Re:It's about time...
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I fear that at the end of the day, one of the casualties of this worm will be home-hosted web servers of any kind. IIRC, most cable modem contracts forbid running servers. However, as far as I can tell, this policy hasn't been enforced.
I'll bet that it gets strictly enforced from now on, killing all the fun even for people like me who run Apache on OpenBSD.
Re:Therein lies the dilemna
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 2, Funny
We would need a value per dollar metric to compare systems, then. What value?
Well, if the value metric is how well your computer complements a black turtleneck sweater, then a Mac has to win hands down.:-)
Ten minutes in, I wanted to shoot myself. Twenty minutes in, and my wife was openly wondering if this constituted the sort of spousal abuse that would get her more than 50% in the divorce.
Heh, I played it smart. I waited for my friends to go first. As a result of their reports, I didn't even bother to see the movie until a couple of months ago ($1.99 rental). I watched it late at night after my wife went to bed.
The next morning, I fast-forwarded to show her the stupidest parts and we shared a laugh.
It belongs to nobody and should not be bought and sold as property...
The land and its wheath should be divided as an inheritance to be passed to our children and their children.
Your system sounds great. As one of the first to sign on, I'm taking dibs on a particular stretch of beach on Maui that I'm really fond of.
My recommendation to anyone reading this is to sign up for your parcel before all the good spots are gone. You don't want to be stuck with a radioactively contanimated section of desert in a former part of the Soviet Bloc.
Are you implying that people who write GPLed code should give away software *and let people sue them* if it doesn't work right?
No. I'm saying that if someone manages to collect from MS regarless of what their EULA says, then free software authors could theoretically face similar liablilities regardless of what the GPL says. It's just an observation.
This Limited Warranty is void if failure of the Product has resulted from accident, abuse, misapplication, abnormal use or a virus.
Interesting.
Also...
Some
states/jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or
limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the
above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you.
Does this really mean anything? Could somebody in some state conceivably sue them successfully? The rest of the EULA is an absolute, complete, iron-clad denial of any liability whatsoever. This last sentence is the only shred of hope I could find.
OTOH, be careful what you wish for. The GPL has similar disclaimers...
Well, I wasn't saying that the P4 was a good buy. I wouldn't buy one today; I'd get an Athlon.
I was just trying to explain some background information for all the people who keep posting "1N73L 5UX5 -- 4MD R00LS" all the time, so they won't be confused when Intel doesn't go out of business next year.
I agree that the P4 is not the best CPU at this time. However, Intel has designed this new architecture looking out 10 years or so. Many of these choices are dictated by the laws of physics, and all other processors will be heading this direction over time.
The fundamental problem is that propagation speed of a signal on a chip is essentially fixed (that's why the minor improvement from a special trick like copper wiring was a big deal). As you speed up the transistors, the signal propagation delay becomes more of a bottleneck.
To avoid this, you have to break the logic steps into smaller pieces that live in a smaller portion of the chip. The standard way to do this in synchronous logic is to pipeline the work into more stages. The total signal propagation delay to do one instruction remains about the same, but at least you can pipeline alot of instructions to try to get more work done.
This processor is not very competetive today, but in 5 years there won't be any other way to make forward progress. By that time, Intel will have worked out the kinks (problems with branch prediction, memory interface snafus, etc.), and this core will probably be as wildly successful as the Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Celeron core was.
BTW, remember how sucky the Pentium Pro was when it came out? It was a piece of crap on 16-bit code and it would generate huge pipeline bubbles for no good reason. Over time, they fixed these problems and made countless $billions in the process. Watch for a repeat with this new architecture.
Why wait around for the governments of the world to address the issues raised in this article? Some of these ideas could be implemented now with a new license that uses some of the features of the GPL.
The GPL itself is not sufficient to satisfy the principles from the article because its emphasis on freedom overrides most other considerations, including compensating the authors in a straightforward manner. The GPL is fine for use in large swaths of the software landscape, where well-to-do computer professionals donate efforts for the public good. However, it's hard to see how the GPL alone would be sufficient to support most writers or musicians.
A different kind of public license could be written, though, that is intended to fairly balance all of the interests discussed in the article. It would allow copying and modifying of works by the user, as long as attribution is carefully maintained. It might allow for free redistribution; however, it would certainly prohibit redistribution or public performance for a fee unless royalties are paid to the author. I would think that Gnutella would be allowed, but Napster disallowed, because Napster was trying to make money indirectly. Redistribution for a fee would be non-exclusive; anyone could produce and distribute copies as long as the appropriate royalties were paid. Royalties terms need not be fixed, but they would have to be simple and well defined by the license. All parties would know exactly what to expect in terms of royalties.
Even if file sharing is explicitely allowed, the content creators would still see revenue. Free sharing is a self-limiting phenomenon. When people really like something, they want a token of it in the form of atomic matter (like a disk, a pamphlet, a T-shirt, whatever). If this weren't true, TV and radio would have wiped out IP decades ago. Any production of atomic matter will involve a fee, because it costs money to produce copies of these; you'd be a fool to stamp out CDs and then give them away for free. ('Free' distribution tied to some other condition or promotion would not be allowed, either; no embrace-and-extend.)
If that's not strong enough, maybe content protection would be allowed. However, the license would clearly define how the protection is used and what rights the end user has; these rights would be at least as strong as those implied by current analog media. Any protection schemes would be openly developed and implemented (and therefore, probably more secure than current schemes). Cracking the protection would be explicitely allowed; however, redistributing the plaintext results would not (even for free). Redistributing the encrypted form would be OK.
This kind of license would share an important advantage with the GPL: it would be a well known contract that anyone could choose to use. This provides a kind of pre-canned business plan that could make it easier to get started selling IP without giving up all of your rights to a distributor. The 'viral' aspects would be important, too. As more artists, users and distributors find out about the advantages of this license, more would choose to join in and avoid the current distribution oligarchy. It might even build up enough momentum to challenge the current order.
I'm a busy man. I'm a disorganized man. Time is money. One of the best things about
purchasing a real Linux distro is the vivid labels on the CDs. When I need one,
they are easy to find in the huge stacks of crap that litter my office.
All of my CD-R disks look the same and get lost very quickly.
This is also one of the worst things about Microsoft software. You need
to track down the Certificate of Authenticity to install anything,
but the CUAs look like junk mail and blend in with all of the other crap.
What's worse, they always get separated from the disks.
I recently had an idea for improving laws in general. Pass a constitutional ammendment that limits the size (in bytes) of the body of all federal law. You could make it a nice round number (like 1.44 MB, so fit fits on a floppy, or 100MB so it fits on a Zip disk), and let them use the most advanced compression methods available to cram it in (so they don't try to write it in cryptic text).
That way, congress would have to carefully prioritize what they do. To add a new law, they'd have to identify the most useless current law and repeal it. Under this system, I doubt that there would be room for a specific federal law about students misusing school computers.
The concept sounds libertarian, but it needn't be. For example, you could include a nice leftist law like: "All cars sold must average 57 MPG." in under 40 bytes; or how about a right-wing one like "All abortions are illegal." Either way, each law would be more carefully thought out, and the public would be much more aware of what's going on in government.
Remember that the interception occurs in outer space with no atmosphere.
There are no aerodynamic problems with low-mass countermeasures, and they don't
have to weigh much at all. It would all be launched on the same missle.
Likewise, the guy above you said the prechilled warhead would get hot; this doesn't happen
until reentry.
A lot of these concepts were discussed in a Scientific American article
about star wars that came out 5 or so years ago. They also had interesting anti-laser countermeasures
such as chrome plating the warheads. The conclusion was that countermeasures
are so much cheaper than missle defense capabilities that it's futile to build these systems.
but the intercepting missile did not use GPS to find its target anyway.
That's right, it uses infrared sensors. And unless they can show 80% success at shooting down warheads that are pre-chilled with liquid nitrogen and escorted by dozens of decoy flares, balloons and swarms of chaffe, then they are just wasting money with talks of early deployment.
Even the most rudimentary countermeasures make this problem an order of magnitude harder than what they have been testing so far. That's bad, because this system barely works even under ideal conditions.
They'll probably build it anyway, sold to the public the same way that insecure snake oil cryptography products are sold: buyer's ignorance.
the x86 is CRAP AT EVERYTHING. IT SUCKS. IT HAS ALWAYS SUCKED.
Well, I've been happily using SUCKY computers since 1983. There's nothing more
satisfying than using a really good kludge. Running a direct descendant of the world's
first microprocessor (the Intel 4004) at thousands of times the original performance
level is an awesome kludge. Throw in all of the goodies availible for x86 machines
(OS's, apps, hardware) and its been like spending 18 years in a candy store.
You can stay up there in your ivory tower and watch the rest of us having fun down here in the fresh air.
I think that those big Flash ads embedded in the stories on ZDnet are actually a happy medium. They are almost exactly like magazine ads. We are all used to magazine ads (even after paying $5 for the privilege of reading them:-/ ), but nobody complains about them unless they are infused with perfume.
Banner ads have always looked tacky and cheap. The ZDnet ads are often placed by reputable companies (IBM, Compaq, etc.) and have often have decent production values, so they usually don't bother me even with the animation. Most importantly, I don't have to spend 2 seconds and wear out my tendons closing the popunder window.
OTOH, maybe I'm just weird. I've always appreciated high-quality ads; in fact I once payed good money for a video of nothing but old animated TV ads.
Any company can build thier own Passport and Hailstorm clones
I saw an article a couple of months ago (I don't remember where). It pointed out that the genius behind Microsoft's plans with Passport and Hailstorm involved controlling the schema of the data. Sure, anyone can reimplement the software behind these services. However, each industry will standardize on Microsoft-written schemas relating to their communications and authentication needs.
The clever part is, Microsoft will copyright those schemas. They can't be cloned legally, so you're still stuck with MS control. MS knows that almost nobody is going to write and test a service twice with different schemas just to interoperate with some second-tier implementations. At the end of they day, they're still in the driver's seat.
Microsoft will probably tell these sites that for every sale they lose to a high-minded geek, they'll gain ten sales from Joe Sixpacks who like the single logon. Not to mention MS marketing parnerships pointing customers to their sites.
Liquid fueled weapons are a pain in the ass, especially cryogenic ones. The earliest ICBMs used liquid fuel, but they transitioned to room-temperature liquid fuels and then to solid fuels as soon as they could.
Forward commander:We've confirmed the terrorist summit is going on right now at coordinates 1.343'34.33. Launch a strike with that 45-minute space bomber! Bomber control:Roger that. We'll begin hydrogen fueling procedures and checklist now. ETA, 4 hours. Forward commander:Too late; forget it. I'll launch one of those boring old cruise missles instead. It'll save the taxpayers a few hundred million anyway; maybe we can use the money to remodel the gym here at the base...
Until we discover a means of FTL communication, interplanetary networks will have to use something other than TCP/IP.
It's called a subspace channel. I've been trying to tunnel TCP/IP over one, but I keep getting problems with timeouts and dropped packets that are associated with non-causality paradoxes.
I did manage to use my setup to chat with a hot black chick who seemed to be on some kind of space mission, though...
One thing that made movies like the original Star Wars, Mad Max and Tron stand out was the spartan ambiance that came with a (relatively) low budget. As it happened, that ambiance worked well with the screenplay and acting for these movies; that's why these movies are still talked about while dozens of others from that time are forgotten.
Twenty or so years later, they redo Star Wars (largely on the same planet) with a big budget and too many visual distractions and not enough focus on the story... and it doesn't work. There was nothing special about it compared to all of the other computer-effects scifi movies out there today. I fear the same thing will happen to this sequel.
When you finish a phone call, the contents thankfully dissapear into the ether (well, maybe the NSA keeps a backup copy).
E-mail and other computer transmissions, OTOH, can remain forever. Even Bill Gates learned this
the hard way during the MS trial.
Even with the best of intentions or supposed legal protections, your
messages will be burning a hole in a company controlled hard drive or backup tape long
after you're gone. They could be pulled into the public spotlight even for unrelated subpoenas served to your company. Regardless of what the policies or laws say,
common sense still says that it's wise to exercise a little prudence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet that it gets strictly enforced from now on, killing all the fun even for people like me who run Apache on OpenBSD.
Well, if the value metric is how well your computer complements a black turtleneck sweater, then a Mac has to win hands down. :-)
"Software as a Service" means "Software execution controlled by someone else". Not something I want for my personal computers.
Heh, I played it smart. I waited for my friends to go first. As a result of their reports, I didn't even bother to see the movie until a couple of months ago ($1.99 rental). I watched it late at night after my wife went to bed.
The next morning, I fast-forwarded to show her the stupidest parts and we shared a laugh.
Your system sounds great. As one of the first to sign on, I'm taking dibs on a particular stretch of beach on Maui that I'm really fond of.
My recommendation to anyone reading this is to sign up for your parcel before all the good spots are gone. You don't want to be stuck with a radioactively contanimated section of desert in a former part of the Soviet Bloc.
No. I'm saying that if someone manages to collect from MS regarless of what their EULA says, then free software authors could theoretically face similar liablilities regardless of what the GPL says. It's just an observation.
Interesting.
Also...
Some states/jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to you.
Does this really mean anything? Could somebody in some state conceivably sue them successfully? The rest of the EULA is an absolute, complete, iron-clad denial of any liability whatsoever. This last sentence is the only shred of hope I could find.
OTOH, be careful what you wish for. The GPL has similar disclaimers...
I was just trying to explain some background information for all the people who keep posting "1N73L 5UX5 -- 4MD R00LS" all the time, so they won't be confused when Intel doesn't go out of business next year.
I agree that the P4 is not the best CPU at this time. However, Intel has designed this new architecture looking out 10 years or so. Many of these choices are dictated by the laws of physics, and all other processors will be heading this direction over time.
The fundamental problem is that propagation speed of a signal on a chip is essentially fixed (that's why the minor improvement from a special trick like copper wiring was a big deal). As you speed up the transistors, the signal propagation delay becomes more of a bottleneck.
To avoid this, you have to break the logic steps into smaller pieces that live in a smaller portion of the chip. The standard way to do this in synchronous logic is to pipeline the work into more stages. The total signal propagation delay to do one instruction remains about the same, but at least you can pipeline alot of instructions to try to get more work done.
This processor is not very competetive today, but in 5 years there won't be any other way to make forward progress. By that time, Intel will have worked out the kinks (problems with branch prediction, memory interface snafus, etc.), and this core will probably be as wildly successful as the Pentium Pro/PII/PIII/Celeron core was.
BTW, remember how sucky the Pentium Pro was when it came out? It was a piece of crap on 16-bit code and it would generate huge pipeline bubbles for no good reason. Over time, they fixed these problems and made countless $billions in the process. Watch for a repeat with this new architecture.
The GPL itself is not sufficient to satisfy the principles from the article because its emphasis on freedom overrides most other considerations, including compensating the authors in a straightforward manner. The GPL is fine for use in large swaths of the software landscape, where well-to-do computer professionals donate efforts for the public good. However, it's hard to see how the GPL alone would be sufficient to support most writers or musicians.
A different kind of public license could be written, though, that is intended to fairly balance all of the interests discussed in the article. It would allow copying and modifying of works by the user, as long as attribution is carefully maintained. It might allow for free redistribution; however, it would certainly prohibit redistribution or public performance for a fee unless royalties are paid to the author. I would think that Gnutella would be allowed, but Napster disallowed, because Napster was trying to make money indirectly. Redistribution for a fee would be non-exclusive; anyone could produce and distribute copies as long as the appropriate royalties were paid. Royalties terms need not be fixed, but they would have to be simple and well defined by the license. All parties would know exactly what to expect in terms of royalties.
Even if file sharing is explicitely allowed, the content creators would still see revenue. Free sharing is a self-limiting phenomenon. When people really like something, they want a token of it in the form of atomic matter (like a disk, a pamphlet, a T-shirt, whatever). If this weren't true, TV and radio would have wiped out IP decades ago. Any production of atomic matter will involve a fee, because it costs money to produce copies of these; you'd be a fool to stamp out CDs and then give them away for free. ('Free' distribution tied to some other condition or promotion would not be allowed, either; no embrace-and-extend.)
If that's not strong enough, maybe content protection would be allowed. However, the license would clearly define how the protection is used and what rights the end user has; these rights would be at least as strong as those implied by current analog media. Any protection schemes would be openly developed and implemented (and therefore, probably more secure than current schemes). Cracking the protection would be explicitely allowed; however, redistributing the plaintext results would not (even for free). Redistributing the encrypted form would be OK.
This kind of license would share an important advantage with the GPL: it would be a well known contract that anyone could choose to use. This provides a kind of pre-canned business plan that could make it easier to get started selling IP without giving up all of your rights to a distributor. The 'viral' aspects would be important, too. As more artists, users and distributors find out about the advantages of this license, more would choose to join in and avoid the current distribution oligarchy. It might even build up enough momentum to challenge the current order.
This is also one of the worst things about Microsoft software. You need to track down the Certificate of Authenticity to install anything, but the CUAs look like junk mail and blend in with all of the other crap. What's worse, they always get separated from the disks.
I recently had an idea for improving laws in general. Pass a constitutional ammendment that limits the size (in bytes) of the body of all federal law. You could make it a nice round number (like 1.44 MB, so fit fits on a floppy, or 100MB so it fits on a Zip disk), and let them use the most advanced compression methods available to cram it in (so they don't try to write it in cryptic text).
That way, congress would have to carefully prioritize what they do. To add a new law, they'd have to identify the most useless current law and repeal it. Under this system, I doubt that there would be room for a specific federal law about students misusing school computers.
The concept sounds libertarian, but it needn't be. For example, you could include a nice leftist law like: "All cars sold must average 57 MPG." in under 40 bytes; or how about a right-wing one like "All abortions are illegal." Either way, each law would be more carefully thought out, and the public would be much more aware of what's going on in government.
A lot of these concepts were discussed in a Scientific American article about star wars that came out 5 or so years ago. They also had interesting anti-laser countermeasures such as chrome plating the warheads. The conclusion was that countermeasures are so much cheaper than missle defense capabilities that it's futile to build these systems.
That's right, it uses infrared sensors. And unless they can show 80% success at shooting down warheads that are pre-chilled with liquid nitrogen and escorted by dozens of decoy flares, balloons and swarms of chaffe, then they are just wasting money with talks of early deployment.
Even the most rudimentary countermeasures make this problem an order of magnitude harder than what they have been testing so far. That's bad, because this system barely works even under ideal conditions.
They'll probably build it anyway, sold to the public the same way that insecure snake oil cryptography products are sold: buyer's ignorance.
Well, I've been happily using SUCKY computers since 1983. There's nothing more satisfying than using a really good kludge. Running a direct descendant of the world's first microprocessor (the Intel 4004) at thousands of times the original performance level is an awesome kludge. Throw in all of the goodies availible for x86 machines (OS's, apps, hardware) and its been like spending 18 years in a candy store.
You can stay up there in your ivory tower and watch the rest of us having fun down here in the fresh air.
Banner ads have always looked tacky and cheap. The ZDnet ads are often placed by reputable companies (IBM, Compaq, etc.) and have often have decent production values, so they usually don't bother me even with the animation. Most importantly, I don't have to spend 2 seconds and wear out my tendons closing the popunder window.
OTOH, maybe I'm just weird. I've always appreciated high-quality ads; in fact I once payed good money for a video of nothing but old animated TV ads.
I saw an article a couple of months ago (I don't remember where). It pointed out that the genius behind Microsoft's plans with Passport and Hailstorm involved controlling the schema of the data. Sure, anyone can reimplement the software behind these services. However, each industry will standardize on Microsoft-written schemas relating to their communications and authentication needs.
The clever part is, Microsoft will copyright those schemas. They can't be cloned legally, so you're still stuck with MS control. MS knows that almost nobody is going to write and test a service twice with different schemas just to interoperate with some second-tier implementations. At the end of they day, they're still in the driver's seat.
In this case, MS would probably be right.
Forward commander:We've confirmed the terrorist summit is going on right now at coordinates 1.343'34.33. Launch a strike with that 45-minute space bomber!
Bomber control:Roger that. We'll begin hydrogen fueling procedures and checklist now. ETA, 4 hours.
Forward commander:Too late; forget it. I'll launch one of those boring old cruise missles instead. It'll save the taxpayers a few hundred million anyway; maybe we can use the money to remodel the gym here at the base...
Windows Way: In explorer select view/as thumbnails. What's a filename again?
It's called a subspace channel. I've been trying to tunnel TCP/IP over one, but I keep getting problems with timeouts and dropped packets that are associated with non-causality paradoxes.
I did manage to use my setup to chat with a hot black chick who seemed to be on some kind of space mission, though...
Twenty or so years later, they redo Star Wars (largely on the same planet) with a big budget and too many visual distractions and not enough focus on the story... and it doesn't work. There was nothing special about it compared to all of the other computer-effects scifi movies out there today. I fear the same thing will happen to this sequel.
If they want to answer this burning question, why don't they just send a probe that's equipped with a microscope? Or am I missing something here?
Even with the best of intentions or supposed legal protections, your messages will be burning a hole in a company controlled hard drive or backup tape long after you're gone. They could be pulled into the public spotlight even for unrelated subpoenas served to your company. Regardless of what the policies or laws say, common sense still says that it's wise to exercise a little prudence.
How about "lossy" compression: Pi = 22/7