I haven't read the book but this sounds rather like Roger Penrose's 1990 effort The Emperor's New Mind. Short version: Penrose suspects consciousness is what happens at the quantum level before an infinity of superimposed states collapses into what we call reality. It involves a lot of conjecture and isn't really very convincing.
(But Penrose explores a maze of fascinating concepts in math, physics, and other disciplines, in order to give the reader enough background that he can make his point. He's an engaging writer, and the book's worth it just for the ride, even if you think as I do that his conclusion is bunk.)
So, if I understand correctly, the software solution being proposed will not even allow people to view the site of the organization that began this proposal process!
Not their whole site is blocked, just the section that they've put together on pornography.
Pornography is apparently so bad that not only should we not look at it, we should not look at other people telling us not to look at it.
I don't think it was an attempted scam. Lawyers are busy people, and when the paperwork for "whois.net" dropped on their desk, they probably didn't realize that the generic term was already in use. A case of miscommunication, unless I miss my guess.
If I'll find censorship (which I really have doubt about it as I know Hemos & Rob) - then be sure that the slashdot readers WILL know about it.
Yeah. What HeUnique said.
If I see a story about any computer company, positive or negative, my only concern when deciding whether to run it is: "is this newsworthy? is it of interest to Slashdot readers?" I'll keep doing things that way regardless of what company owns Slashdot.
Censorship of these stories hasn't been a blip on my radar. In fact, it's been explained to me that if I ever think someone "corporate" is trying to tell me what I should write or run, I should raise a huge stink about it. If it ever happens, I will.
See, the Macintosh team (at least one of them) had seen one of Xerox's systems at PARC back in the late 70s/early 80s. And had _blatantly_ ripped off the UI. In fact, if you look at the 2-color System 1-6 GUI, it's the same (and I mean _identical_) as what Xerox had put together.
Exactly none of that is true.
Apple hired engineers from Xerox PARC.
Apple's design team visited PARC and PARC's team showed them what they were doing. PARC was a research lab, and Steve Jobs pitched them the idea that Apple was the perfect company to implement their ideas and take them to the public. There was no misunderstanding on either side about this.
Apple signed an agreement with Xerox, giving them stock worth millions of dollars, to be able to use some ideas from PARC.
And Apple extended the desktop metaphor way beyond what Xerox had done. The PARC had some innovative ideas but the Macintosh was much more usable and brought the whole concept together.
My primary role in this matter was to create the Macintosh project. I named it for my favorite kind of eatin' apple...
My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get...
By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac.
Thus Horn is more correct than he knew when he wrote that the world has generally overestimated the influence of PARC on the Mac...
Carl Sagan opposed research to find near-earth asteroids, on the grounds that finding them was statistically more dangerous than not.
The argument is that earth-grazers are orders of magnitude more common than earth-colliders; and that, in the near future, terrorists will have the capability to launch devices to intercept grazers and change their course.
If there will be 1,000 terrorist opportunities before the first rock actually hits us, then ignorance is safer than knowledge - unless we have reason to believe that the Mean Time Between Terrorists Taking Advantage Of Earth-Grazing Rocks (MTBTTAOEGR) is less than 1,000. In short, we have to assume that random chance is less dangerous than the crazy human beings who live on our planet. That's a questionable argument at best.
He's got a point. But, by the time your average terrorist has the capability to put a rocket on an asteroid (twenty years?) it may not matter. By that time, sky imaging may be so cheap that the bad guys can find grazers without the good guys' help. A difficult question in any case.
As the note at the bottom of this piece indicates, I accidentally posted a half-finished version yesterday afternoon. Strangely, no one reading it seemed to realize it was half-done, which is a little embarrassing (think of all the verbiage I could have saved!).
I regret having had to yank it off the Slashdot front page, but I did so, in order that the full story could be posted today.
No censorship involved - if there was, you'd hear me yelling about it! Just good old-fashioned screwups and fubar.
The CPAN module isn't the most clever or the biggest or most mind-bogglingly complicated you can't believe anyone ever wrote it. (I'd nominate MakeMaker in the latter category:-)
What CPAN.pm does is bridge the gap between your desktop perl code and the rest of the world, with both elegance and great functionality. The CPAN itself, in collaboration with CPAN.pm, has made perl the first popular programming language that lives and breathes on the internet.
Your system would run much faster under perl. There's no excuse for a search on a 2 MB file taking 5-6 seconds, even on the equivalent of a 486/66.
I just tested a mildly complex Perl regex on 2 MB of text, 300000 words, in RAM, on my P133; it found 900 word matches in 1.34 seconds. Your described "prototype" of grepping through files on disk really doesn't have anything to do with Perl.
If your script were written in Perl, running it with mod_perl would be easy. Once the script is persistent, you won't have to read the 2 MB file into RAM every time it runs. That will be the big speedup.
Perl's regex engine is also extremely fast. If you're doing any kind of powerful expression-matching in C, I guarantee perl not only would make the task easier to write and maintain, but would run it faster too. And if you're not doing powerful matching (prefix searching? full name searching?) Perl has other tools that will be just as fast as C: hash tables in RAM or in a simple database; b-trees; even a built-in module to find all unique prefixes from a list of words (Text::Abbrev).
I'm not sure what you mean about "parsing binary databases" as opposed to "text databases." Perl has not been a text-only language since roughly version 2. If you're talking about the difference between a linear and binary search, consider that Perl's hash tables are going to be faster still. If you're talking about storing data in a format native to your language, rather than as one big text string, Perl does this excellently as well.
I think you should look more carefully at including Perl in your toolbox.
Click this text: "Only accept cookies originating from the same server as the page being viewed." Now click okay! Now you can only get a cookie if the server sending you the HTML (or whatever) page is sending it.
Thanks for bringing this up. This is exactly the text given for that option in Netscape Communicator 4.6, which I also use. The text is 100% wrong and misleading. "The page being viewed" may be WebMD.com, but the cookie attached to the ad banner comes from DoubleClick.net.
If you don't believe me, quit Netscape, rename your ~/.netscape/cookies file, restart Netscape, go to my.webmd.com, verify for yourself that the banner ad comes from doubleclick.net, quit Netscape, and "grep doubleclick ~/.netscape/cookies".
As Gerv points out, Netscape 4.7 finally makes this option read: "Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server." This is technically accurate, but 99.9+% of the audience will still not understand that they'll be tracked from site to site across the internet.
I was surprised that "Fight Club" exploded a display-room full of Macs. Apple has a few rules regarding use of its computers in films, and one of those rules is that you cannot blow them up.
Seriously. I read it in an interview maybe five years ago. Someone actually wrote down the rule that, if they do a product placement in a film, the computer can't be blown up.
I guess either the filmmakers didn't get paid for the placement, or they weaseled out of the rule because (if you look carefully) they pour the explosive into the monitors, not the computers they're sitting on.
If what the NYT says is true then Open Source software wasn't specifically excluded from the recent relaxed stance on crypto software. No source code may be exported whether its Open Source or a commercial entity. Please don't embellish stories with information that isn't factual.
This is splitting hairs in my opinion, because the nature of cryptography demands peer review and the most popular cryptography packages are open-source.
I suppose one could say that the government has also restricted the export of commercial crypto packages which make their source code available only under NDA for a price. Are there even any companies which are silly enough to offer such a product?
Apart from that hypothetical, the effect of prohibiting the export of source code is essentially identical to prohibiting the export of open-source software. In essense, the government is turning the GPL or any other open-source license into an anchor which forces the package to remain within U.S. borders. Closed-source software is not so restricted.
A bigger point is that constraints on the export of source code has been rendered ineffective anyway.
Crontab was a secondary issue. The hacker got in through a CGI application which PC Week installed.
Was the test fair? Ask yourself why PC Week set up the Linux box with a $150 CGI script that allowed upload of binary files (GIFs) whereas the Windows machine only had a glorified guestbook - no GIFs, no uploads at all - that in any case was customized by Microsoft itself.
How many sysadmins are going to have the resources to call up Bill Gates and say, "Bill, I need a custom app, can you guys write me one?" And are we supposed to believe that the same sysadmins have so little resources that they have to buy their Linux applications from a company whose FAQ has questions like "What if I don't have 'telnet' access to my web site?"
Imagine 1 trillion Bill Gateses standing in a circle (not a pretty picture, but play along for a moment). Now ask each one to convert his fortune into pennies and toss them in a collective pile.
OK, so I'm a math weirdo, but play along for a moment. If one trillion Bill Gateses were standing in a circle and threw all their pennies in, how tall would the pile of pennies be?
Actually, there wouldn't be a pile at all: the density would only be one penny per 2.5 square cm. Assuming three Gateses per linear meter. Evenly spread out, there's plenty of room to spare. 1*10^12 people -> (1/3)*10^12 m circumference -> 1.06*10^11 m diameter -> 2.5*10^21 m^2 area -> 2.5*10^13 cm^2 per Gates. Each Gates gets to throw his wealth of 1.06*10^13 pennies into a square 50 km on a side.
If all those Gateses were standing in a circle, light would take over five minutes to cross its diameter. The circle would be not quite the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
If each penny contained 1 trillion tiny computers and each computer had its own IP address, you'd still have used only a fraction of IPv6's potential space.
To be precise, about 2.9%.
But good luck rewriting the TCP protocol for your penny network -- its end-to-end space-time delay is ten minutes!
...having something yanked off Slashdot is just to wierd for me.
There's nothing insidious going on - I'm still getting used to slashdot's administration software, hit the wrong button, and accidentally posted the story for a few minutes before I was done editing it. Sorry!
People are required to label food they distribute, so people who hate, say, peanuts, can avoid that food.
What is so obviously bad about requiring people to label multimedia content so that people who hate, say, pornography can avoid it?
It's not just multimedia content; Germany would like to target specifically plaintext with which they disagree, for example, and censors on this side of the pond won't restrict themselves to just MPEGs either.
More importantly, we should recognize why peanut companies are forced to label their products. First of all, they're selling something, and second of all, they're selling atoms, not bits. Corporations don't enjoy the same free speech rights as real people (for good reason), and atoms can do you real damage if you're allergic to them.
Hopefully our personal right to speak our minds won't be reduced into the same category as corporations' right to label widgets.
Harlon Ellison summed it up pretty well: "Star Wars is the stupidest piece of shit."
It's a space western, folks. Lots of people like John Wayne's movies, too, but that doesn't mean he didn't have to wrap his mouth around some of the lamest, most pretentious dialogue ever written. At least Alec Guinness has the presence of mind to take himself less seriously than the Duke.
Sure, Star Wars is entertaining. Many children's movies are. I enjoyed all four. But people who think they're high art need to get out more often.
The ITU procedure requires a statistical "filtering" of the responses to eliminate listeners who didn't understand the instructions or who couldn't reliably distinguish processed from original sound. From more than 30 respondents we ended up with usable scores from 16 listeners...
The magazine made a major effort to find serious audiophiles: people at speaker companies, members of "user groups," even employees at their own publication.
And in this sample group, they only found half who could statistically tell the difference between the original CD and compressed data.
Even when listening carefully, in back-to-back tests, to snippets designed to push the encoders to their limits.
I don't doubt that there's a tiny fraction of the population, well-trained, who really does get occasionally annoyed by MP3 or other encoding. But "golden ears" are very rare even among those who like to pretend they're experts. What this article really says is that, in real-world usage, encoded audio is effectively indistinguishable from the original.
There's no reason to bring animals into a Linux convention. What's the point? An animated GIF would be much more appropriate.
Paying their handlers to exhibit them just ensures that more penguins will be trapped in the wild, carted around in tiny cages, and stressed-out by hundreds of grabby humans.
Apple has always maintained its usability edge by controlling both the OS and the hardware. This is what helped them keep their superior user experience back when PC cloners were still tearing their hair out with jumper switches and IRQs.
Apple probably isn't concerned about this move opening the door to clones: their custom ASICs and of course the ROM chips are still firmly under their copyright. Cobbling up something to run the MacOS without those chips will always be flaky at best.
But Apple has invested a great deal of money and image in promoting "their CPU" as superior to Intel. When a salesdroid shows PowerPCs side-by-side, one running MacOS and one Linux (especially with a cool Enlightenment theme), and says "these run the same CPU but the one on the right costs $x less," that's got to make Apple's marketing department groan.
Slashdot Mirror
# katz.pl
# $Revision: 0.94 $
for (;;) {
open($dialogue, "</dev/community") or msgrcv(getpeername);
while (<$dialogue>) { listen; reverse @opinion }
while (shift @opinion) {
&examine(values %ENV);
crypt(quotemeta);
s/'/]/g;
s/19\d\d/l9\d\d/g;
s/\b\.(\s)/,$1/g;
write and msgsnd;
accept($hatemail, $flames) or die;
}
read;
}
Jamie McCarthy
(But Penrose explores a maze of fascinating concepts in math, physics, and other disciplines, in order to give the reader enough background that he can make his point. He's an engaging writer, and the book's worth it just for the ride, even if you think as I do that his conclusion is bunk.)
Jamie McCarthy
Not their whole site is blocked, just the section that they've put together on pornography.
Pornography is apparently so bad that not only should we not look at it, we should not look at other people telling us not to look at it.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
Yeah. What HeUnique said.
If I see a story about any computer company, positive or negative, my only concern when deciding whether to run it is: "is this newsworthy? is it of interest to Slashdot readers?" I'll keep doing things that way regardless of what company owns Slashdot.
Censorship of these stories hasn't been a blip on my radar. In fact, it's been explained to me that if I ever think someone "corporate" is trying to tell me what I should write or run, I should raise a huge stink about it. If it ever happens, I will.
Jamie McCarthy
Exactly none of that is true.
Apple hired engineers from Xerox PARC.
Apple's design team visited PARC and PARC's team showed them what they were doing. PARC was a research lab, and Steve Jobs pitched them the idea that Apple was the perfect company to implement their ideas and take them to the public. There was no misunderstanding on either side about this.
Apple signed an agreement with Xerox, giving them stock worth millions of dollars, to be able to use some ideas from PARC.
And Apple extended the desktop metaphor way beyond what Xerox had done. The PARC had some innovative ideas but the Macintosh was much more usable and brought the whole concept together.
If you'd like to learn more about this myth you're propagating, read MacKiDo or SteveWozniak on the subject. Or just read some thoughts of Jef Raskin:
Jamie McCarthy
Maybe I phrased it badly. Lincoln was the first and only Republican presidential candidate not to win the majority of votes from Holland.
At least, that's what a reliable source told me.
Jamie McCarthy
The argument is that earth-grazers are orders of magnitude more common than earth-colliders; and that, in the near future, terrorists will have the capability to launch devices to intercept grazers and change their course.
If there will be 1,000 terrorist opportunities before the first rock actually hits us, then ignorance is safer than knowledge - unless we have reason to believe that the Mean Time Between Terrorists Taking Advantage Of Earth-Grazing Rocks (MTBTTAOEGR) is less than 1,000. In short, we have to assume that random chance is less dangerous than the crazy human beings who live on our planet. That's a questionable argument at best.
He's got a point. But, by the time your average terrorist has the capability to put a rocket on an asteroid (twenty years?) it may not matter. By that time, sky imaging may be so cheap that the bad guys can find grazers without the good guys' help. A difficult question in any case.
Jamie McCarthy
I regret having had to yank it off the Slashdot front page, but I did so, in order that the full story could be posted today.
No censorship involved - if there was, you'd hear me yelling about it! Just good old-fashioned screwups and fubar.
Jamie McCarthy
What CPAN.pm does is bridge the gap between your desktop perl code and the rest of the world, with both elegance and great functionality. The CPAN itself, in collaboration with CPAN.pm, has made perl the first popular programming language that lives and breathes on the internet.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
I just tested a mildly complex Perl regex on 2 MB of text, 300000 words, in RAM, on my P133; it found 900 word matches in 1.34 seconds. Your described "prototype" of grepping through files on disk really doesn't have anything to do with Perl.
If your script were written in Perl, running it with mod_perl would be easy. Once the script is persistent, you won't have to read the 2 MB file into RAM every time it runs. That will be the big speedup.
Perl's regex engine is also extremely fast. If you're doing any kind of powerful expression-matching in C, I guarantee perl not only would make the task easier to write and maintain, but would run it faster too. And if you're not doing powerful matching (prefix searching? full name searching?) Perl has other tools that will be just as fast as C: hash tables in RAM or in a simple database; b-trees; even a built-in module to find all unique prefixes from a list of words (Text::Abbrev).
I'm not sure what you mean about "parsing binary databases" as opposed to "text databases." Perl has not been a text-only language since roughly version 2. If you're talking about the difference between a linear and binary search, consider that Perl's hash tables are going to be faster still. If you're talking about storing data in a format native to your language, rather than as one big text string, Perl does this excellently as well.
I think you should look more carefully at including Perl in your toolbox.
Jamie McCarthy
Thanks for bringing this up. This is exactly the text given for that option in Netscape Communicator 4.6, which I also use. The text is 100% wrong and misleading. "The page being viewed" may be WebMD.com, but the cookie attached to the ad banner comes from DoubleClick.net.
If you don't believe me, quit Netscape, rename your ~/.netscape/cookies file, restart Netscape, go to my.webmd.com, verify for yourself that the banner ad comes from doubleclick.net, quit Netscape, and "grep doubleclick ~/.netscape/cookies".
As Gerv points out, Netscape 4.7 finally makes this option read: "Accept only cookies that get sent back to the originating server." This is technically accurate, but 99.9+% of the audience will still not understand that they'll be tracked from site to site across the internet.
Jamie McCarthy
Seriously. I read it in an interview maybe five years ago. Someone actually wrote down the rule that, if they do a product placement in a film, the computer can't be blown up.
I guess either the filmmakers didn't get paid for the placement, or they weaseled out of the rule because (if you look carefully) they pour the explosive into the monitors, not the computers they're sitting on.
Jamie McCarthy
This is splitting hairs in my opinion, because the nature of cryptography demands peer review and the most popular cryptography packages are open-source.
I suppose one could say that the government has also restricted the export of commercial crypto packages which make their source code available only under NDA for a price. Are there even any companies which are silly enough to offer such a product?
Apart from that hypothetical, the effect of prohibiting the export of source code is essentially identical to prohibiting the export of open-source software. In essense, the government is turning the GPL or any other open-source license into an anchor which forces the package to remain within U.S. borders. Closed-source software is not so restricted.
Quite true!
Jamie McCarthy
Was the test fair? Ask yourself why PC Week set up the Linux box with a $150 CGI script that allowed upload of binary files (GIFs) whereas the Windows machine only had a glorified guestbook - no GIFs, no uploads at all - that in any case was customized by Microsoft itself.
How many sysadmins are going to have the resources to call up Bill Gates and say, "Bill, I need a custom app, can you guys write me one?" And are we supposed to believe that the same sysadmins have so little resources that they have to buy their Linux applications from a company whose FAQ has questions like "What if I don't have 'telnet' access to my web site?"
Jamie McCarthy
OK, so I'm a math weirdo, but play along for a moment. If one trillion Bill Gateses were standing in a circle and threw all their pennies in, how tall would the pile of pennies be?
Actually, there wouldn't be a pile at all: the density would only be one penny per 2.5 square cm. Assuming three Gateses per linear meter. Evenly spread out, there's plenty of room to spare. 1*10^12 people -> (1/3)*10^12 m circumference -> 1.06*10^11 m diameter -> 2.5*10^21 m^2 area -> 2.5*10^13 cm^2 per Gates. Each Gates gets to throw his wealth of 1.06*10^13 pennies into a square 50 km on a side.
If all those Gateses were standing in a circle, light would take over five minutes to cross its diameter. The circle would be not quite the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.
To be precise, about 2.9%.
But good luck rewriting the TCP protocol for your penny network -- its end-to-end space-time delay is ten minutes!
Jamie McCarthy
There's nothing insidious going on - I'm still getting used to slashdot's administration software, hit the wrong button, and accidentally posted the story for a few minutes before I was done editing it. Sorry!
Jamie McCarthy
Register.com was the first. Joker.com is currently the cheapest (it's based in Germany but its English webpages are passable).
Jamie McCarthy
It's not just multimedia content; Germany would like to target specifically plaintext with which they disagree, for example, and censors on this side of the pond won't restrict themselves to just MPEGs either.
More importantly, we should recognize why peanut companies are forced to label their products. First of all, they're selling something, and second of all, they're selling atoms, not bits. Corporations don't enjoy the same free speech rights as real people (for good reason), and atoms can do you real damage if you're allergic to them.
Hopefully our personal right to speak our minds won't be reduced into the same category as corporations' right to label widgets.
Jamie McCarthy
It's a space western, folks. Lots of people like John Wayne's movies, too, but that doesn't mean he didn't have to wrap his mouth around some of the lamest, most pretentious dialogue ever written. At least Alec Guinness has the presence of mind to take himself less seriously than the Duke.
Sure, Star Wars is entertaining. Many children's movies are. I enjoyed all four. But people who think they're high art need to get out more often.
Jamie McCarthy
The magazine made a major effort to find serious audiophiles: people at speaker companies, members of "user groups," even employees at their own publication.
And in this sample group, they only found half who could statistically tell the difference between the original CD and compressed data.
Even when listening carefully, in back-to-back tests, to snippets designed to push the encoders to their limits.
I don't doubt that there's a tiny fraction of the population, well-trained, who really does get occasionally annoyed by MP3 or other encoding. But "golden ears" are very rare even among those who like to pretend they're experts. What this article really says is that, in real-world usage, encoded audio is effectively indistinguishable from the original.
Jamie McCarthy
Paying their handlers to exhibit them just ensures that more penguins will be trapped in the wild, carted around in tiny cages, and stressed-out by hundreds of grabby humans.
Jamie McCarthy
Apple probably isn't concerned about this move opening the door to clones: their custom ASICs and of course the ROM chips are still firmly under their copyright. Cobbling up something to run the MacOS without those chips will always be flaky at best.
But Apple has invested a great deal of money and image in promoting "their CPU" as superior to Intel. When a salesdroid shows PowerPCs side-by-side, one running MacOS and one Linux (especially with a cool Enlightenment theme), and says "these run the same CPU but the one on the right costs $x less," that's got to make Apple's marketing department groan.
Jamie McCarthy