I think you've missed the point of Geekcruises going to remote places, and in particular to Alaska.
It's not so much to give geeks nicer surroundings (beauty is in the eye of the beholder anyway), but to make them inaccessible to the thousand and one annoying non-tech people and events that interrupt their daily lives with irrelevancies, and to bring like-minded tech people together.
A simple definition of a geek (I'm one) is a person who enjoys technology above all else, and who prefers the company of like-minded others. A geek cruise is hard to beat for that!
Lawyers can defend even acknowledged ruthless child serial killers, so complaining about their defence of the music studios is pointless; it's in the nature of legal argument to ignore all arguments against one's position and only focus on supportive ones, so the RIAA lawyers are deaf by design, by training. Likewise, the studios are doing as required by law in defending the income of their shareholders, so the most one can really complain about is the lack of vision of their executives. If you really want to get to the source of the current problem, you need to look at the artists themselves, because as long as they continue to sell their souls to the studio system, it follows as night follows day that the studios will continue to capitalize from it.
Buy a music mag and try to find any groundswell of opinion among artists in favor of their listeners and against the policies of the studios and against the actions of the RIAA. Once in a blue moon you'll find a high-profile celebrity like Janis Ian, but they're lone voices rather than part of a trend. There is no groundswell of opinion among the artists in favor of removing the studios from the loop. They continue to buy into the music industry hype, because it's the done thing in their world. They don't feel that they've made it until they're mentioned in the music press buzz, which is an inherent part of the studio propaganda machinery.
I don't know how this vicious circle can be broken, but it's being fed daily by countless signings of new artists to the labels, and trying to combat the RIAA and other symptoms instead of the root cause is not likely to be very productive.
Unfortunatly, huge classes of suitable elliptic curves got patented.
On what basis were the different elliptic curves considered different, to allow for the patentability of followups after the first patent was granted?
I ask this because along that dimension of "approved" non-overlapping variance there must be other elliptic curves for which there is no current patent, and if prior art is established for them then we can use that in an ECC implementation for GnuPG without fear of patent claims. Proceeding without knowing which type of variation is approved by the patent office as "different" would not have that safeguard.
Just because products can be inventoried rapidly with RFID or barcodes doesn't necessarily mean that inventory control improves. There needs to be someone with a brain cell in the loop somewhere too.
As a mildly funny example, I'm pretty tired of the wholemeal pitta bread running out every day several hours before the white variety in our local supermarket. It's been happening for years, despite the perpetual roving hoards of clerks running up and down the isles with their little scanning machines. You'd think that better stock control would be used to help increase sales by ordering optimal amounts.
I bet you've all seen your own versions of this lack of a guiding intelligence in places, despite deployment of the latest technologies.
The potential dangers go further than merely allowing "the enemy" (LOL) to check your inventory. It's pretty easy to forecast that denial of service attacks will be used against this system as well as mere snooping, and there's no way that it'll be hardened against them because RFID is marketed as a cheap and simple way of reducing your costs, which eliminates hardening entirely.
By the way, there's no need for the sledgehammer aircraft-based transmitter approach. I would expect inventory snooping to be done by dropping small scanners into delivery trucks or air vents, or getting them positioned properly by the most powerful weapon, namely insider help, either voluntary or under duress.
Even worse, this is not just an inventory issue. Once RFID tags are accepted, live hardware will employ them, and the potential problems then hit another dimension altogether.
The reliability aspects of this are indeed dreadful, but could possibly be overcome if each driver ran in its own individual MMU-protected virtual machine. User-space module and driver mechanisms already exist, so this wouldn't be such a huge leap.
That could ensure that diver code never tramples on any other code and only communicates with the rest of the O/S via fixed interfaces. It could still hang of course, but dealing with that would be no different to dealing with other misbehaving user processes, and if the problem is severe enough to lock up the hardware under the driver's control then it'll do so regardless of the implementation.
If an open-source implementation of ITRON did exist, someone would have pulled the openly available sources off a Japanese server and we'd be playing with them right now.
At best, there is an open specification of ITRON whereas all implementations are proprietary. Furthermore, even that "open" specification appears to be tied in with privileged access if you want to see anything resembling actual code APIs or architectural details at a finer level than boxes, lines and clouds. I guess that that stems from all implementations being closed.
The possibility always remains that we simply don't see all the detailed material because of the language barrier, but there are more than enough cross-linguists in open-source ranks to have disabused us of that misapprehension by now.
ITRON just doesn't actually appear to exist at all, in an open-source sense. The billions of instances burned into microcontroller chips are definitely not open.
While the commercialization of the Internet was inevitable because the Internet is a good thing and it didn't take a teccie to realize that, there's no doubt that along with the gains, much has been destroyed.
I don't think that this is a biggie though, but merely part of the cycle of things. Now that we're reaching the point where life on the Internet is distasteful owing to control by the corporate clueless, it's time to move on and build our next network.
That'd be the definition of linear scaling. Scaling can apply to n,.5n, or other rates. So, saying X and Y scale at the same rate could they both scale at 0 (ie, adding machines have no effect).
You are of course right.
However, everyone uses the phrase "it scales" without further adornment to mean "it scales linearly and with a factor of not much less than 1.0". That's just us humans taking sensible linguistic shortcuts.:-)
On a more academic front, there are two separate issues to consider, the first being linearity (the scaling factor not dropping off as you increase N, ie. overall throughput remaining on the straight line), and the second being the value of the scaling factor, as you point out. They're both important in practice, simply because in the real world it's not just scalability that matters but also absolute performance and efficient resource utilitization as well.
Did you ever deal with NSI or Verisign customer service?
I dealt with Verisign customer service some years back, and the memory still makes me giggle, although that's probably to keep from crying.
I was trying to identify a problem with our server certificates after a format change, and I was using telnet and various other normal engineering tools to figure out what was wrong. Some way into our chat which was making curiously slow progress, the Verisign customer service person asked me "What is telnet?".
I'm more concerned about the state of violent politics, the underpinning of big business by law makers at the expense of the individual citizen, and the subversion of law and justice in the name of profit.
Games are... just games, the same as television and films and books are just their own types of fiction. To criticize one without criticizing the other is not just inconsistent, it is fundamentally dishonest.
The point of the EFF doing this is precisely to underline the fact that big business is attempting to take control of the end-user computing platform away from the user.
You see, the problem is not so much that big business is doing this, but that it is doing so by subterfuge rather than out in the open.
The EFF is just flushing out the rats here. If business were trying to take control of people's property openly then the EFF wouldn't need to put on an act of innocence and merely be "identifying dangers" as the proposed solutions as if business wasn't aware of them.
It's a good strategy. Big business can only respond by saying either "Oh yeah, we hadn't realized" (LOL), or else it can reply that this was indeed the intention. In both cases, the user wins.
My bet though is that the EFF will be met by total silence.
Pretty odd really, his entire set of "benefits" were almost entirely negative, or at least presented negatively: for example, not needing to wake up to the alarm clock, yet waking up anyway at the crack of dawn owing to a sense of dread. That seems to stem from a less than positive outlook on life, and it isn't really all that consistent with the title of the essay.
As a freelancer, I go through long periods between contracts as part of normal operation, and yes, one does turn down the spending knob to its lowest setting, but it's entirely a positive experience. One simply doesn't need to keep up with the Jones's every time they go out to the restaurant, buy a new DVD, or upgrade their car. Life in the affluent west is great... as long as you don't fall for the hype, and you keep the telly firmly switched off, and you do your own thing.
And as a programmer, assuming that it's in your blood and not just a job, then "your own thing" really means being creative with computers.
So, I'd have expected a long list of new technologies that he'd always meant to catch up on and now has the time, and a long list of personal projects that he always wanted to develop and at last has the opportunity, etc etc.
Being positive is in the mind, and has almost nothing to do with external circumstances, and definitely has nothing to do with financial circumstances.
Just keep that telly firmly switched off, as it's the primary instrument of evil hype and distorted goals, and it will not help you to feel happy in yourself unless you have the cash that the advertisers implicitly require viewers to have. The messaging is largely subliminal or implicit too in "entertainment" features, so it's not enoough to simply avoid the adverts. Stick to online games... same square format, no evil hype.:-)
If the worst comes to pass and all countries everywhere go nuts with patent laws, at the end of the day every piece of Free or Open Source software could end up potentially subject to royalties from countless thousands of patent squatters around the globe. The very openness of the code promotes that possibility, because patent squatters can start with the source code and work backwards to find patents that it might possibly fit. The nightmare would be unimaginable.
If the community is to survive, perhaps the only possible outcome of that (short of civil war or terrorism) would be for free and open-source software writers to go underground, with all distribution being done through anonymous injection into flooding-fill networks like Usenet.
I'm not really sure if that would be good or bad, but it would certainly be different, and it would be hard.
I know why he says that Solaris is dramatically less expensive than Linux. It's because he works for Sun and therefore doesn't pay Sun's massive rates for service contracts.:-)
Seriously, Sun's post-sales services are pretty good, but nobody ever said they were cheap. Or not too expensive. Or not even just very expensive. The only word that comes to mind for decent cover is exhorbitant.
A top-end Sun service contract costs many many times the total cost of a Linux server system, including all its hardware, software, and permanent supply of Jolt cola, so clearly the man is engaged in baseless PR.
If there is anything at all that qualifies as a right, it's the ability to communicate with others freely. That is why removal of the freedom to communicate is quite possibly the harshest aspect of imprisonment. And that is why most of the free world regards regimes with repressive communication policies as being anti-freedom.
When a company provides a means of communication as part of their product, disallowing their customers from using that medium to communicate with non-customers is vastly worse than a mere business decision, if the tool is at all popular then it hits at the heart of people's daily lives.
It seems that politicians are too busy underpinning big business these days to notice unimportant issues like their citizens losing part of their ability to communicate freely. Well, I guess it's in the hands of the voters.
I think you're right to be pessimistic about where things are going. The blame is being appportioned incorrectly to the RIAA though.
The RIAA is basically a bunch of amoral (not immoral) lawyers and their hacks, going about their daily business of bleeding the population dry to fill studio coffers. Lawyers are always amoral like this, that's why they can represent the most evil and violent scum of humanity in court.
The scum in this case are the studios, but who can blame them. In many ways, they're mandated to do everything in their power to bring in cash by their obligation to their shareholders. So where does the blame lie?
Simple. If artists did not hand over rights to their music to the studios, this issue would not exist at all. Almost all of them continue to do so though, albeit with some high profile and very worthy exceptions. It's a drop in the ocean though. The rest are not idiots, oblivious to the plight of their fans and the strong-arm tactics of studios and RIAA. They're simple money-grabbing, full stop, or else they'd do something about it, make a noise about not wishing their fans to be persecuted like this, at the very least.
Yes, many artists signed contracts way back and can't get out of them immediately, but most of them aren't even trying, and new bands are still trying to get signed up daily. Blame the artists for the current situation.
It's a double hidden secret scheme
on
Inkblot Passwords
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· Score: 1
An innovative, potential useful idea coming from Microsoft?
LOL, maybe that's going too far, but it is pretty interesting, and certainly fun. I like the hidden secret aspect especially.
Lots of security systems use the notion of a hidden secret -- CHAP is probably the most common. The secret is most often part of the computing platform and not part of the user, although textual prompts to the user have been in use for many years so the general mechanism is not new.
Here they're using two hidden secrets, chained: the inkblot input gets transformed first by one's fairly unique pattern recognizer and then by one's fairly unique word association machinery, neither of which is ever externalized. In principle that sounds pretty viable, although it does raise the question of whether both transformations are deterministic, and if not, then whether one helps the other to converge or whether a failure in one always leads to divergence. As with anything related to our inner workings, there are a lot of unanswered questions in this area, and not just for psychoanalysts.:-)
Reproducibility could be a concern too. Since our pattern matching is sensitive to color and brightness and not just to shape alone, the method of encoding the inkblots to generate always the same image attributes regardless of platform or display is probably going to be non-trivial.
Of course, the problem with that novel is that while they have full molecular nanotechnology, the main characters walk around as meat bags.
I agree, that kind of physical manifestation is pretty incongruous in a distant-future setting, and it's a mistake that virtually all SF books and films make to some degree. I think there might be some "restrict humanity" meme going around in SF publishing circles, possibly fueled by the "otherwise readers won't relate to it" argument. Pretty pathetic.
However, I don't think the novel was really intended to be any kind of hardcore SF adventure with well-designed physicals that mattered. Aristoi is about people harnessing their daimones (internal autonomous intelligent agents, for those that haven't read it), and it does a really good job of that. It's a great read, even funny in the stereotyped focuses of some of those daimones as they work together.
Aristoi is one of my favourite books, and it's certainly on my recommendations list. The "walk around as meat bags" thing doesn't detract much from it at all, maybe because nearly all SF authors fall into the same trap.
Looking at this nonsense from outside, all the things others on this thread are saying about artists makes them look like gormless, witless, even masochistic sheep, unable to see beyond the ends of their noses and to understand cause and effect. It's hard to believe. In fact I don't believe it, these are intelligent, creative people for the most part, if one disregards "manufactured" pop bands.
Why they're doing what they're doing and continuing to sign up with labels at all is completely incomprehensible to me. I'm totally at a loss here. I just cannot believe that the insignificantly tiny possibility that they will make it huge can distort judgement that badly. Not really. There must be some other factor.
Creativity in the genius category comes from obsession with a topic, mulling it around in your brain without cease (unavoidably around the clock) until you see it so clearly that intuition leaps in periodically and takes you a quantum step ahead. It's easy to see how that stops dead when you're married and your think-time becomes "managed" and your priorities reassessed. It's one of the many compromises that you have to make to live a shared life with another person, rather than just sharing a living space, normally. It's worth pointing out though that this needn't actually be a limiting factor for everyone: a few people get married but don't self-introspect enough to notice a need for compromise at all. I don't know how common that is though.
As regards crime, that correlation is probably for a different reason, but equally easy to see. Most criminals are likely to be loners, at least outside Italy (:-), and for a very good reason: anyone else that knows what you're doing is likely to be a liability to you. I really don't see it working in a family environment.
So to summarize all the responses to Karma_Sucks's thread, C++ is basically pointless.
As most of you agree, it has lots of pretty features (even the advocates agree that it's got *too* many though), and it's incredibly versatile (although even the advocates agree that in some areas it's *too* versatile for its own good), and it allows the compiler to optimize better (except that language complexity results in most programs being a lot slower than necessary because of all the unexpected and unnecessary temp constructions and destructions), and it's got excellent overloading (except that the gotchas increase semantic complexity a hundredfold and the rest of the time overloading confuses the newbies), and it's fully object-oriented (except that it's not since the encapsulation is only class-based).... so, er, what exactly were the pro's?
I'm speaking as a long-term C++ developer, but (clearly) not as an advocate. I've just seen too many commercial projects die through using C++, mainly because the team's project management skills were not up to the challange of using such an extraordinarily complex language. When I say "die", I mean it has cost the companies millions of dollars each time.
I've also seen it succeed, magnificently, just once. But the management on that project was absolutely brilliant, exceptional. It is not the norm.
C++ has a few good things for lone developers. Pure and simply though, C++ is dangerous on typical commercial projects. YMMV.
I agree with the parent post (but not from a Java standpoint, as that language has a lot of silliness too): to improve C++, remove 90% of it.
It disgusts me too, but for a slightly different reason.
As a systems designer with just too much background behind me in a multiplicity of fields including linguistics, semantics, cognition and AI, among many others, I refuse to be bound or in any way hindered or limited by this patent or any similar ones in this field.
Just because someone has the gall to put in a patent application on something doesn't mean that other people's life's work and thoughts suddenly become worthless or derivative or exploitable.
Good luck mister "inventor". But if you try to put a stopper or royalty on my own totally independent ideas here (even if they were to coincidentally turn out identical to yours) then please be ready for litigation based on published thoughts long predating yours. You weren't the first to come up with this, in fact you might have been the hundredth. But you were the first with the professional affrontary to try to stop further development of these ideas through the patent process. If you think that's praise, you've got the wrong end of the stick.
It's not a bad thing that there is no federal anti-spam law. [...] Or worse, a law that allows Ashcroft and Poindexter to get even further into my computer.
Indeed, and there's another argument that supports your position. We now have really reliable spam blocking mechanisms available to us, for all platforms, very easy to use, and they reduce the spam that reaches us by 98% without any effort at all. And they can be deployed on servers too where appropriate, not just on end-user machines. Spam need no longer be a headache, and it is under *OUR* control.
In contrast, getting the non-technical powers of society involved in this is a recipe for much mourning and gnashing of teeth for the future. We *will* regret it, there's not the slightest shadow of doubt. And they won't even thank us for giving away our control and giving them yet more power over us.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've missed the point of Geekcruises going to remote places, and in particular to Alaska.
It's not so much to give geeks nicer surroundings (beauty is in the eye of the beholder anyway), but to make them inaccessible to the thousand and one annoying non-tech people and events that interrupt their daily lives with irrelevancies, and to bring like-minded tech people together.
A simple definition of a geek (I'm one) is a person who enjoys technology above all else, and who prefers the company of like-minded others. A geek cruise is hard to beat for that!
Lawyers can defend even acknowledged ruthless child serial killers, so complaining about their defence of the music studios is pointless; it's in the nature of legal argument to ignore all arguments against one's position and only focus on supportive ones, so the RIAA lawyers are deaf by design, by training. Likewise, the studios are doing as required by law in defending the income of their shareholders, so the most one can really complain about is the lack of vision of their executives. If you really want to get to the source of the current problem, you need to look at the artists themselves, because as long as they continue to sell their souls to the studio system, it follows as night follows day that the studios will continue to capitalize from it.
Buy a music mag and try to find any groundswell of opinion among artists in favor of their listeners and against the policies of the studios and against the actions of the RIAA. Once in a blue moon you'll find a high-profile celebrity like Janis Ian, but they're lone voices rather than part of a trend. There is no groundswell of opinion among the artists in favor of removing the studios from the loop. They continue to buy into the music industry hype, because it's the done thing in their world. They don't feel that they've made it until they're mentioned in the music press buzz, which is an inherent part of the studio propaganda machinery.
I don't know how this vicious circle can be broken, but it's being fed daily by countless signings of new artists to the labels, and trying to combat the RIAA and other symptoms instead of the root cause is not likely to be very productive.
Unfortunatly, huge classes of suitable elliptic curves got patented.
On what basis were the different elliptic curves considered different, to allow for the patentability of followups after the first patent was granted?
I ask this because along that dimension of "approved" non-overlapping variance there must be other elliptic curves for which there is no current patent, and if prior art is established for them then we can use that in an ECC implementation for GnuPG without fear of patent claims. Proceeding without knowing which type of variation is approved by the patent office as "different" would not have that safeguard.
Just because products can be inventoried rapidly with RFID or barcodes doesn't necessarily mean that inventory control improves. There needs to be someone with a brain cell in the loop somewhere too.
As a mildly funny example, I'm pretty tired of the wholemeal pitta bread running out every day several hours before the white variety in our local supermarket. It's been happening for years, despite the perpetual roving hoards of clerks running up and down the isles with their little scanning machines. You'd think that better stock control would be used to help increase sales by ordering optimal amounts.
I bet you've all seen your own versions of this lack of a guiding intelligence in places, despite deployment of the latest technologies.
The potential dangers go further than merely allowing "the enemy" (LOL) to check your inventory. It's pretty easy to forecast that denial of service attacks will be used against this system as well as mere snooping, and there's no way that it'll be hardened against them because RFID is marketed as a cheap and simple way of reducing your costs, which eliminates hardening entirely.
By the way, there's no need for the sledgehammer aircraft-based transmitter approach. I would expect inventory snooping to be done by dropping small scanners into delivery trucks or air vents, or getting them positioned properly by the most powerful weapon, namely insider help, either voluntary or under duress.
Even worse, this is not just an inventory issue. Once RFID tags are accepted, live hardware will employ them, and the potential problems then hit another dimension altogether.
The reliability aspects of this are indeed dreadful, but could possibly be overcome if each driver ran in its own individual MMU-protected virtual machine. User-space module and driver mechanisms already exist, so this wouldn't be such a huge leap.
That could ensure that diver code never tramples on any other code and only communicates with the rest of the O/S via fixed interfaces. It could still hang of course, but dealing with that would be no different to dealing with other misbehaving user processes, and if the problem is severe enough to lock up the hardware under the driver's control then it'll do so regardless of the implementation.
If an open-source implementation of ITRON did exist, someone would have pulled the openly available sources off a Japanese server and we'd be playing with them right now.
At best, there is an open specification of ITRON whereas all implementations are proprietary. Furthermore, even that "open" specification appears to be tied in with privileged access if you want to see anything resembling actual code APIs or architectural details at a finer level than boxes, lines and clouds. I guess that that stems from all implementations being closed.
The possibility always remains that we simply don't see all the detailed material because of the language barrier, but there are more than enough cross-linguists in open-source ranks to have disabused us of that misapprehension by now.
ITRON just doesn't actually appear to exist at all, in an open-source sense. The billions of instances burned into microcontroller chips are definitely not open.
While the commercialization of the Internet was inevitable because the Internet is a good thing and it didn't take a teccie to realize that, there's no doubt that along with the gains, much has been destroyed.
I don't think that this is a biggie though, but merely part of the cycle of things. Now that we're reaching the point where life on the Internet is distasteful owing to control by the corporate clueless, it's time to move on and build our next network.
And you know, that actually sounds interesting.
That'd be the definition of linear scaling. Scaling can apply to n, .5n, or other rates. So, saying X and Y scale at the same rate could they both scale at 0 (ie, adding machines have no effect).
:-)
You are of course right.
However, everyone uses the phrase "it scales" without further adornment to mean "it scales linearly and with a factor of not much less than 1.0". That's just us humans taking sensible linguistic shortcuts.
On a more academic front, there are two separate issues to consider, the first being linearity (the scaling factor not dropping off as you increase N, ie. overall throughput remaining on the straight line), and the second being the value of the scaling factor, as you point out. They're both important in practice, simply because in the real world it's not just scalability that matters but also absolute performance and efficient resource utilitization as well.
Did you ever deal with NSI or Verisign customer service?
I dealt with Verisign customer service some years back, and the memory still makes me giggle, although that's probably to keep from crying.
I was trying to identify a problem with our server certificates after a format change, and I was using telnet and various other normal engineering tools to figure out what was wrong. Some way into our chat which was making curiously slow progress, the Verisign customer service person asked me "What is telnet?".
Who cares about the state of violent games.
... just games, the same as television and films and books are just their own types of fiction. To criticize one without criticizing the other is not just inconsistent, it is fundamentally dishonest.
I'm more concerned about the state of violent politics, the underpinning of big business by law makers at the expense of the individual citizen, and the subversion of law and justice in the name of profit.
Games are
The point of the EFF doing this is precisely to underline the fact that big business is attempting to take control of the end-user computing platform away from the user.
You see, the problem is not so much that big business is doing this, but that it is doing so by subterfuge rather than out in the open.
The EFF is just flushing out the rats here. If business were trying to take control of people's property openly then the EFF wouldn't need to put on an act of innocence and merely be "identifying dangers" as the proposed solutions as if business wasn't aware of them.
It's a good strategy. Big business can only respond by saying either "Oh yeah, we hadn't realized" (LOL), or else it can reply that this was indeed the intention. In both cases, the user wins.
My bet though is that the EFF will be met by total silence.
Pretty odd really, his entire set of "benefits" were almost entirely negative, or at least presented negatively: for example, not needing to wake up to the alarm clock, yet waking up anyway at the crack of dawn owing to a sense of dread. That seems to stem from a less than positive outlook on life, and it isn't really all that consistent with the title of the essay.
... as long as you don't fall for the hype, and you keep the telly firmly switched off, and you do your own thing.
... same square format, no evil hype. :-)
As a freelancer, I go through long periods between contracts as part of normal operation, and yes, one does turn down the spending knob to its lowest setting, but it's entirely a positive experience. One simply doesn't need to keep up with the Jones's every time they go out to the restaurant, buy a new DVD, or upgrade their car. Life in the affluent west is great
And as a programmer, assuming that it's in your blood and not just a job, then "your own thing" really means being creative with computers.
So, I'd have expected a long list of new technologies that he'd always meant to catch up on and now has the time, and a long list of personal projects that he always wanted to develop and at last has the opportunity, etc etc.
Being positive is in the mind, and has almost nothing to do with external circumstances, and definitely has nothing to do with financial circumstances.
Just keep that telly firmly switched off, as it's the primary instrument of evil hype and distorted goals, and it will not help you to feel happy in yourself unless you have the cash that the advertisers implicitly require viewers to have. The messaging is largely subliminal or implicit too in "entertainment" features, so it's not enoough to simply avoid the adverts. Stick to online games
If the worst comes to pass and all countries everywhere go nuts with patent laws, at the end of the day every piece of Free or Open Source software could end up potentially subject to royalties from countless thousands of patent squatters around the globe. The very openness of the code promotes that possibility, because patent squatters can start with the source code and work backwards to find patents that it might possibly fit. The nightmare would be unimaginable.
If the community is to survive, perhaps the only possible outcome of that (short of civil war or terrorism) would be for free and open-source software writers to go underground, with all distribution being done through anonymous injection into flooding-fill networks like Usenet.
I'm not really sure if that would be good or bad, but it would certainly be different, and it would be hard.
I know why he says that Solaris is dramatically less expensive than Linux. It's because he works for Sun and therefore doesn't pay Sun's massive rates for service contracts. :-)
Seriously, Sun's post-sales services are pretty good, but nobody ever said they were cheap. Or not too expensive. Or not even just very expensive. The only word that comes to mind for decent cover is exhorbitant.
A top-end Sun service contract costs many many times the total cost of a Linux server system, including all its hardware, software, and permanent supply of Jolt cola, so clearly the man is engaged in baseless PR.
If there is anything at all that qualifies as a right, it's the ability to communicate with others freely. That is why removal of the freedom to communicate is quite possibly the harshest aspect of imprisonment. And that is why most of the free world regards regimes with repressive communication policies as being anti-freedom.
When a company provides a means of communication as part of their product, disallowing their customers from using that medium to communicate with non-customers is vastly worse than a mere business decision, if the tool is at all popular then it hits at the heart of people's daily lives.
It seems that politicians are too busy underpinning big business these days to notice unimportant issues like their citizens losing part of their ability to communicate freely. Well, I guess it's in the hands of the voters.
MP3s drive sales of good music, and of good music only. Nobody that has downloaded an MP3 and found the music crap is going to buy the CD.
And that of course is intollerable to the studios, for reasons that are pretty obvious.
I think you're right to be pessimistic about where things are going. The blame is being appportioned incorrectly to the RIAA though.
The RIAA is basically a bunch of amoral (not immoral) lawyers and their hacks, going about their daily business of bleeding the population dry to fill studio coffers. Lawyers are always amoral like this, that's why they can represent the most evil and violent scum of humanity in court.
The scum in this case are the studios, but who can blame them. In many ways, they're mandated to do everything in their power to bring in cash by their obligation to their shareholders. So where does the blame lie?
Simple. If artists did not hand over rights to their music to the studios, this issue would not exist at all. Almost all of them continue to do so though, albeit with some high profile and very worthy exceptions. It's a drop in the ocean though. The rest are not idiots, oblivious to the plight of their fans and the strong-arm tactics of studios and RIAA. They're simple money-grabbing, full stop, or else they'd do something about it, make a noise about not wishing their fans to be persecuted like this, at the very least.
Yes, many artists signed contracts way back and can't get out of them immediately, but most of them aren't even trying, and new bands are still trying to get signed up daily. Blame the artists for the current situation.
An innovative, potential useful idea coming from Microsoft?
:-)
LOL, maybe that's going too far, but it is pretty interesting, and certainly fun. I like the hidden secret aspect especially.
Lots of security systems use the notion of a hidden secret -- CHAP is probably the most common. The secret is most often part of the computing platform and not part of the user, although textual prompts to the user have been in use for many years so the general mechanism is not new.
Here they're using two hidden secrets, chained: the inkblot input gets transformed first by one's fairly unique pattern recognizer and then by one's fairly unique word association machinery, neither of which is ever externalized. In principle that sounds pretty viable, although it does raise the question of whether both transformations are deterministic, and if not, then whether one helps the other to converge or whether a failure in one always leads to divergence. As with anything related to our inner workings, there are a lot of unanswered questions in this area, and not just for psychoanalysts.
Reproducibility could be a concern too. Since our pattern matching is sensitive to color and brightness and not just to shape alone, the method of encoding the inkblots to generate always the same image attributes regardless of platform or display is probably going to be non-trivial.
Of course, the problem with that novel is that while they have full molecular nanotechnology, the main characters walk around as meat bags.
I agree, that kind of physical manifestation is pretty incongruous in a distant-future setting, and it's a mistake that virtually all SF books and films make to some degree. I think there might be some "restrict humanity" meme going around in SF publishing circles, possibly fueled by the "otherwise readers won't relate to it" argument. Pretty pathetic.
However, I don't think the novel was really intended to be any kind of hardcore SF adventure with well-designed physicals that mattered. Aristoi is about people harnessing their daimones (internal autonomous intelligent agents, for those that haven't read it), and it does a really good job of that. It's a great read, even funny in the stereotyped focuses of some of those daimones as they work together.
Aristoi is one of my favourite books, and it's certainly on my recommendations list. The "walk around as meat bags" thing doesn't detract much from it at all, maybe because nearly all SF authors fall into the same trap.
Looking at this nonsense from outside, all the things others on this thread are saying about artists makes them look like gormless, witless, even masochistic sheep, unable to see beyond the ends of their noses and to understand cause and effect. It's hard to believe. In fact I don't believe it, these are intelligent, creative people for the most part, if one disregards "manufactured" pop bands.
Why they're doing what they're doing and continuing to sign up with labels at all is completely incomprehensible to me. I'm totally at a loss here. I just cannot believe that the insignificantly tiny possibility that they will make it huge can distort judgement that badly. Not really. There must be some other factor.
Creativity in the genius category comes from obsession with a topic, mulling it around in your brain without cease (unavoidably around the clock) until you see it so clearly that intuition leaps in periodically and takes you a quantum step ahead. It's easy to see how that stops dead when you're married and your think-time becomes "managed" and your priorities reassessed. It's one of the many compromises that you have to make to live a shared life with another person, rather than just sharing a living space, normally. It's worth pointing out though that this needn't actually be a limiting factor for everyone: a few people get married but don't self-introspect enough to notice a need for compromise at all. I don't know how common that is though.
As regards crime, that correlation is probably for a different reason, but equally easy to see. Most criminals are likely to be loners, at least outside Italy (:-), and for a very good reason: anyone else that knows what you're doing is likely to be a liability to you. I really don't see it working in a family environment.
So to summarize all the responses to Karma_Sucks's thread, C++ is basically pointless.
.... so, er, what exactly were the pro's?
As most of you agree, it has lots of pretty features (even the advocates agree that it's got *too* many though), and it's incredibly versatile (although even the advocates agree that in some areas it's *too* versatile for its own good), and it allows the compiler to optimize better (except that language complexity results in most programs being a lot slower than necessary because of all the unexpected and unnecessary temp constructions and destructions), and it's got excellent overloading (except that the gotchas increase semantic complexity a hundredfold and the rest of the time overloading confuses the newbies), and it's fully object-oriented (except that it's not since the encapsulation is only class-based)
I'm speaking as a long-term C++ developer, but (clearly) not as an advocate. I've just seen too many commercial projects die through using C++, mainly because the team's project management skills were not up to the challange of using such an extraordinarily complex language. When I say "die", I mean it has cost the companies millions of dollars each time.
I've also seen it succeed, magnificently, just once. But the management on that project was absolutely brilliant, exceptional. It is not the norm.
C++ has a few good things for lone developers. Pure and simply though, C++ is dangerous on typical commercial projects. YMMV.
I agree with the parent post (but not from a Java standpoint, as that language has a lot of silliness too): to improve C++, remove 90% of it.
What we really need is a C+.
To be honest this really disgusts me.
It disgusts me too, but for a slightly different reason.
As a systems designer with just too much background behind me in a multiplicity of fields including linguistics, semantics, cognition and AI, among many others, I refuse to be bound or in any way hindered or limited by this patent or any similar ones in this field.
Just because someone has the gall to put in a patent application on something doesn't mean that other people's life's work and thoughts suddenly become worthless or derivative or exploitable.
Good luck mister "inventor". But if you try to put a stopper or royalty on my own totally independent ideas here (even if they were to coincidentally turn out identical to yours) then please be ready for litigation based on published thoughts long predating yours. You weren't the first to come up with this, in fact you might have been the hundredth. But you were the first with the professional affrontary to try to stop further development of these ideas through the patent process. If you think that's praise, you've got the wrong end of the stick.
Patenting ideas is simply bad, full stop.
It's not a bad thing that there is no federal anti-spam law. [...] Or worse, a law that allows Ashcroft and Poindexter to get even further into my computer.
Indeed, and there's another argument that supports your position. We now have really reliable spam blocking mechanisms available to us, for all platforms, very easy to use, and they reduce the spam that reaches us by 98% without any effort at all. And they can be deployed on servers too where appropriate, not just on end-user machines. Spam need no longer be a headache, and it is under *OUR* control.
In contrast, getting the non-technical powers of society involved in this is a recipe for much mourning and gnashing of teeth for the future. We *will* regret it, there's not the slightest shadow of doubt. And they won't even thank us for giving away our control and giving them yet more power over us.