Isn't that a little far-fetched? The company isn't named after the book, and I think that most people around here aren't so rabid that they won't have anything to do with something that relates to copyrights and patents over several degrees.
Ayn Rand lived and wrote in a very different era from ours. I see no trouble combining the notion of free software with her ideas: I think people who do have misunderstood free software just as bad as Gates and Balmer when they claim it is "un-American" (or more likely they have bought into the misunderstanding MS is trying to foster). Free software is not about socialism, or even charity - everybody who writes it is working freely and in their own interest.
Besides, shouldn't "KAK is married to a man who made a fortune from writing proprietary software" be a bigger issue in that case?
DRM is not real technology because it isn't inventing anything new. All it is doing is taking existing real encryption technology, and making it act against the user rather than for him.
(Firstly, it's Digital Restrictions Management and nothing else - don't propogate the doublespeak.)
Can somebody who runs a company founded on the basis of closing off computers from their users, and making it impossible to hack them really be called a geek? This is a company that lauds and depends on the DMCA - which is the antithesis of everything that being a geek or a hacker means.
And besides, Intertrust makes software based DRM, which shows that they can't have any actual technical skills or they would know their product can be defenition not work. Except for the "let's get rid of the open PC platform all together" crowd (aka TCPA and Palladium), anybody selling DRM is selling snake oil. Apparently the NY Times got fooled.
It is not necessarily wrong, but not completely uncontroversial either. Certainly it is more common among people with a high exposure to noise, but there is no proof that is an effect of unrecoverable hearing damage.
It should be noted that if left in complete (unnaturally total) silence, almost 80% of all people will report hearing some background noise. And EEG scans will show that there is always some level of neural activity around the hearing center.
The most compelling theory I have heard is there is always some level of subjective "imaginary" noise in the human mind, that our subcontious sorts out, but that mild damage to the inner ear can change it's nature, which causes us to percieve it (note the temporary tinnitus that people get after exposure to loud noise). If this change is percieved as a threat, and the person continues to pay attention and listen to it, then one continues to hear it.
The problem with going after the silent PC at all cost is that the level of noise is not purely objective, and there is a strong psychological aspect to how much a sound will disturb you. A lot of people have computers that sound like F15s during take-off, but seem completely surprised when you even mention the noise to them: other people start trying to silence their computers, yet end up finding even the slightest hum annoying.
The problem here is the way our brain work in regards to sound. If a sound is percieved as a threat, then the sound amplified subcontiously, where-as ambient sounds that are percieved as mundane are muffled. It is not difficult to understand why we have evolved that way.
When you start trying to silence your computer, it is easy to start thinking of any sound you hear as a "failure" and thus a threat, which will make you focus on it. Thus you have people who get a silent power supply, only to suddenly find themselves driven up the wall by the CPU-fan, and then the harddisk.
The extreme end of all this, of course, is tinnitus. I've suffered from this condition for ten years, and it is like having a noisy a computer inside your head that nothing can turn off. But at the same time, it works just the same psychologically: if you start fearing the sound, running from it, thinking about how it will be there for the rest of ones life, the condition becomes unbarable. Whereas if you can tell yourself that it really isn't that bad, and learn to just accept it, you can live almost undisturbed. (The latter is easier said then done, even when you realize it is true - myself I tend to have good periods followed by bad.) Some people even argue that tinnitus is entirely psychosomatic in this sense (I would like to believe them).
So, just as a warning, a silent PC isn't a bad thing, but be careful about how far you take yourself down the road of fighting the noise.
But, seriously, that is so sad. Does anyone realize that we've already lost the war against viruses and are now to the point where we are trying to overthrow firmly entrenched tyranny?
(Likewise with spam and Microsoft)
And DRM (I knew it was coming, never thought it would be Apple...) And ISPs limiting what you can do with an account. And proprietary file formats. And software patents.
Thats what she thought was the reason for the machine "rebooting" itself every now and then. Honestly, i have not had the time to figure out why XP does this on my AMD Athlon machine- auto-reboot 2/3 times per week? Till the time i know the exact reason i would just think that there is something wrong with power-supply cable!
I don't know if you are being facetious here, but you do realize this is a SoBig.F infection, right?
Why on earth would they put Linux on them? They are only making the damn things cause Billy told them to.
It's not like there was a market for these things, it was just Billy's latest idea about what the future would be. You know, like MS Bob, MSN dialup, UPNP, voice recognition, and all those other things that never amounted to anything. Bill Gates is probably the world's worst technology visionary (*): he is so bad that even with all his power and money, he cannot even force into the world the things he imagines are the next big thing.
(*) To answer the "why is he so rich then?" questions, I like to say that the fact that Billy was two years behind everybody else on grasping the significance of the Internet shows what a lousy visionary he is. That he turned his whole company around on a dime when he _did_ get it, shows what a brilliant industrialist he is.
I couldn't agree more. All the anti-drug programs were important to me: they taught me all about which drugs were interesting and which weren't, how to go about getting ahold of them, what to do with them, etc etc. Hell, even now, if somebody comes along with a new drug, I always look it up on one of the anti-drug sites on the net to see what effects I should be expecting.
Hardly unique, European farm policy is a totalitarian fuckup of gargantuan proportions as well.
Between them, the protection of farmers on both sides of the atlantic has done more to harm the third world then any "globalist exploitation." Yet you don't see a lot of protest for a free markets on produce...
Even if he retained copyright when he sold the book to his publisher, he almost certainly signed an exclusive deal on distribution, and thus was infringing when he distributed it (for money!) to you.
You may see people who are categorised as terrorists as automatically evil, but what would you do if your country had been occupied by a foreign power for the past 50 years, who treated you as a second class citizen, and was able to shoot people, such as your brother, without any form of punishment?
I'd blow up children and teenagers in cafe's of course! How could anyone ever think of doing something else?
I would do this especially because I would realize that this could only lead to escalation, make things more difficult for my people, and delay any hope of peaceful solution.
To the extent that term "evil" has any meaning, that is exactly what terrorists are. This sort of apologism is just stupid.
With a probability of 1, all dicussions involving Nazis, Terrorists, etc eventually degenerate into a discussion regarding the validity and applicablity of Godwin's law.
He said stream from the iPod. Music on the iPod is already compressed. It does create the problem that speaker systems would have to know all the audio codecs though.
Skype uses a P2P network (in the popular sense of the word, not in the technical sense in which case all end to end VoIP is P2P) to achieve two things:
1) The directory service.
By keeping the directory service in a P2P network, they don't need a centralized directory server and can save money (consider if ICQ had done this - Mirabilis wouldn't have had to sell out to AOL). Technically, this is interesting exactly how they are pulling this off, since searching in such a directory is harder than P2P (Kazaa searches never spanned the whole network - but Skype searches have to).
2) NAT traversal
Basically, Skype seems to solve the NAT problem by finding some broadband sucker who isn't behind a NAT and having him proxy the connections. NAT is a big problem for VoIP - especially since hardware VoIP devices are made to plug into home LANs (99% of which are NATed).
I would like to agree with the optimistic outlook that Skype will fail with it's proprietary protocol, but I don't see history showing that. Look at IM: what we have seen is that in these cases the network effect is so strong that if the first person to get it right is proprietary it can be damn difficult to break. At least until TCPA is deployed we will be able to reverse engineer the protocol (though it should be noted that there has not been much success with reverse engineering the Kazaa protocol).
Part of me wants to sit down and spend the next three months doing nothing but writing a good work-alike for Skype that uses an open protocol, but unfortunately I don't have that kind of time...
This isn't about spyware (the first paragraph says so), but about programs that completely monitor users, and that to my knowledge are not bundled with freeware downloads.
These programs are simply trojans, nothing else. It's just BackOrifice or Netbus for the less technically inclined, and maybe without the remote control features.
The point I'm trying to make here is that indeed this is a problem of Research vs. Production. Freenet is bent on testing and trying new and different methodologies. While this is a noble task to perform, with white papers and honest to goodness actual science in computer science (wow, does that actually happen?) there does reach a point that it needs to move more toward software engineering where specifications written in plain old English (or other common written language between developers) is used.
I would argue, that since Freenet arguably doesn't work, it has not yet nearly reached the point. Trying to a freeze a protocol to allow multiple implementations at this point would result in multiple non-working implementations...
That said, I do think there are problems with the methology that has hampered the development. A greater emphasis should have been placed on some sort of duality between simulation and testing in the wild: where equal effort was placed on trying to simulate the network in each stage of it's development. That is easy to say, but it is understandable that the people working on stuff like this for free will always veer toward the hope of short term benefits to the visible product.
Also, a lot of the "science" is rather suspect. The core arguments for why the network "should" work are veyr heuristic, and no real analysis has been that conclusively shows the algorithm working as expected.
There is enough there to get one through the first six months of development. If one gets that far, filling out the missing details and changes (which AFAIK are all backwards compatible) should be no problem.
There are many things wrong with Freenet - after having used it over a long period of time I could write a book about the problems - but that the protocol isn't specified is not one of them.
As somebody working in a field where ballpoint pens and chalk are still the most important instruments (ie mathematics), I swear by Ballograf Epoca pens and am lost without them.
Plus, they aren't extremely expensive, which is helpful if you are like me and pens have an expected lifetime of maybe a month before they are misplaced.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that a little far-fetched? The company isn't named after the book, and I think that most people around here aren't so rabid that they won't have anything to do with something that relates to copyrights and patents over several degrees.
Ayn Rand lived and wrote in a very different era from ours. I see no trouble combining the notion of free software with her ideas: I think people who do have misunderstood free software just as bad as Gates and Balmer when they claim it is "un-American" (or more likely they have bought into the misunderstanding MS is trying to foster). Free software is not about socialism, or even charity - everybody who writes it is working freely and in their own interest.
Besides, shouldn't "KAK is married to a man who made a fortune from writing proprietary software" be a bigger issue in that case?
The comment in question was posted from a box running:
bash-2.05b$ uname -a
SunOS xxx.xxxxxxx.xxx 5.7 Generic_106541-16 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-80
Solaris may not be open sourced, but it is still a reasonably open system, and to my knowledge it isn't user hostile.
DRM is not real technology because it isn't inventing anything new. All it is doing is taking existing real encryption technology, and making it act against the user rather than for him.
(Firstly, it's Digital Restrictions Management and nothing else - don't propogate the doublespeak.)
Can somebody who runs a company founded on the basis of closing off computers from their users, and making it impossible to hack them really be called a geek? This is a company that lauds and depends on the DMCA - which is the antithesis of everything that being a geek or a hacker means.
And besides, Intertrust makes software based DRM, which shows that they can't have any actual technical skills or they would know their product can be defenition not work. Except for the "let's get rid of the open PC platform all together" crowd (aka TCPA and Palladium), anybody selling DRM is selling snake oil. Apparently the NY Times got fooled.
It is not necessarily wrong, but not completely uncontroversial either. Certainly it is more common among people with a high exposure to noise, but there is no proof that is an effect of unrecoverable hearing damage.
It should be noted that if left in complete (unnaturally total) silence, almost 80% of all people will report hearing some background noise. And EEG scans will show that there is always some level of neural activity around the hearing center.
The most compelling theory I have heard is there is always some level of subjective "imaginary" noise in the human mind, that our subcontious sorts out, but that mild damage to the inner ear can change it's nature, which causes us to percieve it (note the temporary tinnitus that people get after exposure to loud noise). If this change is percieved as a threat, and the person continues to pay attention and listen to it, then one continues to hear it.
Sorry to go off topic here.
The problem with going after the silent PC at all cost is that the level of noise is not purely objective, and there is a strong psychological aspect to how much a sound will disturb you. A lot of people have computers that sound like F15s during take-off, but seem completely surprised when you even mention the noise to them: other people start trying to silence their computers, yet end up finding even the slightest hum annoying.
The problem here is the way our brain work in regards to sound. If a sound is percieved as a threat, then the sound amplified subcontiously, where-as ambient sounds that are percieved as mundane are muffled. It is not difficult to understand why we have evolved that way.
When you start trying to silence your computer, it is easy to start thinking of any sound you hear as a "failure" and thus a threat, which will make you focus on it. Thus you have people who get a silent power supply, only to suddenly find themselves driven up the wall by the CPU-fan, and then the harddisk.
The extreme end of all this, of course, is tinnitus. I've suffered from this condition for ten years, and it is like having a noisy a computer inside your head that nothing can turn off. But at the same time, it works just the same psychologically: if you start fearing the sound, running from it, thinking about how it will be there for the rest of ones life, the condition becomes unbarable. Whereas if you can tell yourself that it really isn't that bad, and learn to just accept it, you can live almost undisturbed. (The latter is easier said then done, even when you realize it is true - myself I tend to have good periods followed by bad.) Some people even argue that tinnitus is entirely psychosomatic in this sense (I would like to believe them).
So, just as a warning, a silent PC isn't a bad thing, but be careful about how far you take yourself down the road of fighting the noise.
I had it wrong, Sobig.F is a mail worm. I was thinking about MS Blaster which infects through open ports and makes windows reboot.
But, seriously, that is so sad. Does anyone realize that we've already lost the war against viruses and are now to the point where we are trying to overthrow firmly entrenched tyranny?
(Likewise with spam and Microsoft)
And DRM (I knew it was coming, never thought it would be Apple...) And ISPs limiting what you can do with an account. And proprietary file formats. And software patents.
Thats what she thought was the reason for the machine "rebooting" itself every now and then. Honestly, i have not had the time to figure out why XP does this on my AMD Athlon machine- auto-reboot 2/3 times per week? Till the time i know the exact reason i would just think that there is something wrong with power-supply cable!
I don't know if you are being facetious here, but you do realize this is a SoBig.F infection, right?
Why on earth would they put Linux on them? They are only making the damn things cause Billy told them to.
It's not like there was a market for these things, it was just Billy's latest idea about what the future would be. You know, like MS Bob, MSN dialup, UPNP, voice recognition, and all those other things that never amounted to anything. Bill Gates is probably the world's worst technology visionary (*): he is so bad that even with all his power and money, he cannot even force into the world the things he imagines are the next big thing.
(*) To answer the "why is he so rich then?" questions, I like to say that the fact that Billy was two years behind everybody else on grasping the significance of the Internet shows what a lousy visionary he is. That he turned his whole company around on a dime when he _did_ get it, shows what a brilliant industrialist he is.
I couldn't agree more. All the anti-drug programs were important to me: they taught me all about which drugs were interesting and which weren't, how to go about getting ahold of them, what to do with them, etc etc. Hell, even now, if somebody comes along with a new drug, I always look it up on one of the anti-drug sites on the net to see what effects I should be expecting.
Thanks Gruff! (Or was that crime?)
Hardly unique, European farm policy is a totalitarian fuckup of gargantuan proportions as well.
Between them, the protection of farmers on both sides of the atlantic has done more to harm the third world then any "globalist exploitation." Yet you don't see a lot of protest for a free markets on produce...
Even if he retained copyright when he sold the book to his publisher, he almost certainly signed an exclusive deal on distribution, and thus was infringing when he distributed it (for money!) to you.
You may see people who are categorised as terrorists as automatically evil, but what would you do if your country had been occupied by a foreign power for the past 50 years, who treated you as a second class citizen, and was able to shoot people, such as your brother, without any form of punishment?
I'd blow up children and teenagers in cafe's of course! How could anyone ever think of doing something else?
I would do this especially because I would realize that this could only lead to escalation, make things more difficult for my people, and delay any hope of peaceful solution.
To the extent that term "evil" has any meaning, that is exactly what terrorists are. This sort of apologism is just stupid.
I hereby coin the Sprudel's Meta-Godwin Law:
With a probability of 1, all dicussions involving Nazis, Terrorists, etc eventually degenerate into a discussion regarding the validity and applicablity of Godwin's law.
Had it not been for him, the U.S. space program wouldn't be what it is today.
You mean an administrative quagmire that hasn't done anything but scramble to justify it's funding for the last thirty-four years?
He said stream from the iPod. Music on the iPod is already compressed. It does create the problem that speaker systems would have to know all the audio codecs though.
Skype uses a P2P network (in the popular sense of the word, not in the technical sense in which case all end to end VoIP is P2P) to achieve two things:
1) The directory service.
By keeping the directory service in a P2P network, they don't need a centralized directory server and can save money (consider if ICQ had done this - Mirabilis wouldn't have had to sell out to AOL). Technically, this is interesting exactly how they are pulling this off, since searching in such a directory is harder than P2P (Kazaa searches never spanned the whole network - but Skype searches have to).
2) NAT traversal
Basically, Skype seems to solve the NAT problem by finding some broadband sucker who isn't behind a NAT and having him proxy the connections. NAT is a big problem for VoIP - especially since hardware VoIP devices are made to plug into home LANs (99% of which are NATed).
I would like to agree with the optimistic outlook that Skype will fail with it's proprietary protocol, but I don't see history showing that. Look at IM: what we have seen is that in these cases the network effect is so strong that if the first person to get it right is proprietary it can be damn difficult to break. At least until TCPA is deployed we will be able to reverse engineer the protocol (though it should be noted that there has not been much success with reverse engineering the Kazaa protocol).
Part of me wants to sit down and spend the next three months doing nothing but writing a good work-alike for Skype that uses an open protocol, but unfortunately I don't have that kind of time...
This isn't about spyware (the first paragraph says so), but about programs that completely monitor users, and that to my knowledge are not bundled with freeware downloads.
These programs are simply trojans, nothing else. It's just BackOrifice or Netbus for the less technically inclined, and maybe without the remote control features.
From what I have read, ROTK will go the theatres as a three and a half hour film, so the normal edition will be comparable to the earlier extendeds.
The point I'm trying to make here is that indeed this is a problem of Research vs. Production. Freenet is bent on testing and trying new and different methodologies. While this is a noble task to perform, with white papers and honest to goodness actual science in computer science (wow, does that actually happen?) there does reach a point that it needs to move more toward software engineering where specifications written in plain old English (or other common written language between developers) is used.
I would argue, that since Freenet arguably doesn't work, it has not yet nearly reached the point. Trying to a freeze a protocol to allow multiple implementations at this point would result in multiple non-working implementations...
That said, I do think there are problems with the methology that has hampered the development. A greater emphasis should have been placed on some sort of duality between simulation and testing in the wild: where equal effort was placed on trying to simulate the network in each stage of it's development. That is easy to say, but it is understandable that the people working on stuff like this for free will always veer toward the hope of short term benefits to the visible product.
Also, a lot of the "science" is rather suspect. The core arguments for why the network "should" work are veyr heuristic, and no real analysis has been that conclusively shows the algorithm working as expected.
There is enough there to get one through the first six months of development. If one gets that far, filling out the missing details and changes (which AFAIK are all backwards compatible) should be no problem.
There are many things wrong with Freenet - after having used it over a long period of time I could write a book about the problems - but that the protocol isn't specified is not one of them.
The protocol specification is here.
Actually, those who can't be dentists teach P.E.
The Swedes know how to make pens.
As somebody working in a field where ballpoint pens and chalk are still the most important instruments (ie mathematics), I swear by Ballograf Epoca pens and am lost without them.
Plus, they aren't extremely expensive, which is helpful if you are like me and pens have an expected lifetime of maybe a month before they are misplaced.