ahold of the test suite, a month or so later, it took me between 2 and 3 days to fix all the problems. If I'd been permitted to use the test suite from the beginning, even those days would have been saved, because my code would have passed the tests from the start. But their blocking my access to the test suite delayed our delivery by at least a month, and damaged our rep with the customers.
I've never had problems with wanting to install P2P or pr0n. (I do those on my home machine.
Completely false. iTunes is completely locked down and PROHIBITS EVERYTHING, everything other than playing the files using the predefinded and restricted software on the predefined and restricted players in the predefined and restricted manner.
Well, they don't seem to do a very good job of it.
A while ago, just for yuks, I copied my the iTunes directory from my Mac to a web directory on my linux and FreeBSD web servers. I then downloaded the MP3 files to various machines, and sent the URLs to a few friends for testing on their machines.
All the downloaded MP3 files played just fine in all of our MP3 players. So whatever scheme they used to make them unplayable doesn't seem to be very effective.
I deleted all the extra copies after a while, of coure, since they were just cluttering up my disk. I don't know what the other guys did with them. It was just a test to see what we had to do to "violate" the DRM, and the answer turned out to be "Nothing at all."
Frankly, I was a bit disappointed.
And I do suspect that the "magic fairy dust" characterization might be accurate. Anyone know what it takes to make iTunes MP3s not work when you copy them to a non-Mac, non-MS system?
they are a very frequent advertiser here on Slashdot which should have been mentioned.
/. with a text reader for the past 6 months, it's obvious.
/. with mozilla, and I've never noticed their name.
Why? Unless you've been browsing
Huh? I've been reading
Of course, it may have something to do with the fact that I told mozilla to ignore all images from slashdot.org. I do occasionally try other browsers, but I keep coming back to the ones that can turn off images on a per-site basis.
So much for the effectiveness of that advertising.
Porn 2.0. HTH.
Yeah; that helps a lot. That, combined with the "social computing" meme and all the talk of collaboration, tells us how it'll work:
You take your photos of yourself and various friends, and put them online with Web 2.0 tools. I and a million others do the same. Then those photos are picked up by the collaboration tools, that combine you and me (and a few others and their pets) in interesting pornographic poses.
That's just the simple case, of course. The more advanced Web 2. sites will pick up the videos that we've put online, and combine them, making all of us porn stars.
Ofcourse, the web is different. The part that listens on the network there is on the remote machine, not on the local machine.
;-).
This is probably yet another case where we're faced with a running battle against non-techies who don't understand the terminology and seem intent on corrupting it. And it's not just the confusion of thinking that a server is remote while a client is local; lots of people think that a "server" is a piece of hardware. I've even seen this in computer-industry managers, and I've had to try to correct them as gently as I can. But I don't use their mis-definitions; I teach them the meaning of the technica terms.
But there's no reason for us to acquiesce in any revision of the definition. We should just do as scientists and engineers have been doing for centuries: There's a technically-correct definition. If you don't understand it or misuse it, you simply discredit yourself in any tech setting. We should make it clear to novices that the position relative to a human is not part of the definition, and if you insist that it is, you will merely exclude yourself from serious discussion.
For another common example, consider that physicists have never gone along with the popular reversal of the term "quantum" to mean something very big, as in the media's "quantum leap". To maintain credibility in physicist circles, you have to understand and use their definition (and you'll probably say "quantum jump"
There are zillions of other examples. Possibly the funniest is the way that computer geeks continue to use "hacker" as a term of honor, despite the media's attempts to twist it into a criminal term.
X was overkill for the hardware early windows ran on. Remember, in the days of windows 1.0, a 286 with 1 megabyte of ram was a beefy machine. By the time windows 3.0 was out (the first version that mattered), people were still predominately using 386's with 4 megs of ram.
Jim Gettys has commented that the machines he (and a few friends) built X on were vaxen with no more than 2 MB of memory. He has also expressed mild dismay at the bloat in current X releases. One of his projects is to help get X running on the growing flock of linux PDAs, which requires trimming it back down to something with a much smaller footstep. Current PDAs usually have much more memory than the machines that he built X on. But identifying and trimming the bloat is a time-consuming process; experienced programmers know how much easier it is to add code that to remove code.
In any case, when MS Windows first came out, X Windows would have easily fit in the memory limits. X's size couldn't have been MS's reason for rejecting it. Much more likely is the theory that they wanted something that they could own, and they couldn't own X Windows. This is believable, because it's consistent with MS's general history.
So why persue science and medicine at all? why make discoveries? why create art? why listen to music? why start a family? Why not just spend our entire lives cloistered and worshipping this divine being who gives our life its only true meaning?
...) is really the one in charge, you won't be punished at all no matter how you act. She doesn't care how you live your life or if you die without descendants. She'll just continue to work with the ones who do produce offspring, and forget that you existed. She also doesn't care whether you worship Her or not, and won't punish you either way.
Why not, indeed. It appears that neither God (if He/She exists) nor Ma Nature (aka the evolutionary process) really cares much what you do. Both refuse to hand you any information about themselves, saying in effect that you're on your own and free to live your life as you wish.
There is a widespread belief that God will punish you if you don't properly worship Him (or Her). But we have many conflicting claims on just how this worship is to be performed, and most of those claims include punishment if you pick the wrong style of worship. So the sensible approach might be to not worship at all, under what might be called a "reverse Pascal's Wager": It's better to suffer the mild punishment of being a noncommitted believer than to deal with the much greater punishment of having picked the wrong worship style.
And, of course, if Ma Nature (aka
[I]t wasn't until CERN in 1991 that the idea of a global network was even brought up.
/., we're gonna really make fun of you ...
Um, I distinctly recall that in the early 1980s, I routinely accessed Internet sites in Europe. Granted, the cross-Atlantic routes were few and at times flakey, but they existed. In particular, I recall using ftp in 1983 to download TNC (The Newcastle Connection) source from the U of Newcastle upon Tyne. If you dig into the archives, you'll find that such uses were definitely part of the intent of the Internet designers, going back into the 1970s well before the term "internet" was invented.
By 1991, the international nature of the Internet was well established. Perhaps what you're thinking of is that it was about then that the World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser came into existence. This was a major new development, true, but it was hardly the first intercontinental use of the Internet. It was just the latest "killer app" in a long list of Internet apps.
And if you confuse the WWW with the Internet here on
It's not just your fancypantsart.com site that's a problem here. Part of the history of "porn on the internet" has been the repeated closing down of sites, mailing lists and other fora that deal with subjects like breast cancer, sexually-transmitted diseases, contraception, abortion, etc. There are ongoing battles to keep the religious nuts from attacking nearly anything medical.
I was reminded recently of how far back this goes, when I ran across an article on the history of medicine in the Middle East. One of the writer's theses was that part of what put an end to the initial flowering of scientific and medical research was the Islamic ban on any images of the human body. This puts a severe limit on how far you can go with medical texts. It's a conventional explanation of why, though the Arabs were ahead of Europe in medical knowledge 1000 years ago, the Europeans eventually caught up and passed them. You really can't have good medical texts without lots of images. There was also resistance to medical texts in Europe for a long time, due to all the "pornographic" images. But eventually this was ended and medical texts were made exceptions from the porn laws, to everyone's benefit.
Sorry, but the only way you can really eliminate "porn" is by eliminating most educational material that deals with the human body. It's not just computers that can't distinguish them. History shows that human society and its laws can't easily tell them apart, either.
How does this stack up against the $100 laptop, in terms of helping the developing world?"
Rather than presenting them as alternatives or competitors, I'd suggest viewing them as "better together than alone".
The major purpose of the $100 laptop is as an educational tool for people without access to libraries or other information sources. Without a disk, it's mainly a network terminal. To function as one requires network connectivity, which is rare in most of the developed countries, and nearly nonexistent in most of the developing world.
The $100 laptops are to include a wireless "mesh" network capability, so they can use each other as relays to reach the Net. But somewhere in the vicinity, they'll need a real connection to the Net. This is where a good, cheap "PC" could come in handy. If it could function as a hub and gateway for a flock of the $100 gadgets (for which we need a short name), it could help greatly in the effort.
But one thing that I suspect from reading the article is that this may not be the intent. TFA has no mention of the software that Intel's new PC will include. This makes me suspect that they intend to deliver it with MS Windows. And since the $100 laptop is a competitor (non-Intel hardware, linux and OSS software), the PC will be designed to make the $100 "toys" look and work as bad as possible.
So I suspect that this is an anti-Negroponte marketing tool, not a serious contribution to the effort to bring information to more of the world. I'd love to be proven wrong, but frankly, Intel's track record isn't encouraging.
Of course, if we could sneak in a CD or DVD with Koppix or Ubuntu with lots of server software, it could really enable the "kiosk" owner as a local network provider.
Maybe we should suggest delivering it with software like this, and see how Intel reacts. This might tell us whether they're trying to be part of the problem or part of the solution.
But that blonde joke only goes a few hops before repeating. Has anyone reached a loop point in "The Cure for Information Overload"? I went about 20 hops (I'm waiting for some rice to finish cooking ;-), and I didn't hit any repeats. Google says there are 235 matches for that phrase, but they probably didn't do the scan in the past 24 hours. Whoever organized (?) this one seems to have recruited a lot of people willing to extend the chain.
You see the same thing with statistics on "teen pregnancy".
I like to innocently ask something like "What's the problem with a 19-year-old married woman becoming pregnant?". Invariably this gets a "That's not what we meant" reaction. But 19 is clearly a "teen" year.
It also turns out that as you eliminate the higher "teen" ages, the rate of "teen pregnancy" drops rapidly. But somehow, you never see this mentioned in the articles on the topic.
My favorite Apple CS story is about when I got my Airport Extreme, and an Apple-recommended printer to lug into it. We have two Powerbooks here, and neither of them could find the printer following the (meager) instructions that it came with. So, after a lot of frustrating failures, I called Apple for help.
The fellow that I talked to started off by wanting to make sure that my Internet connection was working properly. This was curious, because it had nothing to do with the problem; I should have been able to use the printer even without an Internet connection. In fact, that would have been the logical aproach to isolate the problem (and in fact would have worked). But I went along, to see what he knew that I didn't.
I was walked through the process of rebooting the Airport and my Powerbook. But when he got to the gateway, a linux box, I balked when he told me to reboot it. This was clearly far beyond any reasonable act; better would have been to disconnect it from and internal LAN (and that would have also worked, it turned out).
He got rather miffed at my refusal to reboot a machine that was outside the scope of the problem. His response was, in essense, to tell me that Apple doesn't support the Airport in the presence of "unauthorized" computers. If I wanted help, I'd have to shut down all non-Apple equipment, and give the Airport a direct connection to the Internet.
I finally gave up, and tackled the problem myself. I eventually pinned it down: Unbeknownst to me (because it wasn't mentioned in any documentation I could find), the Airport was running a DHCP server, and its address range overlapped that of the LAN's DHCP server (the linux box). When I found this, I changed them to not overlap, and the printer suddenly worked. None of this required rebooting anything.
This might just be a personal problem, except for something that I didn't mention to the CS guy: Part of what I was doing on my home network was testing stuff for the people I was working for. I wrote a report of this "support" incident, making special note of Apple's unwillingness to support their Airport in a mixed-vendor environment. This had an immediate effect: Apple was dropped from the list of acceptable vendors for their network. Like most companies with offices in several states, they had a rather mixed combination of computing stuff, and the ability to play nice with the others was high on their list of desirable features.
Although they had a lot of Windows boxes, and a few Macs, they went with RedHat linux rather than Macs for their net's infrastructure, with a few Cisco boxes in the obvious places. And a mixture of wireless things, all chosen partly because they were linux-friendly, and none from Apple.
So by blowing me off as they did, Apple lost at least one significant corporate customer.
I might add that it wasn't just this one incident that eliminated them from consideration. But everyone did agree that they were significantlly better than Microsoft.
Doing your testing from a "home" site can be a useful thing for a company to do. You learn a lot of things that you can't learn from a salesman. I recommend it.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to learn how to access that printer from our linux and Windows boxes. It's suppose to "just work". Yeah, right.
That sort of solution might be OK for the linux fanboys - but this is Apple (and I would like my filenames preserved, rather then have weird ipod db names)
...
Heh. Just the sort of know-nothingness that Apple (and MS) depend on to keep you in their thrall.
If you wanna know how it works and how to get it to do what you want, well, you gotta learn how it works. You must look behind the public mask, grasshopper, and see the reality throuth the lens of the CLI. You must learn to call things by their True Names, which can't be spoken by the mouse.
Not to mix a metaphor or anything
So the solution is obvious: every Diebold electronic voting machine is to be guarded by a member of that state's National Guard, with orders to kill anyone who attempts to touch the machine.
It wouldn't help. Google for "voting machine infrared port", which gets about 800,000 hits right now. It seems that at least some Diebold machines come with an IR port. This makes it possible for someone with a laptop or handheld to connect to the machine from across the room. No actual physical contact is needed.
Actually, I wonder why they do this. An IR port uses an externally-visible "antenna". With wi-fi the port can be internal, without anything visible to give away its presence. And it wouldn't need line-of-sight access, either, so it would be a lot harder to detect.
Preventing on-the-fly tampering with electronic voting equipment could be rather difficult.
Why does Diebold design these machines in such a way that they *CAN* be hacked?
Um, maybe because that's what they're being paid to do?
Remember back before the 2004 election, when Diebold's CEO sent a message to Ohio's registered Republicans promising to deliver their state for George Bush. They delivered on that promise, too.
There are lots of us who suspect that if Kerry's crowd had offered Diebold a better deal, Kerry would have won.
One reliable rule of thumb for elections is that every candidate has people who are trying hard to find ways to bias the vote counts for their candidate. The candidates themselves may not know any of the details, but you're naive to think this isn't being attempted by most of the parties in all the marginal precincts.
One of the best ways to get your candidate elected is to cut a deal with the people who supply the vote-recording hardware. If it's paper, you can put in an order for pre-marked ballots and a way to sneak them into the pipeline. If voting is electronic, you arrange for some special software that can be invoked in some subtle way that nobody will notice.
Anyone who pushes for secret, unauditable software in voting equiment should automatically be assumed corrupt and in the pay of one or more candidates. And Diebold has made it quite clear that this is exactly what they're in the business for.
What's interesting is that they're so brazen about it. It's as if they're saying "Suckers! We're running this so-called election, and there ain't a damned thing you can do about it"
As another programmer, I find that I agree with you.
I did a quick check of my email for the past couple months. I found that it easily divides into "personal" and "professional". In the personal class, 90% of my email is from/to people who live within 200 miles (300 km) of where I am (Boston, Massachusetts, USA). In the professional class, about 2/3 is from/to people outside North America.
I think my professional-type email is distributed around the world in about the same ratio as the incidence of internet access, and national borders are essentially irrelevant. My personal email is essentially the same, since the national border a few hundred miles north is also irrelevant, and I have more correspondents in Quebec or Ontario than Alabama, Texas or Oregon.
Of course, for some of the professional-type email, I have no idea where in the world they are. I could find out, but for the purposes of this message, it's not worth the effort.
You and I would like to return to an earlier time where competition and meritocracy were the norm, but sadly this just isn't the case any more.
And it never was. Look up the history of the phrase "robber baron". Look up the history of the companies that were given "crown charters" to develop the Americas.
Government intertwined with big business is the historic norm. We fight against it sporadically, and have some partial success. Then we move back toward the norm.
Vista slips largely because keeping things backward compatible makes things more complex.
More complex than what?
If this statement were true, then linux should have a much worse problem of backward compatibility. After all, it implements the POSIX standard, which dates from the early 1980s. That's a lot more "backward" than anything that Gates and Ballmer have to worry about.
But somehow, I don't think that POSIX compliance is considered much of a drag on innovation in the linux world. Rather, it's a base that supports innovation in a time-tested fashion.
But that's a discussion for another thread.
If there is infringement, regardless of MS's motives, they are justified in taking action to protect their patent rights.
Possibly. But they might also be reasonably worried about the result of an actual court case. It's entirely possible that if they were to sue over linux permitting such things as double clicks or nested scrolling (which they also have a patent on), the courts just might laugh and throw out the patents.
Like atomic weapons, patents such as these are primarily useful as threats and PR tools. Actually using them in a legal action could easily end their usefulness.
We might note here that the mere use of the phrase "missing link" pretty much discredits the writer in scientific circles. This is one of the many phrases that gets you classified as clueless, either a journalist or a creationist.
A common observation is that the "evolutionary gap" idea is a traditional red herring. If you find a fossil that fits in a gap, you haven't filled the gap. You have replaced the gap with two gaps. Trying to fill in all the holes in the fossil record is about as sensible as trying to fill in the gaps in a list of real numbers by adding new numbers to the list.
You can't win the pseudo-debate with the creationists this way. All you can do is give them another gap that "science hasn't filled". Anyone who thinks that filling a gap is significant just doesn't understand how the whole process works.
From a scientific point of view, this is potentially an interesting fossil. It may tell us a bit more about our own primate ancestry. Or maybe not; maybe it will turn out to be a close relative of fossils already found. We'll see.
Ya, fiscal conservatives have finally started asking why and when the Republican party switched from being fiscally conservative to morally conservative with a nose for PORK PORK PORK PORK PORK.
And if they'd bother to read the sacred book that they make such a fuss over, they'd find that it flatly forbids the consumption of pork.
If I was IBM, ... I'd just wait until they called for a bug to be fixed, or wanted a feature. Then I'd negotiate a mutually-agreeable price for the work, and sign a contract.
Note that this is pretty much a description of how "Free Software" works. And lots of commercial operations work this way. Thus, you can download Adobe's Acrobat reader for free. But if you want to get the version with all the bells and whistles (i.e., a full PDF editor), you'll have to pay.
It's traditionally known as a "loss leader". AKA the "drug dealer" strategy: Give them a free sample. When they get addicted to your introductory gift, they'll pay you for the better versions.
Of course, if you work for Microsoft, it's all communism, and Must Be Stopped. Except when they do it (see Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player).