That's ok; they'll release the Mac and linux versions shortly after the latest Windows upgrade has it added to MS Player's kill list. Then any time you run any of MS Player's components (which will be reinstalled for you if you accidentally deleted them), the unapproved Hercules stuff will stop working. When they read the contract they'll have to sign to get it added to MS Player's approved list, they'll look seriously at other platforms.
This is what has happened with several friends who made the mistake of trying to market their own Windows sound software. They went through the inevitable period of depression as they came to terms with how The Market in such things really works. Then they started working on the ports to Mac and linux, so they could get the income from the sales.
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents...
Well, as a software developer by trade, I sorta like it.
One of the very real problems with all computer systems (linux included) is the difficulty in discovering the capabilities and limitations of the software. This is where "X vs Y flame wars" come in handy.
Thus, in the eternal unix vi-vs-emacs war, I went with the vi side. But I didn't learn much about it from the docs. Where I really learned was the flame wars. Some emacs partisan would say "Emacs can do FOO and vi can't." A vi partisan would then say "Yes it can, here's how..." My response would be "Hey, I never suspected that vi or emacs could do that, but now I know how to do it."
It's a pity that this particular was seems to have somewhat died down. As a result, the younger generation no longer has this simple, elegant way of discovering the undocumented capabilities of these powerful tools. I often watch younger people laboriously trying to get them to do what to me are simple, quick tasks.
Meanwhile, on the GUI front, the X-windows world has a flock of window managers, most recently KDE and Gnome. As usual, the "documentation" mostly consists of idiot-level intros that are more marketing that education. If you want to find out how to do something, asking newsgroups or mailing lists mostly gets you a "RTFM" response. But if you can say "Gnome can do BAR but KDE can't" you often get a reply explaining how easy it is with KDE.
With both MS Windows and the Mac GUI, you don't have this. I've been playing with OSX for four months now, and there are a lot of cool things about it. But from my X-Windows perspective, the GUI sucks. The simplest things that I do with one or two events on my linux box can take the longest time. Even a simple cut-and-paste is 2 to 10 times longer than with X, and prone to frustrating errors. I can't background a window. There's only one desktop. You can only resize windows via the lower right corner. Terminal windows don't have borders, and changing the background color is extremely difficult, so the windows run together. And so on.
Yes, I've asked on...mac... newsgroups, but with disappointing results. The replies tend to be "It can't be done" or "Wait for the next release". The first reply I tend to translate to "I don't know how to do it", of course, and the second to "Maybe someday, when the geniuses at Apple get around to it".
It's all very frustrating to know that such things have been solved on linux, but the commercial guys at both MS and Apple seem to have little interest in the possible solutions. And as a programmer, I don't have any practical way to implement a solution myself and offer it to the population of Mac users, as I've done in the past with linux and GNU software.
Or maybe I'm missing something...
[Note that this message could be interpreted as an example of "linux can to QUX but OSX can't." I'd be happy to see it lead to a debunking of all my comments by explaining how too get a profitable linux-vs-OSX flame war going, so I can learn how to do things on OSX that I know how to do on linux.;-]
Completely wrong. You can't take the work of someone else and patent it.
Completely wrong. It's called "work for hire". If I hire you to do a job, and some of what you do turns out to be original and patentable, under US law I can claim the patent.
Many US companies also require employees to sign agreements that any patents be assigned to the company. In many cases, such agreements are worded so that they apply to anything you develop while working for the company, even if you do it at home on your own time. I've turned down jobs because they required signing such an agreement. I've also known co-workers who didn't understand this, and found that the company owned something they'd developed on their own that had nothing at all to do with their job.
It gets especially tricky when the company asks you to sign such an agreement after you've worked for them for a while.
Many corporate grants to universities come with a contract stating that any patentable results of the research are owned by the company. MIT is one of the schools that doesn't permit its employees to accept such grants. They've figured out that a university's greatest asset is the knowledge of its people. So accepting such a grant may seem profitable in the short term, but in the longer term, it amounts to giving away the most important thing you have. Banning such contracts is one of the ways that MIT has maintained its position as a leading research institute.
the RIAA must have missed the kindergarten lesson on sharing.
Yeah, but you should understand that the kids that missed (or more likely, resisted) that lesson are the ones who grow up to become corporate CEOs and lawyers.
The rest of us become civilized human beings.
Repeat after me, kiddies: "Bad people steal; good people share."
(That oughta confuse the hell out of those RIAA types.;-)
a better analogy might be if you were the only kid who had to do homework and the next day all the other kids got to copy your work. You might think it was funny the first day or two, but eventually, you'd probably quit bothering to do any homework at all.
Oh, I dunno about that. When I was in school, I was always the "class genius", and lots of other kids wanted to copy from me. I just let them. I figured that if they copied, they would hardly learn anything. This was to their benefit in the very short term, but with a longer view, they really lost. When the tests came up, they wouldn't have the info in their heads. And next year, when new material came along that required the earlier knowledge, they'd be clueless.
A smart kids will do the work and learn from it. The rest can do blind copying, and learn little or nothing. It doesn't take a lot of brains to see the advantage for the smart kids here.
"Sure, I'd be happy to let you copy my homework..."
I also noticed that the article said the IP phones were only available to students with Windows computers. I wonder if a student had their own Mac or linux box and their own IP phone, would they be allowed to use the campus VoIP system? Or is part of their intent to make sure that every student has a Windows box?
... the gravitational pull of the obstetrician that delivered you far outweighed that of any celestial body.
There was a related incident on NPR a couple of years ago. Someone claimed that, if you have a large dog, its gravitation pull on you is more that the pull of Saturn at its closest approach. Someone else questioned this. So someone else looked up the numbers in an astronomical reference book and did the calculations.
As I recall, they assumed a 50-pound (20-kg) dog. It turned out that at about 3 or 4 meters the dog has the same gravitational pull as Saturn at its closest approach to Earth. If the dog is closer, it's pull is greater that Saturn's. And if you're touching, even a small dog has a greater pull than Saturn.
I also recall thinking that a large dog that's very close when you're born might very well have a greater effect on your life than Saturn. But this is not due to its gravitaional pull.
Let's see, Windows Rights Management Service... WRMS... That sounds an awfully lot like a copyright infringement on the title of one of Orson Scott Card's novels.
I think that Card should sue MS for this.
There's gotta be a lot of organizations that use this acronym. Let's see what Google says...
Washburn Rural Middle School.
Will Rogers Middle School.
Winter Road Maintenance System.
Wood River Middle School.
WRMS FM
Water Resources Management Study.... and lots more...
Looks like MS has lots of problems with this acronym. And they wouldn't want to infringe on anyone else's Intellectual Property, now would they? Of course not!
If you use the internet for passive information consumption, you are getting maybe 5% of its true value.
Well, maybe, but I've found an interesting way to convince people who dismiss the Net as pr0n and spam: I send them to news.google.com. I tell them that, while the news stories are interesting, they are mostly what you'll see in the commercial media. But there's something there that's much more valuable: The lists of hundreds or thousands of news sources on each story. I suggest that they spend a little time looking through those lists for news sources they've never heard of, and visit them.
This is something that no previous commercial news source has delivered. You wanna hear N differently-biased reports of something going on in some part of the world? They're all there. Yeah, they're biased, but keep that in mind as you read, and as an intelligent person, you'll learn a lot.
Of course, this isn't exactly "passive information consumption". Google merely provides a convenient list of links. You have to actively dig through them, and read with a good amount of skepticism.
This really is something materially new in the news business. And now that google has prototyped it, we can expect that future news services will have to match it, or be dismissed as uninformative.
A real artist always knows her materials, right down to the last atom.
Indeed. It's sometimes surprising how often lower-level details that you "shouldn't have to be aware of" stand up and bite you if you don't understand them.
Right now, I'm looking at a bizarre bug that has been plagueing me for a year or so, in which little chunks 3 or 4 extra bytes appear scattered through out downloaded web pages. I finally tracked it down to the HTTP level. How many web developers could tell you what "chunked" data is? I know now, even though I really "shouldn't have to be aware of" that, because the magic HTTP modules should all hide it from me.
Right. I'll submit bug reports eventually, when I have a bit more evidence. And then it'll take a while to get the library modules patched, and a lot longer before I can rely on them being installed at all customer sites.
So for the near future (a couple years), I'll have to have my code intercept the low-level HTTP stuff, read the headers, and figure out when chunked data is coming in. And I have the fun of handling whatever mishandled decoding of this has been passed up to my code.
What I think I may do is just dispense with the library HTTP modules, and do the low-level TCP connection and HTTP protocol myself. How hard can it be?;-)
(Actually, I know how hard it can be. This won't be the first time I've dropped HTTP modules and written my own routines to do what the library didn't do correctly. And I've saved that code...)
Does that mean he managed to convince someone he was a computer?
My wife likes to tell people that her first job, back in the late 70's, was with a Civil Engineering firm in New York, where her job title was "Computer". She did the calculations (and error checking;-) for their engineering drawings. She used machines to do this, of course, but those machines were called "calculators".
there's still issues with making the platform "plug-n-play" enough so you can get real use out of it without being a somewhat familiar with linux at the start.... especially when it comes to Synching with a desktop.
Well, frankly, I find all the PDA sync things rather uncompelling. They all seem to use secret, binary data formats, so I can't do anything with them. And they can't back up my personal files, just the data from a select list of apps.
When I can use scp and/or rsync to do the job, then I'll be impressed.
Of course, this shouldn't be impressive. I routinely use these to sync machines that are thousands of miles apart, and I don't need any special adapters or cables. Why can't a PDA be as easy?
After this suit RH needs to sue SCO for slander, own them and end this whole affair with the death of SCO. That is, after devaluing their stock hopefully before the execs can dump it.
Too late. If you'd been following all the SCO news, you'd have read that their execs have been quietly dumping their stock for some time now, ever since they successfully jacked up the price.
Then they'll retire to Rio, where there's no extradition to the US.;-)
Sun could also, conceivably, devise a Linux-like OS I suppose I am capable of conceiving that, but it is a ridiculous idea.
Um, how so? Both are, at their heart, implementations of the POSIX standard. This makes them more alike than different, for all purposes other than kernel work.
I'd reply that Sun already has a "Linux-like OS". It's called "Solaris".
And, yes, I've ported code between them. It usually just compiles and runs, without any changes.
The main difference is that Sun's software is not nearly as open as it was 10 or 15 years ago. You can't get a source tree and compile it yourself, unless you want to pay a significant sum for a source license. So if you have serious security concerns and want your people to examine the source (and recompile it), you should go with linus or one of the *BSDs.
But this isn't a difference in these systems; it's just a difference in accessibility of the source. The few functional differences are in the various extensions that each has added to their POSIX base.
P2P is used to download the latest Linux kernel, the Matrix preview when the official site was slashdotted, etc. It might stop having millions of users downloading copyrighted stuff,...
But note that both of these examples are in fact copyrighted. These are actually examples of "content" producers understanding that P2P is useful to them.
Of course, in both of these cases, the owners want you to download the particular files for free. The reasons are different, which just makes it a more useful example. There are many reasons why a copyright holder might want to give out part or all of their material for free.
This isn't anything unusual. Thus, in the auto industry, people have been pointing out for decades that the actual vehicles are sold "at cost", or sometimes slightly below cost. The reasons is that it's a competetive market. But the market for add-ons and spare parts is much less competetive. So it makes sense to give the primary product away cheap, when you can get a good price for the after-market goods.
This actually applies to the linux kernel quite nicely. I made about $120k last year developing software that primarily runs on linux (though it is in fact highly portable, and runs of FreeBSD and OSX just as well). It's all highly-specialized software for one client. Yeah, I could have written it for Windows. But this client has gone for reliability and security in a big way. So from my viewpoint, the more "free" copies of linux that are downloaded, the better. I'd bet that most of the prime movers behind linux would agree with this.
The OS is just a platform, after all. The real money is to be made in writing the add-ons. If you want "reliable" and "secure" in your product's list of features, you want it running on an OS with those properties. And you want that OS to be easily available to your clients.
Note also that the big news sources are now giving away their main news stories for free on their web sites. I doubt if they object at all if you email copies to friends. Some of them are reporting that their web sites are in fact making a profit now. It doesn't take much digging to find out why. Those front-page stories are "loss leaders", much as the matrix previews were. But if you want full access to their news archives, well, that'll cost you.
The idea that P2P is only for piracy is the dying scream of buggy-whip makers. We can hope that they die soon, and are replaced by others that have a better understanding of the world that's developing.
(OTOH, if you google for "buggy whip", among the metaphorical uses you'll find a number of mostly small companies selling them.;-)
why would you think that? intellectual property has only become stronger over the last 20, 100, 500 years.
Of course, it hasn't been a steady advance, and there have been occasional major setbacks to the progression.
For example, a bit over 200 years back, there was a revolution in North America, and when a new Constitution was established, it restricted "IP" to a short time, and only when it advances the arts and sciences. Some economists and historians have claimed that this was one of the major reasons the US became the world's biggest economic power. Of course, now this has mostly been cancelled by recent laws extending patent and copyright indefinitely, and allowing them for rather silly "inventions". So the US's technical lead is probably ended, at least for the near future.
But it's always possible we'll see another such revolution, either in the US or in another part of the world that wants to take the lead in technology while the US strangles its own creative folks. It has happened before, after all; there's no reason to believe it can't ever happen again.
Furthermore, to see MS's "shared source", you have to sign a NDA. This means that if you find some serious problem, you can't warn their other marks - uh, I mean customers - about it.
And because of this, they can fix it at their leisure. Or not. Or fix it for you, and leave it in for selected other customers.
If you're responsible for a government agency's security, you really should be aware of this, or you're not competent for your position.
It's obviously a good thing that governments are mandating the use of OSS.</sarcasm>
Actually, there have been very few cases of governments mandating linux or any OSS. Rather, most of the stories have been about governments declaring that such software will be considered. This is something very different.
And one could argue that the world is in a sad state when we need laws requiring that governments consider more than just one or two products. But fact is, we do need this, or in most cases the purchasing departments would only consider a very short list. And if you hadn't greased the right palms, your product wouldn't be considered at all, no matter how good or cheap it might be.
You're basically right, but for the wrong reason. The real reason is that we can't agree on what "security" means. Some things can't be made secure because, under some reasonable definitions of "secure", you'd have to disable the security for the system to function at all.
My favorite example is a definition that I ran across across a while ago. A "secure" system was defined as one in which an unauthorized user couldn't get access to any files and copy the data to another computer.
Now this probably sounds like a very reasonable definition, and in a lot of cases, it is. But just recently we had an interesting story here that reminded me of that definition. It was the story about the survey that purported to show that twice as many linux-based web servers as windows-based servers had been successfully "hacked".
When I read the claimed numbers, one thing that I noticed was that they were almost exactly the same as the Netcraft numbers on apache and IIS we servers, which of course mostly run on linux and windows respectively. This made me wonder what their definition of a "secure" server might be.
Then it occurred to me: They were using the above definition. A "hacked" server was one that gave up files to unauthorized users! If you have connected to a web server without authorization from the server's owner, and got back any web page, you have just seccussfully broken into that server and made off with data.
By this definition, of course, all web servers that work at all are totally insecure, since their fundamental task is to hand out files to all users. And to make a web server secure by this definition means that you must shut it down totally.
Now, this may sound facetious to some. But I can assure you that people do write such definitions and take them seriously. Without a good deal of thought, any committee's definition of "security" is likely to be as bad, and will outlaw many of the things that you want your own computer to do.
In this case, it is possible to revise the definition so that it works for web servers. But it takes a bit more thought. The resulting definition will be quite a bit more complex, and will be phrased subtly. You might want to try writing the definition, and then apply it to various things you do on the Net to see whether it will block you. You might be surprised at how difficult it is to get it right.
Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think there's anything wrong with a browser downloading Flash, or data in any other format.
What I find really annoying is that current browsers insist that they are going to handle a list of file formats themselves, in their own window, and you can't do anything about it.
If they were forced to give me the option of saying to handle MIME type foo/bar in a separate app, that would be a huge improvement.
For example, on my cute new Powerbook, I've found that I can't feed things like Flash or XML to an independent app. The browsers (IE, mozilla, Safari) insist that they will handle those themselves, with their standard plugin. It doesn't matter whether I have an app of my own to handle them; my attempts to add the handler to the list are rebuffed.
The XML case is especially annoying. I'me testing some XML apps, and I'd really like to use some of them as plugins. I've asked a couple of times in the usual mozilla fora, and the answer seems to be "Tough luck; we're smarter than you, and we know how to handle XML, so we won't let you do it." Right. Their XML handler chokes on the slightest syntax error, fails to show any of the text, and thus gives a big middle finger to any poor schmuck trying to debug his XML generator.
Similarly, when I download MP3s or MIDI files to mozilla on my Powerbook, it insists on feeding them to the embedded Quicktime, and ignores my attempts to use a separate handler. The Quicktime plugin has only a dumb slider for backspacing, plus start/stop buttons. You can't do anything with the data at all. Again, I asked in a couple of newsgroups, and was told in no uncertain terms that I'm too stupid to know how to do such things, and I should just leave it to my betters.
It's interesting that on my linux box, MP3 and MIDI can be handed off by mozilla to a separate app. This lets me do lots of interesting stuff with those formats. But with mozilla on my Powerbook, the same thing doesn't work.
If "seamless" plugins are eliminated, maybe we can get browsers that are friendly to not-so-dumb users. It would be really useful (especially for XML and MIDI) if we could point to a separate app to handle all files of any specific type.
Actually, I suspect that the ability to do this might be buried in the current browsers. But it doesn't do me much good if I can't learn how to use it. And note that, with mozilla, Preferences -> Navigator -> Helper Applications doesn't allow one to override the builtin handling of some types (such as XML). Some types are handled by builtin plugins, and if they don't do what you need, tough.
Maybe I can be the first to suggest ...
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 4, Funny
This is obviously just an attempt by Apple Corps to be bought out.;-)
Heh. I already have a situation like this in my pocket. I have a cell phone (kyocera 6035) that runs PalmOS, and has a real web browser. To do something on the Web, what it does is makes a phone call and brings up a PPP connection on the "line".
This means that I have IP implemented on PPP over a voice line, which is emulated over a digital packet network. The resulting IP network probably runs at least 1000 times slower than just doing IP on the low-level packet network would run.
Why don't they do it the logical way? Well, if they did that, they'd only be able to charge for the traffic, which for a typical web page is only a few packets. But the way they do it, they can charge you around half a minute of air time to make the connection, and then charge you air time for the full time of the connection, even though most of the time you aren't sending packets at all because you're reading. And if you forget to hang up, they charge you the full price for your idle time.
I can see them doing VoIP by implementing it on top of the PPP link that is on top of the voice line that's on top of the packet network. It's no mystery why it's slow, when you realize all this.
Yeah; I usually do this. Any program more than a few dozen lines, and I start adding debugging hooks.
They're never "hidden", though. I always document them. Of course, I can't force users to read the documentation.
And I don't remove the debug hooks for a "release" version. When it's out at some customer's site and they call you asking what's wrong is when you REALLY need those hooks.
It's really handy to be able to be able to tell a user "Just add the following line to the config file, wait a bit, and tell me what it says."
I've worked on several projects where we added an HTTP interface, with the app listening on some port. All configurable, of course, but usually turned on by default. Then when a user called with a problem, if they are on the Net, we can ftp to that port, start typing GET commands, and learn about its state. This is a real back door, very easy to implement, and incredibly helpful when there are problems.
Of course, you do want to document them, so that the user can't accuse you of sneaking something in on them. And make sure there's a simple way to turn them on and off. If the app has a config file, a line like "HTTP-Port: N" does the job, with N=0 to disable the back door.
Then you can say "Well, I can't see what's wrong, because the HTTP port is turned off. Yes, I understand your security concerns. But I can't help you if your security won't let me talk to the program."
Usually this isn't much of a problem, since new users rarely notice that stuff, and leave the back door enabled. When their security folks discover it, it's really handy to be able to point to the fact that it's all documented in the manual and the sample config file. Then they say "Oh, yeah." turn it off, and don't bug you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's ok; they'll release the Mac and linux versions shortly after the latest Windows upgrade has it added to MS Player's kill list. Then any time you run any of MS Player's components (which will be reinstalled for you if you accidentally deleted them), the unapproved Hercules stuff will stop working. When they read the contract they'll have to sign to get it added to MS Player's approved list, they'll look seriously at other platforms.
This is what has happened with several friends who made the mistake of trying to market their own Windows sound software. They went through the inevitable period of depression as they came to terms with how The Market in such things really works. Then they started working on the ports to Mac and linux, so they could get the income from the sales.
I'd hate to see users of two fantastic operating systems like OS X and Linux turn into bickering opponents ...
..." My response would be "Hey, I never suspected that vi or emacs could do that, but now I know how to do it."
...mac... newsgroups, but with disappointing results. The replies tend to be "It can't be done" or "Wait for the next release". The first reply I tend to translate to "I don't know how to do it", of course, and the second to "Maybe someday, when the geniuses at Apple get around to it".
...
;-]
Well, as a software developer by trade, I sorta like it.
One of the very real problems with all computer systems (linux included) is the difficulty in discovering the capabilities and limitations of the software. This is where "X vs Y flame wars" come in handy.
Thus, in the eternal unix vi-vs-emacs war, I went with the vi side. But I didn't learn much about it from the docs. Where I really learned was the flame wars. Some emacs partisan would say "Emacs can do FOO and vi can't." A vi partisan would then say "Yes it can, here's how
It's a pity that this particular was seems to have somewhat died down. As a result, the younger generation no longer has this simple, elegant way of discovering the undocumented capabilities of these powerful tools. I often watch younger people laboriously trying to get them to do what to me are simple, quick tasks.
Meanwhile, on the GUI front, the X-windows world has a flock of window managers, most recently KDE and Gnome. As usual, the "documentation" mostly consists of idiot-level intros that are more marketing that education. If you want to find out how to do something, asking newsgroups or mailing lists mostly gets you a "RTFM" response. But if you can say "Gnome can do BAR but KDE can't" you often get a reply explaining how easy it is with KDE.
With both MS Windows and the Mac GUI, you don't have this. I've been playing with OSX for four months now, and there are a lot of cool things about it. But from my X-Windows perspective, the GUI sucks. The simplest things that I do with one or two events on my linux box can take the longest time. Even a simple cut-and-paste is 2 to 10 times longer than with X, and prone to frustrating errors. I can't background a window. There's only one desktop. You can only resize windows via the lower right corner. Terminal windows don't have borders, and changing the background color is extremely difficult, so the windows run together. And so on.
Yes, I've asked on
It's all very frustrating to know that such things have been solved on linux, but the commercial guys at both MS and Apple seem to have little interest in the possible solutions. And as a programmer, I don't have any practical way to implement a solution myself and offer it to the population of Mac users, as I've done in the past with linux and GNU software.
Or maybe I'm missing something
[Note that this message could be interpreted as an example of "linux can to QUX but OSX can't." I'd be happy to see it lead to a debunking of all my comments by explaining how too get a profitable linux-vs-OSX flame war going, so I can learn how to do things on OSX that I know how to do on linux.
Completely wrong. You can't take the work of someone else and patent it.
Completely wrong. It's called "work for hire". If I hire you to do a job, and some of what you do turns out to be original and patentable, under US law I can claim the patent.
Many US companies also require employees to sign agreements that any patents be assigned to the company. In many cases, such agreements are worded so that they apply to anything you develop while working for the company, even if you do it at home on your own time. I've turned down jobs because they required signing such an agreement. I've also known co-workers who didn't understand this, and found that the company owned something they'd developed on their own that had nothing at all to do with their job.
It gets especially tricky when the company asks you to sign such an agreement after you've worked for them for a while.
Many corporate grants to universities come with a contract stating that any patentable results of the research are owned by the company. MIT is one of the schools that doesn't permit its employees to accept such grants. They've figured out that a university's greatest asset is the knowledge of its people. So accepting such a grant may seem profitable in the short term, but in the longer term, it amounts to giving away the most important thing you have. Banning such contracts is one of the ways that MIT has maintained its position as a leading research institute.
the RIAA must have missed the kindergarten lesson on sharing.
;-)
...
Yeah, but you should understand that the kids that missed (or more likely, resisted) that lesson are the ones who grow up to become corporate CEOs and lawyers.
The rest of us become civilized human beings.
Repeat after me, kiddies: "Bad people steal; good people share."
(That oughta confuse the hell out of those RIAA types.
Hey, y'know, that'd make a good sig
a better analogy might be if you were the only kid who had to do homework and the next day all the other kids got to copy your work. You might think it was funny the first day or two, but eventually, you'd probably quit bothering to do any homework at all.
..."
Oh, I dunno about that. When I was in school, I was always the "class genius", and lots of other kids wanted to copy from me. I just let them. I figured that if they copied, they would hardly learn anything. This was to their benefit in the very short term, but with a longer view, they really lost. When the tests came up, they wouldn't have the info in their heads. And next year, when new material came along that required the earlier knowledge, they'd be clueless.
A smart kids will do the work and learn from it. The rest can do blind copying, and learn little or nothing. It doesn't take a lot of brains to see the advantage for the smart kids here.
"Sure, I'd be happy to let you copy my homework
I also noticed that the article said the IP phones were only available to students with Windows computers. I wonder if a student had their own Mac or linux box and their own IP phone, would they be allowed to use the campus VoIP system? Or is part of their intent to make sure that every student has a Windows box?
... the gravitational pull of the obstetrician that delivered you far outweighed that of any celestial body.
There was a related incident on NPR a couple of years ago. Someone claimed that, if you have a large dog, its gravitation pull on you is more that the pull of Saturn at its closest approach. Someone else questioned this. So someone else looked up the numbers in an astronomical reference book and did the calculations.
As I recall, they assumed a 50-pound (20-kg) dog. It turned out that at about 3 or 4 meters the dog has the same gravitational pull as Saturn at its closest approach to Earth. If the dog is closer, it's pull is greater that Saturn's. And if you're touching, even a small dog has a greater pull than Saturn.
I also recall thinking that a large dog that's very close when you're born might very well have a greater effect on your life than Saturn. But this is not due to its gravitaional pull.
Ain't physics wonderful?
information and tools online which could be used by malicious hackers and virus writers
... Maybe I shouldn't post this. It could be used against me in court some day ...
Obviously this also includes things like:
i = 1;
This could very well be a part of all sorts of malicious code, so teaching someone to use it would be helping them become evil hackers.
Hmmm
Let's see, Windows Rights Management Service ... WRMS ... That sounds an awfully lot like a copyright infringement on the title of one of Orson Scott Card's novels.
...
... and lots more ...
I think that Card should sue MS for this.
There's gotta be a lot of organizations that use this acronym. Let's see what Google says
Washburn Rural Middle School.
Will Rogers Middle School.
Winter Road Maintenance System.
Wood River Middle School.
WRMS FM
Water Resources Management Study.
Looks like MS has lots of problems with this acronym. And they wouldn't want to infringe on anyone else's Intellectual Property, now would they? Of course not!
If you use the internet for passive information consumption, you are getting maybe 5% of its true value.
Well, maybe, but I've found an interesting way to convince people who dismiss the Net as pr0n and spam: I send them to news.google.com. I tell them that, while the news stories are interesting, they are mostly what you'll see in the commercial media. But there's something there that's much more valuable: The lists of hundreds or thousands of news sources on each story. I suggest that they spend a little time looking through those lists for news sources they've never heard of, and visit them.
This is something that no previous commercial news source has delivered. You wanna hear N differently-biased reports of something going on in some part of the world? They're all there. Yeah, they're biased, but keep that in mind as you read, and as an intelligent person, you'll learn a lot.
Of course, this isn't exactly "passive information consumption". Google merely provides a convenient list of links. You have to actively dig through them, and read with a good amount of skepticism.
This really is something materially new in the news business. And now that google has prototyped it, we can expect that future news services will have to match it, or be dismissed as uninformative.
A real artist always knows her materials, right down to the last atom.
;-)
...)
Indeed. It's sometimes surprising how often lower-level details that you "shouldn't have to be aware of" stand up and bite you if you don't understand them.
Right now, I'm looking at a bizarre bug that has been plagueing me for a year or so, in which little chunks 3 or 4 extra bytes appear scattered through out downloaded web pages. I finally tracked it down to the HTTP level. How many web developers could tell you what "chunked" data is? I know now, even though I really "shouldn't have to be aware of" that, because the magic HTTP modules should all hide it from me.
Right. I'll submit bug reports eventually, when I have a bit more evidence. And then it'll take a while to get the library modules patched, and a lot longer before I can rely on them being installed at all customer sites.
So for the near future (a couple years), I'll have to have my code intercept the low-level HTTP stuff, read the headers, and figure out when chunked data is coming in. And I have the fun of handling whatever mishandled decoding of this has been passed up to my code.
What I think I may do is just dispense with the library HTTP modules, and do the low-level TCP connection and HTTP protocol myself. How hard can it be?
(Actually, I know how hard it can be. This won't be the first time I've dropped HTTP modules and written my own routines to do what the library didn't do correctly. And I've saved that code
Does that mean he managed to convince someone he was a computer?
;-) for their engineering drawings. She used machines to do this, of course, but those machines were called "calculators".
My wife likes to tell people that her first job, back in the late 70's, was with a Civil Engineering firm in New York, where her job title was "Computer". She did the calculations (and error checking
They've since changed the job title.
Funny how quickly such terminology can change.
there's still issues with making the platform "plug-n-play" enough so you can get real use out of it without being a somewhat familiar with linux at the start.... especially when it comes to Synching with a desktop.
Well, frankly, I find all the PDA sync things rather uncompelling. They all seem to use secret, binary data formats, so I can't do anything with them. And they can't back up my personal files, just the data from a select list of apps.
When I can use scp and/or rsync to do the job, then I'll be impressed.
Of course, this shouldn't be impressive. I routinely use these to sync machines that are thousands of miles apart, and I don't need any special adapters or cables. Why can't a PDA be as easy?
I await with anticipation the M$ and RIAA stories soon forth coming.
/. window, the M$ stories of the morning are the 2nd and 3rd below this one.
...
Hey, in my
But I don't see any RIAA stories yet. So I'm eagerly awaiting
After this suit RH needs to sue SCO for slander, own them and end this whole affair with the death of SCO. That is, after devaluing their stock hopefully before the execs can dump it.
;-)
Too late. If you'd been following all the SCO news, you'd have read that their execs have been quietly dumping their stock for some time now, ever since they successfully jacked up the price.
Then they'll retire to Rio, where there's no extradition to the US.
Sun could also, conceivably, devise a Linux-like OS
I suppose I am capable of conceiving that, but it is a ridiculous idea.
Um, how so? Both are, at their heart, implementations of the POSIX standard. This makes them more alike than different, for all purposes other than kernel work.
I'd reply that Sun already has a "Linux-like OS". It's called "Solaris".
And, yes, I've ported code between them. It usually just compiles and runs, without any changes.
The main difference is that Sun's software is not nearly as open as it was 10 or 15 years ago. You can't get a source tree and compile it yourself, unless you want to pay a significant sum for a source license. So if you have serious security concerns and want your people to examine the source (and recompile it), you should go with linus or one of the *BSDs.
But this isn't a difference in these systems; it's just a difference in accessibility of the source. The few functional differences are in the various extensions that each has added to their POSIX base.
P2P is used to download the latest Linux kernel, the Matrix preview when the official site was slashdotted, etc. It might stop having millions of users downloading copyrighted stuff, ...
;-)
But note that both of these examples are in fact copyrighted. These are actually examples of "content" producers understanding that P2P is useful to them.
Of course, in both of these cases, the owners want you to download the particular files for free. The reasons are different, which just makes it a more useful example. There are many reasons why a copyright holder might want to give out part or all of their material for free.
This isn't anything unusual. Thus, in the auto industry, people have been pointing out for decades that the actual vehicles are sold "at cost", or sometimes slightly below cost. The reasons is that it's a competetive market. But the market for add-ons and spare parts is much less competetive. So it makes sense to give the primary product away cheap, when you can get a good price for the after-market goods.
This actually applies to the linux kernel quite nicely. I made about $120k last year developing software that primarily runs on linux (though it is in fact highly portable, and runs of FreeBSD and OSX just as well). It's all highly-specialized software for one client. Yeah, I could have written it for Windows. But this client has gone for reliability and security in a big way. So from my viewpoint, the more "free" copies of linux that are downloaded, the better. I'd bet that most of the prime movers behind linux would agree with this.
The OS is just a platform, after all. The real money is to be made in writing the add-ons. If you want "reliable" and "secure" in your product's list of features, you want it running on an OS with those properties. And you want that OS to be easily available to your clients.
Note also that the big news sources are now giving away their main news stories for free on their web sites. I doubt if they object at all if you email copies to friends. Some of them are reporting that their web sites are in fact making a profit now. It doesn't take much digging to find out why. Those front-page stories are "loss leaders", much as the matrix previews were. But if you want full access to their news archives, well, that'll cost you.
The idea that P2P is only for piracy is the dying scream of buggy-whip makers. We can hope that they die soon, and are replaced by others that have a better understanding of the world that's developing.
(OTOH, if you google for "buggy whip", among the metaphorical uses you'll find a number of mostly small companies selling them.
why would you think that? intellectual property has only become stronger over the last 20, 100, 500 years.
Of course, it hasn't been a steady advance, and there have been occasional major setbacks to the progression.
For example, a bit over 200 years back, there was a revolution in North America, and when a new Constitution was established, it restricted "IP" to a short time, and only when it advances the arts and sciences. Some economists and historians have claimed that this was one of the major reasons the US became the world's biggest economic power. Of course, now this has mostly been cancelled by recent laws extending patent and copyright indefinitely, and allowing them for rather silly "inventions". So the US's technical lead is probably ended, at least for the near future.
But it's always possible we'll see another such revolution, either in the US or in another part of the world that wants to take the lead in technology while the US strangles its own creative folks. It has happened before, after all; there's no reason to believe it can't ever happen again.
Furthermore, to see MS's "shared source", you have to sign a NDA. This means that if you find some serious problem, you can't warn their other marks - uh, I mean customers - about it.
And because of this, they can fix it at their leisure. Or not. Or fix it for you, and leave it in for selected other customers.
If you're responsible for a government agency's security, you really should be aware of this, or you're not competent for your position.
It's obviously a good thing that governments are mandating the use of OSS.</sarcasm>
Actually, there have been very few cases of governments mandating linux or any OSS. Rather, most of the stories have been about governments declaring that such software will be considered. This is something very different.
And one could argue that the world is in a sad state when we need laws requiring that governments consider more than just one or two products. But fact is, we do need this, or in most cases the purchasing departments would only consider a very short list. And if you hadn't greased the right palms, your product wouldn't be considered at all, no matter how good or cheap it might be.
You're basically right, but for the wrong reason. The real reason is that we can't agree on what "security" means. Some things can't be made secure because, under some reasonable definitions of "secure", you'd have to disable the security for the system to function at all.
My favorite example is a definition that I ran across across a while ago. A "secure" system was defined as one in which an unauthorized user couldn't get access to any files and copy the data to another computer.
Now this probably sounds like a very reasonable definition, and in a lot of cases, it is. But just recently we had an interesting story here that reminded me of that definition. It was the story about the survey that purported to show that twice as many linux-based web servers as windows-based servers had been successfully "hacked".
When I read the claimed numbers, one thing that I noticed was that they were almost exactly the same as the Netcraft numbers on apache and IIS we servers, which of course mostly run on linux and windows respectively. This made me wonder what their definition of a "secure" server might be.
Then it occurred to me: They were using the above definition. A "hacked" server was one that gave up files to unauthorized users! If you have connected to a web server without authorization from the server's owner, and got back any web page, you have just seccussfully broken into that server and made off with data.
By this definition, of course, all web servers that work at all are totally insecure, since their fundamental task is to hand out files to all users. And to make a web server secure by this definition means that you must shut it down totally.
Now, this may sound facetious to some. But I can assure you that people do write such definitions and take them seriously. Without a good deal of thought, any committee's definition of "security" is likely to be as bad, and will outlaw many of the things that you want your own computer to do.
In this case, it is possible to revise the definition so that it works for web servers. But it takes a bit more thought. The resulting definition will be quite a bit more complex, and will be phrased subtly. You might want to try writing the definition, and then apply it to various things you do on the Net to see whether it will block you. You might be surprised at how difficult it is to get it right.
Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think there's anything wrong with a browser downloading Flash, or data in any other format.
What I find really annoying is that current browsers insist that they are going to handle a list of file formats themselves, in their own window, and you can't do anything about it.
If they were forced to give me the option of saying to handle MIME type foo/bar in a separate app, that would be a huge improvement.
For example, on my cute new Powerbook, I've found that I can't feed things like Flash or XML to an independent app. The browsers (IE, mozilla, Safari) insist that they will handle those themselves, with their standard plugin. It doesn't matter whether I have an app of my own to handle them; my attempts to add the handler to the list are rebuffed.
The XML case is especially annoying. I'me testing some XML apps, and I'd really like to use some of them as plugins. I've asked a couple of times in the usual mozilla fora, and the answer seems to be "Tough luck; we're smarter than you, and we know how to handle XML, so we won't let you do it." Right. Their XML handler chokes on the slightest syntax error, fails to show any of the text, and thus gives a big middle finger to any poor schmuck trying to debug his XML generator.
Similarly, when I download MP3s or MIDI files to mozilla on my Powerbook, it insists on feeding them to the embedded Quicktime, and ignores my attempts to use a separate handler. The Quicktime plugin has only a dumb slider for backspacing, plus start/stop buttons. You can't do anything with the data at all. Again, I asked in a couple of newsgroups, and was told in no uncertain terms that I'm too stupid to know how to do such things, and I should just leave it to my betters.
It's interesting that on my linux box, MP3 and MIDI can be handed off by mozilla to a separate app. This lets me do lots of interesting stuff with those formats. But with mozilla on my Powerbook, the same thing doesn't work.
If "seamless" plugins are eliminated, maybe we can get browsers that are friendly to not-so-dumb users. It would be really useful (especially for XML and MIDI) if we could point to a separate app to handle all files of any specific type.
Actually, I suspect that the ability to do this might be buried in the current browsers. But it doesn't do me much good if I can't learn how to use it. And note that, with mozilla, Preferences -> Navigator -> Helper Applications doesn't allow one to override the builtin handling of some types (such as XML). Some types are handled by builtin plugins, and if they don't do what you need, tough.
This is obviously just an attempt by Apple Corps to be bought out. ;-)
TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.
Heh. I already have a situation like this in my pocket. I have a cell phone (kyocera 6035) that runs PalmOS, and has a real web browser. To do something on the Web, what it does is makes a phone call and brings up a PPP connection on the "line".
This means that I have IP implemented on PPP over a voice line, which is emulated over a digital packet network. The resulting IP network probably runs at least 1000 times slower than just doing IP on the low-level packet network would run.
Why don't they do it the logical way? Well, if they did that, they'd only be able to charge for the traffic, which for a typical web page is only a few packets. But the way they do it, they can charge you around half a minute of air time to make the connection, and then charge you air time for the full time of the connection, even though most of the time you aren't sending packets at all because you're reading. And if you forget to hang up, they charge you the full price for your idle time.
I can see them doing VoIP by implementing it on top of the PPP link that is on top of the voice line that's on top of the packet network. It's no mystery why it's slow, when you realize all this.
"Most of these were for providing support, ..."
Yeah; I usually do this. Any program more than a few dozen lines, and I start adding debugging hooks.
They're never "hidden", though. I always document them. Of course, I can't force users to read the documentation.
And I don't remove the debug hooks for a "release" version. When it's out at some customer's site and they call you asking what's wrong is when you REALLY need those hooks.
It's really handy to be able to be able to tell a user "Just add the following line to the config file, wait a bit, and tell me what it says."
I've worked on several projects where we added an HTTP interface, with the app listening on some port. All configurable, of course, but usually turned on by default. Then when a user called with a problem, if they are on the Net, we can ftp to that port, start typing GET commands, and learn about its state. This is a real back door, very easy to implement, and incredibly helpful when there are problems.
Of course, you do want to document them, so that the user can't accuse you of sneaking something in on them. And make sure there's a simple way to turn them on and off. If the app has a config file, a line like "HTTP-Port: N" does the job, with N=0 to disable the back door.
Then you can say "Well, I can't see what's wrong, because the HTTP port is turned off. Yes, I understand your security concerns. But I can't help you if your security won't let me talk to the program."
Usually this isn't much of a problem, since new users rarely notice that stuff, and leave the back door enabled. When their security folks discover it, it's really handy to be able to point to the fact that it's all documented in the manual and the sample config file. Then they say "Oh, yeah." turn it off, and don't bug you.