Would it have even been possible to make this album if the sources of those clips had been DRM restricted?
These days, the recording companies seem to have a special system in place to trade sample rights. The liner notes often say something like "sample licensed through so-and-so recording company special products division". I'm sure that if DRM was somehow preventing their sampling (although they would probably work around this by holding down the shift key like anyone else), they could arrange to get an official sample straight from the source.
The ironic thing is that the Beastie Boys' early days, before court rulings that forced people to pay up, they did massive sampling without attributing the sources. I have their "Paul's Boutique" album from 1989 (A pretty good CD, IMO). I've seen a blurb somewhere that said that an album like this couldn't be made today, given that each track contains at least 2 or 3 recognizable samples. In fact, I'd say that the samples are so prominent, they are the main "musical instrument" on the record. Many of these weren't obscure samples either; I recognized some of the main "hooks" out of several top-40 hits. There are zero credits in the liner notes mentioning any of these samples.
Compare this to The Verve, who tried to get away with only a slightly worse sample ripoff a decade later, and got their asses handed to them on a platter by the Rolling Stones' lawyers.
Ok, I'm a little rusty on Windows because I haven't used it for web browsing in the past few years. How do all of these things get installed? Did she have to click "yes" on an ActiveX install dialog 1447 different times, or is there a totally automatic way to hijack the computer?
If its an automatic breakin, aren't there already recently passed "get tough on cybercrime" laws on the books that would classify the spyware author as an unlawful combatant or something?
it's wrong to assume people who feel the 'love' have a deeper understanding. understanding is a function of intelligence, motivation (even money), and experience.
People who "love" the field will usually be continuing to program and learn computers even during their off hours, while the people just in it for the money are out golfing or watching TV. They have a natural advantage in motivation, and over time they will gain a big advantage in experience.
When I was a kid, there was an animated series on TV that explained what race car steering wheel buttons do.
For example, one button controls the cars "Jump" feature, allowing it to jump over canyons, rivers and the like.
Another button extends the circular saws from the front bumper so that the car can race through the jungle at full speed.
Another one closes the top and enables underwater operation, and there's one that extends a set of wings so that the car can fly for short distances.
The exact functions of the buttons vary by race team. Some of the evil race teams install unfair buttons, like spiked wheel hub extenders or fire dispensers.
I really think that these buttons were overused and shifted the focus of the drivers from racing to implementing dangerous technical tricks. If they had only put some of the button effort into fuel tank safety, many of the lesser-known drivers would have avoided gruesome deaths in huge fiery explosions. I'm still emotionally scarred from witnessing some of those scenes at such a young age.
If you're flying in a commercial airliner, you've got about 13% of the potential+kinetic energy that it requires to win the X-prize.
However, once you've won the X-prize, you've still only achieved about 3% of the potential+kinetic energy that it requires to reach orbit.
Considering that you've got to carry your rocket fuel with you as you go, achieving orbit is even harder than the 3% number would suggest. There's still a long way to go.
It's going to be a long time before private astronauts competing for prize money spend more than a few fleeting minutes in space, much less think about going to Mars.
VC covers them all, and produces code that is faster and more compact than gcc, and does so in less time than gcc takes.
So I guess if anything ought to be posted on the new gcc news site, it ought to be how gcc is catching up to commerical alternatives (which, though not Free, are free for download).
The last time I checked, the free version of VC had optimization disabled. Has this situation changed?
There is no one answer to the question "which language is faster?". It all depends on that the workload is.
For example, Java with its JIT can easily match a C compiler on bit-banging and number crunching small data sets when there's no memory allocation going on. However, that isn't what most people are waiting for when they run typical interactive applications.
If a system is not I/O bound, most applications tend to be doing a lot of string manipulation or similar operations on small objects. When Java operates on strings, it tends to create, discard and garbage-collect a large number of short-lived string objects because Java's strings are immutable. This consumes quite a bit of CPU and memory.
Some C++ applications are written the same way. Many KDE applications are rather sluggish, probably because they are taking advantage of a lot of automatic management of a lot of QT objects. STL-based C++ apps can also be sluggish if you use high-level containers like tree maps without a keen awareness about what kinds of extra copying and thrashing can happen under the hood when you use them. Even in C, if you use high-level libraries, you can get sluggish performance, as some of the more bloated Gnome apps demonstrate.
However, C++ programs, even STL-based ones, may also be written in a different style that takes advantage of mutable strings and handles object allocation manually. This tends to reuse data structures in place, eliminating memory management overhead, and it has the very important effect of keeping caches and page tables much more localized. This is more bug-prone than the alternative, but can provide a substantial performance improvement that Java can't hope to touch on a similar dataset. The drawback is that the app is much more likely to crash unless it was written by a top-notch developer; in fact, this kind of programming is the cause of many of the security problems plaguing the various OSes over the years.
(People often point out that nobody writes kernels in Java. That's because they tend to be written using the manual memory management style with as many static data structures as possible to squeeze out more performance. People don't use popular high-level C++ libraries to write kernels for the same reasons.)
Bottom line, the answer to which language is faster will always be "it depends". It depends on what the program is doing, and it depends on how the program was written. A couple of datapoints from a language shootout don't help to resolve the issues.
I was reading about the U.S. airforce's SAGE systems a while ago. They built a couple of dozen of these tube-based computers that consumed ~1 megawatt each. The last ones weren't taken offline until the 1980s.
The funny part is that these were built to coordinate air defenses against a Soviet bomber strike, but towards the end of their life they had to buy replacement tubes from countries in the Soviet bloc because they were the only places that still manufactured them.
The Hindenberg accident was just the most memorable. However, most of the major dirigibles of the era were destroyed in mishaps. A lot of them got twisted to bits in thunderstorms; flying in those storm magnets was kind of like hanging out in a floating trailer park.
The most famous exception to this, the Graf Zeppelin, was memorable mainly because it was able to operate so long without being lost in an accident.
The Hindenburg was really just the last straw. Not to mention that even in the 1930s airplanes could transport a similar number of passengers faster, with fewer crew, and without needing a vessel comparable in size to the Titanic.
I don't get to put "license restrictions" on the taxes I pay, so the government should not be allowed to put license restrictions on code it develops with those taxes.
Ok, but then why should you be allowed to put license restrictions on that tax-funded code?
Yep, my PDA is at the bottom of a drawer. A couple of years ago I "upgraded" to an $0.89 Mead 3x5-inch 80-sheet notepad, along with a tiny keychain pen to operate it. It fits in my pocket, holds all of my contact info, calender info, and todo lists, and has great ergonomics.
486 engineering samples were available in June 1989, but they were buggy as hell. There were several severe problems with features such as the page table logic in early steppings.
Later in the year, IBM introduced an upgrade kludge 486 piggy-back board that could be shoehorned into their 386-based PS/2 Model 80s. However, IIRC, these all had to be recalled due to the bugs in the early 486s.
End users didn't get to see a significant number of correctly functioning 486 systems until early in 1990.
BTW, if you ever saw the processor specs for the i860, its byzantine complexity made the x86 architecture look clean and elegant. There's no wonder it never took off.
like the Somerset farmer who got a demand for his 17mph tractor being 150 miles away in London
I for one support measures that discourage people from driving inefficient polluting farm equipment hundreds of miles just to go shopping in the city. Attempting to maneuver a bulky tractor on cramped London streets was surely a safety menace to motorists and pedestrians alike. He should have considered taking some form of public transportation instead.
If RFID tags can help keep tractors and combine harvesters off of our city streets, then I support them 110%.
If you wanted to create a CPU called 'Orgasmatron', you could since trademarks only apply to a specific line of products
Nevertheless, I doubt that you could get away naming a product "Orgasmatron", since AFAIK it was a word made up just for Woody Allen's movie. It has no generic meaning outside of the context of the film, and using it would imply that you had some kind of association with the producers of Sleeper, regardless of the product category.
For the similar reasons, it is highly unlikely that you would be allowed to sell computers under the name "Viagra Systems" unless you did a deal with Pfizer.
Here are a few security tips that I use to help keep my passwords secure:
Don't impress your passwords into soft clay tablets then bake them and leave them in the ruins of your civilization.
Never glaze your passwords onto pottery. Even breaking the pottery into shards is not a secure way to dispose of them.
Do not write your passwords onto parchment then leave them rolled up in caves in a desert environment.
Remember, security through obscurity doesn't work. Even if you keep your passwords in a totally hidden chamber under thousands of tons of stone, determined hackers will still be able to find them.
I don't think it's the government's business to tell me how much to charge for my music.
Copyright was created to "promote useful arts and sciences". It was not created to allow you to determine how much to charge for your music, or just to give you control over your own work after you've published it.
If developments in technology create an environment where the maximum amount of quality content is produced under a system where the artist does not individually set the price, then the government would be perfectly within its mandate to change the rules to implement that.
Your current control over the distribution of your work is a windfall side-effect of the current implementation of copyright; it is not a god-given entitlement. The current system was designed for a world where all media were write-once, and printing presses were hugely expensive. This system is breaking down in a world where most media will be rewriteable and almost free, and every citizen has his own printing press and distribution channel.
With new technology, there is almost no way to enforce the artificial scarcity needed to back the current copyright system without creating an oppressive police state. Your control over your work is not worth forcing us all to live under a police state.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which.conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
The funny thing is, I've been shopping around for TV tuner cards on NewEgg.com. It's scary how many customer reviews slam various cards for having horribly buggy Windows drivers and/or applications. But they're all just SOL, stuck with the crashes, unless the card manufacturer deigns to patch their code.
At least with Linux they would potentially have a little more control over the situation.
The problem is that the current technology can't deal with unknown situations/objects, maybe in a controlled enviroment with selected things added and removed but in a desert there is very little chance.
What it boils down to is that there's something horribly wrong with the current approach to "AI". Nature solves problems very similar to this with a totally different approach. Take a cockroach for example. Its task is probably much harder than this "grand challenge". It must survive in the world for several weeks or months while: finding its own fuel, avoiding hostile predators, finding a suitable mate, and include a control system that supports walking in any orientation along with controlled flight through the air.
What computing horsepower drives this task? A few milligrams of wet neurons that probably consume a few microwatts.
Even if a cockroach weren't up to driving one of these vehicles through the desert, any small bird probably has enough signal processing power to handle the chore. They certainly are able to handle flying through a thicket of tree branches, a pretty tough challenge in itself. How much does a house finch brain and vision system weigh? Maybe 1 gram?
Back in the 80s I majored in AI briefly, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the incredible pattern matching abilities of living organisms can't be effectively modeled by piping numbers through a single accumulator register. The highly interconnected architecture of a brain is totally different. (Many of my professors seemed to think that they had some deep secret insight to "intelligence" because they were hacking in Lisp. What was really happening was that they were caught up in their own cleverness in using recursion and macros to create layers of abstraction. But that's just tricky discreet math, not self-awareness.)
Now that computers are 1000X faster, my assessment is still valid. In fact, computers probably aren't even nearly 1000X faster at the algorithms that living organisms use to deal with the real world, because all of the computer speed tricks rely on locality of reference (caches). A brain, OTOH, is a fully associative processor that can compare an large chunk of input with a good amount of its entire memory in a single atomic operation. Its power comes from not having locality of reference.
IMHO, attempts at these kinds of projects are always going to result in clumsy, kludgy, stupid machines until some totally new approaches are developed for processing and information retrieval.
That would be a disastrous approach for Microsoft. First, there's the PR issue with peddling products that seem to be "out to get" the customers, rightly or wrongly.
Second, there are millions of casual pirates who install Windows on more machines than they've licensed, or who "borrow" a copy from work. Many of these people just aren't ever going to buy the appropriate number of copies of the OS, especially at retail prices. However, they do benefit Microsoft by remaining in the Windows "ecosystem", increasing its value through the network effect. If they crack down on these people, many of them will go to the effort to learn Linux or some other solution, thereby increasing the influence of alternative ecosystems at the expense of Microsoft's influence. This increased familiarity of alternative solutions in the general public would lower the barriers for Microsoft's lucrative customers, like entire businesses, from dumping all of their Microsoft products and switching to alternatives.
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But my legal name is {477ef70b-a53c-4658-9586-9d4e8541f02f}, you insensitive clod!
Its shell would have commands like: idkfa, idspispopd, idchoppers and (for administrators only) iddqd.
These days, the recording companies seem to have a special system in place to trade sample rights. The liner notes often say something like "sample licensed through so-and-so recording company special products division". I'm sure that if DRM was somehow preventing their sampling (although they would probably work around this by holding down the shift key like anyone else), they could arrange to get an official sample straight from the source.
The ironic thing is that the Beastie Boys' early days, before court rulings that forced people to pay up, they did massive sampling without attributing the sources. I have their "Paul's Boutique" album from 1989 (A pretty good CD, IMO). I've seen a blurb somewhere that said that an album like this couldn't be made today, given that each track contains at least 2 or 3 recognizable samples. In fact, I'd say that the samples are so prominent, they are the main "musical instrument" on the record. Many of these weren't obscure samples either; I recognized some of the main "hooks" out of several top-40 hits. There are zero credits in the liner notes mentioning any of these samples.
Compare this to The Verve, who tried to get away with only a slightly worse sample ripoff a decade later, and got their asses handed to them on a platter by the Rolling Stones' lawyers.
If its an automatic breakin, aren't there already recently passed "get tough on cybercrime" laws on the books that would classify the spyware author as an unlawful combatant or something?
People who "love" the field will usually be continuing to program and learn computers even during their off hours, while the people just in it for the money are out golfing or watching TV. They have a natural advantage in motivation, and over time they will gain a big advantage in experience.
For example, one button controls the cars "Jump" feature, allowing it to jump over canyons, rivers and the like.
Another button extends the circular saws from the front bumper so that the car can race through the jungle at full speed.
Another one closes the top and enables underwater operation, and there's one that extends a set of wings so that the car can fly for short distances.
The exact functions of the buttons vary by race team. Some of the evil race teams install unfair buttons, like spiked wheel hub extenders or fire dispensers.
I really think that these buttons were overused and shifted the focus of the drivers from racing to implementing dangerous technical tricks. If they had only put some of the button effort into fuel tank safety, many of the lesser-known drivers would have avoided gruesome deaths in huge fiery explosions. I'm still emotionally scarred from witnessing some of those scenes at such a young age.
However, once you've won the X-prize, you've still only achieved about 3% of the potential+kinetic energy that it requires to reach orbit.
Considering that you've got to carry your rocket fuel with you as you go, achieving orbit is even harder than the 3% number would suggest. There's still a long way to go.
It's going to be a long time before private astronauts competing for prize money spend more than a few fleeting minutes in space, much less think about going to Mars.
So I guess if anything ought to be posted on the new gcc news site, it ought to be how gcc is catching up to commerical alternatives (which, though not Free, are free for download).
The last time I checked, the free version of VC had optimization disabled. Has this situation changed?
For example, Java with its JIT can easily match a C compiler on bit-banging and number crunching small data sets when there's no memory allocation going on. However, that isn't what most people are waiting for when they run typical interactive applications.
If a system is not I/O bound, most applications tend to be doing a lot of string manipulation or similar operations on small objects. When Java operates on strings, it tends to create, discard and garbage-collect a large number of short-lived string objects because Java's strings are immutable. This consumes quite a bit of CPU and memory.
Some C++ applications are written the same way. Many KDE applications are rather sluggish, probably because they are taking advantage of a lot of automatic management of a lot of QT objects. STL-based C++ apps can also be sluggish if you use high-level containers like tree maps without a keen awareness about what kinds of extra copying and thrashing can happen under the hood when you use them. Even in C, if you use high-level libraries, you can get sluggish performance, as some of the more bloated Gnome apps demonstrate.
However, C++ programs, even STL-based ones, may also be written in a different style that takes advantage of mutable strings and handles object allocation manually. This tends to reuse data structures in place, eliminating memory management overhead, and it has the very important effect of keeping caches and page tables much more localized. This is more bug-prone than the alternative, but can provide a substantial performance improvement that Java can't hope to touch on a similar dataset. The drawback is that the app is much more likely to crash unless it was written by a top-notch developer; in fact, this kind of programming is the cause of many of the security problems plaguing the various OSes over the years.
(People often point out that nobody writes kernels in Java. That's because they tend to be written using the manual memory management style with as many static data structures as possible to squeeze out more performance. People don't use popular high-level C++ libraries to write kernels for the same reasons.)
Bottom line, the answer to which language is faster will always be "it depends". It depends on what the program is doing, and it depends on how the program was written. A couple of datapoints from a language shootout don't help to resolve the issues.
The funny part is that these were built to coordinate air defenses against a Soviet bomber strike, but towards the end of their life they had to buy replacement tubes from countries in the Soviet bloc because they were the only places that still manufactured them.
The most famous exception to this, the Graf Zeppelin, was memorable mainly because it was able to operate so long without being lost in an accident.
The Hindenburg was really just the last straw. Not to mention that even in the 1930s airplanes could transport a similar number of passengers faster, with fewer crew, and without needing a vessel comparable in size to the Titanic.
But have you seen the airbase they operate from? It's on some hill in a Teletubbies-like landscape in the middle of nowhere. It gives me the creeps.
Ok, but then why should you be allowed to put license restrictions on that tax-funded code?
Yep, my PDA is at the bottom of a drawer. A couple of years ago I "upgraded" to an $0.89 Mead 3x5-inch 80-sheet notepad, along with a tiny keychain pen to operate it. It fits in my pocket, holds all of my contact info, calender info, and todo lists, and has great ergonomics.
... you should meet his bitch, Suave.
Later in the year, IBM introduced an upgrade kludge 486 piggy-back board that could be shoehorned into their 386-based PS/2 Model 80s. However, IIRC, these all had to be recalled due to the bugs in the early 486s.
End users didn't get to see a significant number of correctly functioning 486 systems until early in 1990.
BTW, if you ever saw the processor specs for the i860, its byzantine complexity made the x86 architecture look clean and elegant. There's no wonder it never took off.
All Sony electronic products will only support Sony pens, and all non-Sony products will interoperate amongst themselves, but not with Sony devices.
This annoying situation will persist for at least a decade.
I for one support measures that discourage people from driving inefficient polluting farm equipment hundreds of miles just to go shopping in the city. Attempting to maneuver a bulky tractor on cramped London streets was surely a safety menace to motorists and pedestrians alike. He should have considered taking some form of public transportation instead.
If RFID tags can help keep tractors and combine harvesters off of our city streets, then I support them 110%.
Nevertheless, I doubt that you could get away naming a product "Orgasmatron", since AFAIK it was a word made up just for Woody Allen's movie. It has no generic meaning outside of the context of the film, and using it would imply that you had some kind of association with the producers of Sleeper, regardless of the product category.
For the similar reasons, it is highly unlikely that you would be allowed to sell computers under the name "Viagra Systems" unless you did a deal with Pfizer.
Sometimes in life we have to set priorities. In this case, you have to decide which is more important to you: your laptop or your nads.
Copyright was created to "promote useful arts and sciences". It was not created to allow you to determine how much to charge for your music, or just to give you control over your own work after you've published it.
If developments in technology create an environment where the maximum amount of quality content is produced under a system where the artist does not individually set the price, then the government would be perfectly within its mandate to change the rules to implement that.
Your current control over the distribution of your work is a windfall side-effect of the current implementation of copyright; it is not a god-given entitlement. The current system was designed for a world where all media were write-once, and printing presses were hugely expensive. This system is breaking down in a world where most media will be rewriteable and almost free, and every citizen has his own printing press and distribution channel.
With new technology, there is almost no way to enforce the artificial scarcity needed to back the current copyright system without creating an oppressive police state. Your control over your work is not worth forcing us all to live under a police state.
The funny thing is, I've been shopping around for TV tuner cards on NewEgg.com. It's scary how many customer reviews slam various cards for having horribly buggy Windows drivers and/or applications. But they're all just SOL, stuck with the crashes, unless the card manufacturer deigns to patch their code.
At least with Linux they would potentially have a little more control over the situation.
What it boils down to is that there's something horribly wrong with the current approach to "AI". Nature solves problems very similar to this with a totally different approach. Take a cockroach for example. Its task is probably much harder than this "grand challenge". It must survive in the world for several weeks or months while: finding its own fuel, avoiding hostile predators, finding a suitable mate, and include a control system that supports walking in any orientation along with controlled flight through the air.
What computing horsepower drives this task? A few milligrams of wet neurons that probably consume a few microwatts.
Even if a cockroach weren't up to driving one of these vehicles through the desert, any small bird probably has enough signal processing power to handle the chore. They certainly are able to handle flying through a thicket of tree branches, a pretty tough challenge in itself. How much does a house finch brain and vision system weigh? Maybe 1 gram?
Back in the 80s I majored in AI briefly, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the incredible pattern matching abilities of living organisms can't be effectively modeled by piping numbers through a single accumulator register. The highly interconnected architecture of a brain is totally different. (Many of my professors seemed to think that they had some deep secret insight to "intelligence" because they were hacking in Lisp. What was really happening was that they were caught up in their own cleverness in using recursion and macros to create layers of abstraction. But that's just tricky discreet math, not self-awareness.)
Now that computers are 1000X faster, my assessment is still valid. In fact, computers probably aren't even nearly 1000X faster at the algorithms that living organisms use to deal with the real world, because all of the computer speed tricks rely on locality of reference (caches). A brain, OTOH, is a fully associative processor that can compare an large chunk of input with a good amount of its entire memory in a single atomic operation. Its power comes from not having locality of reference.
IMHO, attempts at these kinds of projects are always going to result in clumsy, kludgy, stupid machines until some totally new approaches are developed for processing and information retrieval.
Second, there are millions of casual pirates who install Windows on more machines than they've licensed, or who "borrow" a copy from work. Many of these people just aren't ever going to buy the appropriate number of copies of the OS, especially at retail prices. However, they do benefit Microsoft by remaining in the Windows "ecosystem", increasing its value through the network effect. If they crack down on these people, many of them will go to the effort to learn Linux or some other solution, thereby increasing the influence of alternative ecosystems at the expense of Microsoft's influence. This increased familiarity of alternative solutions in the general public would lower the barriers for Microsoft's lucrative customers, like entire businesses, from dumping all of their Microsoft products and switching to alternatives.