Within a week? It's already happening. You can read it here on/., too.
We should be pointing out a few things here:
1. We don't know who started this thing. It could be some fanatic linux hacker. It could be a script kiddie in Russia or Brazil. It could be someone at SCO, IBM, Microsoft, or Red Hat. Until we actually find the culprit, any accusations are nothing more than libel.
2. The agent provocateur is an old PR trick. (If you don't know the term, ask dictionary.com about it.)
3. It doesn't really reflect badly on Windows users. They are not generally computer experts, true. Why should they be? We don't expect people to be design and manufacturing experts before they buy other products. The real culprit here is the marketing machine that sells computer software with crappy design to unsuspecting customers. Email software should either refuse to execute code in a message, or should clearly warn the user that this is an extremely risky thing to do. If non-expert users are suckered by this, the blame belongs with the supplier of the crappy software.
4. And, of course, the joke "It couldn't have come from the linux community, because the source isn't available.";-)
Yeah; you're right. And, of course, all those funny separator chars can be omitted, except for the sign before the time-zone offset.
I have seen comments that '/' and '.' may be used in the date, but I'm not sure the ISO specs say that. This may come from people who try it and find that it seems to cause no problems. Probably because most software just strips out all the separators.
Anyway, it is fun to bring up the ISO date/time standard, and watch as people look at you like you're some sort of really strange weirdo. Even techies often show this reaction, though you'd think they'd know better. So, even though it's a Good Idea, there isn't the slightest chance of it being widely adopted in the forseeable future.
These days, date/time problems are a much bigger cause of problems and lost time than metric/imperial measures. And, even with the big fuss over the Y2K event, we aren't even close to getting this problem solved.
Well, yeah; I saw that. But I was working on the understanding that if someone is going to go to the bother of putting their resume in HTML, there's a real good chance that it's gonna end up visible on the web. Then, as soon as google finds it, it's an open doc to every HR web-harvesting script on the planet (and maybe a few other planets).
I suppose some people might hide their HTML resumes from the web. But a brief check shows that there are, in fact, at least a few hundred thousand of them Out There right now.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
(And have you ever noticed that when you try for an "insightful" rating, you get "funny", and vice versa? So much for karma whoring.;-)
bullshit questions like "what is your greatest weakness"
Well, I've always given an answer like "I have a tendency to give straightforward, detailed, techically answers to people who are really looking for vague management or marketing answers."
That's why I always put a bunch of killer keywords... in a white font at the bottom of my resume...
Heh. I hope you also specify the background color. Lots of web pages set only the foreground color. With any browser that I'm using for more than one or two pages, I always set the background color to a 40% or so grey. It's a lot easier on the eyes than the glaring white that is usually the default. I often tell it to override all colors, but sometimes I have to undo this to read the text-as-images that occasionally come up unreadable. Anyway, I may just be able to read your white-text stuff unless you also set the background color.
Using a grey40 background makes a lot of stealth HTML stuff visible, in addition to easing your eyestrain at the end of the day.
No, no! That's year/month/day (ISO standard format). And the year MUST be four digits. Any competent programmer understands why.
Actually, that's mostly for internal computer dates (and even the, a pure second counter is a lot more practical). You can always convert to random output formats for the benefit of those weird humans.
The problem that I keep running into is that my software has to parse "user-friendly" input data and decode dates formatted as dd/dd/dd, where 'd' is a digit. We used to only have the problem that the first two fields could be day/month or month/day. Now that computers have existed during two centuries, we also have the problem that an input date like 01/02/03 can be in 2001 (if it's ISO standard format) or 2003. Well, of course 2001 is a violation of the ISO standard, but my programs DO see it.
One of the real weirdness is that HTTP headers specify dates in non-ISO formats. What were they thinking? Back when HTTP was invented, we already knew enough about timestamps on the network to know that the ISO format was the only logical one to use. Correctly parsing HTTP header dates from random machines around the world can get really weird. Especially with the spelled-out months. I mean, native English speakers sometimes can't spell the names of the months correctly. You get some very inventive spellings from people who aren't fluent in English.
(And think how much better everything would work if we could just get people to use Kelvin rather than that arbitrary Celsius scale.;-)
In anything much bigger than a 2-person shop these days, resumes pretty much just go unread into a database. They are only seen by a human if they match a retrieval request. For that to happen, you have to have the keywords that the hiring manager typed.
The rest doesn't much matter. If a retrieval doesn't match your resume, it will never be retrieved, and will never be read by a human.
One thing still missing from the databases: They need information on how long a given acronym, uh, I mean product, has been out. This would cut down on managers looking for five years experience on something that was released less than a year ago.
Copyright protection encourages creation. Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
If your "works" are discussions of how you and your cohorts are planning to defraud customers or subvert an election, you don't deserve copyright protection. Your "creation" should be made public and used against you in court.
This is what the Diebold memo story is all about. They were not producing works of art. They were plotting criminal acts.
You may consider criminal activity to be a work of art. Your victims might not agree.
Well, I don't think it's much of a surprise that they're noticing. There is a very long history of powerful people using the legal system to suppress publication of information that those powerful people don't want made public. That's why the US Constitution has a press-freedom clause in its Bill of Rights.
It's interesting that the article started right off with the Diebold memos. This makes it clear that the writer "gets it". Diebold is attempting to use the copyright laws and the DMCA to block publication of information about its own illegal attempts to control the outcome of elections. The memos make it clear that the "bugs" in Diebold's voting equipment aren't bugs at all, but features designed to make it possible to sell an election. Diebold does not want the evidence of this made public. This is, of course, exactly why press-freedom laws have come to exist.
This is a direct threat to the NYT and all other news publishers. If Diebold can suppress the "publication" of its "copyrighted" memos on the internet, then any company or politician can suppress the publication of embarrassing information in the New York Times.
I'd bet that most news people understand quite well the threat to their livelihood (and to society as a whole) from things like this. Now that anything written is "born copyrighted", news people face a possible future in which it is illegal to publish anything without first getting written permission from everyone involved in the story.
Of course, this would end the long-time complaints about all the negative news.;-)
... you may not have much choice in the matter when you get sent a word document in XML format.
Well, you can reply with a message like:
You have sent a document in Microsoft's Word format. Such documents now contain text encoded in forms that are patented by Microsoft. Decoding and reading such a document on a non-Microsoft system or with non-Microsoft software may subject the reader to criminal charges and/or large fines for patent enfringement.
Please re-send the document in a format that won't result in such criminal charges and/or fines if I read it.
..., just stay out of Microsoft's twisted proprietary world.
Might not help. With copyright, you can (sometimes) successfully argue that you didn't copy a piece of text because you've never seen it. This gets harder to argue as the length of the matching text increases, but it is at least a possible legal defense.
With patents, this doesn't work. Even if you've never heard of the patent, and can prove that you thought it up yourself, you are still guilty. Any use of the ideas in a patent are illegal unless you have a license.
So if you write a piece of code that accidentally uses the same XML encoding that Microsoft has patented, you have violated the patent.
One of the problems with patenting a file format is that programmers "invent" file formats nearly every time they write code that outputs anything at all. Any time you code a print() or write() call, you are in danger of infringing on some patent that you've never heard of.
This is why Bruce Parens is warning that we may soon find that programming may be illegal for anyone but big corporations with the funds for a legal defense against a patent-infringement lawsuit. It's slowly becoming impossible to write code that doesn't violate a software patent.
Well, actually he might have both aids and aides. Y'know, like visual aids and such. Though maybe a hearing aid wouldn't be anything to brag about (unless it's a really good one).
The English language is so wonderfully confused at times.
It is funny how the image of an intern changed so rapidly.
If I define myCleverMethod, I don't want to debug code littered with MYcleVERMetHOD.
Heh. There is the story about the Expert's Exchange web site, which was originally "ExpertsExchange.com". Then some pranksters started referring to them as "ExpertSexChange.com". But the real killer was when anto-porn filters started blocking them for the same reason. So now they're "experts-exchange.com".
Of course, host.dom.ain names are officially case insensitive, which is probably a Good Thing. Funny thing, though, is that user ids are case sensitive on some systems and not on others, and no matter what the standards say, joe@foo.bar.com and Joe@foo.bar.com may or may not be the same user.
Actually, there was a good discussion of this back in the 1980's, when the DLT (Distribuita Lingvo-Tradukado) project got underway. This was an attempt to use Esperanto as an intermediate language for translation and archival purposes.
One of the first decisions was a slight change in the capitalization rules: The first letter in a sentence would not be capitalized. This made it possible for software to distinguish common and proper nouns. If there was a capital letter, it was a proper name or acronym of some sort, and thus should not be translated. Lower-case words could thus be unambiguously separated out, parsed and translated, and proper names could be unamiguously recognized as such and not translated.
German has its own peculiar capitalization rules. But English and Spanish both use capitalization to flag proper names and acronyms. The spoken languages don't have this, of course. But this capitalization is a useful tool in the written languages.
Programmers in case-sensitive languages are usually quick to take advantage of this sort of distinction. Most programming languages have many classes of words, and it's useful to be able to distinguish them visually. Since upper and lower cases are visually rather different, it's an easy way to make type distinctions quickly visible.
Case sensitivity is just a tradition, with its roots in the Old Testiment.
Um, funny maybe, but wrong. The Old Testament was written in classical Hebrew (with maybe a bit of Aramaic in some of the later parts), and that alphabet has never had a case distinction.
Upper/lower case is something that developed only around 1500 years ago, plus or minus a few centuries. It was adopted in the Roman, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but that's about it.
It is useful, as we all learned in grade school. Thus, many managers have aids who are very helpful. But if they have AIDS, it's a serious medical problem.
One of the reasons that the project I'm working on isn't using Macs is that OSX uses a caseless file system. When we tried porting several important software packages to OSX, they were utter disasters. The symptoms were bizarre and inexplicable, and took forever to hunt down. It turned out to be caused by executables from different packages that had names that differed only in capitalization. Each package had its own convention, so there weren't any collisions on linux and other unix-like systems. But on OSX, there were cases where a component of package X ended up calling a program from package Y, and they both went crazy. We spent so much time finding the problems and fixing them that we decided to just not use OSX except as a UI.
It's too bad, really. My 17" Powerbook is a really neat tool. I'd like to use it as a real computer. It wouldn't have been much more work for Apple to hide their case insensitivity in runtime libraries, the way it should be done. I really wish they'd done that, rather than breaking the assumptions that all other unix-like systems are built on.
# Microsoft backs the Republicans. # Microsoft shares exploit with the Republicans....
Do we know that the computers involved were running Microsoft software?
While reading the article (front page of the dead-tree edition of the Globe that's now holding up my Mac;-), I looked for clues about what software was running. They didn't give any clues at all.
Now, this probably does mean MS Windows. Media people usually mention other kinds of computers, because this is considered unusual. When they don't mention the kind of software, it almost always means MS Windows. But we don't in fact know this from the article.
I wouldn't put too much faith in Microsoft being the Republicans' friends here. In recent elections, they have contributed large amounts to the Democrats, too. So no matter which party wins, the fix is in. And we can expect that they are sharing exploits with all the support people in the government.
Republican pols have to be wondering how much of the stuff in their computers is backed up on their opponents' computers.
This is an ideal situation to do a bit of lobbying for Open Source software. People in governments need to understand that any proprietary, binary-only software is highly likely to be spyware that is sending the data to their opponents. The only defense against this, as security folks have been saying for years, is that you make sure that you have the source for all of your software. You compile it yourself. And you install traffic monitors on your network to see what may be getting shipped out when you're not looking.
Anyone who thinks that binary software shipped to government offices is clean of spyware is, quite simply, a naive fool. We seem to have a lot of those in the Democratic party now. But maybe fewer than a few weeks ago. Maybe they'll be interested in lessons on how to avoid this sort of trick in the future.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
Wrong. Open source is going to drive down the price of software. But the value is going up.
And, for the software developers among us, it will radically increase our value to society, as we can build higher-quality software.
Whether society will actually pay us for this increase in value isn't yet obvious. But my income-tax return for last year had a bottom line of around $110,000, and all of it was for software that ran on linux. Most of it was special-purpose software for one client. Some involved working on Open Source packages that we used, and of course we gave our patches back to the archives where we found the packages, thus benefitting society as a whole.
1. While the profit motive may be recognized by the Supreme Court as "the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors" (Eldred v. Ashcroft), it is not the only one. The very existance of Open Source software demonstrates that motives other than profit can produce a public benefit and proliferation of knowledge.
While true, this is nonetheless overly simplistic. It contains the hidden assumption that "profit" can only mean "money". But there are many other ways of profiting from something you do.
I like to explain to people that I have profited greatly by contributing to linux and other Open Source projects. I get back a high-quality computer system that is easy for me to use as I like. And the only cost to me is a few hours of my time here and there.
This wouldn't work if I were the only one doing it, of course. But when there are a bunch of others out there doing the same sort of thing, then we can all profit greatly.
Your typical CEO (or right-wing talk-show host) may not understand this meaning of "profit". Buy I'd bet that your typical politician would understand it instantly. Payoffs "in kind" are the basis of a lot of politics.
...Should ICANN bow to the pressure of the most politically powerful and take the domain by force? No.
History says they will.
Remember a couple of years ago, when Apple was handed the newton.com domain? It had been owned for several years by a fellow in Silicon Valley named Newton who had his own software firm. Then Apple came out with the Newton handheld, and decided that Mr. Newton had no right to their name. The fact that Apple was a latecomer to the name, and Mr. Newton had had the domain for years didn't matter. ICANN took his domain away from him and gave it to Apple.
A quick check shows that Apple still owns it. Try it yourself.
I'd predict that Mike Rowe doesn't stand a chance.
It is somewhat a pity. We could use a bit of humor now and then. But I guess we ain't gonna get it from billg & co.
Why should an "virtual" space be any different than that? It works for the rest of private property, why not here?
Well, because we have decades of experience showing that as soon as there is a computer involved, the cry of "That's different!" arises, and all precedent is discarded. Everything must be re-learned from scratch.
It has taken us humans millenia to even start to understand the value of freedom, liberty, and all that. But one of the constant themes in discussions like this is that, since the low-level infrastructure of the Internet is mostly owned by corporations, those corporations by right control everything and there is no such thing as freedom or liberty. There is only TOS; you have no say in what they are; if you violate them, you're out.
It may well take us several millenia to collectively understand that this is wrong, and that, despite the presence of computers, the hard-learned lessons supporting freedom should also apply here.
In the meantime, the legal fact probably is that, since the infrasturcture of the Internet is run controlled computers and owned by corporations, we in fact have no legal rights here whatsoever. The US constitution is utterly irrelevant, as is the Declaration of Human Rights, except in local backwaters where the infrastructure is run by governmments.
Of course, we could start pressing for government takeovers of the Internet's infrastructure. If we want freedom of speech here, that's probably the only way to get it.
But I maintain that there is very little likelyhood that someone searching for playboy isn't looking for boobies.
For a good argument otherwise, ask amazon.com to search for "playboy" under the classification "books". Right now, it returns 7974 matches. The first two are related to the Playboy magazine, as are a few more far down the list. But the overwhelming majority are books with "playboy" in the title. Some of these are classics.
So someone googling for "playboy" could very well be looking for "The Playboy" (Carly Phillips) or "The Playboy of the Western World" (J.M.Synge), or any of thousands of others.
I'd guess that amazon actually does a better job of such a search than google. If you're a regular amazon customer, their computer knows your past purchases and will use their "People who bought this book also bought the following..." ranking scheme. If you have bought books thus linked to any of the "playboy" matches, you'll get those listed first, and there's a good chance that this will include books that you'll like.
Funny thing; I checked out a few of the first 10 matches that I got for "playboy", and I wasn't tempted to buy any of them. Well, maybe I'm tempted a little by Will Elder's book. But it looks like they couldn't relate anything in the list to my past purchases, so they used their general sales rankings.
I actually do have two collections of Playboy cartoons on my humor bookshelf. But I didn't buy them through amazon.com, so they don't know about them.
Trademark law includes a concept referred to as "likelihood of confusion",... no court would ever convict a playground equipment manufacturer with trademark infringment in such a case.
I wouldn't be too sure about this. Note that the term "playmate" as used by Playboy and by educators are in fact exactly the same thing. And in the US, there is a lot of fuss these days about child molestation.
Recall that a century or so back, "intercourse" was a close synonym to "conversation". Once a term picks up a sexual connotation, that meaning can very rapidly supplant a more general meaning. For a more recent example, the term "gay" is now mostly restricted to its sexual meaning in most American, uh, conversation.
Consider also things like the bowdlerization of writers like Mark Twain because of his famous character "Nigger Jim". (Not to mention the recent fuss over someone publicly using the term "nigardly".;-)
It wouldn't take much PR to convince most Americans that the term "playmate" has a sexual meaning, and anyone using it around children is probably a p[a]edophile.
There are plenty of example to show that, yes, people really are that foolish. At least here in the US.
For that matter, there was the recent story from Wales about the mob that attacked a "paediatrician". I guess Americans aren't the only people who behave that way.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Within a week? It's already happening. You can read it here on /., too.
;-)
We should be pointing out a few things here:
1. We don't know who started this thing. It could be some fanatic linux hacker. It could be a script kiddie in Russia or Brazil. It could be someone at SCO, IBM, Microsoft, or Red Hat. Until we actually find the culprit, any accusations are nothing more than libel.
2. The agent provocateur is an old PR trick. (If you don't know the term, ask dictionary.com about it.)
3. It doesn't really reflect badly on Windows users. They are not generally computer experts, true. Why should they be? We don't expect people to be design and manufacturing experts before they buy other products. The real culprit here is the marketing machine that sells computer software with crappy design to unsuspecting customers. Email software should either refuse to execute code in a message, or should clearly warn the user that this is an extremely risky thing to do. If non-expert users are suckered by this, the blame belongs with the supplier of the crappy software.
4. And, of course, the joke "It couldn't have come from the linux community, because the source isn't available."
No apostrophe is required for a plural.
Then there's Dave Barry's comment: In modern English spelling, an apostrophe is used to warn the reader that an "s" is coming.
... maybe next it'll be MikeRoweFish.com
Nah; that'd just get him sued by microfiche manufacturers.
Ya think they'd try to buy him off by offering a free microfiche reader?
Yeah; you're right. And, of course, all those funny separator chars can be omitted, except for the sign before the time-zone offset.
I have seen comments that '/' and '.' may be used in the date, but I'm not sure the ISO specs say that. This may come from people who try it and find that it seems to cause no problems. Probably because most software just strips out all the separators.
Anyway, it is fun to bring up the ISO date/time standard, and watch as people look at you like you're some sort of really strange weirdo. Even techies often show this reaction, though you'd think they'd know better. So, even though it's a Good Idea, there isn't the slightest chance of it being widely adopted in the forseeable future.
These days, date/time problems are a much bigger cause of problems and lost time than metric/imperial measures. And, even with the big fuss over the Y2K event, we aren't even close to getting this problem solved.
before I print it out. (emphasis added)
...
;-)
Well, yeah; I saw that. But I was working on the understanding that if someone is going to go to the bother of putting their resume in HTML, there's a real good chance that it's gonna end up visible on the web. Then, as soon as google finds it, it's an open doc to every HR web-harvesting script on the planet (and maybe a few other planets).
I suppose some people might hide their HTML resumes from the web. But a brief check shows that there are, in fact, at least a few hundred thousand of them Out There right now.
Not that there's anything wrong with that
(And have you ever noticed that when you try for an "insightful" rating, you get "funny", and vice versa? So much for karma whoring.
bullshit questions like "what is your greatest weakness"
Well, I've always given an answer like "I have a tendency to give straightforward, detailed, techically answers to people who are really looking for vague management or marketing answers."
They never do get it.
That's why I always put a bunch of killer keywords ... in a white font at the bottom of my resume ...
Heh. I hope you also specify the background color. Lots of web pages set only the foreground color. With any browser that I'm using for more than one or two pages, I always set the background color to a 40% or so grey. It's a lot easier on the eyes than the glaring white that is usually the default. I often tell it to override all colors, but sometimes I have to undo this to read the text-as-images that occasionally come up unreadable. Anyway, I may just be able to read your white-text stuff unless you also set the background color.
Using a grey40 background makes a lot of stealth HTML stuff visible, in addition to easing your eyestrain at the end of the day.
- month/day/year - day/month/year
;-)
No, no! That's year/month/day (ISO standard format). And the year MUST be four digits. Any competent programmer understands why.
Actually, that's mostly for internal computer dates (and even the, a pure second counter is a lot more practical). You can always convert to random output formats for the benefit of those weird humans.
The problem that I keep running into is that my software has to parse "user-friendly" input data and decode dates formatted as dd/dd/dd, where 'd' is a digit. We used to only have the problem that the first two fields could be day/month or month/day. Now that computers have existed during two centuries, we also have the problem that an input date like 01/02/03 can be in 2001 (if it's ISO standard format) or 2003. Well, of course 2001 is a violation of the ISO standard, but my programs DO see it.
One of the real weirdness is that HTTP headers specify dates in non-ISO formats. What were they thinking? Back when HTTP was invented, we already knew enough about timestamps on the network to know that the ISO format was the only logical one to use. Correctly parsing HTTP header dates from random machines around the world can get really weird. Especially with the spelled-out months. I mean, native English speakers sometimes can't spell the names of the months correctly. You get some very inventive spellings from people who aren't fluent in English.
(And think how much better everything would work if we could just get people to use Kelvin rather than that arbitrary Celsius scale.
Buzzwords. Acronyms. Keywords.
In anything much bigger than a 2-person shop these days, resumes pretty much just go unread into a database. They are only seen by a human if they match a retrieval request. For that to happen, you have to have the keywords that the hiring manager typed.
The rest doesn't much matter. If a retrieval doesn't match your resume, it will never be retrieved, and will never be read by a human.
One thing still missing from the databases: They need information on how long a given acronym, uh, I mean product, has been out. This would cut down on managers looking for five years experience on something that was released less than a year ago.
Copyright protection encourages creation. Nobody else has any right to works I've created.
If your "works" are discussions of how you and your cohorts are planning to defraud customers or subvert an election, you don't deserve copyright protection. Your "creation" should be made public and used against you in court.
This is what the Diebold memo story is all about. They were not producing works of art. They were plotting criminal acts.
You may consider criminal activity to be a work of art. Your victims might not agree.
Well, I don't think it's much of a surprise that they're noticing. There is a very long history of powerful people using the legal system to suppress publication of information that those powerful people don't want made public. That's why the US Constitution has a press-freedom clause in its Bill of Rights.
;-)
It's interesting that the article started right off with the Diebold memos. This makes it clear that the writer "gets it". Diebold is attempting to use the copyright laws and the DMCA to block publication of information about its own illegal attempts to control the outcome of elections. The memos make it clear that the "bugs" in Diebold's voting equipment aren't bugs at all, but features designed to make it possible to sell an election. Diebold does not want the evidence of this made public. This is, of course, exactly why press-freedom laws have come to exist.
This is a direct threat to the NYT and all other news publishers. If Diebold can suppress the "publication" of its "copyrighted" memos on the internet, then any company or politician can suppress the publication of embarrassing information in the New York Times.
I'd bet that most news people understand quite well the threat to their livelihood (and to society as a whole) from things like this. Now that anything written is "born copyrighted", news people face a possible future in which it is illegal to publish anything without first getting written permission from everyone involved in the story.
Of course, this would end the long-time complaints about all the negative news.
... you may not have much choice in the matter when you get sent a word document in XML format.
Well, you can reply with a message like:
You have sent a document in Microsoft's Word format. Such
documents now contain text encoded in forms that are
patented by Microsoft. Decoding and reading such a
document on a non-Microsoft system or with non-Microsoft
software may subject the reader to criminal charges and/or
large fines for patent enfringement.
Please re-send the document in a format that won't result
in such criminal charges and/or fines if I read it.
That might get some attention.
..., just stay out of Microsoft's twisted proprietary world.
Might not help. With copyright, you can (sometimes) successfully argue that you didn't copy a piece of text because you've never seen it. This gets harder to argue as the length of the matching text increases, but it is at least a possible legal defense.
With patents, this doesn't work. Even if you've never heard of the patent, and can prove that you thought it up yourself, you are still guilty. Any use of the ideas in a patent are illegal unless you have a license.
So if you write a piece of code that accidentally uses the same XML encoding that Microsoft has patented, you have violated the patent.
One of the problems with patenting a file format is that programmers "invent" file formats nearly every time they write code that outputs anything at all. Any time you code a print() or write() call, you are in danger of infringing on some patent that you've never heard of.
This is why Bruce Parens is warning that we may soon find that programming may be illegal for anyone but big corporations with the funds for a legal defense against a patent-infringement lawsuit. It's slowly becoming impossible to write code that doesn't violate a software patent.
Well, actually he might have both aids and aides. Y'know, like visual aids and such. Though maybe a hearing aid wouldn't be anything to brag about (unless it's a really good one).
The English language is so wonderfully confused at times.
It is funny how the image of an intern changed so rapidly.
If I define myCleverMethod, I don't want to debug code littered with MYcleVERMetHOD.
Heh. There is the story about the Expert's Exchange web site, which was originally "ExpertsExchange.com". Then some pranksters started referring to them as "ExpertSexChange.com". But the real killer was when anto-porn filters started blocking them for the same reason. So now they're "experts-exchange.com".
Of course, host.dom.ain names are officially case insensitive, which is probably a Good Thing. Funny thing, though, is that user ids are case sensitive on some systems and not on others, and no matter what the standards say, joe@foo.bar.com and Joe@foo.bar.com may or may not be the same user.
Actually, there was a good discussion of this back in the 1980's, when the DLT (Distribuita Lingvo-Tradukado) project got underway. This was an attempt to use Esperanto as an intermediate language for translation and archival purposes.
One of the first decisions was a slight change in the capitalization rules: The first letter in a sentence would not be capitalized. This made it possible for software to distinguish common and proper nouns. If there was a capital letter, it was a proper name or acronym of some sort, and thus should not be translated. Lower-case words could thus be unambiguously separated out, parsed and translated, and proper names could be unamiguously recognized as such and not translated.
German has its own peculiar capitalization rules. But English and Spanish both use capitalization to flag proper names and acronyms. The spoken languages don't have this, of course. But this capitalization is a useful tool in the written languages.
Programmers in case-sensitive languages are usually quick to take advantage of this sort of distinction. Most programming languages have many classes of words, and it's useful to be able to distinguish them visually. Since upper and lower cases are visually rather different, it's an easy way to make type distinctions quickly visible.
Case sensitivity is just a tradition, with its roots in the Old Testiment.
Um, funny maybe, but wrong. The Old Testament was written in classical Hebrew (with maybe a bit of Aramaic in some of the later parts), and that alphabet has never had a case distinction.
Upper/lower case is something that developed only around 1500 years ago, plus or minus a few centuries. It was adopted in the Roman, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, but that's about it.
It is useful, as we all learned in grade school. Thus, many managers have aids who are very helpful. But if they have AIDS, it's a serious medical problem.
One of the reasons that the project I'm working on isn't using Macs is that OSX uses a caseless file system. When we tried porting several important software packages to OSX, they were utter disasters. The symptoms were bizarre and inexplicable, and took forever to hunt down. It turned out to be caused by executables from different packages that had names that differed only in capitalization. Each package had its own convention, so there weren't any collisions on linux and other unix-like systems. But on OSX, there were cases where a component of package X ended up calling a program from package Y, and they both went crazy. We spent so much time finding the problems and fixing them that we decided to just not use OSX except as a UI.
It's too bad, really. My 17" Powerbook is a really neat tool. I'd like to use it as a real computer. It wouldn't have been much more work for Apple to hide their case insensitivity in runtime libraries, the way it should be done. I really wish they'd done that, rather than breaking the assumptions that all other unix-like systems are built on.
# Microsoft backs the Republicans. ...
;-), I looked for clues about what software was running. They didn't give any clues at all.
# Microsoft shares exploit with the Republicans.
Do we know that the computers involved were running Microsoft software?
While reading the article (front page of the dead-tree edition of the Globe that's now holding up my Mac
Now, this probably does mean MS Windows. Media people usually mention other kinds of computers, because this is considered unusual. When they don't mention the kind of software, it almost always means MS Windows. But we don't in fact know this from the article.
I wouldn't put too much faith in Microsoft being the Republicans' friends here. In recent elections, they have contributed large amounts to the Democrats, too. So no matter which party wins, the fix is in. And we can expect that they are sharing exploits with all the support people in the government.
Republican pols have to be wondering how much of the stuff in their computers is backed up on their opponents' computers.
This is an ideal situation to do a bit of lobbying for Open Source software. People in governments need to understand that any proprietary, binary-only software is highly likely to be spyware that is sending the data to their opponents. The only defense against this, as security folks have been saying for years, is that you make sure that you have the source for all of your software. You compile it yourself. And you install traffic monitors on your network to see what may be getting shipped out when you're not looking.
Anyone who thinks that binary software shipped to government offices is clean of spyware is, quite simply, a naive fool. We seem to have a lot of those in the Democratic party now. But maybe fewer than a few weeks ago. Maybe they'll be interested in lessons on how to avoid this sort of trick in the future.
Open source is going to drive down the value of software.
Wrong. Open source is going to drive down the price of software. But the value is going up.
And, for the software developers among us, it will radically increase our value to society, as we can build higher-quality software.
Whether society will actually pay us for this increase in value isn't yet obvious. But my income-tax return for last year had a bottom line of around $110,000, and all of it was for software that ran on linux. Most of it was special-purpose software for one client. Some involved working on Open Source packages that we used, and of course we gave our patches back to the archives where we found the packages, thus benefitting society as a whole.
1. While the profit motive may be recognized by the Supreme Court as "the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors" (Eldred v. Ashcroft), it is not the only one. The very existance of Open Source software demonstrates that motives other than profit can produce a public benefit and proliferation of knowledge.
While true, this is nonetheless overly simplistic. It contains the hidden assumption that "profit" can only mean "money". But there are many other ways of profiting from something you do.
I like to explain to people that I have profited greatly by contributing to linux and other Open Source projects. I get back a high-quality computer system that is easy for me to use as I like. And the only cost to me is a few hours of my time here and there.
This wouldn't work if I were the only one doing it, of course. But when there are a bunch of others out there doing the same sort of thing, then we can all profit greatly.
Your typical CEO (or right-wing talk-show host) may not understand this meaning of "profit". Buy I'd bet that your typical politician would understand it instantly. Payoffs "in kind" are the basis of a lot of politics.
...Should ICANN bow to the pressure of the most politically powerful and take the domain by force? No.
History says they will.
Remember a couple of years ago, when Apple was handed the newton.com domain? It had been owned for several years by a fellow in Silicon Valley named Newton who had his own software firm. Then Apple came out with the Newton handheld, and decided that Mr. Newton had no right to their name. The fact that Apple was a latecomer to the name, and Mr. Newton had had the domain for years didn't matter. ICANN took his domain away from him and gave it to Apple.
A quick check shows that Apple still owns it. Try it yourself.
I'd predict that Mike Rowe doesn't stand a chance.
It is somewhat a pity. We could use a bit of humor now and then. But I guess we ain't gonna get it from billg & co.
Why should an "virtual" space be any different than that? It works for the rest of private property, why not here?
Well, because we have decades of experience showing that as soon as there is a computer involved, the cry of "That's different!" arises, and all precedent is discarded. Everything must be re-learned from scratch.
It has taken us humans millenia to even start to understand the value of freedom, liberty, and all that. But one of the constant themes in discussions like this is that, since the low-level infrastructure of the Internet is mostly owned by corporations, those corporations by right control everything and there is no such thing as freedom or liberty. There is only TOS; you have no say in what they are; if you violate them, you're out.
It may well take us several millenia to collectively understand that this is wrong, and that, despite the presence of computers, the hard-learned lessons supporting freedom should also apply here.
In the meantime, the legal fact probably is that, since the infrasturcture of the Internet is run controlled computers and owned by corporations, we in fact have no legal rights here whatsoever. The US constitution is utterly irrelevant, as is the Declaration of Human Rights, except in local backwaters where the infrastructure is run by governmments.
Of course, we could start pressing for government takeovers of the Internet's infrastructure. If we want freedom of speech here, that's probably the only way to get it.
Software is like sex; if you feel the need to pay for it you can always find someone willing to take your money.
I've also seen
Software is like sex; one mistake and you support it the rest of your life.
Anyone got any more good comparisons of software and sex?
But I maintain that there is very little likelyhood that someone searching for playboy isn't looking for boobies.
..." ranking scheme. If you have bought books thus linked to any of the "playboy" matches, you'll get those listed first, and there's a good chance that this will include books that you'll like.
For a good argument otherwise, ask amazon.com to search for "playboy" under the classification "books". Right now, it returns 7974 matches. The first two are related to the Playboy magazine, as are a few more far down the list. But the overwhelming majority are books with "playboy" in the title. Some of these are classics.
So someone googling for "playboy" could very well be looking for "The Playboy" (Carly Phillips) or "The Playboy of the Western World" (J.M.Synge), or any of thousands of others.
I'd guess that amazon actually does a better job of such a search than google. If you're a regular amazon customer, their computer knows your past purchases and will use their "People who bought this book also bought the following
Funny thing; I checked out a few of the first 10 matches that I got for "playboy", and I wasn't tempted to buy any of them. Well, maybe I'm tempted a little by Will Elder's book. But it looks like they couldn't relate anything in the list to my past purchases, so they used their general sales rankings.
I actually do have two collections of Playboy cartoons on my humor bookshelf. But I didn't buy them through amazon.com, so they don't know about them.
Trademark law includes a concept referred to as "likelihood of confusion", ... no court would ever convict a playground equipment manufacturer with trademark infringment in such a case.
;-)
;-)
I wouldn't be too sure about this. Note that the term "playmate" as used by Playboy and by educators are in fact exactly the same thing. And in the US, there is a lot of fuss these days about child molestation.
Recall that a century or so back, "intercourse" was a close synonym to "conversation". Once a term picks up a sexual connotation, that meaning can very rapidly supplant a more general meaning. For a more recent example, the term "gay" is now mostly restricted to its sexual meaning in most American, uh, conversation.
Consider also things like the bowdlerization of writers like Mark Twain because of his famous character "Nigger Jim". (Not to mention the recent fuss over someone publicly using the term "nigardly".
It wouldn't take much PR to convince most Americans that the term "playmate" has a sexual meaning, and anyone using it around children is probably a p[a]edophile.
There are plenty of example to show that, yes, people really are that foolish. At least here in the US.
For that matter, there was the recent story from Wales about the mob that attacked a "paediatrician". I guess Americans aren't the only people who behave that way.