Bingo. I think you hit the nail squarely on the head: Aperture is a process/workflow management tool, which works equally well for RAW as it does for JPEG. It's gotten a lot of attention because it will handle RAW files -- which is something not a lot of other programs do -- but that doesn't take away from it's JPEG capabilities. And it certainly doesn't say anything about the workflow-management in general.
I could definitely see that if you take a lot of pictures and want more management and sorting capabilities than iPhoto gives you (which is to say, very few), and you think you might one day do anything with RAW files, then Aperture could be worth the money.
What kind of camera a person has doesn't figure into it, nor really does Apple's decision to market the program primarily because of the RAW capabilities. Everyone should evaluate it based on its own technical and usability merits, in relation to their own needs.
Sadly, I can't justify it's pricetag at the current time, though I'd like to. To me the price isn't $500, but effectively $1800, because to run Aperture I'd need a complete hardware upgrade, and its specs dictate at least a 1.8Ghz G5 (est street price $1300). And unlike software, you can't download a new CPU off BitTorrent.
Actually, FYI almost 30% of the U.S. population has at least a bachelor's degree in something. Some states are above 35%.
However in general I agree with the point and tone of your post. It's just that your numbers are no longer true, and will become increasingly less true in the future with regard to the percentage of the population with advanced degrees of one sort or another. And occupational education is (somewhat unfortunately, perhaps) waning: based on Table 1 of these detailed census reports, there are far more young people with bachelors degrees than occupational degrees. It's the associate-level community colleges that are fading away, or being 'upgraded' to bachelors-level programs.
A bachelor's degree is very quickly becoming "advanced highschool." The public schools don't turn out people with any salable skills anymore (and arguably neither do some colleges), so you pretty much have to go right into another four years of education after you graduate HS even to get an entry-level job with any future. And to get the sort of special, sought-after skills that used to be the realm of college graduates, today you need a masters or PhD.
To be sure, I don't disagree with what you're saying. However the ageing of America is producing a lot of older people who are extremely well-educated and causing the young person coming into the job market to have to do many more years of schooling than their parents did before embarking on a career. About the only advantage that a young candidate has in seeking a job today is that they'll generally not be supporting a family and will expect less of a salary.
You're right, however I think it warrants pointing out that the Mac OS prior to OS X never stored the type/creator codes as part of the file name. They were separate metadata fields, and to change them you needed to use a third party utility (e.g. ResEdit). I believe that these fields were stored somewhere in the file's resource fork, because when you moved them to a filesystem that didn't support resource forks, the information would be lost.
To the filesystem itself, "MyFile" on a Mac was just "MyFile", not "Myfile.[type]". In fact if you opened a directory with a lot of files in Classic Mac OS, the file names would all load with generic icons at first, and then the OS would go through and -- I assume -- examine each file to determine its type, and load the appropriate icon for either the creator, or the applicatoin that you had specified to open it.
The Mac system was superior to the simple three-digit type system, first because it provided eight bits of file type information, but also because it allowed for different applications to easily create files of the same type (e.g. ClarisWorks and SimpleText could both make files of type TEXT, but they had different creator codes) and open them in the creating application if it existed, or if not then in another application that was compatible with the type.
The "friend" example doesn't hold too far, but the reason why that's considered 'creating more money' is because (assuming the IOU was written correctly and you're trusted by everyone to pay it back) your friend that you've given the IOU to could take that piece of paper and trade it for goods or services with some third party. And then that third party could trade it to someone else, etc., etc. Sure, at some point somebody could take it back to you and cash it in, but if you're trusted by all they might never bother to do this. Thus by issuing a debt you've increased the currency circulating by some small amount.
Replace 'you' with 'Government' and 'IOU' with 'paper currency' and eliminate the ability for a person to go back to the debtor and get anything in exchange for the IOU (since it's not backed by anything anymore), and you've basically got our monetary system.
On another level this is similar to why banks loaning out depositors money actually seems to increase the amount of currency in the market. I have money in my bank account, while at the same time you have money that the bank has given you as a loan. The bank doesn't actually 'make more money,' and the money that I think is in my bank account isn't really "there," but the web of trust between people and banks causes everyone to act as it if did (e.g. when they make purchasing decisions). Of course if that web of trust breaks and there is a run on the bank, then you have a real problem.
Interesting. I just read through it and I'm not sure if the 'cacheing' that they're talking about would cover a Google-like cache. It specifically defines cache as something that's "intermediate and temporary storage," so I'm guessing what they're aimed at are systems like Squid, not databanks like Google's Cache. Of course, we'll never know until somebody decides to test it and develop some precident.
Here is the relevant part of the law in context:
17 USC 512(b) System caching.
(1) Limitation on liability. A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the intermediate and temporary storage of material on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider in a case in which--
(A) the material is made available online by a person other than the service provider;
(B) the material is transmitted from the person described in subparagraph (A) through the system or network to a person other than the person described in subparagraph (A) at the direction of that other person; and
(C) the storage is carried out through an automatic technical process for the purpose of making the material available to users of the system or network who, after the material is transmitted as described in subparagraph (B), request access to the material from the person described in subparagraph (A), if the conditions set forth in paragraph (2) are met.
One assumes, given that the people at Google do not appear to be entirely retarded, that they have probably thought of this.
I doubt that the system allows you to search by page number, and if they wanted to be on the safe side they could have it just not report page numbers with the search result either -- although this might make it less attractive to scholars who have to cite the dead-tree-equivalent's page number.
I'm betting given the expertise over at Google in the information search and retrieval fields that they can probably put together a system that makes it difficult to reassemble an entire book from their search results.
Remember, they don't need to make it impossible: just harder than going out and buying or downloading the book elsewhere if you're that desperate to get at the content.
The copyright holder made a choice to allow their work on the Internet. It's up to them, or their publisher, or whomever, to place the restrictions on that content in some form or another. If they leave it open to public perusal then Google has every right in the world to make it searchable.
FYI, I think the lawsuit in the U.S. is not over Google's internet indexing and searching, but about the "search inside the book"-type scheme, where they were scanning and OCRing large numbers of still-copyrighted books and placing them in a searchable index. The caveat was that an end user could not see more than a small amount of content from books where the author/publisher hadn't given permission.
The question is whether scanning books and placing them into an information storage and retrieval system with limitations on its access falls under 'fair use' or not.
At any rate, I'm with Google on this one. The book publishers are sounding more and more like the music companies every day. They just realized that the future doesn't look good for their business model. Rather than accept the fact they've had a good run, accept the inherent risk and try to change, they're going to do everything they can to keep consumers locked into the old way of things for as long as possible. At least the music companies are starting to change -- but they had past experience from smaller format shifts; vinyl to tape, tape to CD, and others. When is the last time the publishing industry really changed on its most basic level?
Like the music companies, book publishers exist mainly as intermediaries that stand between authors and content consumers who evolved into their current role due to technical constraints. Publishing books is expensive, it requires a huge capital investment into printing presses and there is a large amount of financial risk associated with the launch of a new book (printing too many copies, etc.). However we are increasingly seeing that there are other ways of doing business which get the content to the consumer in a simpler fashion: eBooks, print on demand, print at home, digitally delivered audiobooks, etc. The startup cost of becoming a low-volume publisher is very low, and it's now more possible than ever for a niche-market author to self-publish. As this happens, the value added by the big houses starts to diminish. Although there will still probably always be a place for big publishing houses (somebody has to print millions of copies of the next Harry Potter), it's clear that their content monopoly is breaking up, and they're afraid.
In short their lawsuits seem like a knee-jerk response to innovation by dinosaurs who know they're not going to be able to compete in the future, and a sad attempt at trying to preserve the status quo for a few more years.
Actually, you can be quite the diehard capitalist and still believe in some regulation of extreme anticompetitive behavior. You can argue about how much regulation is good or the best ways to apply it all day, but there are certain situations (monopolies, cartels) which the market will not self-correct if they have gone past a certain point and good arguments can be made for government interference to fix them. I think very few people would make the argument that there is not any place for regulation at all.
The "cap" on how big you can get doesn't really exist per se; the limit is on your actions. Regulators in the U.S. generally take a dim view of firms that obviously distort the market away from a competitive model, if that distortion hurts consumers. The limits on dumping and market distortion that help consumers (in the short term anyway) are significantly less strict IMO than in Europe.
Also, while America is one of probably the 'most capitalist' major countries in the world, it doesn't mean that there is no demand for regulation to reign in corporations who do things that the citizens don't like. It is a representative democracy -- if you piss off enough voters, eventually you're going to be the subject of a Congressional inquiry, no matter how closely you follow economic theory. (Witness the oil companies.)
Uh... I'm not sure if this is relevant. LEON was a branch of SPARC; what we're talking about here today is UltraSPARC. So while LEON and OpenSPARC might not have any patent landmines in them, it doesn't necessarily mean that the code that Sun is releasing soon won't. Doubtless it includes the implementations of new research that they've done since the original SPARC code was released, research that was probably patented, so I don't think you can say with any certainty that there aren't encumbrances.
I never meant to imply that all ActiveX was necessarily IE only -- I am not intimately familiar enough with it to make such a broad statement explicitly (although to be honest, I've never seen an ActiveX site run on any other browser); however if a developer chose to implement a part of ActiveX that was for whatever reason compatible with only a single browser, which was the situation being discussed, than I think it would be a bad decision.
I probably should have removed the third comma in my original post to make myself more clear.
However as the developer said in his response (below), the decision to do this was made several years ago when the landscape looked different (although I think I people still would have said it was a bad idea, but hindsight's always 20/20); as long as people accept that it was not something that they should repeat today, then I'm inclined not to wag fingers too much.
Not a good idea. Just because nobody is using the OpenDoc software anymore doesn't mean the name is no longer in use; people might still want to discuss OpenDoc, and it's a pain to have two even vaguely related technologies use the same name, much less two different office-document-format technologies.
I think it's much better that we keep OpenDocument separate from OpenDoc. And also, to give the OpenDoc -- ill fated as the project was -- its due. It was a very cool technology, just quite ahead of its time.
If I was a politician and I got a letter from someone at a huge multinational corporation telling me how they could help me help my people, and it didn't contain an obvious explanation of what their interest was in this venture, I'd be immediately filled with suspicion. Why is it that they care about this issue? What's in it for them? How are they going to make money?
By being upfront about what IBM's angle is, the reader doesn't have to untangle what ulterior motive is driving the writer's actions.
Well if you were the Governor, I bet you would read it (or have one of your cronies give you the executive summary) if the second paragraph contained:
As the result of acquiring several Massachusetts-based companies, including Rational Software, Lotus Development Corp. and Ascential Software, we now have over 4,000 IBMers based in the Commonwealth
Basically what he's saying is something like: 'hey pal, we pay a lot of taxes and keep a whole bunch of people in this state gainfully employed, and last time we checked, Redmond is in Washington. How about getting a little less obviously in bed with them?'
Re:Thanks for Fixing the Problem
on
Google Fixes IE Bug
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm sorry, but I can't come up with much sympathy for you or your users, because you used those IE-only, ActiveX controls. It's not as if IE being insecure is exactly news; sure the last few weeks have been particularly bad, but a whole lot of people have been saying this is coming for a while. Years, really.
Your attitude shows concern for your users, which is good -- it sounds like you put in this feature to make life easier for them, and I think that's great. However the way you implemented it was evidently a bad choice, exchanging ease of use for security, and now your clients have showed where their priorities are: security over ease-of-use.
Now would probably be a good time to either go back to the drawing board and see how you can reimplement those ease of use features, without tying yourselves down to one browser (particularly one that's developing an ever-growing reputation for being insecure and slowly patched). The alternative seems to be dumping the functionality completely, if you can't figure out a way to do it without IE ActiveX. Just waiting or hoping for Microsoft to release a "Secure IE" (how do you know it's secure?) seems foolish, and just begging to be put in the same position again down the road.
I admit I don't like Microsoft much, but I would be saying the same thing if you had written a Firefox-only interface and then some massive security hole was found with it.
You make a good point; TI is no friend to open source or Free software.
However, just because someone releases a Linux-based product doesn't even begin to suggest that they are, so I'm not sure if 'hypocrisy' is really the right thing to be calling them out for. I don't think they've ever claimed to support open source in any form, and it seems as if their inclusion of Linux is really more because they've finially realized that there are a lot more Linux programmers than DSP programmers, and they need to get with the program or die.
I think it's safe to say that they're definitely not into the Linux philosophy in any way, shape, or form; that said, they're not above trying to market to Linux embedded-systems programmers.
It's unfortunate that they choose to do this, because I've always though TI's low-level component products (semis and ICs) were great: always well-documented and logically designed. (Plus they let you buy single-unit samples off of their website, which is pretty nice.) However when it comes to their computer hardware, chipsets and the like, I avoid it like the plague.
Yes, but IMO the non-Euclidian solution is rather trivial: you have a wheel rotating around and following a straight cirumferential (great or small circle) path on a sphere. Being on a sphere, the wheel's path can be "straight" and also a closed loop. You could also have a solution on the curved surface of a cylinder
Whether or not that's an acceptable solution to you depends on how you define "straight" in the problem originally. If you take it to be something like 'a path whose coordinates remain constant except in one dimension' then by using a spherical or cylindrical coordinate system these are good, albeit simple, solutions.
However if you stick to Euclidian geometry in the Cartesian coordinate system then I don't see that there can ever be a real solution.
Uh... yeah. But the point of the article was to test a tri-core system. Everyone knows that a quad system works. Heck you can buy one from Apple today if you want, and they're probably not the only ones.
But I doubt anyone has ever used a tri-core system, and that's why they wrote the article. Saying "why didn't they just use two dual-cores" is akin to reading a magazine about tuner cars and saying "why don't they just buy a Lambo?"
I think their ultimate point was to say something about the feasibility of triple-core, single-chip products -- that is three cores on one wafer, as a sort of stopgap until they can squeeze the transistors enough to put four cores on -- but in reality it isn't much of a comparison because the problems that they have with their two-chip tri-core that lead to the crashing probably wouldn't be present with a purpose-fabricated single-chip tri-core (because one assumes the chip designers would use three identical processors and would go to lengths to make them talk well to each other).
It's arguably a bit of a pointless exercise... but then again, this is Slashdot. Nothing is a pointless exercise here.
I still maintain that Sigenthaler is full of horseshit with regards to his libel claims, and it's unfortunate that the person who wrote that page can't be identified just so Sigenthaler can't have his day in court, and be promptly laughed out of it.
Because he's a public figure, he'd have to not only show damages (which are doubtful, given that it would require demonstrating that people essentially take Wikipedia as gospel, when in reality you could get any number of reasonable, unsophisticated users to say "well duh, everyone knows wikipedia is full of suspect information"), and also show that the writer acted with malice, which might be difficult because for all we know, the writer was a conspiracy-theory nut who honestly believes his comments about Sigenthaler to be the truth. Unless Sigenthaler could demonstrate both of those things (damages and malice), he'd be done, and Wikipedia would be vindicated.
Or alternately -- although I doubt he'd be that stupid -- it would be amusing if he tried to sue Wikipedia's operators directly under some strange secondary liability doctrine. It probably wouldn't make it very far, but at least it would provide a story for the media to use as a sort of finale and end it on a winning note for Wikipedia.
Instead, we have this move by Wikipedia that can only be called placation -- which no matter how you spin it makes Sigenthaler look like the winner (as he is, because they let him). I just have no idea why: he had no case, as any first-year law student could attest, and his resources are infinitely more limited than the ones the EFF and the ACLU probably could have thrown at it.
For the record, I don't think Wikipedia's move (to prevent ACs from posting articles) was necessarily a bad one. I'm all for a psuedonymous system rather than an IP-address based one; as it provides more privacy for posters while also enabling good citizens to build a reputation, and a thus has sustainable social model. If anything, the move actually gets further away from what a pro-censorship person would want; it's just that their timing makes them look like a bunch of pushovers, when they had the clear opportunity to do something significant.
it will be the responsibility of the library's network administrators to produce the proof of who did it.
The library, by it's nature, may be unable to keep logs. Either it could be financially or technologically prohibitive, or possibly restrictive under First Amendment grounds (though I'm not sure how long you would make an argument like that fly). But the point is that you can't subpoena what doesn't exist, and it's not necessarily clear that the library is breaking any law by not keeping records of who was using what computer when.
If some sort of illegal activity was traced back to a library -- and based on accounts from law enforcement that I've read, what I think actually happens -- the most likely course of action would be to put a keylogger and closed-circuit cameras on the computers at that point. This is totally legitimate, since with the IP address the police could demonstrate to a judge that the activity originated at the library, get a wiretap warrant, and record everything that goes on practically any way they want.
Although given the direction we're going in as a country these days, it wouldn't surprise me if sometime not so long from now, libraries were required as part of their "due diligence" to keep track of who was using which computers when, I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case today. The creeping doctrine of strict liability hasn't made it quite that far yet; and it would be a big deal if it did, since there are lots of places where you can get basically anonymous internet access (including any WiFi hotspot that isn't logging your MAC address) that would probably have to shut down overnight.
If you can provide any evidence as to law or precedent that would oblige a library to keep client records, then perhaps I will stand corrected (and not a little disappointed in our legal system). However, what you're suggesting is very controversial and in direct contravention of the practices of many high-profile libraries, who do not keep client records as a general rule.
Your comparison in your close to phones is more apt than you think. If I go to a pay phone and make a threatening phone call, the phone company doesn't have a legal requirement to be able to identify me as an individual. Their responsibility ends with telling the police that the call originated from number x at time y. If the police want to catch me, they have to either find out that I was there through some indirect means (eyewitness, etc.) or sit on the phone and hope I come back again. Likewise, the library isn't required to collect or give any information other than what it has on hand as a byproduct of rendering service, until it's specifically requested to do so (via a wiretap warrant).
Agree completely. I definitely DO NOT want to give any more control over to the cable companies than they already have.
The last thing I need is them installing some overprotective, nannying firewall at the head end and limiting what I can do with my connection. What I do on my end, as long as it's not damaging to the network in some way (relaying spam or something) isn't their business or their problem.
Maybe I want to leave my system open to the public net for some reason; perhaps so I can access my iTunes from work or something, or use FTP. That's my risk to take, and if I do it with a computer running a shoddy OS, I'll probably get owned and turned into a spam zombie (in which case they should cut my connection when it becomes clear I'm relaying Viagra ads 10,000 times a minute).
You know if they made a firewall like that, it would be aimed at the 'lowest common denominator' -- probably an unsecured, unpatched Win98 or WinME box. And that would shoot a whole lot of people who either don't use such an insecure OS, or actually follow good security practices, in the foot. It would be a vast step backwards, and give users a horrible false sense of security that they don't deserve. Plus, you know the cable companies would charge an arm and a leg to get rid of that firewall (probably you'd need to upgrade to their Business or Premier account, just like you do now to get a static IP).
That's an idea that we just cannot let gain any traction. Your ISP is not your net mommy; don't expect it to take care of you.
I understand the objections: it probably would be a lot less effective against malware that encrypts its transmissions and masquerades as a legitimate HTTPS session or something, but it would at least give a greatly increased amount of control to home network operators, control which is currently limited to enterprise networks.
The product I'd love to see a free alternative to is the Packeeter Packetshaper. It's a hardware device that inspects packets individually and compares them (with a certain degree of intelligence, I'm told) to lists of known P2P programs, spam email streams, and other garbage traffic (excessive ping requests, etc.). The main selling point is blocking peer to peer apps, at which it is quite good against casual use; it doesn't do anything against sessions that are tunnelled in other protocols or encrypted, but it increases the user expertise and effort required (as well as computational and network overhead) to get P2P working, which is enough to discourage it for 90+% of users. Plus it has some very nice reporting features that could be a good diagnostic tool. (E.g., is mom's computer in the basement that she only uses for email and IM going through GBs of transfer a day? Probably zombified.)
I think if it were a free product, first of all it could probably be put to a lot more interesting uses than what Packeeter is marketing it for. Obviously at the very least you could use it to stop the dumber varieties of spyware and malware (ones that don't tunnel or encrypt), plus I think it would have a more general role just in giving users more control over their networks and what flows in and out of them than they now have. I would install it just for the diagnostic and reporting capabilities.
What I'd love to have is a product sort of like SmoothWall -- one CD that you pop into an unused box with two NICs to make it into an appliance -- that would run on a home network between the router/gateway and the cable/DSL modem and could be remotely administered. I think there could be significant demand for something like this (which will only increase in the future) but companies are too focused on the lucrative enterprise market to aim for end users. Although there might not be much money to be made, the mindshare gain could be a significant win for FOSS if it was done correctly.
I concur. Little Snitch is a great product -- it's actually one of the few pieces of OS X shareware that I think is absolutely worth the money for anyone with a Mac (PithHelmet is the other easy choice).
I think it's actually superior to ZoneAlarm on the PC, because it provides more flexible options for blocking outbound connections. When an application that's not on the whitelist tries to initiate a connection, you get the option of allowing it to connect to any server on any port, any server but only on one port, or only to a specific server and on a specific port. Plus you can have that setting remembered either only for a single session, or permanently. Although the interface is pretty simple, over time you can build up a pretty complicated scheme of custom preferences. Personally I err on the strict side; unless I can think of a good reason why an application needs to connect to 'any server' (e.g., it's a browsing app of some sort), I always set it to "only this server and port" and then approve every server that it's trying to connect to.
And you're absolutely right, Adobe software has struck me recently as being extremely creepy in both how often it tries to call home, and where it calls "home."
The one downside to Little Snitch is that it's so well known on the Mac that some rootkits actually go out of their way to check and see if it's installed and disable it. It's therefore not a replacement for caution and good use practices, however it does make users a lot more aware about what software does stuff without them giving it permission.
Frankly, I think it's ridiculous that something like this isn't built into the OS kernel. Maybe there are technical barriers to doing it that I'm not aware of, but for a consumer OS these days, it seems borderline irresponsible to allow any program to initiate any network connection to any server and to any port that it wants, without any checking of user intent.
Shouldn't you really be "working with" the makers of TrueActive Activity Monitor -- whatever it is -- to uncover why they're installing one of your components as part of their software? Or at least verify that it's a completely different thing going by the same name as your component? (And by "working with" I mean 'ask politely first, and then sic lawyers at'.)
Seems like it would be relatively easy to verify if the component is identical to yours of the same name, just by running a hash or something. In fact it seems farfetched that the spyware tools (or if not the tools themselves, then the companies that mantain the databases) don't keep a list that includes some "fingerprint" info on files that are on their blacklists, which would be able to let you tell whether the banned file is yours or a different one using the same name.
Complaining to the SpySweeper people to take that name off of their list doesn't do anybody any good, if there really is someone unscrupulous releasing something by the same name. TrueActive seems like it should be the people you should be going after, not the SpySweeper folks. If anything you might want to thank SpySweeper, if it ends up that they discovered someone using your code for some sort of shady purpose.
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Bingo. I think you hit the nail squarely on the head: Aperture is a process/workflow management tool, which works equally well for RAW as it does for JPEG. It's gotten a lot of attention because it will handle RAW files -- which is something not a lot of other programs do -- but that doesn't take away from it's JPEG capabilities. And it certainly doesn't say anything about the workflow-management in general.
I could definitely see that if you take a lot of pictures and want more management and sorting capabilities than iPhoto gives you (which is to say, very few), and you think you might one day do anything with RAW files, then Aperture could be worth the money.
What kind of camera a person has doesn't figure into it, nor really does Apple's decision to market the program primarily because of the RAW capabilities. Everyone should evaluate it based on its own technical and usability merits, in relation to their own needs.
Sadly, I can't justify it's pricetag at the current time, though I'd like to. To me the price isn't $500, but effectively $1800, because to run Aperture I'd need a complete hardware upgrade, and its specs dictate at least a 1.8Ghz G5 (est street price $1300). And unlike software, you can't download a new CPU off BitTorrent.
Actually, FYI almost 30% of the U.S. population has at least a bachelor's degree in something. Some states are above 35%.
However in general I agree with the point and tone of your post. It's just that your numbers are no longer true, and will become increasingly less true in the future with regard to the percentage of the population with advanced degrees of one sort or another. And occupational education is (somewhat unfortunately, perhaps) waning: based on Table 1 of these detailed census reports, there are far more young people with bachelors degrees than occupational degrees. It's the associate-level community colleges that are fading away, or being 'upgraded' to bachelors-level programs.
A bachelor's degree is very quickly becoming "advanced highschool." The public schools don't turn out people with any salable skills anymore (and arguably neither do some colleges), so you pretty much have to go right into another four years of education after you graduate HS even to get an entry-level job with any future. And to get the sort of special, sought-after skills that used to be the realm of college graduates, today you need a masters or PhD.
To be sure, I don't disagree with what you're saying. However the ageing of America is producing a lot of older people who are extremely well-educated and causing the young person coming into the job market to have to do many more years of schooling than their parents did before embarking on a career. About the only advantage that a young candidate has in seeking a job today is that they'll generally not be supporting a family and will expect less of a salary.
You're right, however I think it warrants pointing out that the Mac OS prior to OS X never stored the type/creator codes as part of the file name. They were separate metadata fields, and to change them you needed to use a third party utility (e.g. ResEdit). I believe that these fields were stored somewhere in the file's resource fork, because when you moved them to a filesystem that didn't support resource forks, the information would be lost.
To the filesystem itself, "MyFile" on a Mac was just "MyFile", not "Myfile.[type]". In fact if you opened a directory with a lot of files in Classic Mac OS, the file names would all load with generic icons at first, and then the OS would go through and -- I assume -- examine each file to determine its type, and load the appropriate icon for either the creator, or the applicatoin that you had specified to open it.
The Mac system was superior to the simple three-digit type system, first because it provided eight bits of file type information, but also because it allowed for different applications to easily create files of the same type (e.g. ClarisWorks and SimpleText could both make files of type TEXT, but they had different creator codes) and open them in the creating application if it existed, or if not then in another application that was compatible with the type.
Not unlike asking your real estate to give you a cut of the commission on a house that is particularly desirable for an agent to list.
Where I come from, they have a term for that. It's called a "kickback."
The "friend" example doesn't hold too far, but the reason why that's considered 'creating more money' is because (assuming the IOU was written correctly and you're trusted by everyone to pay it back) your friend that you've given the IOU to could take that piece of paper and trade it for goods or services with some third party. And then that third party could trade it to someone else, etc., etc. Sure, at some point somebody could take it back to you and cash it in, but if you're trusted by all they might never bother to do this. Thus by issuing a debt you've increased the currency circulating by some small amount.
Replace 'you' with 'Government' and 'IOU' with 'paper currency' and eliminate the ability for a person to go back to the debtor and get anything in exchange for the IOU (since it's not backed by anything anymore), and you've basically got our monetary system.
On another level this is similar to why banks loaning out depositors money actually seems to increase the amount of currency in the market. I have money in my bank account, while at the same time you have money that the bank has given you as a loan. The bank doesn't actually 'make more money,' and the money that I think is in my bank account isn't really "there," but the web of trust between people and banks causes everyone to act as it if did (e.g. when they make purchasing decisions). Of course if that web of trust breaks and there is a run on the bank, then you have a real problem.
Here is the relevant part of the law in context:
One assumes, given that the people at Google do not appear to be entirely retarded, that they have probably thought of this.
I doubt that the system allows you to search by page number, and if they wanted to be on the safe side they could have it just not report page numbers with the search result either -- although this might make it less attractive to scholars who have to cite the dead-tree-equivalent's page number.
I'm betting given the expertise over at Google in the information search and retrieval fields that they can probably put together a system that makes it difficult to reassemble an entire book from their search results.
Remember, they don't need to make it impossible: just harder than going out and buying or downloading the book elsewhere if you're that desperate to get at the content.
The copyright holder made a choice to allow their work on the Internet. It's up to them, or their publisher, or whomever, to place the restrictions on that content in some form or another. If they leave it open to public perusal then Google has every right in the world to make it searchable.
FYI, I think the lawsuit in the U.S. is not over Google's internet indexing and searching, but about the "search inside the book"-type scheme, where they were scanning and OCRing large numbers of still-copyrighted books and placing them in a searchable index. The caveat was that an end user could not see more than a small amount of content from books where the author/publisher hadn't given permission.
The question is whether scanning books and placing them into an information storage and retrieval system with limitations on its access falls under 'fair use' or not.
At any rate, I'm with Google on this one. The book publishers are sounding more and more like the music companies every day. They just realized that the future doesn't look good for their business model. Rather than accept the fact they've had a good run, accept the inherent risk and try to change, they're going to do everything they can to keep consumers locked into the old way of things for as long as possible. At least the music companies are starting to change -- but they had past experience from smaller format shifts; vinyl to tape, tape to CD, and others. When is the last time the publishing industry really changed on its most basic level?
Like the music companies, book publishers exist mainly as intermediaries that stand between authors and content consumers who evolved into their current role due to technical constraints. Publishing books is expensive, it requires a huge capital investment into printing presses and there is a large amount of financial risk associated with the launch of a new book (printing too many copies, etc.). However we are increasingly seeing that there are other ways of doing business which get the content to the consumer in a simpler fashion: eBooks, print on demand, print at home, digitally delivered audiobooks, etc. The startup cost of becoming a low-volume publisher is very low, and it's now more possible than ever for a niche-market author to self-publish. As this happens, the value added by the big houses starts to diminish. Although there will still probably always be a place for big publishing houses (somebody has to print millions of copies of the next Harry Potter), it's clear that their content monopoly is breaking up, and they're afraid.
In short their lawsuits seem like a knee-jerk response to innovation by dinosaurs who know they're not going to be able to compete in the future, and a sad attempt at trying to preserve the status quo for a few more years.
Actually, you can be quite the diehard capitalist and still believe in some regulation of extreme anticompetitive behavior. You can argue about how much regulation is good or the best ways to apply it all day, but there are certain situations (monopolies, cartels) which the market will not self-correct if they have gone past a certain point and good arguments can be made for government interference to fix them. I think very few people would make the argument that there is not any place for regulation at all.
The "cap" on how big you can get doesn't really exist per se; the limit is on your actions. Regulators in the U.S. generally take a dim view of firms that obviously distort the market away from a competitive model, if that distortion hurts consumers. The limits on dumping and market distortion that help consumers (in the short term anyway) are significantly less strict IMO than in Europe.
Also, while America is one of probably the 'most capitalist' major countries in the world, it doesn't mean that there is no demand for regulation to reign in corporations who do things that the citizens don't like. It is a representative democracy -- if you piss off enough voters, eventually you're going to be the subject of a Congressional inquiry, no matter how closely you follow economic theory. (Witness the oil companies.)
Uh ... I'm not sure if this is relevant. LEON was a branch of SPARC; what we're talking about here today is UltraSPARC. So while LEON and OpenSPARC might not have any patent landmines in them, it doesn't necessarily mean that the code that Sun is releasing soon won't. Doubtless it includes the implementations of new research that they've done since the original SPARC code was released, research that was probably patented, so I don't think you can say with any certainty that there aren't encumbrances.
You can call it what you want, but if you leave out the content in the square brackets completely I'd just call it bad grammar.
INCORRECT: "I DO support open source, but no p2p."
CORRECT: "I DO support open source, but not p2p."
The first just makes you sound like a mentally deficient punk. In order to properly drop the subject and verb, you need to change the "no" to "not."
I never meant to imply that all ActiveX was necessarily IE only -- I am not intimately familiar enough with it to make such a broad statement explicitly (although to be honest, I've never seen an ActiveX site run on any other browser); however if a developer chose to implement a part of ActiveX that was for whatever reason compatible with only a single browser, which was the situation being discussed, than I think it would be a bad decision.
I probably should have removed the third comma in my original post to make myself more clear.
However as the developer said in his response (below), the decision to do this was made several years ago when the landscape looked different (although I think I people still would have said it was a bad idea, but hindsight's always 20/20); as long as people accept that it was not something that they should repeat today, then I'm inclined not to wag fingers too much.
Not a good idea. Just because nobody is using the OpenDoc software anymore doesn't mean the name is no longer in use; people might still want to discuss OpenDoc, and it's a pain to have two even vaguely related technologies use the same name, much less two different office-document-format technologies.
I think it's much better that we keep OpenDocument separate from OpenDoc. And also, to give the OpenDoc -- ill fated as the project was -- its due. It was a very cool technology, just quite ahead of its time.
I disagree completely.
If I was a politician and I got a letter from someone at a huge multinational corporation telling me how they could help me help my people, and it didn't contain an obvious explanation of what their interest was in this venture, I'd be immediately filled with suspicion. Why is it that they care about this issue? What's in it for them? How are they going to make money?
By being upfront about what IBM's angle is, the reader doesn't have to untangle what ulterior motive is driving the writer's actions.
Well if you were the Governor, I bet you would read it (or have one of your cronies give you the executive summary) if the second paragraph contained:
As the result of acquiring several Massachusetts-based companies, including Rational Software, Lotus Development Corp. and Ascential Software, we now have over 4,000 IBMers based in the Commonwealth
Basically what he's saying is something like: 'hey pal, we pay a lot of taxes and keep a whole bunch of people in this state gainfully employed, and last time we checked, Redmond is in Washington. How about getting a little less obviously in bed with them?'
I'm sorry, but I can't come up with much sympathy for you or your users, because you used those IE-only, ActiveX controls. It's not as if IE being insecure is exactly news; sure the last few weeks have been particularly bad, but a whole lot of people have been saying this is coming for a while. Years, really.
Your attitude shows concern for your users, which is good -- it sounds like you put in this feature to make life easier for them, and I think that's great. However the way you implemented it was evidently a bad choice, exchanging ease of use for security, and now your clients have showed where their priorities are: security over ease-of-use.
Now would probably be a good time to either go back to the drawing board and see how you can reimplement those ease of use features, without tying yourselves down to one browser (particularly one that's developing an ever-growing reputation for being insecure and slowly patched). The alternative seems to be dumping the functionality completely, if you can't figure out a way to do it without IE ActiveX. Just waiting or hoping for Microsoft to release a "Secure IE" (how do you know it's secure?) seems foolish, and just begging to be put in the same position again down the road.
I admit I don't like Microsoft much, but I would be saying the same thing if you had written a Firefox-only interface and then some massive security hole was found with it.
You make a good point; TI is no friend to open source or Free software.
However, just because someone releases a Linux-based product doesn't even begin to suggest that they are, so I'm not sure if 'hypocrisy' is really the right thing to be calling them out for. I don't think they've ever claimed to support open source in any form, and it seems as if their inclusion of Linux is really more because they've finially realized that there are a lot more Linux programmers than DSP programmers, and they need to get with the program or die.
I think it's safe to say that they're definitely not into the Linux philosophy in any way, shape, or form; that said, they're not above trying to market to Linux embedded-systems programmers.
It's unfortunate that they choose to do this, because I've always though TI's low-level component products (semis and ICs) were great: always well-documented and logically designed. (Plus they let you buy single-unit samples off of their website, which is pretty nice.) However when it comes to their computer hardware, chipsets and the like, I avoid it like the plague.
Yes, but IMO the non-Euclidian solution is rather trivial: you have a wheel rotating around and following a straight cirumferential (great or small circle) path on a sphere. Being on a sphere, the wheel's path can be "straight" and also a closed loop. You could also have a solution on the curved surface of a cylinder
Whether or not that's an acceptable solution to you depends on how you define "straight" in the problem originally. If you take it to be something like 'a path whose coordinates remain constant except in one dimension' then by using a spherical or cylindrical coordinate system these are good, albeit simple, solutions.
However if you stick to Euclidian geometry in the Cartesian coordinate system then I don't see that there can ever be a real solution.
Uh ... yeah. But the point of the article was to test a tri-core system. Everyone knows that a quad system works. Heck you can buy one from Apple today if you want, and they're probably not the only ones.
... but then again, this is Slashdot. Nothing is a pointless exercise here.
But I doubt anyone has ever used a tri-core system, and that's why they wrote the article. Saying "why didn't they just use two dual-cores" is akin to reading a magazine about tuner cars and saying "why don't they just buy a Lambo?"
I think their ultimate point was to say something about the feasibility of triple-core, single-chip products -- that is three cores on one wafer, as a sort of stopgap until they can squeeze the transistors enough to put four cores on -- but in reality it isn't much of a comparison because the problems that they have with their two-chip tri-core that lead to the crashing probably wouldn't be present with a purpose-fabricated single-chip tri-core (because one assumes the chip designers would use three identical processors and would go to lengths to make them talk well to each other).
It's arguably a bit of a pointless exercise
I still maintain that Sigenthaler is full of horseshit with regards to his libel claims, and it's unfortunate that the person who wrote that page can't be identified just so Sigenthaler can't have his day in court, and be promptly laughed out of it.
Because he's a public figure, he'd have to not only show damages (which are doubtful, given that it would require demonstrating that people essentially take Wikipedia as gospel, when in reality you could get any number of reasonable, unsophisticated users to say "well duh, everyone knows wikipedia is full of suspect information"), and also show that the writer acted with malice, which might be difficult because for all we know, the writer was a conspiracy-theory nut who honestly believes his comments about Sigenthaler to be the truth. Unless Sigenthaler could demonstrate both of those things (damages and malice), he'd be done, and Wikipedia would be vindicated.
Or alternately -- although I doubt he'd be that stupid -- it would be amusing if he tried to sue Wikipedia's operators directly under some strange secondary liability doctrine. It probably wouldn't make it very far, but at least it would provide a story for the media to use as a sort of finale and end it on a winning note for Wikipedia.
Instead, we have this move by Wikipedia that can only be called placation -- which no matter how you spin it makes Sigenthaler look like the winner (as he is, because they let him). I just have no idea why: he had no case, as any first-year law student could attest, and his resources are infinitely more limited than the ones the EFF and the ACLU probably could have thrown at it.
For the record, I don't think Wikipedia's move (to prevent ACs from posting articles) was necessarily a bad one. I'm all for a psuedonymous system rather than an IP-address based one; as it provides more privacy for posters while also enabling good citizens to build a reputation, and a thus has sustainable social model. If anything, the move actually gets further away from what a pro-censorship person would want; it's just that their timing makes them look like a bunch of pushovers, when they had the clear opportunity to do something significant.
it will be the responsibility of the library's network administrators to produce the proof of who did it.
The library, by it's nature, may be unable to keep logs. Either it could be financially or technologically prohibitive, or possibly restrictive under First Amendment grounds (though I'm not sure how long you would make an argument like that fly). But the point is that you can't subpoena what doesn't exist, and it's not necessarily clear that the library is breaking any law by not keeping records of who was using what computer when.
If some sort of illegal activity was traced back to a library -- and based on accounts from law enforcement that I've read, what I think actually happens -- the most likely course of action would be to put a keylogger and closed-circuit cameras on the computers at that point. This is totally legitimate, since with the IP address the police could demonstrate to a judge that the activity originated at the library, get a wiretap warrant, and record everything that goes on practically any way they want.
Although given the direction we're going in as a country these days, it wouldn't surprise me if sometime not so long from now, libraries were required as part of their "due diligence" to keep track of who was using which computers when, I haven't seen any evidence that this is the case today. The creeping doctrine of strict liability hasn't made it quite that far yet; and it would be a big deal if it did, since there are lots of places where you can get basically anonymous internet access (including any WiFi hotspot that isn't logging your MAC address) that would probably have to shut down overnight.
If you can provide any evidence as to law or precedent that would oblige a library to keep client records, then perhaps I will stand corrected (and not a little disappointed in our legal system). However, what you're suggesting is very controversial and in direct contravention of the practices of many high-profile libraries, who do not keep client records as a general rule.
Your comparison in your close to phones is more apt than you think. If I go to a pay phone and make a threatening phone call, the phone company doesn't have a legal requirement to be able to identify me as an individual. Their responsibility ends with telling the police that the call originated from number x at time y. If the police want to catch me, they have to either find out that I was there through some indirect means (eyewitness, etc.) or sit on the phone and hope I come back again. Likewise, the library isn't required to collect or give any information other than what it has on hand as a byproduct of rendering service, until it's specifically requested to do so (via a wiretap warrant).
Agree completely. I definitely DO NOT want to give any more control over to the cable companies than they already have.
The last thing I need is them installing some overprotective, nannying firewall at the head end and limiting what I can do with my connection. What I do on my end, as long as it's not damaging to the network in some way (relaying spam or something) isn't their business or their problem.
Maybe I want to leave my system open to the public net for some reason; perhaps so I can access my iTunes from work or something, or use FTP. That's my risk to take, and if I do it with a computer running a shoddy OS, I'll probably get owned and turned into a spam zombie (in which case they should cut my connection when it becomes clear I'm relaying Viagra ads 10,000 times a minute).
You know if they made a firewall like that, it would be aimed at the 'lowest common denominator' -- probably an unsecured, unpatched Win98 or WinME box. And that would shoot a whole lot of people who either don't use such an insecure OS, or actually follow good security practices, in the foot. It would be a vast step backwards, and give users a horrible false sense of security that they don't deserve. Plus, you know the cable companies would charge an arm and a leg to get rid of that firewall (probably you'd need to upgrade to their Business or Premier account, just like you do now to get a static IP).
That's an idea that we just cannot let gain any traction. Your ISP is not your net mommy; don't expect it to take care of you.
I think this would be a great idea.
I understand the objections: it probably would be a lot less effective against malware that encrypts its transmissions and masquerades as a legitimate HTTPS session or something, but it would at least give a greatly increased amount of control to home network operators, control which is currently limited to enterprise networks.
The product I'd love to see a free alternative to is the Packeeter Packetshaper. It's a hardware device that inspects packets individually and compares them (with a certain degree of intelligence, I'm told) to lists of known P2P programs, spam email streams, and other garbage traffic (excessive ping requests, etc.). The main selling point is blocking peer to peer apps, at which it is quite good against casual use; it doesn't do anything against sessions that are tunnelled in other protocols or encrypted, but it increases the user expertise and effort required (as well as computational and network overhead) to get P2P working, which is enough to discourage it for 90+% of users. Plus it has some very nice reporting features that could be a good diagnostic tool. (E.g., is mom's computer in the basement that she only uses for email and IM going through GBs of transfer a day? Probably zombified.)
I think if it were a free product, first of all it could probably be put to a lot more interesting uses than what Packeeter is marketing it for. Obviously at the very least you could use it to stop the dumber varieties of spyware and malware (ones that don't tunnel or encrypt), plus I think it would have a more general role just in giving users more control over their networks and what flows in and out of them than they now have. I would install it just for the diagnostic and reporting capabilities.
What I'd love to have is a product sort of like SmoothWall -- one CD that you pop into an unused box with two NICs to make it into an appliance -- that would run on a home network between the router/gateway and the cable/DSL modem and could be remotely administered. I think there could be significant demand for something like this (which will only increase in the future) but companies are too focused on the lucrative enterprise market to aim for end users. Although there might not be much money to be made, the mindshare gain could be a significant win for FOSS if it was done correctly.
I concur. Little Snitch is a great product -- it's actually one of the few pieces of OS X shareware that I think is absolutely worth the money for anyone with a Mac (PithHelmet is the other easy choice).
I think it's actually superior to ZoneAlarm on the PC, because it provides more flexible options for blocking outbound connections. When an application that's not on the whitelist tries to initiate a connection, you get the option of allowing it to connect to any server on any port, any server but only on one port, or only to a specific server and on a specific port. Plus you can have that setting remembered either only for a single session, or permanently. Although the interface is pretty simple, over time you can build up a pretty complicated scheme of custom preferences. Personally I err on the strict side; unless I can think of a good reason why an application needs to connect to 'any server' (e.g., it's a browsing app of some sort), I always set it to "only this server and port" and then approve every server that it's trying to connect to.
And you're absolutely right, Adobe software has struck me recently as being extremely creepy in both how often it tries to call home, and where it calls "home."
The one downside to Little Snitch is that it's so well known on the Mac that some rootkits actually go out of their way to check and see if it's installed and disable it. It's therefore not a replacement for caution and good use practices, however it does make users a lot more aware about what software does stuff without them giving it permission.
Frankly, I think it's ridiculous that something like this isn't built into the OS kernel. Maybe there are technical barriers to doing it that I'm not aware of, but for a consumer OS these days, it seems borderline irresponsible to allow any program to initiate any network connection to any server and to any port that it wants, without any checking of user intent.
Shouldn't you really be "working with" the makers of TrueActive Activity Monitor -- whatever it is -- to uncover why they're installing one of your components as part of their software? Or at least verify that it's a completely different thing going by the same name as your component? (And by "working with" I mean 'ask politely first, and then sic lawyers at'.)
Seems like it would be relatively easy to verify if the component is identical to yours of the same name, just by running a hash or something. In fact it seems farfetched that the spyware tools (or if not the tools themselves, then the companies that mantain the databases) don't keep a list that includes some "fingerprint" info on files that are on their blacklists, which would be able to let you tell whether the banned file is yours or a different one using the same name.
Complaining to the SpySweeper people to take that name off of their list doesn't do anybody any good, if there really is someone unscrupulous releasing something by the same name. TrueActive seems like it should be the people you should be going after, not the SpySweeper folks. If anything you might want to thank SpySweeper, if it ends up that they discovered someone using your code for some sort of shady purpose.