Actually, I think the basic idea goes beyond metadata. Ideally, data and metadata become one and the same, and you achieve "closure". Hans Reiser has a very interesting paper on this. It made me a believer.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has exactly the wrong platform to implement these ideas on. The whole motivation behind this kind of thing is to simplify the software. Microsoft needs to be backwards compatible with 20+ years of cruft, and they have an abysmal record for writing clean, simple APIs.
This will probably end up being just another popular software engineering idea that ends up being superceded by new business plans later on. It will become yet another ossified layer in the lower sediment of their future OSes (see DCOM, etc.).
Security isn't something you suddenly do, it is built from architecture to deployment
This is very true. Lately, however, I've been thinking
that Microsoft and Unix/Linux/*BSD are all pretty much in the same
boat. The update treadmills for both OS families
have been spinning faster and faster. I need to
run Windows Update half a dozen times in series
to attempt to secure a fresh Windows install. The
update RPMs since RedHat 7.2 came out
are something like 800MB.
For a different perspective, check out the EROS OS website.
This is an OS "capabilities" based security model.
They claim that in an age of interconnected
machines and portable code, the ACL-style
security model of NT and Posix is woefully inadequate.
(If resources are like doors, then an ACL is like
a security badge reader. You give your badge to
your programs, and they are free to try to open
any door they find with your badge. In a capability
system, OTOH, resources have keyed locks,
and no two locks are the same. You hand your
programs only the keys they need for the resources they should use. They have no
other way to open any other doors. In fact, they can't
even see doors they don't have keys for.)
I'm not an expert, I don't know how much I should
buy into their arguments, but it's opened my mind to
the possibility that there could be better security
models out there than what most people have
always assumed. Security probably should be built into
the system even deeper than it is done on current
popular OSes.
They're debating rewriting the HURD from scratch becase of all of the Mach dependancies.
This is where the HURD is beginning to look like the 4 decades of effort Charles Babbage put
into endlessly redesigning his computing machines without really completing any of them.
If that was the plan, why not buy Apple and license Mac OS X?
Maybe because they have the wisdom to stay out
of the hardware business?
Plus, AOL would need to put their OS on piece-of-crap
machines. Apple engineers would puke if they had to work with
anything less than 1337 hardware. (Disclaimer: I
like crappy hardware.)
But without an exploding star, there's no way for any of the elements (lighter or heavier than iron) to get outside of the stars that created them. Hydrogen and helium were the only elements produced in the Big Bang.
Since most of our bodies' mass is made of elements heavier than helium, we've all been inside at least one supernova explosion. Things have really quieted down around here since those days.
I don't even want to contemplate how much energy was given off forming the elements I'm made of. Now there's hardly enough energy left over for me to get up and fetch another beer.
Maybe those poor folks in Afghanistan should have thougt about all these bad things Americans might do to their country before they helped Bin Laden knock over our little sky scrapers.
Ok, so kids are staving to death as we speak on this planet, and some people want to spends billions of dollars to conduct a gigantic geology experiment on Mars.
Kids are starving to death as we speak, and you're sitting on your ass reading slashdot.
Communist slime like you shouldn't be allowed to post on slashdot. If record companies have a monopoly then it's only because they have run their business better than everyone else.
Yeah, business is business. Any attempt at outside interference is communism. Hmm... wait a minute. What would the record companies be worth if the government wasn't granting little 95-year feifdoms over each sound recording? They'd be worth JACK SHIT.
The recording companies are a product of government fiat. On what grounds does the government grant these copyrights? To "promote useful arts and sciences". They're regulating what I can and can't do to help out a certain class of people. Sounds kind of socialist to me.
Instead, what is usually done is to encase the hydrogen (tritium actually) in additional uranium or plutonium.
IIRC, tritium is very rare and only a few grams are used to "boost" the fission trigger. The main fusion fuel in most H bombs is a mixture of lithium and deuterium, which conveniently combine to form a solid chemical compound.
At any rate, in many bombs, the fusion is not even the main source of energy. It is used as a massive source of neutrons, instantly converting hundreds or thousands of pounds of dirt cheap unenriched uranium into fissionable fuel (unenriched uranium also avoids worries about dangerous multiple critical masses in one bomb). Many bombs get only about 1/3 of their energy from actual fusion, the rest is from the fast-neutron induced fission of the uranium blanket surrounding the fusion core. The end result orders of magnitude more fallout isotopes than a simple A-bomb.
The lesson we learn from this example of biological warfare is that he with the baddest diseases wins. The choices of diseases brought to battle was largely random chance. (The Old World just happened to have more diverse population to draw diseases from.)
If the New World had more powerful diseases, the Aztec culture would probably be dominiant in Europe today. They would have boned up on European technology, then come accross the Atlantic, kicked European ass, taken their land and subjugated the people.
The patents on the J5 (I think, it's been a long time - the engine used in the second and third stages of the Saturn V anyways) expired in the late 70's so those engine designs are fully in the public domain.
That's right, if you've been craving more power for your vehicle, you can now strap a genuine moon rocket motor to it with no restrictions or license fees.
However, being a practical-minded guy, I'd use the Saturn-V's first stage F5 instead. It's a whole lot more powerful, and it uses kerosene so you won't have to wait around for the "hydrogen economy" to refuel it.
Bring your credit card along, though, because it burns something like 3 tons of fuel per second.
The companies will surely argue in friend of the court briefs that giving them additional copyright time will cause them to keep old works in distribution, which is a public benefit.
That's what systems like Gnutella are for. There is zero justification for that assertion.
The argument these companies would make is just a thinly veiled attempt to steal from the people. The Constitution clearly states that IP reverts to the people after limited times. Subverting the government to get around the Constitution is nothing more than 'piracy' on a monumental scale.
I'll belive in tabletop fusion when a generator comes atached to my next laptop.
That would be cool, but it's probably not going to help on airplane trips...
"Once again, the operation of nuclear fusion reactors is not permitted on this aircraft while in the air or while taxiing on the ground. Nuclear fusion reactors are also not permitted at any time when sitting in a row with a child under 3 years old, due to the neutron flux. Please be considerate of your fellow travelers who have small children."
Ford is accusing Sears of encouraging theft by
their promotion of "Crafstman" brand crowbars, thereby distressing Ford's customers.
When asked about the actual legitimate uses
for crowbars, a Ford spokesman responded: "What's
the first thing that comes into your mind when you
hear the word 'Crowbar'? I bet it's smashing
things. Maybe smashing windshields. We just want
to help keep crowbar wielding thugs off of our streets."
If the government is doesn't get enough tax revenue because
of the GPL, all it has to do is raise the tax rates. Duh.
It won't come to that, though, because I'll spend the
money that I saved avoiding expensive software
on something else. The government will
get just as much money. I'll have the software
I need and whatever other nice things I
bought with my saved money.
The only party that doesn't win in this scenario is
the world's richest man.
I higher order scaling OS. One that ties together thousands of Internets, each one full of hundreds of millions of computers.
Let's notate your Linux box as floodge(0), and ISOS as floodge(1). This higher-order OS would be floodge(2).
It gets better. Now consider an OS of order floodge(N), where N is an unimagineably large but finite number. This would harness the power of millions ** N computers! Truly outrageous horsepower; more teraflops than there are electons in the universe. Just think of how many extra-terrestial intelligences we could discover per second!
His product is FREE though, you should just don your asbestos suit should you go looking for support. (View a few IRC logs etc. to get a feel for how "Dick" seems to view newbies and/or non-paying customers.)
I think this guy has finally found a way to make money on free software: Forget selling licenses; forget selling service and support. Just sell protection from ridicule and verbal abuse.
Preserving some semblance of self-esteem has clear value in the marketplace. I think this business plan will be successful.
.we invent faster-than-light travel. Should we go out there and collect Pioneer 10 and the Voyager probes and everything else we've launched and put them in a museum for posterity? Or should we let them continue to drift through space, humanity's silent ambassadors to the stars?
We will let them drift. However, once extra-solar system travel becomes dirt cheap, these probes will become tourist traps. Whole shiploads of little brats will go to visit them on field trips. They will become surrounded by porta-potties, discarded hamburger boxes, and T-shirt stands (in all 3 dimensions).
In our group's machines, I strongly encourage everybody to leave all the settings at the default, or if somebody makes a strong case (strong does not mean "I like it") for a particular change, we all make it. That way we can move from machine to machine without going berserk or even feeling a little ill at ease.
In our group, I strongly encourage everyone
to keep their fscking mitts off of my machine. That way
nobody gets hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, Microsoft has exactly the wrong platform to implement these ideas on. The whole motivation behind this kind of thing is to simplify the software. Microsoft needs to be backwards compatible with 20+ years of cruft, and they have an abysmal record for writing clean, simple APIs.
This will probably end up being just another popular software engineering idea that ends up being superceded by new business plans later on. It will become yet another ossified layer in the lower sediment of their future OSes (see DCOM, etc.).
This is very true. Lately, however, I've been thinking that Microsoft and Unix/Linux/*BSD are all pretty much in the same boat. The update treadmills for both OS families have been spinning faster and faster. I need to run Windows Update half a dozen times in series to attempt to secure a fresh Windows install. The update RPMs since RedHat 7.2 came out are something like 800MB.
For a different perspective, check out the EROS OS website. This is an OS "capabilities" based security model. They claim that in an age of interconnected machines and portable code, the ACL-style security model of NT and Posix is woefully inadequate.
(If resources are like doors, then an ACL is like a security badge reader. You give your badge to your programs, and they are free to try to open any door they find with your badge. In a capability system, OTOH, resources have keyed locks, and no two locks are the same. You hand your programs only the keys they need for the resources they should use. They have no other way to open any other doors. In fact, they can't even see doors they don't have keys for.)
I'm not an expert, I don't know how much I should buy into their arguments, but it's opened my mind to the possibility that there could be better security models out there than what most people have always assumed. Security probably should be built into the system even deeper than it is done on current popular OSes.
This is where the HURD is beginning to look like the 4 decades of effort Charles Babbage put into endlessly redesigning his computing machines without really completing any of them.
Building up your own debt at 18% APR is not a good decision.
Letting a company do that on your account is extremely foolish.
Letting a company that is a product of a market bubble do that is utterly insane.
Maybe because they have the wisdom to stay out of the hardware business?
Plus, AOL would need to put their OS on piece-of-crap machines. Apple engineers would puke if they had to work with anything less than 1337 hardware. (Disclaimer: I like crappy hardware.)
But without an exploding star, there's no way for any of the elements (lighter or heavier than iron) to get outside of the stars that created them. Hydrogen and helium were the only elements produced in the Big Bang.
I don't even want to contemplate how much energy was given off forming the elements I'm made of. Now there's hardly enough energy left over for me to get up and fetch another beer.
I hate race conditions. Nevertheless, the other post doesn't have my GUID.
Kids are starving to death as we speak, and you're sitting on your ass reading slashdot.
Yeah, business is business. Any attempt at outside interference is communism. Hmm... wait a minute. What would the record companies be worth if the government wasn't granting little 95-year feifdoms over each sound recording? They'd be worth JACK SHIT.
The recording companies are a product of government fiat. On what grounds does the government grant these copyrights? To "promote useful arts and sciences". They're regulating what I can and can't do to help out a certain class of people. Sounds kind of socialist to me.
No problem for most slashdot readers, since they are most likely asking: "What is this sunlight you speak of?"
IIRC, tritium is very rare and only a few grams are used to "boost" the fission trigger. The main fusion fuel in most H bombs is a mixture of lithium and deuterium, which conveniently combine to form a solid chemical compound.
At any rate, in many bombs, the fusion is not even the main source of energy. It is used as a massive source of neutrons, instantly converting hundreds or thousands of pounds of dirt cheap unenriched uranium into fissionable fuel (unenriched uranium also avoids worries about dangerous multiple critical masses in one bomb). Many bombs get only about 1/3 of their energy from actual fusion, the rest is from the fast-neutron induced fission of the uranium blanket surrounding the fusion core. The end result orders of magnitude more fallout isotopes than a simple A-bomb.
If the New World had more powerful diseases, the Aztec culture would probably be dominiant in Europe today. They would have boned up on European technology, then come accross the Atlantic, kicked European ass, taken their land and subjugated the people.
That's right, if you've been craving more power for your vehicle, you can now strap a genuine moon rocket motor to it with no restrictions or license fees.
However, being a practical-minded guy, I'd use the Saturn-V's first stage F5 instead. It's a whole lot more powerful, and it uses kerosene so you won't have to wait around for the "hydrogen economy" to refuel it.
Bring your credit card along, though, because it burns something like 3 tons of fuel per second.
That's what systems like Gnutella are for. There is zero justification for that assertion.
The argument these companies would make is just a thinly veiled attempt to steal from the people. The Constitution clearly states that IP reverts to the people after limited times. Subverting the government to get around the Constitution is nothing more than 'piracy' on a monumental scale.
That would be cool, but it's probably not going to help on airplane trips...
"Once again, the operation of nuclear fusion reactors is not permitted on this aircraft while in the air or while taxiing on the ground. Nuclear fusion reactors are also not permitted at any time when sitting in a row with a child under 3 years old, due to the neutron flux. Please be considerate of your fellow travelers who have small children."
Ford is accusing Sears of encouraging theft by their promotion of "Crafstman" brand crowbars, thereby distressing Ford's customers. When asked about the actual legitimate uses for crowbars, a Ford spokesman responded: "What's the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear the word 'Crowbar'? I bet it's smashing things. Maybe smashing windshields. We just want to help keep crowbar wielding thugs off of our streets."
It won't come to that, though, because I'll spend the money that I saved avoiding expensive software on something else. The government will get just as much money. I'll have the software I need and whatever other nice things I bought with my saved money.
The only party that doesn't win in this scenario is the world's richest man.
Let's notate your Linux box as floodge(0), and ISOS as floodge(1). This higher-order OS would be floodge(2).
It gets better. Now consider an OS of order floodge(N), where N is an unimagineably large but finite number. This would harness the power of millions ** N computers! Truly outrageous horsepower; more teraflops than there are electons in the universe. Just think of how many extra-terrestial intelligences we could discover per second!
I think this guy has finally found a way to make money on free software: Forget selling licenses; forget selling service and support. Just sell protection from ridicule and verbal abuse.
Preserving some semblance of self-esteem has clear value in the marketplace. I think this business plan will be successful.
Wrong. Neither is theft. One is copyrignt infringement, and the other is copyright infringement and fraud.
Copyright infringement and theft are not interchangeable legal terms.
We will let them drift. However, once extra-solar system travel becomes dirt cheap, these probes will become tourist traps. Whole shiploads of little brats will go to visit them on field trips. They will become surrounded by porta-potties, discarded hamburger boxes, and T-shirt stands (in all 3 dimensions).
Those poor sux0rs just wouldn't know they lost until the next day.
In our group, I strongly encourage everyone to keep their fscking mitts off of my machine. That way nobody gets hurt.