It's definitely already been said, but it's worth emphasizing that online postings for jobs can be a huge waste of time -- resulting in a few calls from headhunters, and not much in the way of actual offers (see this CNET article for more info).
If you do rely on job postings (online, in the newspaper, or otherwise) to find employment, make sure that you are assertive, and make sure you're dealing with a human being when possible -- it's good to know who actually reads your letter when you email it to jobs@somecompany.com.
Of course, knowing a few people at companies you'd like to work at is incredibly valuable.
Interesting this article was published almost a full month before the next Crypt-o-gram newsletter comes out... let the buzz die down before Schneier rebutts too harhsly, eh?
All the other trendy open-source killer apps have a windows port, including the GIMP,
Mozilla, GNUPLOT, GhostView, Emacs, etc. etc. etc.
With libraries like SDL
being built cross-platform, and now even seeing
a Windows port of the GTK+ library, why not? How
better to take customers from Intuit and Microsoft
than to attack them on their own native platform?
I'm a Quicken user right now, but I would jump
to a free (as in beer, speech, whatever) alternative for Windows if I had the chance
(cause installing Linux is not my preferred
course of action right now)
Petreley has a decent point in this article. Now before I get moderated to -18 for lack of dogmatism, hear me out:
Petreley's stance on the "open" craze that's so stylish right now is much the same as mine - he thinks people are confusing beer with speech (tho I don't think Petreley uses that overworked metaphor) to detrimental effect. The folks who are taking advantage of Napster as a source of free-as-in-beer music but hide behind free-as-in-speech ideals are destroying the credibility of the rest of us.
Understand that I myself have used before to download music (that I previously owned on CD, of course... *wink*), but I don't view my renegade downloading as part of a noble movement - instead I see it as a transgression against society on about the same level as jaywalking - nobody is going to catch me, and no one is hurt enough to prevent me from doing it.
That doesn't mean that no one is hurt at all, and it doesn't mean that a society of jaywalkers is a healthy society - it just reflects the fact that people will break laws if they feel like they can get away with it and the consequences aren't particulary dire.
The subtler point that Petreley misses is that not all "illegal" actions with regard to freedom of information are unethical. I might not believe that it's ok to duplicate Win2000 CDs (or even desirable, for that matter), but you can bet that I wear my DeCSS t-shirt (thank you copyleft) with pride.
What Petreley doesn't get is that there is a totally valid civil disobedience aspect of the freedom movement, and I wish I could have seen him acknowledge that in his column. I wear my DeCSS shirt not because I think source code is free speech (though it probably is), but because I don't believe a corporation should be able to dictate how I view the publications that I have purchased. The civil disobedience aspect of the information freedom movement, and the efforts of the EFF, are as important to the future of open and free (as in speech) information as the development of Linux and other quality open software.
Moral: Stop whining and evaluate your position legally and ethically before reciting geek dogma. Save the lawsuits for stuff that actually matters.
The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law.
It is not the judge's job to uphold the law if he or she decides that the law is in error. That's why the judicial system is an effective check against the other branches of government. Civil disobedience of the type practiced by 2600 and the authors of DeCSS has been shown historically (read: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau) to be one of the best ways for individuals to make a difference in law.
The constitution is subject to interpretation by individuals and judicial officials, not just large corporations and the policymakers under their employ.
Many of us believe the DMCA should not be the law, and one of the best ways to challenge that is to show that upholding the DMCA violates the Constitution.
Check the link on my first post to confirm this, but I think they DID try your CD-R trick, and found that the PSX-based emulator was hardcoded to recognize the Japanese Chrono Trigger rom version. Someone burnt a CD with the English ROM, and the game didn't work.
I dunno if there's an ID tag in the ROM structure, or if the emulator recognized the rom by checksum, etc. It seems, tho, that Square did NOT want to release a general-purpose, PSX based, SNES emulator.
I read in an news posting a few months ago on Zophar's Domain that the Japanese Chrono Trigger re-release for the Playstation contained a file called rom.bin on the CD-ROM. People who copied the file onto a PC found that would play just fine in Snes9x [a SNES emulator], meaning that Squaresoft was running SNES emulation on the Playstation.
This implies 2 things:
Emulation on consoles would be nothing new (even barring bleemcast).
Future emulation on the X-Box (or other consoles) is likely to be transparent to the user -- people buy rereleases of the games they want (or developers write emulators for current games!) which may require emulation, but the user doesn't necessarily have to know that it's going on behind the scenes.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Square re-releasing some of their PSX games onto the X-Box with emulators built into the discs (that is, if they're not still miffed about MS trying to buy them out...).
Speech recognition is really neat and stands to greatly improve indexing and organization of non-text media. It looks like this is a pretty cool application of it, too.
That being said, let me say that something like this scares the crap out of me. This sort of technology is exactly what the FBI had in mind when it began to pressure telecommunications companies to make their phone lines more tappable. Now I don't remember the exact figure, but they wanted something like 1% of the phones in any metropolitan area tappable at once. 1% of the phones in New York City is something on the order of 50,000 phones. Tell me how you're going to keep track of all of that without a computer monitoring 50,000 conversations and looking for key words. You can't.
Monitor 1% of the population's conversations for some suspect keywords like 'bomb', 'assasinate', 'cocaine' or perhaps 'open source' and you've got one scary computer-assisted big brother watching over everything. If you don't hear anything juicy, shift to another 1%. I suppose people have had the technology to do realtime speech recognition and filtering for some time now, but the idea of maintaining searchable archives of phone conversations (enter Speechbot) is a genuinely spooky privacy violation.
Now, any technology is only as good or as evil as the people who use it. I will be cautiously interested to watch what Speechbot evolves into.
It's good to see that monsanto is doing something that is somewhat responsible -- but I'm pretty sure it's just because they know they couldn't get away with the 'terminator' plants.
Something makes me not trust Monsanto at all... One of their acheivements they're probably not so proud of is Agent Orange, which isn't too encouraging from the people who grow your food. Let's look at who else might sell us crop seeds, ok?
I've seen plenty of anti-adobe posts in response to this article. Why are they getting so much flak? I understand that they may be a bit naïve about the open source community, and that GIMP is a wonderful standin for Photoshop, but here are a few things to consider:
For those of us who are forced to use Windows in the workplace, Photoshop is just about the best tool there is for graphics, with pretty good tech support, and it's becoming more extensible and scriptable with each release. That's a good thing. GIMP may be great for those who have access to Linux, but the truth is not everyone does. Photoshop (and Illustrator) represent solid reliable tools for plenty of folks, and that should inspire some respect for Adobe.
Adobe is actually putting money into the open source community for implementing XSL, which is a standard that will be helpful not just for Adobe, but for everyone who uses XML (read: the whole web community in the near-ish future). While they may be driving a standard that they will embrace, they certainly won't control it, and I'd say the overall effect for the online community will be positive.
Adobe, while maybe unfamiliar with the open source culture, has put forth a lot of effort in developing open (and non-open) industry standards. Postscript is as good an example as any of such a standard -- and free tools like ghostscript are available for sharing information between folks. Check out the SVG (scalable vector graphics) specification at the W3C, you'll see that a couple of the authors of the document come from Adobe. Standards like SVG and Postscript are good for industry because they prevent people like Microsoft and Macromedia from sneaking in and making their own propriatary standards.
To conclude: yes, GIMP is pretty damn nifty. No, Adobe doesn't have all the clues about open source. But they are pretty good at what they do, and even if you never use photoshop, chances are you can still benefit from Adobe's work.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to nitpick here, but if you honestly wanted to "squeeze every last bit of math power out of the CPU", would you really be writing Perl scripts?
Just wondering...
-ubermuffin
...ever.
where are the sources? where are these numbers coming from? why are there no more than 4 points? are the graphs depicting the same data?
come on, folks!
It's definitely already been said, but it's worth emphasizing that online postings for jobs can be a huge waste of time -- resulting in a few calls from headhunters, and not much in the way of actual offers (see this CNET article for more info).
If you do rely on job postings (online, in the newspaper, or otherwise) to find employment, make sure that you are assertive, and make sure you're dealing with a human being when possible -- it's good to know who actually reads your letter when you email it to jobs@somecompany.com.
Of course, knowing a few people at companies you'd like to work at is incredibly valuable.
-ubermuffin
Interesting this article was published almost a full month before the next Crypt-o-gram newsletter comes out... let the buzz die down before Schneier rebutts too harhsly, eh?
-ubermuffin
With libraries like SDL being built cross-platform, and now even seeing a Windows port of the GTK+ library, why not? How better to take customers from Intuit and Microsoft than to attack them on their own native platform?
I'm a Quicken user right now, but I would jump to a free (as in beer, speech, whatever) alternative for Windows if I had the chance (cause installing Linux is not my preferred course of action right now)
-ubermuffin
Spend money? For software? I bet you pay for beer too, you poor sap! -ubermuffin
Petreley has a decent point in this article. Now before I get moderated to -18 for lack of dogmatism, hear me out:
Petreley's stance on the "open" craze that's so stylish right now is much the same as mine - he thinks people are confusing beer with speech (tho I don't think Petreley uses that overworked metaphor) to detrimental effect. The folks who are taking advantage of Napster as a source of free-as-in-beer music but hide behind free-as-in-speech ideals are destroying the credibility of the rest of us.
Understand that I myself have used before to download music (that I previously owned on CD, of course... *wink*), but I don't view my renegade downloading as part of a noble movement - instead I see it as a transgression against society on about the same level as jaywalking - nobody is going to catch me, and no one is hurt enough to prevent me from doing it.
That doesn't mean that no one is hurt at all, and it doesn't mean that a society of jaywalkers is a healthy society - it just reflects the fact that people will break laws if they feel like they can get away with it and the consequences aren't particulary dire.
The subtler point that Petreley misses is that not all "illegal" actions with regard to freedom of information are unethical. I might not believe that it's ok to duplicate Win2000 CDs (or even desirable, for that matter), but you can bet that I wear my DeCSS t-shirt (thank you copyleft) with pride.
What Petreley doesn't get is that there is a totally valid civil disobedience aspect of the freedom movement, and I wish I could have seen him acknowledge that in his column. I wear my DeCSS shirt not because I think source code is free speech (though it probably is), but because I don't believe a corporation should be able to dictate how I view the publications that I have purchased. The civil disobedience aspect of the information freedom movement, and the efforts of the EFF, are as important to the future of open and free (as in speech) information as the development of Linux and other quality open software.
Moral: Stop whining and evaluate your position legally and ethically before reciting geek dogma. Save the lawsuits for stuff that actually matters.
-ubermuffin
The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law.
It is not the judge's job to uphold the law if he or she decides that the law is in error. That's why the judicial system is an effective check against the other branches of government. Civil disobedience of the type practiced by 2600 and the authors of DeCSS has been shown historically (read: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau) to be one of the best ways for individuals to make a difference in law.
The constitution is subject to interpretation by individuals and judicial officials, not just large corporations and the policymakers under their employ.
Many of us believe the DMCA should not be the law, and one of the best ways to challenge that is to show that upholding the DMCA violates the Constitution.
-ubermuffin
Check the link on my first post to confirm this, but I think they DID try your CD-R trick, and found that the PSX-based emulator was hardcoded to recognize the Japanese Chrono Trigger rom version. Someone burnt a CD with the English ROM, and the game didn't work.
I dunno if there's an ID tag in the ROM structure, or if the emulator recognized the rom by checksum, etc. It seems, tho, that Square did NOT want to release a general-purpose, PSX based, SNES emulator.
-ubermuffin
This implies 2 things:
- Emulation on consoles would be nothing new (even barring bleemcast).
- Future emulation on the X-Box (or other consoles) is likely to be transparent to the user -- people buy rereleases of the games they want (or developers write emulators for current games!) which may require emulation, but the user doesn't necessarily have to know that it's going on behind the scenes.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Square re-releasing some of their PSX games onto the X-Box with emulators built into the discs (that is, if they're not still miffed about MS trying to buy them out...).-ubermuffin
Speech recognition is really neat and stands to greatly improve indexing and organization of non-text media. It looks like this is a pretty cool application of it, too.
That being said, let me say that something like this scares the crap out of me. This sort of technology is exactly what the FBI had in mind when it began to pressure telecommunications companies to make their phone lines more tappable. Now I don't remember the exact figure, but they wanted something like 1% of the phones in any metropolitan area tappable at once. 1% of the phones in New York City is something on the order of 50,000 phones. Tell me how you're going to keep track of all of that without a computer monitoring 50,000 conversations and looking for key words. You can't.
Monitor 1% of the population's conversations for some suspect keywords like 'bomb', 'assasinate', 'cocaine' or perhaps 'open source' and you've got one scary computer-assisted big brother watching over everything. If you don't hear anything juicy, shift to another 1%. I suppose people have had the technology to do realtime speech recognition and filtering for some time now, but the idea of maintaining searchable archives of phone conversations (enter Speechbot) is a genuinely spooky privacy violation.
Now, any technology is only as good or as evil as the people who use it. I will be cautiously interested to watch what Speechbot evolves into.
It's good to see that monsanto is doing something that is somewhat responsible -- but I'm pretty sure it's just because they know they couldn't get away with the 'terminator' plants.
Something makes me not trust Monsanto at all... One of their acheivements they're probably not so proud of is Agent Orange, which isn't too encouraging from the people who grow your food. Let's look at who else might sell us crop seeds, ok?
-ubermuffin
To conclude: yes, GIMP is pretty damn nifty. No, Adobe doesn't have all the clues about open source. But they are pretty good at what they do, and even if you never use photoshop, chances are you can still benefit from Adobe's work.