There are two broad classes of problem here: generally protected IP rights and contracted IP issues.
Without being a lawyer, I can tell you that the former issues are generally easy to protect yourself from. If the developer isn't just copying and changing variable names in a copy of the code, then it's pretty easy to defend the idea... until you get to look-and-feel, which is were some really tragic mistakes have been made, IMHO.
However, it's (almost) never that simple. Most everyone signs a non-disclosure and/or non-compete of some sort, and that's a relatively unique contract that a lawyer will have to analyze on a case-by-case basis. I'd say that no company should ever hire anyone who is encumbered in this way, if the practice hadn't somehow become wide-spread. It's just insane that you never know what your employees are infringing on unless you have a tech-savvy lawyer sitting over their shoulders with copies of every NDA/NCA they've ever signed.
There are limits to what rights you can sign away, but those are getting thinner and thinner....
Well, if you lived in Scottland, you'd be looking up in the skies for some excitement. Heck, these are the people who throw rocks and logs around for fun!
Ok, relax... it's just a joke. Here in the U.S. we need to wear pads and have time-outs to play rugby, so what do ya want?:-)
If you or anyone you know has a green card, work or student visa, check the back side that has the optical data stripe.
Now you know how they do that. This is old tech, but is just now making it to the consumer market.
I just happen to know this because I did a little bit of work on the green card printer system.
For those of you who don't have access to them, they print the images of the first 32 presidents on the back. In uber-DPI, it's not much of a challenge to fit them all. I think there's other stuff too, like your picture. It's one of the many features of the new green cards that helps to discourage forgery.
The ultimate act of disobedience in this case is to simply stop buying music. Go to live shows. Listen to your old albums. Download free (freed by the artist, there's a lot out there) music. Just never pay another dime for commercially recorded music media until you approve of the way the industry wants to deal with you. This is what I do, and it's quite liberating. I hear people talking about the BoW (Band of the Week) and can't help but feel that I've gained as a human being by having no idea what they're talking about.
That would just result in an arms war, which realistically, Wine is already fighting. They add calls to undocumented API entry point X; code breaks on Wine; Wine adds undocumented API entry point X; code works; call Y; code breaks; Wine+Y; code works; etc....
In the end, Wine is sort of doomed to always be a revision or so behind MS products (perhaps ultimately a service pack or two), but it's still doable.
About the only thing MS *could* do is add code that checks for some Windows license data and call it "anti-piracy" code. Then they could press charges under the DMCA when Wine "circumvents" that measure by adding the data or a stub function that reports its existance.
No, it would not. The GPL clearly states that if you don't want to be bound by its terms, you don't have to. This is why the GPL is so strong, you can do anything with GPLed programs you want as long as it's within the bounds of copyright law. Since using the software *is* within those bounds (at least it was until about 2 years ago), you're all set.
When you want to do something that's illegal under copyright law (e.g. re-distribute or distribute modified versions) you then have to deal with the GPL.
Ximian's Red Carpet is left totally out of the discussion of package management over RPM. I use Ximian on top of Red Hat at work, and am very happy to never download an RPM for the OS or Ximian's add-on dekstop other than through Red Carpet.
science.slashdot.org
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
The front page has a link to this article through science.slashdot.org. That name does not resolve. The link is fine if you take out the "science". Hmm... I didn't actually mean that as commentary:-)
SW's 256 autometa
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
He uses a classification of 256 particular 2D autometa for a lot of the examples in the book that's kind of interesting. I took the time to write some code for it to explore the various permutations. It's CGI-based and it generates a png or jpeg image, so just throw it in your cgi-bin and check it out. The comments list the various options you can send it.
I don't have enough memory? Are you sure? The point I was responding to was the idea that X should bounds-check font sizes before attempting to render (more to the point, xfs should bounds-check before attempting to scale). That would require a) setting an arbitrary upper limit b) setting a sliding upper limit based on memory available or c) trying to allocate the font and failing gracefully.
If you do a, you leave people with larger-than-you-expect boxes out in the cold for rendering scary-large fonts. If you do b, you have to figure out what's available. And this should be based on real memory or virtual memory? Should it take into account the 3GB per-process limit for 32-bit Intel architectures under Linux? If so, should it detect 64-bit architectures and relax that limitation? How much RAM can I use on an ARM? Sparc? Alpha? X will have to take each one of those into account.
No, c is the answer. You're right that X should fail gracefully, but that's not the point I was respoinding to. The simple fact is that the X server should do:
buffer = malloc(memory);
if (!buffer) puke("No font for you, monkey!");
Nuff said, move along.
PS: If you really want a headache, try thinking about how allocating large fonts that just barely fit in memory works with a multi-threaded X server. Heck, you don't need fonts to cause this kind of problem. Images will do fine. I can create a VERY small JPEG or GIF that will require an awful lot of memory to render, client-side. Fill a page with 20 dozen of those, and you have yourself a party:-)
In this case though the problem is more clear cut X11 must not allow absurdly large fonts.
And if I'm working in the Gimp, and am trying to create a 40,000 pixel-tall letter A? The X Font Server should fail to allocate the memory to render my character why?
No, I think the fix has to be in Mozilla. When a desktop user really wants an insane font-size, they should be allowed to have it.
That is correct behavior. When you view any file and the server says it's type text/html, the browser is required to render it as such. When it's the target of an IMG element, then the browser is allowed to try to guess at the image type (and mozilla does so correctly).
Yes, thank you for the correction. Of course (and I think everyone got this on the first reading), I meant 120GBi, and yes I was rounding CDs to 600MBi, which isn't terribly fair, but there you have it.
Now, can we go back to discussing the actual media and not nit-picking this silliness?
So, that would be 120Gb in the size of a postage stamp. Not bad. Even if it takes a long time to write and longer to read back, this could wipe out tape archival for most backup purposes!
No, this is a new technology finding its legs. Reviewed and scored content will be the next step. It's an arms race that companies like RIAA and MPAA can only win if they ban the technology, and that's seeming increasingly unlikely.
I suspect that the next stage of music and video distribution are just around the corner, but they have some mindset hurdles to overcome (MTV was the most brilliant thing the music industry could have done to delay the phenomenon of digital distribution). Certainly there's a lot of money to be made and there's also an altruistic goal: if the mindshare lock can be broken, real music can once again penetrate the masses. Imagine the change; music as poetry taking root again. Music as protest. Music as expression. Wow, wouldn't that be something!
But for now, all the teenies who are swapping mp3s can see to do is trade copyrighted Metallica and No Doubt. That will change, and sooner than you think.
B1 does not say anything about frequency of patches, security of default install, or 'breakability' of the system.
You bet your sweet @$$ is does! B1 security is not a guideline (though it's often treated as such), it's a certification. If you patch your system, you're NOT B1-CERTIFIED ANY MORE!
Of course, the orange book security ratings are meaningless at this point, and really only used as marketing feed. They were created in a day when the military needed to enforce some standards on systems like VMS (not to exclude VMS or other OSes like it, but to allow the military to not award bids to other operating systems (e.g. UNIX) which did not meet the criteria). The standards do not allow for network connectivity (though many "secure" Vax and IBM systems were connected to "secure networks" even in the 70s) and it does not deal with the concept of regular updates or hardware swap-outs. There is no provision for the implications of hot-standby, checkpointing, etc, etc.
Can we please stop talking about the orange book now?
I've long wondered about Verisign. Any organization that controls most of the digital certificate and domain name registrations as well as buying up commercial PGP have a little more power than I'm thrilled with, but Verisign has something more... they've managed to land some awesome deals with the US government and have done so seemingly without significant competition. Why?
If I'd suggested yesterday that Verisign was going to get into the wiretapping business, I would likely have been laughed at. Well, it's not a laughing matter any longer. What's next? Ever wonder who else Verisign gives your certificates to?
Bah! Ignore all of that. There's one and only one reason that you should never do business with Verisign. Their customer support is some of the worst in the world, and that's a challenge. Just call them sometime and try to get an HST record removed... you'll know fear, then you will know pain and then you will wish you were dead to badly paraphrase Babylon 5.
That's not really a given. Certainly the initial condition is an entire universe in one form or another, but its parameters might be fairly limited. For example, you could say that the Mandelbrot set is a "universe", though a relatively simple one. It defines a 2-dimensional universe as oppsosed to our four (or more) dimensional one, but the principle is basically the same. Perhaps there is some simple calculation which requires some number of orders of magnitude less information than all of the information in the universe in order to calculate an initial state, and every subsequent state.
Then again, perhaps not. There are no givens other than what you can observe when you speculate about the nature of the universe.
"why does everything have to be made into a computer of some sort? DNA, and now the whole universe?"
Well, that's a complicated question. Computation is the manipulation and/or transformation of symbolic information. Since this is basically how human beings interact with the universe, it makes sense that we would try to understand it in that context. It would make little sense for us to measure our universe in terms of the correctness of its shape, since we don't have a point of reference for that.
I'm of the opinion that this is not terribly interesting because there are probably much larger symbols involved in the universe's "execution". I'm not sure I'm in the "10 lines of code" camp, but certainly it is attractive to presume that there are formulae -- which are simpler than the universe as a whole and which can take less starting information than the state of the entire universe -- that describe the iteration of the universe. We shall see....
"If you listen carefully the experts don't say we'll run out but that the cost will increase to a point where other fuels cost less."
Well, that's sort of double-speak isn't it. Are you asserting that if supply-and-demand did not function, and the price remained steady that the supply would not run out, or are you asserting that the supply won't have a chance to run out because when it gets low enough the price will sky-rocket?
The USGS certainly does assert that the supply will dwindle. Their expectation is (perhaps unreasonably) that the global oil community will curtail oil sales sometime between 2030 and 2060 in order to maintain a 10:1 reserve to production ratio (which is where the US has always been, but the world market is up around 50:1 right now). As that ratio drops, something will have to happen. It would be more disasterous to suddenly "run out" then to curtail sales and strech the budget of oil out into the latter part of the century.
And just to nail the point home, these studies also take into account the discovery of new sources of oil and new techniques. This is factored into the equations as an annual growth in the oil reserves (which cannot accomodate the exponential growth in demand, of course, but every little bit helps).
I would agree fully with your assesment. I wasn't trying to hype lucas up to be any more than that at all. To put it in the words of Zaphod, "he's just this guy, you know?"
Yes, you're right. But I was refering to Lucas' sense of visual style, and while I think he had less impact on that in VI, he certainly was a massive factor there in V. I knew what I was saying, and what the facts were, even if I wasn't as clear about it as I should have been.
"[George Lucas] is *not* the genius visionary that all his buddies and hollywood ass kissers like to tell him he is"
Heh, I always love to hear this kind of uninformed sillyness. It's what keeps me going.
First off, as for directing, Lucas is good. He directs well, and his visual sense is utterly amazing. He's terrible at some things, and I would never rank him with someone like Kubrik or Hitchcock. There are, however, only a handful of people who can make a movie as physically engaging as episodes IV, V and II. Technically he does a good job.
But no one sings Lucas' praises solely for his directorial work. The reason that he's refered to as a giant in the industry is the sheer number of times he's changed the way Hollywood works! You may have heard of the names Skywalker Sound, Lucasfilm, Lucas Arts, Pixar, ILM? These are all Lucas companies that have contributed hugely to the modernization of the movie-making industry. Having created any *one* of them would have been an achivement worthy of comment in Hollywood. Having created all of them is frankly stunning.
There are also less... wholesome things that I credit the man with genius and visionary status for. He forsook pay on episode IV in return for merchandizing rights. He was frankly laughed at for asking for this, but the studio happily gave away the "worthless" merchandizing rights. No studio will ever be able to take that decision lightly again because it was George Lucas who showed Hollywood what those rights were really worth. That money paid to turn ILM and Lucasfilm into forces to be reckoned with in Hollywood and in turn founded Skywalker Sound, Pixar, and lots of other little companies as spinnoffs (can anyone remember the name of the medical imaging company that Pixar spun off?)
You may or may not like or respect Lucas, and that call is all yours, but I think genius visionary is a title that can be safely awarded to anyone who slaps Hollywood to its senses and ushers in the age of digital effects and later digital film making.
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There are two broad classes of problem here: generally protected IP rights and contracted IP issues.
Without being a lawyer, I can tell you that the former issues are generally easy to protect yourself from. If the developer isn't just copying and changing variable names in a copy of the code, then it's pretty easy to defend the idea... until you get to look-and-feel, which is were some really tragic mistakes have been made, IMHO.
However, it's (almost) never that simple. Most everyone signs a non-disclosure and/or non-compete of some sort, and that's a relatively unique contract that a lawyer will have to analyze on a case-by-case basis. I'd say that no company should ever hire anyone who is encumbered in this way, if the practice hadn't somehow become wide-spread. It's just insane that you never know what your employees are infringing on unless you have a tech-savvy lawyer sitting over their shoulders with copies of every NDA/NCA they've ever signed.
There are limits to what rights you can sign away, but those are getting thinner and thinner....
Well, if you lived in Scottland, you'd be looking up in the skies for some excitement. Heck, these are the people who throw rocks and logs around for fun!
:-)
Ok, relax... it's just a joke. Here in the U.S. we need to wear pads and have time-outs to play rugby, so what do ya want?
If you or anyone you know has a green card, work or student visa, check the back side that has the optical data stripe.
Now you know how they do that. This is old tech, but is just now making it to the consumer market.
I just happen to know this because I did a little bit of work on the green card printer system.
For those of you who don't have access to them, they print the images of the first 32 presidents on the back. In uber-DPI, it's not much of a challenge to fit them all. I think there's other stuff too, like your picture. It's one of the many features of the new green cards that helps to discourage forgery.
The ultimate act of disobedience in this case is to simply stop buying music. Go to live shows. Listen to your old albums. Download free (freed by the artist, there's a lot out there) music. Just never pay another dime for commercially recorded music media until you approve of the way the industry wants to deal with you. This is what I do, and it's quite liberating. I hear people talking about the BoW (Band of the Week) and can't help but feel that I've gained as a human being by having no idea what they're talking about.
That would just result in an arms war, which realistically, Wine is already fighting. They add calls to undocumented API entry point X; code breaks on Wine; Wine adds undocumented API entry point X; code works; call Y; code breaks; Wine+Y; code works; etc....
In the end, Wine is sort of doomed to always be a revision or so behind MS products (perhaps ultimately a service pack or two), but it's still doable.
About the only thing MS *could* do is add code that checks for some Windows license data and call it "anti-piracy" code. Then they could press charges under the DMCA when Wine "circumvents" that measure by adding the data or a stub function that reports its existance.
No, it would not. The GPL clearly states that if you don't want to be bound by its terms, you don't have to. This is why the GPL is so strong, you can do anything with GPLed programs you want as long as it's within the bounds of copyright law. Since using the software *is* within those bounds (at least it was until about 2 years ago), you're all set.
When you want to do something that's illegal under copyright law (e.g. re-distribute or distribute modified versions) you then have to deal with the GPL.
Done in the source. Thanks for the correction!
Ximian's Red Carpet is left totally out of the discussion of package management over RPM. I use Ximian on top of Red Hat at work, and am very happy to never download an RPM for the OS or Ximian's add-on dekstop other than through Red Carpet.
The front page has a link to this article through science.slashdot.org. That name does not resolve. The link is fine if you take out the "science". Hmm... I didn't actually mean that as commentary :-)
He uses a classification of 256 particular 2D autometa for a lot of the examples in the book that's kind of interesting. I took the time to write some code for it to explore the various permutations. It's CGI-based and it generates a png or jpeg image, so just throw it in your cgi-bin and check it out. The comments list the various options you can send it.
I don't have enough memory? Are you sure? The point I was responding to was the idea that X should bounds-check font sizes before attempting to render (more to the point, xfs should bounds-check before attempting to scale). That would require a) setting an arbitrary upper limit b) setting a sliding upper limit based on memory available or c) trying to allocate the font and failing gracefully.
:-)
If you do a, you leave people with larger-than-you-expect boxes out in the cold for rendering scary-large fonts. If you do b, you have to figure out what's available. And this should be based on real memory or virtual memory? Should it take into account the 3GB per-process limit for 32-bit Intel architectures under Linux? If so, should it detect 64-bit architectures and relax that limitation? How much RAM can I use on an ARM? Sparc? Alpha? X will have to take each one of those into account.
No, c is the answer. You're right that X should fail gracefully, but that's not the point I was respoinding to. The simple fact is that the X server should do:
buffer = malloc(memory);
if (!buffer) puke("No font for you, monkey!");
Nuff said, move along.
PS: If you really want a headache, try thinking about how allocating large fonts that just barely fit in memory works with a multi-threaded X server. Heck, you don't need fonts to cause this kind of problem. Images will do fine. I can create a VERY small JPEG or GIF that will require an awful lot of memory to render, client-side. Fill a page with 20 dozen of those, and you have yourself a party
In this case though the problem is more clear cut
X11 must not allow absurdly large fonts.
And if I'm working in the Gimp, and am trying to create a 40,000 pixel-tall letter A? The X Font Server should fail to allocate the memory to render my character why?
No, I think the fix has to be in Mozilla. When a desktop user really wants an insane font-size, they should be allowed to have it.
That is correct behavior. When you view any file and the server says it's type text/html, the browser is required to render it as such. When it's the target of an IMG element, then the browser is allowed to try to guess at the image type (and mozilla does so correctly).
Yes, thank you for the correction. Of course (and I think everyone got this on the first reading), I meant 120GBi, and yes I was rounding CDs to 600MBi, which isn't terribly fair, but there you have it.
Now, can we go back to discussing the actual media and not nit-picking this silliness?
So, that would be 120Gb in the size of a postage stamp. Not bad. Even if it takes a long time to write and longer to read back, this could wipe out tape archival for most backup purposes!
No, this is a new technology finding its legs. Reviewed and scored content will be the next step. It's an arms race that companies like RIAA and MPAA can only win if they ban the technology, and that's seeming increasingly unlikely.
I suspect that the next stage of music and video distribution are just around the corner, but they have some mindset hurdles to overcome (MTV was the most brilliant thing the music industry could have done to delay the phenomenon of digital distribution). Certainly there's a lot of money to be made and there's also an altruistic goal: if the mindshare lock can be broken, real music can once again penetrate the masses. Imagine the change; music as poetry taking root again. Music as protest. Music as expression. Wow, wouldn't that be something!
But for now, all the teenies who are swapping mp3s can see to do is trade copyrighted Metallica and No Doubt. That will change, and sooner than you think.
I'm getting sick of these long names like Coctothorpe and Foctothorpe. Can't we just go back to "C", "Perl" and exorbitantly long, "Pascal"?
B1 does not say anything about frequency of patches, security of default install, or 'breakability' of the system.
You bet your sweet @$$ is does! B1 security is not a guideline (though it's often treated as such), it's a certification. If you patch your system, you're NOT B1-CERTIFIED ANY MORE!
Of course, the orange book security ratings are meaningless at this point, and really only used as marketing feed. They were created in a day when the military needed to enforce some standards on systems like VMS (not to exclude VMS or other OSes like it, but to allow the military to not award bids to other operating systems (e.g. UNIX) which did not meet the criteria). The standards do not allow for network connectivity (though many "secure" Vax and IBM systems were connected to "secure networks" even in the 70s) and it does not deal with the concept of regular updates or hardware swap-outs. There is no provision for the implications of hot-standby, checkpointing, etc, etc.
Can we please stop talking about the orange book now?
I've long wondered about Verisign. Any organization that controls most of the digital certificate and domain name registrations as well as buying up commercial PGP have a little more power than I'm thrilled with, but Verisign has something more... they've managed to land some awesome deals with the US government and have done so seemingly without significant competition. Why?
If I'd suggested yesterday that Verisign was going to get into the wiretapping business, I would likely have been laughed at. Well, it's not a laughing matter any longer. What's next? Ever wonder who else Verisign gives your certificates to?
Bah! Ignore all of that. There's one and only one reason that you should never do business with Verisign. Their customer support is some of the worst in the world, and that's a challenge. Just call them sometime and try to get an HST record removed... you'll know fear, then you will know pain and then you will wish you were dead to badly paraphrase Babylon 5.
That's not really a given. Certainly the initial condition is an entire universe in one form or another, but its parameters might be fairly limited. For example, you could say that the Mandelbrot set is a "universe", though a relatively simple one. It defines a 2-dimensional universe as oppsosed to our four (or more) dimensional one, but the principle is basically the same. Perhaps there is some simple calculation which requires some number of orders of magnitude less information than all of the information in the universe in order to calculate an initial state, and every subsequent state.
Then again, perhaps not. There are no givens other than what you can observe when you speculate about the nature of the universe.
"why does everything have to be made into a computer of some sort? DNA, and now the whole universe?"
Well, that's a complicated question. Computation is the manipulation and/or transformation of symbolic information. Since this is basically how human beings interact with the universe, it makes sense that we would try to understand it in that context. It would make little sense for us to measure our universe in terms of the correctness of its shape, since we don't have a point of reference for that.
I'm of the opinion that this is not terribly interesting because there are probably much larger symbols involved in the universe's "execution". I'm not sure I'm in the "10 lines of code" camp, but certainly it is attractive to presume that there are formulae -- which are simpler than the universe as a whole and which can take less starting information than the state of the entire universe -- that describe the iteration of the universe. We shall see....
"If you listen carefully the experts don't say we'll run out but that the cost will increase to a point where other fuels cost less."
Well, that's sort of double-speak isn't it. Are you asserting that if supply-and-demand did not function, and the price remained steady that the supply would not run out, or are you asserting that the supply won't have a chance to run out because when it gets low enough the price will sky-rocket?
The USGS certainly does assert that the supply will dwindle. Their expectation is (perhaps unreasonably) that the global oil community will curtail oil sales sometime between 2030 and 2060 in order to maintain a 10:1 reserve to production ratio (which is where the US has always been, but the world market is up around 50:1 right now). As that ratio drops, something will have to happen. It would be more disasterous to suddenly "run out" then to curtail sales and strech the budget of oil out into the latter part of the century.
And just to nail the point home, these studies also take into account the discovery of new sources of oil and new techniques. This is factored into the equations as an annual growth in the oil reserves (which cannot accomodate the exponential growth in demand, of course, but every little bit helps).
I would agree fully with your assesment. I wasn't trying to hype lucas up to be any more than that at all. To put it in the words of Zaphod, "he's just this guy, you know?"
Yes, you're right. But I was refering to Lucas' sense of visual style, and while I think he had less impact on that in VI, he certainly was a massive factor there in V. I knew what I was saying, and what the facts were, even if I wasn't as clear about it as I should have been.
"[George Lucas] is *not* the genius visionary that all his buddies and hollywood ass kissers like to tell him he is"
Heh, I always love to hear this kind of uninformed sillyness. It's what keeps me going.
First off, as for directing, Lucas is good. He directs well, and his visual sense is utterly amazing. He's terrible at some things, and I would never rank him with someone like Kubrik or Hitchcock. There are, however, only a handful of people who can make a movie as physically engaging as episodes IV, V and II. Technically he does a good job.
But no one sings Lucas' praises solely for his directorial work. The reason that he's refered to as a giant in the industry is the sheer number of times he's changed the way Hollywood works! You may have heard of the names Skywalker Sound, Lucasfilm, Lucas Arts, Pixar, ILM? These are all Lucas companies that have contributed hugely to the modernization of the movie-making industry. Having created any *one* of them would have been an achivement worthy of comment in Hollywood. Having created all of them is frankly stunning.
There are also less... wholesome things that I credit the man with genius and visionary status for. He forsook pay on episode IV in return for merchandizing rights. He was frankly laughed at for asking for this, but the studio happily gave away the "worthless" merchandizing rights. No studio will ever be able to take that decision lightly again because it was George Lucas who showed Hollywood what those rights were really worth. That money paid to turn ILM and Lucasfilm into forces to be reckoned with in Hollywood and in turn founded Skywalker Sound, Pixar, and lots of other little companies as spinnoffs (can anyone remember the name of the medical imaging company that Pixar spun off?)
You may or may not like or respect Lucas, and that call is all yours, but I think genius visionary is a title that can be safely awarded to anyone who slaps Hollywood to its senses and ushers in the age of digital effects and later digital film making.