Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's extremely fast to check if the answer is correct, but slow to find a correct answer. The ideal algorithim for this is one where you have to run the test on every single possible answer until you find the correct one. If there were a million possible answers this would take (on average) 500,000 times longer than the test to see if the answer was correct.
A human-scaled version of this is:
How long does it take you to figure out "what two numbers when multiplied make 14803?"
Compare to how long it takes you to figure out "Does 113 times 131 equal 14803?"
It's a weird kind of fraud. SCO can claim it would be like buying a candybar and discovering a $1 bill in there, it would not make sense to complain to the candy manufacturer that they did not tell you they added a dollar bill to every candy bar.
Of course the reason they did this was so they could make the press release. But you could say that the press release does not harm CA so there is no fraud?
IBM could easily turn on everybody as soon as that nasty Microsoft is finished off. Watch out.
Ideally IBM should do something like put all the rights in the public domain. As a business decision it may make sense due to the enormous immediate karma benefits.
Only problem with this "plan" is, why would Microsoft fund it? Even if SCO went and told Microsoft "we are going to kill Linux if you give us money", if in reality they were really "we have this secret plan to make Linux rool and we are going to fool Microsoft into paying for it!", they would be in serious trouble for lying to Microsoft in a contract.
I actually had a different elaborate scam which apparently has been disproved. In it, SCO is on it's own, and is purposely pretending that they are being secretly funded by Microsoft. Nobody can really see the money, because, you see, it is a big illegal thing and they have to hide it. But they will make as many public statements as possible that are carefully designed to be obviously orchestrated by Microsoft. Then investors will think "hey if I buy SCO stock, I will get some of that enormous payoff from Microsoft" and this elaborate lie is used to kite the stock.
It appears now, with Microsoft's "no comment", that Microsoft really did fund this, so that elaborate idea is out. It really is exactly as everybody suspected all along...
You doofus. The quote your link points to from "headsurfer" is:
I would discount ANY reports or quotes of a 7 figure cash payment as has been reported.
We did agree to a one time payment, however we did not agree to pay a 7 figure cash payment as reported in the media.
Just like the news articles said, SCO has carefully said it was "worth" 7 figures. Which is true if you multiply the number of EV1 Linux machines by the $599 (or whatever) SCO price claims one license is "worth". They gave a "discouint" to EV1, I suspect the discount was $0 mixed with a threat to sue them over some UnixWare licenese they have.
Technically, the "nice ruler" could just as easily tell someone both a wheel account password and the root password, so I don't really see what the wheel group does that is worse for RMS than just the secret root password.
Conversely to other arguments against RMS here, I worked at Sun where everybody had a root password to their desktop machine. You could mess with it all you wanted (though if you screwed it up enough that you had to go to systems to fix it they were mad at you). Having root access to one box had nothing to do with getting root access to any other box. This scheme was incredibly useful and quite safe.
Where I work now, I don't have root password. If you do have root you have it to every machine. I constantly have to ask somebody else who has permission to fix things on my machine, and they have to be careful, for instance if they get confused about what they have rsh'd to they will screw up the wrong machine.
What RMS was complaining about is similar to home Windows users having a system with a correctly-working Administrator account that you must use to install or change software, but only Microsoft has the password and they run it remotely.
But what they need is "print as a pdf" like every other word processor in the world has. Or "email this as pdf".
Not only would this strip out the incriminating evidence (without destroying it for you) this would also make it much more difficult for a receiver to edit the document to say anything they wanted. The document will also look correct even if viewed on a machine with different fonts.
Of course Microsoft will not do this because they want their Word lock-in. They make sure that you have to be a complete Guru to do anything with Word other than store Word and print it on an actual piece of paper.
I agree, you have a good argument for them not refuting anything.
As I didn't really understand the quote at first, here is my version: if ESR says "I have proof right here that Microsoft kills kittens", Microsoft cannot say "that proof is a complete fabrication and ESR is a liar" even though they want to, because then people will say "well, sure, Microsoft does not kill kittens, but they said nothing about RMS's claim that they kill puppies, so that must be true..."
It certainly could be a forgery, in fact that seems likely to me. But analyzing the text is not going to prove it one way or the other.
Any hint that says "this is a forgery" would supposedly *not* be put in by a good forger. Or it *could* be put in by an even better forger, because people will say "such an obvious indication that it is a forgery would not be put in by a forger, so it must not be a forgery". You can continue such arguments forever. The text does not prove anything.
It is possible that SCO's plan is to convince people that Microsoft is funding them, without it being true. Even this memo may be a fake for that purpose.
Investors are not stupid. They know that if SCO "wins" and gets rid of Linux then SCO gets nothing. So they must think that SCO is somehow making income in another way. The only plausable way is to assumme somebody is giving them a lot of money secretly.
So many of SCO's proclamations so anti-Linux, without serving any possible purpose for advancing their case, that it has convinced everybody here that Microsoft is paying them. It is not impossible that this is a scam to make investors believe the same thing.
Only problem is that Microsoft could refute this in a press release. So it would seem that perhaps they fooled Microsoft into coughing up some money such as that license, enough that Microsoft cannot refute their involvement without lying a bit.
If the holloween documents were not real, why doesn't Microsoft refute them?
Believe me, if they did that, lots of people (including me and most people here) would believe them. They could paint Linux advocates as being quite willing to lie and to write quite elaborate scams.
As for MyDoom, your argument would make sense if there was a document that said "Hi I am a Linux Zealot and I wrote the MyDoom virus" and then went on with enough detail to at least indicate that the author worked hard to make an authentic-sounding fake. I have not heard of such a document.
I believe they can use any method they want to choose their candidates, like you suggest. However if they want to take advantage of the state-provided ability to poll a whole lot of people, they have to do it on the day the state chose.
The software in question is LGPL with a clearly spelled out exception that allows the library to be linked with closed-source code (not just mine, but anybody's). (this exception changes the LGPL into more like what people expect. As written the LGPL strongly encourages.so libraries for no good technical reason, static linking makes much more reliable programs and eliminates "installation").
I also accept patches to my GPL programs. Such patches are not used anywhere else other than GPL programs. I did ask for clearance on one patch that had some interesting changes that could be used in FLTK, and I got it.
I write open source software, and it is LGPL'd and GPL'd. I am also employed writing closed-source software, which is actually based on my GPL'd software. That software is the FLTK toolkit. In case this joker wants to know, FLTK is NOT a big deal, it is not tiny, but it obviously will not take over the world and is a distant third (or fourth) to Qt and GTK and maybe even WxWindows in popularity.
Still I derive extrodinary benefit from the GPL software. I have an extremely well-debugged toolkit that I can easily modify. I have also achieved a good deal of fame for this, just a search for my name will reveal that 90% of the citations are for FLTK or other toolkits, while my for-hire work for Digital Domain is hardly noticed at all. I fully expect FLTK to be very important if I need to change jobs. Every single person we have interviewed for a job here who has heard of me has heard of me because they used FLTK.
In his followup letter this guy has the incredible lack of logic to say that programmers should not be selfish and then complain that he cannot use GPL code in his software. This is typical of somebody who just does not get it, or is purposely lying to get his own agenda across. The GPL is extremely selfish. I use it because it is the only way my code can be used and still belong to me. Anybody who does not understand this has not written open source code. Any anybody who complains both about the GPL and also complains about "poor programmers not getting paid" is a raving lunatic who should not be listened too.
I am also disgusted by his "pick up girls in the bar" line. Really, do you think one of the programmers at Microsoft working on Word has any better luck picking up girls in the bar? Do you think the typical salary paid to a software engineer makes the slightest difference in this? If you do, you are pretty seriously deluded. It's the managers and money-makers who are able to do this, and in fact open source is one way to screw with them. And if you happen to be good-looking and have a nice personality then you might get the girls and they really do not care one bit whether you open-source your code or not.
Say everybody *has* to use XFree4.4 and the license clause is as obnoxious as possible (ie far worse than it apparently actually is). What would happen is that every single program will print on startup "Portions of this are based on work by the XFree86 Consortium" or something like that. This has zero effect on end users or Grammy. Plenty of Windows programs print pages and pages of such copyright stuff in their About box and end users really don't care.
The problem is for developers, who don't want to be requried to print this message (but will do so if there was no alternative) and some legal problems with combining this with some code (of which there are alternatives that could be used if necessary).
The best equivalent would be to ask how users of MS Word are affected by a contract dispute between Microsoft and one of their programmers. If they fired him then the resulting program might be different, but to the end user it is meaningless.
Yes you are right, the NeXT system had PostScript commands to create windows, and sort-of it handled events using PostScript. I was talking about DPS and OS/X, where they seem completely disconnected.
Even the NeXT system (which I did write a bunch of stuff in and tried to bypass the AppKit, like you did) was way inferior to NeWS. The window-creation command was unrelated to the rest of the drawing, it only made rectangles. NeWS had "turn the current path into a window" which was much more clever and useful. The event handling seemed to be added at the last minute and it was obvious the entire purpose was as a cheap method of multithreading (basically whatever was done in PostScript worked even if the applicatin was blocked). I would prefer either none, or all, event handling in the server, the NeXT method was just a kludge and not at all pretty. Granted events and communication in NeWS was also pretty bogus and it forced you to do everything in the server, one part NeWS failed at was making a nice way to communicate back to the C program (I was actually writing something to do this while at Sun when they killed the entire project).
No, NeWS is vastly superior to Display Postscript.
Too many people think the purpose of NeWS was to display Postscript in a window. That was a minor but nice detail. What NeWS provided was an interpreted language that was run on the display server end that did *ALL* drawing. Creating a window was a postscript command. Moving or resizing a window was a postscript command. Waiting for an event and interpreting the event was postscript. Widgets were created in postscript (plus some rather nice object-oriented additions to postscript). It was also extremely nice that you did not have to use a different language when you finally got around to drawing graphics. In addition the window manipulations reused the graphics, for instance a window had a current transformation and an outline path, allowing rotated and scaled windows, and windows with arbitrary shapes including disconnected pieces or holes inside them, and this was all cleanly supported by the same code that drew graphics.
Display Postscript and NeXT, and apparently the PDF support in OS/X, are all terrible in comparison. All of them rely on you creating a window and "context" with completely unrelated calls, before you can finally draw in Postscript. Making the window the same shape as an object you draw is incredibly difficult or impossible. Passing the same color you are drawing to some other interface is difficult or impossible. Synchronizing your drawing with changes to the windows is difficult or impossible. Getting a mouse event and figuring out what part of your graphic was clicked is often an enormously complex and obtuse API.
Unfortunatley, even when I was working on NeWS at Sun, it was being broken by people who thought it's entire purpose was to preview PostScript. If the Apple LaserWriter had a bug, it had to be dupliated in NeWS. For instance you cannot use a nul as a dictionary key in real PostScript, but NeWS took huge advantage of this. You cannot use a type other than boolean in an 'if', and NeWS took advatage of this. But people complained that they didn't want their preview working if it would not print on an Apple Laserwriter. Instead of just replacing the statments for them (which would be easy to do) they broke the entire server because so many people thought it served no purpose other than preview.
NeWS is a huge loss. I think the entire browser, and certainly all of Flash and SVG and all streaming media, and obviously X and Windows, would all not exist now, as NeWS did everything needed for them, and far better.
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It's extremely fast to check if the answer is correct, but slow to find a correct answer. The ideal algorithim for this is one where you have to run the test on every single possible answer until you find the correct one. If there were a million possible answers this would take (on average) 500,000 times longer than the test to see if the answer was correct.
A human-scaled version of this is:
How long does it take you to figure out "what two numbers when multiplied make 14803?"
Compare to how long it takes you to figure out "Does 113 times 131 equal 14803?"
So a "single lump payment" made last November is not reported on last quarter's figures? Maybe the SEC should look at this...
It's a weird kind of fraud. SCO can claim it would be like buying a candybar and discovering a $1 bill in there, it would not make sense to complain to the candy manufacturer that they did not tell you they added a dollar bill to every candy bar.
Of course the reason they did this was so they could make the press release. But you could say that the press release does not harm CA so there is no fraud?
Doesn't IBM end up with it if they win?
IBM could easily turn on everybody as soon as that nasty Microsoft is finished off. Watch out.
Ideally IBM should do something like put all the rights in the public domain. As a business decision it may make sense due to the enormous immediate karma benefits.
Though BSD and Linux are technically equivalent, Linux has far more exposure in the popular press and for that reason it is Microsoft's #1 enemy.
I think in fact some IT people install BSD and have to tell their bosses they installed "Linux" because the bosses know what Linux is and not BSD.
Only problem with this "plan" is, why would Microsoft fund it? Even if SCO went and told Microsoft "we are going to kill Linux if you give us money", if in reality they were really "we have this secret plan to make Linux rool and we are going to fool Microsoft into paying for it!", they would be in serious trouble for lying to Microsoft in a contract.
I actually had a different elaborate scam which apparently has been disproved. In it, SCO is on it's own, and is purposely pretending that they are being secretly funded by Microsoft. Nobody can really see the money, because, you see, it is a big illegal thing and they have to hide it. But they will make as many public statements as possible that are carefully designed to be obviously orchestrated by Microsoft. Then investors will think "hey if I buy SCO stock, I will get some of that enormous payoff from Microsoft" and this elaborate lie is used to kite the stock.
It appears now, with Microsoft's "no comment", that Microsoft really did fund this, so that elaborate idea is out. It really is exactly as everybody suspected all along...
You doofus. The quote your link points to from "headsurfer" is:
I would discount ANY reports or quotes of a 7 figure cash payment as has been reported.
We did agree to a one time payment, however we did not agree to pay a 7 figure cash payment as reported in the media.
Just like the news articles said, SCO has carefully said it was "worth" 7 figures. Which is true if you multiply the number of EV1 Linux machines by the $599 (or whatever) SCO price claims one license is "worth". They gave a "discouint" to EV1, I suspect the discount was $0 mixed with a threat to sue them over some UnixWare licenese they have.
Technically, the "nice ruler" could just as easily tell someone both a wheel account password and the root password, so I don't really see what the wheel group does that is worse for RMS than just the secret root password.
Conversely to other arguments against RMS here, I worked at Sun where everybody had a root password to their desktop machine. You could mess with it all you wanted (though if you screwed it up enough that you had to go to systems to fix it they were mad at you). Having root access to one box had nothing to do with getting root access to any other box. This scheme was incredibly useful and quite safe.
Where I work now, I don't have root password. If you do have root you have it to every machine. I constantly have to ask somebody else who has permission to fix things on my machine, and they have to be careful, for instance if they get confused about what they have rsh'd to they will screw up the wrong machine.
What RMS was complaining about is similar to home Windows users having a system with a correctly-working Administrator account that you must use to install or change software, but only Microsoft has the password and they run it remotely.
Of course now the computer generating their special 404 page is getting slashdotted instead, so your trick with the url's didn't help them any.
Where is the proof that the amounts of money is "millions"
Somehow SCO only made $20,000. That is the only number that has been reported.
Revision tracking is quite useful.
But what they need is "print as a pdf" like every other word processor in the world has. Or "email this as pdf".
Not only would this strip out the incriminating evidence (without destroying it for you) this would also make it much more difficult for a receiver to edit the document to say anything they wanted. The document will also look correct even if viewed on a machine with different fonts.
Of course Microsoft will not do this because they want their Word lock-in. They make sure that you have to be a complete Guru to do anything with Word other than store Word and print it on an actual piece of paper.
I agree, you have a good argument for them not refuting anything.
As I didn't really understand the quote at first, here is my version: if ESR says "I have proof right here that Microsoft kills kittens", Microsoft cannot say "that proof is a complete fabrication and ESR is a liar" even though they want to, because then people will say "well, sure, Microsoft does not kill kittens, but they said nothing about RMS's claim that they kill puppies, so that must be true..."
It certainly could be a forgery, in fact that seems likely to me. But analyzing the text is not going to prove it one way or the other.
Any hint that says "this is a forgery" would supposedly *not* be put in by a good forger. Or it *could* be put in by an even better forger, because people will say "such an obvious indication that it is a forgery would not be put in by a forger, so it must not be a forgery". You can continue such arguments forever. The text does not prove anything.
It is possible that SCO's plan is to convince people that Microsoft is funding them, without it being true. Even this memo may be a fake for that purpose.
Investors are not stupid. They know that if SCO "wins" and gets rid of Linux then SCO gets nothing. So they must think that SCO is somehow making income in another way. The only plausable way is to assumme somebody is giving them a lot of money secretly.
So many of SCO's proclamations so anti-Linux, without serving any possible purpose for advancing their case, that it has convinced everybody here that Microsoft is paying them. It is not impossible that this is a scam to make investors believe the same thing.
Only problem is that Microsoft could refute this in a press release. So it would seem that perhaps they fooled Microsoft into coughing up some money such as that license, enough that Microsoft cannot refute their involvement without lying a bit.
Holy cow, you are an idiot.
If the holloween documents were not real, why doesn't Microsoft refute them?
Believe me, if they did that, lots of people (including me and most people here) would believe them. They could paint Linux advocates as being quite willing to lie and to write quite elaborate scams.
As for MyDoom, your argument would make sense if there was a document that said "Hi I am a Linux Zealot and I wrote the MyDoom virus" and then went on with enough detail to at least indicate that the author worked hard to make an authentic-sounding fake. I have not heard of such a document.
Yes but SCO is trying to sue everyone who *drank* your coke, not you. This is obviously bogus.
The machines are running Windows CE.
I believe they can use any method they want to choose their candidates, like you suggest. However if they want to take advantage of the state-provided ability to poll a whole lot of people, they have to do it on the day the state chose.
The software in question is LGPL with a clearly spelled out exception that allows the library to be linked with closed-source code (not just mine, but anybody's). (this exception changes the LGPL into more like what people expect. As written the LGPL strongly encourages .so libraries for no good technical reason, static linking makes much more reliable programs and eliminates "installation").
I also accept patches to my GPL programs. Such patches are not used anywhere else other than GPL programs. I did ask for clearance on one patch that had some interesting changes that could be used in FLTK, and I got it.
I understand that. What I meant was that even the *worst* interpretation of the license would have no "effect on granny".
I write open source software, and it is LGPL'd and GPL'd. I am also employed writing closed-source software, which is actually based on my GPL'd software. That software is the FLTK toolkit. In case this joker wants to know, FLTK is NOT a big deal, it is not tiny, but it obviously will not take over the world and is a distant third (or fourth) to Qt and GTK and maybe even WxWindows in popularity.
Still I derive extrodinary benefit from the GPL software. I have an extremely well-debugged toolkit that I can easily modify. I have also achieved a good deal of fame for this, just a search for my name will reveal that 90% of the citations are for FLTK or other toolkits, while my for-hire work for Digital Domain is hardly noticed at all. I fully expect FLTK to be very important if I need to change jobs. Every single person we have interviewed for a job here who has heard of me has heard of me because they used FLTK.
In his followup letter this guy has the incredible lack of logic to say that programmers should not be selfish and then complain that he cannot use GPL code in his software. This is typical of somebody who just does not get it, or is purposely lying to get his own agenda across. The GPL is extremely selfish. I use it because it is the only way my code can be used and still belong to me. Anybody who does not understand this has not written open source code. Any anybody who complains both about the GPL and also complains about "poor programmers not getting paid" is a raving lunatic who should not be listened too.
I am also disgusted by his "pick up girls in the bar" line. Really, do you think one of the programmers at Microsoft working on Word has any better luck picking up girls in the bar? Do you think the typical salary paid to a software engineer makes the slightest difference in this? If you do, you are pretty seriously deluded. It's the managers and money-makers who are able to do this, and in fact open source is one way to screw with them. And if you happen to be good-looking and have a nice personality then you might get the girls and they really do not care one bit whether you open-source your code or not.
Say everybody *has* to use XFree4.4 and the license clause is as obnoxious as possible (ie far worse than it apparently actually is). What would happen is that every single program will print on startup "Portions of this are based on work by the XFree86 Consortium" or something like that. This has zero effect on end users or Grammy. Plenty of Windows programs print pages and pages of such copyright stuff in their About box and end users really don't care.
The problem is for developers, who don't want to be requried to print this message (but will do so if there was no alternative) and some legal problems with combining this with some code (of which there are alternatives that could be used if necessary).
The best equivalent would be to ask how users of MS Word are affected by a contract dispute between Microsoft and one of their programmers. If they fired him then the resulting program might be different, but to the end user it is meaningless.
Yes you are right, the NeXT system had PostScript commands to create windows, and sort-of it handled events using PostScript. I was talking about DPS and OS/X, where they seem completely disconnected.
Even the NeXT system (which I did write a bunch of stuff in and tried to bypass the AppKit, like you did) was way inferior to NeWS. The window-creation command was unrelated to the rest of the drawing, it only made rectangles. NeWS had "turn the current path into a window" which was much more clever and useful. The event handling seemed to be added at the last minute and it was obvious the entire purpose was as a cheap method of multithreading (basically whatever was done in PostScript worked even if the applicatin was blocked). I would prefer either none, or all, event handling in the server, the NeXT method was just a kludge and not at all pretty. Granted events and communication in NeWS was also pretty bogus and it forced you to do everything in the server, one part NeWS failed at was making a nice way to communicate back to the C program (I was actually writing something to do this while at Sun when they killed the entire project).
Actually the plan is to use more cable extending above geosync orbit, and the remains of the machines used to build the cable, as counterweight.
No, NeWS is vastly superior to Display Postscript.
Too many people think the purpose of NeWS was to display Postscript in a window. That was a minor but nice detail. What NeWS provided was an interpreted language that was run on the display server end that did *ALL* drawing. Creating a window was a postscript command. Moving or resizing a window was a postscript command. Waiting for an event and interpreting the event was postscript. Widgets were created in postscript (plus some rather nice object-oriented additions to postscript). It was also extremely nice that you did not have to use a different language when you finally got around to drawing graphics. In addition the window manipulations reused the graphics, for instance a window had a current transformation and an outline path, allowing rotated and scaled windows, and windows with arbitrary shapes including disconnected pieces or holes inside them, and this was all cleanly supported by the same code that drew graphics.
Display Postscript and NeXT, and apparently the PDF support in OS/X, are all terrible in comparison. All of them rely on you creating a window and "context" with completely unrelated calls, before you can finally draw in Postscript. Making the window the same shape as an object you draw is incredibly difficult or impossible. Passing the same color you are drawing to some other interface is difficult or impossible. Synchronizing your drawing with changes to the windows is difficult or impossible. Getting a mouse event and figuring out what part of your graphic was clicked is often an enormously complex and obtuse API.
Unfortunatley, even when I was working on NeWS at Sun, it was being broken by people who thought it's entire purpose was to preview PostScript. If the Apple LaserWriter had a bug, it had to be dupliated in NeWS. For instance you cannot use a nul as a dictionary key in real PostScript, but NeWS took huge advantage of this. You cannot use a type other than boolean in an 'if', and NeWS took advatage of this. But people complained that they didn't want their preview working if it would not print on an Apple Laserwriter. Instead of just replacing the statments for them (which would be easy to do) they broke the entire server because so many people thought it served no purpose other than preview.
NeWS is a huge loss. I think the entire browser, and certainly all of Flash and SVG and all streaming media, and obviously X and Windows, would all not exist now, as NeWS did everything needed for them, and far better.