As programmers, I think our next big challenge is to remove the inherent religious problems with "whitespace" in programs entirely, by presenting a programming system where the programming is truly done at a conceptual level, and not at a textual level. Pick UML, or (relatively) standard flowcharts for procedural decompositions, and work graphically. Initially, you could "render" your program in a variety of back end languages (c, c++, java, perl, tcl, python, etc.) for execution. Eventually, you could generate machine code directly, libraries for "packages" and binaries for executable programs. Then all we can complain about is the expressivity of the graphical programming environment, and not meaningless trivia like syntax, whitespace, and so on.
With Open Source Plex86, it will be really easy to build a custom reverse engineering tool. Want a parallel port scanner? Don't have the protocol? Log all the output to the printer port. Easier said than done under winzzzz - unless its running under Plex86, which is already intercepting the I/O.
You can also find tools out there that take over the parallel and serial port drivers, and log data. The tools page at www.gphoto.org has the links.
Part of the beauty of this system is that you can run the guest os off of a disk image file. You can keep copies of the file. Run WinXX and try installing a program. Oops, it just messed up your VBRUNxx.DLL! Close the VM and copy from your "last known good" disk image. Also comes in damn handy for testing windows installation software for those of us who do cross platform development.
You need a plot you can care about and get involved in. Myst was largely a variant of the "find the next key" variant. Getting off the island was a minimal plot feature. Quake, Doom, and to some extent, even Wolf3D were "point, shoot, repeat". About as much plot as the average Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Who are we as players in the game? What are our motivations? Why do we want to open the sluice gates on FCD#3? What other game entities are we battling against?
You need character development. I remember playing Planetfall (an Infocom text adventure) and crying when Floyd (your robot pal in the game) died. The prose of that particular phase of the game was crafted to evoke emotions of the player. The human experimentation evidence in Myst, on the other hand was just more stuff I couldn't click on and do anything with. In the Leisure Suit Larry series, characters fell into a few basic categories: "obstacles", "assistants", and "points". The obstacles were part of puzzles, to be worked around. The assistants were helpful parts of puzzles, giving clues and items to proceed past puzzles. The points were, well, the goal of most of the puzzles in the series.
Personally, I still prefer the classic text adventures for stimulating the imagination. The field is now referred to as "interactive fiction", and has new writers showing up every week. They leave something to the imagination, like reading a good book versus watching the movie.
The RIAA will never be able to stop the swaping of mp3. They would have to sue just about everyone with a computer.
Or do what they do with "home recording devices" and blank cassettes, and assess a fee on each computer sale, and each piece of media sold, with the intent to recoup lost earnings due to piracy/sharing.
This betrays either a woeful lack of understanding, a blatant bias, or a harmfully-narrow reading of the statute
This means that no home computers are assessed the "home recording device piracy tax". All home recording devices and media are assessed a surcharge meant to defray record industry losses due to illegal duplication. You probably don't want your computer, nor the blank CDs you burn on it assessed that surcharge, do you?
The plot line involved two human-demon mutants. Bruce's character, who wanted a "normal" kid, but could only spawn demon children, and his love interest, who wanted a "demon" kid, but could only spawn normal children. One of the more intense episodes, as I recall.
That said, and having recently become re-addicted to The Adventures of Brisco County (TNT saturday mornings, right after The Wild Wild West), I think he'd make a decent replacement for the part of Mulder. Many episodes of Brisco County read like they could be the X-files in a Western setting. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out...
the notoriously straight-laced Hatch introduced Ulrich by mentioning that the authors of ''Seek and Destroy'' and ''Creeping Death'' could use another lyricist
Apparently he didn't catch on to the fact that the song is a rendition of a biblical tale. It's just told from the point of view of the plague that swept across the land killing firstborn everywhere, passing over the houses with lamb's blood painted on their doors. Which is of course how we all celebrate passover to this day, right? =)
Most companies that purchase custom written software require a strict process known as "Verification & Validation" (V&V) to be performed in order to certify a system as meeting their requirements. IEEE has standards (IEEE.1012, iirc) that cover what should occur during this process. These companies also usually have a clause to the effect "If your system isn't up to par on the documentation, a good history/track record may be sufficient to supplement available documentation". The idea is that even though your software may not have an independently reviewed test plan derived from requirements documents, etc. that you're software shouldn't be excluded from consideration as long it has a history of working well and accurately.
For the Linux kernel systems, this V&V process amounts to verifying that the screwdrivers used to build the house meet your living requirements. So long as Apache continues to serve web pages, and a server can fairly reliably server files, mail, news, mailing lists, etc. there is a general consensus that the Linux part is trustworthy.
I wonder what he thinks of Microsoft's OSs, where they are known to deliberately mess with OS internals in order to affect performance of competing applications. The email regarding how to adversely affect PalmOS users to the advantage of WinCE users springs to mind... Is this a system I should trust?
Screw the piracy. The RIAA is worried about an independent distribution network becoming accessible to the "common man". My lord, what would the world of music distribution be like if just anyone could drop a few easily downloadable and playable files on a publicly accessible file server, and allow anyone to listen to them. No more insane distribution channels, "independent" radio promotion to launder the kickback money. They realize that their foundation is based on being able to control the distribution network. Pretty shaky foundation these days, eh?
You can get a Z-code (infocom's platform-independent bytecode) interpreter for your palm pilot at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/do wnload.htm
It is free, works well on all the infocom games I've tried so far (Zork III, Planetfall, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos). Great way to pass time waiting for the dentist, car, etc...
Activision sells an Infocom compilation CD (everything but Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Shogun) for about $20-$25. You can play HHGG on the web (or at least used to), and dig up the Z-code file in your cache. Many other entertaining games are available from the interactive fiction archives.
I didn't believe it when I read it, but according to http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/gurt/default.htm,
I am writing to let you know that we are making a public commitment not to commercialize sterile seed technologies, such as the one dubbed "Terminator." We are doing this based on input from you and a wide range of other experts and stakeholders, including our very important grower constituency.
Um. You might recall that the movie was conceived by the aforementioned Arthur C. Clarke, who you could say *invented* the communications satellite, or at least the concept of it. If you pick up the fourth book in the trilogy, 3001, Clarke includes an afterward explaining the rationale behind the technological predictions of the series, where he was right, and where he really blew it. Very good reading. Highly recommended.
Hey, lots of cool games involve running through tunnels killing things...
The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room. Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
The troll is staggered, and drops to his knees. The troll slowly regains his feet.
>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
It's curtains for the troll as your sword removes his head. Almost as soon as the troll breathes his last breath, a cloud of sinister black fog envelops him, and when the fog lifts, the carcass has disappeared. Your sword is no longer glowing
I know people who have paid a good amount of money for rare CDs on E-bay only to find them delivered as CD-Rs that someone burned in their basement. I suspect that software auctions are plagued with the same problem. Eliot J. Haquer burns copies of Windows 98 in his basement, and auctions them on E-bay. People call Microsoft for Tech. Support, and run into all the usual licensed software problems. This is microsoft trying to cover their tech support asses. How long should Microsoft be expected to wait to determine if a Win2K cd is legit? Howdoes the average comnsumer recoup their loss after buying pirated merchandise?
It'll happen eventually you know. AOLinux 7.0 will have this feature in its mail reader, and everyone using it will have problems. And they'll be screaming, "But Linux was supposed to be secure". Never mind if their machine is still running, if their user account is hosed beyond recognition.
As a possible preventive step, I think it would make sense to have a "safe environment" to run potentially untrusted executables in. Use LD_PRELOAD to override many system functions to ask for confirmation before allowing something to happen that seems "suspicious". For example,
"untrusted application ILOVEYOU is attempting to open file ~/mp3s/SomeFile.mp3 for writing: [A]llow operation, [D]isallow operation, or [T]erminate application?
The untrusted environment could be configured for varying levels of paranoia by each operation checked for: File Opens inside App's run environment: OK Ask Disallow Terminate File Opens outside App's run environment: etc.
This would make the distinction between opening a file for it's own purposes in a temporary directory specifically allocated to the untrusted application, and attempting to open, say,/etc/crontab for writing.
The practice of sharing copies of copyrighted material for personal use is not now, nor has it ever been illegal.
Sharing copies is not personal use. You are allowed to archive/translate copyrighted material for personal use. You are not allowed to copy whatever you want and give it away. That is the very definition of piracy. Whether or not you profit from it is orthogonal to the legality of the copying.
In the field of education, photocopiers have been churning out worksheets and articles for years.
Copying of copyrighted works is allowed for educational use. In the case of educational materials, publishers will typically expressly allow duplication of workbooks. However, even educational uses have limits. A school is not allowed to puchase a single copy of a textbook and photocopy the whole text for use by a classroom full of students.
It is also perfectly legal for me to tape a CD and give a copy to my friend. As an owner of the CD, it is my right. It ONLY becomes a crime if I charge and make a profit.
No, it is not perfectly legal for you to tape a CD and give a copy to anyone. It is legal to tape a copy for your own personal use, i.e. in the car, at work, on the computer, but it becomes a crime the instant you hand the tape to your friend.
he is excercising his right to distribute copies for personal use.
Distribution is, by definition, not personal use.
Please get a clue before making such ridiculous assertions.
No,we're talking about kids in college trading copyrighted material with a program to do just that.
You could say the same thing of any FTP client, or web browser, for that matter. As long as *some* of the napster traffic is legal (local band promos, public domain, etc.), the courts *can't* find napster at fault. Precedent is set by the fact you can't sue the phone company for fraud committed by phone. It's the driver, not the road that's to blame.
Lars was a business guy all along, it just didn't show until they really got popular.
Lars before the "One" video, when only *real* metalheads listened to them, and you could survive a mosh pit without full body armor: "Videos suck! They get in the way of the song. The music means something different to everyone."
Lars after the "One" video, when all the trendy assholes started listening to them, and broken bones in mosh pits became a question of "how many?" instead of "if?": "The video was a great for us to bring another dimension of the music to the fans and..."
Lars has a habit of changing his opinions as needed. Not that he shouldn't be allowed to change an opinion if his beliefs change. Just nowadays, I just never get the impression he's given us his "final answer". Whatever he believes, he believes *so* wholeheartedly, even if it's the exact opposite of what he believed a few months ago. If he showed any indication of how he got from belief X to its antithesis, I'd have a lot more trust in anything that came out of his mouth.
RE: Commodities and art - Warhol's view
on
Pay Lars
·
· Score: 1
Art, historically, is something that is meant to bring enjoyment to the masses.
I prefer Andy Warhol's view:
Art is what you can get away with.
Now that I think about it, it's a good thing Andy worked in a time earlier than today. Would Campbell's soup let him sell his renditions of their labels as art? Would they charge him a fee for the privilege? Would... yeesh. This just takes the cake.
We come up with a system that allows for perfect copies of a "piece" (music, art, movie, whatever), i.e. digital representations of same. We then come up with the perfect mass information distribution mechanism, i.e. the internet. Then the owners of the physical media distribution network (CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc.) spend all their time trying to stop the digitized media distribution. It's like fighting gravity, guys. You'll lose eventually.
Having been a starving heavy metal guitarist, I understand that the band members need to eat. The current distribution mechanism (including ASCAP/BMI) is going to need some *serious* rethinking to survive the digital information age.
Slashdot Mirror
As programmers, I think our next big challenge is to remove the inherent religious problems with "whitespace" in programs entirely, by presenting a programming system where the programming is truly done at a conceptual level, and not at a textual level. Pick UML, or (relatively) standard flowcharts for procedural decompositions, and work graphically. Initially, you could "render" your program in a variety of back end languages (c, c++, java, perl, tcl, python, etc.) for execution. Eventually, you could generate machine code directly, libraries for "packages" and binaries for executable programs. Then all we can complain about is the expressivity of the graphical programming environment, and not meaningless trivia like syntax, whitespace, and so on.
You can also find tools out there that take over the parallel and serial port drivers, and log data. The tools page at www.gphoto.org has the links.
Part of the beauty of this system is that you can run the guest os off of a disk image file. You can keep copies of the file. Run WinXX and try installing a program. Oops, it just messed up your VBRUNxx.DLL! Close the VM and copy from your "last known good" disk image. Also comes in damn handy for testing windows installation software for those of us who do cross platform development.
You need a plot you can care about and get involved in. Myst was largely a variant of the "find the next key" variant. Getting off the island was a minimal plot feature. Quake, Doom, and to some extent, even Wolf3D were "point, shoot, repeat". About as much plot as the average Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Who are we as players in the game? What are our motivations? Why do we want to open the sluice gates on FCD#3? What other game entities are we battling against?
You need character development. I remember playing Planetfall (an Infocom text adventure) and crying when Floyd (your robot pal in the game) died. The prose of that particular phase of the game was crafted to evoke emotions of the player. The human experimentation evidence in Myst, on the other hand was just more stuff I couldn't click on and do anything with. In the Leisure Suit Larry series, characters fell into a few basic categories: "obstacles", "assistants", and "points". The obstacles were part of puzzles, to be worked around. The assistants were helpful parts of puzzles, giving clues and items to proceed past puzzles. The points were, well, the goal of most of the puzzles in the series.
Personally, I still prefer the classic text adventures for stimulating the imagination. The field is now referred to as "interactive fiction", and has new writers showing up every week. They leave something to the imagination, like reading a good book versus watching the movie.
Better yet, vote Jello Biafra for president. He is running after all. Now if he could convince Henry Rollins to be his running mate... =)
Or do what they do with "home recording devices" and blank cassettes, and assess a fee on each computer sale, and each piece of media sold, with the intent to recoup lost earnings due to piracy/sharing.
This means that no home computers are assessed the "home recording device piracy tax". All home recording devices and media are assessed a surcharge meant to defray record industry losses due to illegal duplication. You probably don't want your computer, nor the blank CDs you burn on it assessed that surcharge, do you?
I believe it was actually the Microsoft Galaxy. =)
That's all I had to say really...
How long till rockets look like race cars?
The plot line involved two human-demon mutants. Bruce's character, who wanted a "normal" kid, but could only spawn demon children, and his love interest, who wanted a "demon" kid, but could only spawn normal children. One of the more intense episodes, as I recall.
That said, and having recently become re-addicted to The Adventures of Brisco County (TNT saturday mornings, right after The Wild Wild West), I think he'd make a decent replacement for the part of Mulder. Many episodes of Brisco County read like they could be the X-files in a Western setting. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out...
Apparently he didn't catch on to the fact that the song is a rendition of a biblical tale. It's just told from the point of view of the plague that swept across the land killing firstborn everywhere, passing over the houses with lamb's blood painted on their doors. Which is of course how we all celebrate passover to this day, right? =)
You forgot to mention WalMart's habits of raising prices above their competitors' starting point once all competition is crushed and run out of town.
Hooray! WalMart brought 100 new (minimum-wage) jobs to our quaint rural town. And put 100 local businesspeople out of a job over the next few years...
Most companies that purchase custom written software require a strict process known as "Verification & Validation" (V&V) to be performed in order to certify a system as meeting their requirements. IEEE has standards (IEEE.1012, iirc) that cover what should occur during this process. These companies also usually have a clause to the effect "If your system isn't up to par on the documentation, a good history/track record may be sufficient to supplement available documentation". The idea is that even though your software may not have an independently reviewed test plan derived from requirements documents, etc. that you're software shouldn't be excluded from consideration as long it has a history of working well and accurately.
For the Linux kernel systems, this V&V process amounts to verifying that the screwdrivers used to build the house meet your living requirements. So long as Apache continues to serve web pages, and a server can fairly reliably server files, mail, news, mailing lists, etc. there is a general consensus that the Linux part is trustworthy.
I wonder what he thinks of Microsoft's OSs, where they are known to deliberately mess with OS internals in order to affect performance of competing applications. The email regarding how to adversely affect PalmOS users to the advantage of WinCE users springs to mind... Is this a system I should trust?
Screw the piracy. The RIAA is worried about an independent distribution network becoming accessible to the "common man". My lord, what would the world of music distribution be like if just anyone could drop a few easily downloadable and playable files on a publicly accessible file server, and allow anyone to listen to them. No more insane distribution channels, "independent" radio promotion to launder the kickback money. They realize that their foundation is based on being able to control the distribution network. Pretty shaky foundation these days, eh?
It would probably sound like Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Milton Babbit, Ann Sheilds, Keith Emerson, and Rick Wakeman (among others).
Actually, interactive fiction is a *great* way to improve your graffiti skills. Beats the hell out of that Giraffe nonsense...
You can get a Z-code (infocom's platform-independent bytecode) interpreter for your palm pilot at: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/do
wnload.htm
It is free, works well on all the infocom games I've tried so far (Zork III, Planetfall, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos). Great way to pass time waiting for the dentist, car, etc...
Activision sells an Infocom compilation CD (everything but Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Shogun) for about $20-$25. You can play HHGG on the web (or at least used to), and dig up the Z-code file in your cache. Many other entertaining games are available from the interactive fiction archives.
I didn't believe it when I read it, but according to http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/gurt/default.htm
Um. You might recall that the movie was conceived by the aforementioned Arthur C. Clarke, who you could say *invented* the communications satellite, or at least the concept of it. If you pick up the fourth book in the trilogy, 3001, Clarke includes an afterward explaining the rationale behind the technological predictions of the series, where he was right, and where he really blew it. Very good reading. Highly recommended.
Hey, lots of cool games involve running through tunnels killing things...
I know people who have paid a good amount of money for rare CDs on E-bay only to find them delivered as CD-Rs that someone burned in their basement. I suspect that software auctions are plagued with the same problem. Eliot J. Haquer burns copies of Windows 98 in his basement, and auctions them on E-bay. People call Microsoft for Tech. Support, and run into all the usual licensed software problems. This is microsoft trying to cover their tech support asses. How long should Microsoft be expected to wait to determine if a Win2K cd is legit? Howdoes the average comnsumer recoup their loss after buying pirated merchandise?
It'll happen eventually you know. AOLinux 7.0 will have this feature in its mail reader, and everyone using it will have problems. And they'll be screaming, "But Linux was supposed to be secure". Never mind if their machine is still running, if their user account is hosed beyond recognition.
/etc/crontab for writing.
As a possible preventive step, I think it would make sense to have a "safe environment" to run potentially untrusted executables in. Use LD_PRELOAD to override many system functions to ask for confirmation before allowing something to happen that seems "suspicious". For example,
"untrusted application ILOVEYOU is attempting to open file ~/mp3s/SomeFile.mp3 for writing: [A]llow operation, [D]isallow operation, or [T]erminate application?
The untrusted environment could be configured for varying levels of paranoia by each operation checked for:
File Opens inside App's run environment: OK Ask Disallow Terminate
File Opens outside App's run environment: etc.
This would make the distinction between opening a file for it's own purposes in a temporary directory specifically allocated to the untrusted application, and attempting to open, say,
Thoughts? Ideas? Discussion?
Sharing copies is not personal use. You are allowed to archive/translate copyrighted material for personal use. You are not allowed to copy whatever you want and give it away. That is the very definition of piracy. Whether or not you profit from it is orthogonal to the legality of the copying.
In the field of education, photocopiers have been churning out worksheets and articles for years.
Copying of copyrighted works is allowed for educational use. In the case of educational materials, publishers will typically expressly allow duplication of workbooks. However, even educational uses have limits. A school is not allowed to puchase a single copy of a textbook and photocopy the whole text for use by a classroom full of students.
It is also perfectly legal for me to tape a CD and give a copy to my friend. As an owner of the CD, it is my right. It ONLY becomes a crime if I charge and make a profit.
No, it is not perfectly legal for you to tape a CD and give a copy to anyone. It is legal to tape a copy for your own personal use, i.e. in the car, at work, on the computer, but it becomes a crime the instant you hand the tape to your friend.
he is excercising his right to distribute copies for personal use.
Distribution is, by definition, not personal use.
Please get a clue before making such ridiculous assertions.
You could say the same thing of any FTP client, or web browser, for that matter. As long as *some* of the napster traffic is legal (local band promos, public domain, etc.), the courts *can't* find napster at fault. Precedent is set by the fact you can't sue the phone company for fraud committed by phone. It's the driver, not the road that's to blame.
Lars before the "One" video, when only *real* metalheads listened to them, and you could survive a mosh pit without full body armor: "Videos suck! They get in the way of the song. The music means something different to everyone."
Lars after the "One" video, when all the trendy assholes started listening to them, and broken bones in mosh pits became a question of "how many?" instead of "if?": "The video was a great for us to bring another dimension of the music to the fans and
Lars has a habit of changing his opinions as needed. Not that he shouldn't be allowed to change an opinion if his beliefs change. Just nowadays, I just never get the impression he's given us his "final answer". Whatever he believes, he believes *so* wholeheartedly, even if it's the exact opposite of what he believed a few months ago. If he showed any indication of how he got from belief X to its antithesis, I'd have a lot more trust in anything that came out of his mouth.
I prefer Andy Warhol's view:
Now that I think about it, it's a good thing Andy worked in a time earlier than today. Would Campbell's soup let him sell his renditions of their labels as art? Would they charge him a fee for the privilege? Would
We come up with a system that allows for perfect copies of a "piece" (music, art, movie, whatever), i.e. digital representations of same. We then come up with the perfect mass information distribution mechanism, i.e. the internet. Then the owners of the physical media distribution network (CDs, DVDs, tapes, etc.) spend all their time trying to stop the digitized media distribution. It's like fighting gravity, guys. You'll lose eventually.
Having been a starving heavy metal guitarist, I understand that the band members need to eat. The current distribution mechanism (including ASCAP/BMI) is going to need some *serious* rethinking to survive the digital information age.