First of all, I am a software guy and I took only as many hardware classes as were required, so consider most of the following to be phrased in the form of a question (as in "Does this make any sense at all?"). That said:
It seems the speed of light must be becoming a significant factor here. At 1 GHz, light in a vacuum will only propagate about 30 cm during a clock cycle (3*10^8 m/s / 10^9 cycles/s = 3*10^-1 m/cycle), and at 5 GHz that drops to 6 cm. I don't know the speed of electrical impulses in silicon, but even if it's not much less, that means a signal can't be doing too many laps back and forth across the chip (up and down the data path, etc.), i.e., you're working in a time scale where you can see the clock pulses rippling across the chip. Then no matter how fast the gates themselves are switching, the number of them that the signal can go through is limited by the time it takes for it to travel the total distance.
When the speed-of-light propagation time from one end of the chip to the other is a measurably large percentage of the clock period, that would seem to make for some incredibly funky new design problems, due to clock events having occurred in one place but not another, signals that take different paths not reaching the same place at the same time, etc. Or if you just wait for everything to catch up between steps, that would cut down the number of steps per cycle even more. This would be another reason why smaller feature size allows higher clock rates for the same design: it reduces the distance the signals have to travel.
It does sound kind of similar. In fact, here's what seems to be a common theme:
Nobody wants to be first, but everybody wants to be second.
I haven't been watching this as closely (I'm happy with my PowerBook G3), but it did seem to go a bit like this: for a long time everybody was interested but nobody was actually announcing anything; then somebody announced a product, and everybody else rushed to follow suit; now everybody is backing off. I guess the optimistic view would be to suppose that everybody wants to do it but they are nervous about the risk of being the first to test the waters, and that once somebody finally does it, the rest will again follow.
What bothered me was the claim in the other direction, i.e., the suggestion that the lack of the ability to change the connections dynamically is some sort of fundamental limitation on what can be computed (or, more generally, "done") by a traditional digital computer. I don't know how applicable this is here, but it always bothers me when people say things like that because it seems to indicate a complete lack of understanding of the layer of abstraction that exists between hardware and software.
That is, a digital computer can simulate a neural network, with all the flexible connections you could want, in software. The neurons, connections, etc., are data structures in the computer's memory, not actual pieces of circuitry, and the structure of the network can be changed arbitrarily simply by changing the appropriate values in memory. People don't seem to have much trouble with this in other contexts: when you draw a "box-and-pointer" diagram of a data structure and use it to step through an algorithm, changing values by breaking arrows and drawing new ones, nobody protests, "Wait! You can't change the connections in the computer because they are 'wired back at the factory'!" Nor do you hear arguments like "Computers can't model three-dimensional objects because their memory is structured one-dimensionally," or "Computers can't process text because all they have are ones and zeroes -- no letters." Why, then, is there this fundamental confusion of levels when we talk about computers simulating brains?
To say that breaking the connections among the computer's transistors would crash it is more like saying that breaking enough connections within the nuclei of the atoms in my brain (as in nuclear fission) would cause it to "crash". Well, yeah, but how is that a limitation on my brain's computational abilities?
Thanks. I suspected as much, but I wasn't sure, and I figured I'd already rambled enough... Any idea what minimum speed is required by the air cushion? Maybe there could still be an intermediate state between off and on, to better handle the usage characteristics I described, even if it couldn't be that slow. Or is the whole idea just ridiculous? Oh, well.
Hard drives already have a "power saving mode", which is the reason why if you leave your computer unattended for more than a few minutes, it porks out making you wait while the disk spins up. [...]
This arrangement is decidedly sub-optimal for certain sparse workloads, e.g., mine, which I suspect is why Xeger said:
Why not produce a hard drive that "idles" at low RPM [...]
It sounds like he was thinking the same thing I am, namely that instead of stopping when idle and spinning all the way up to 4800 RPM (or whatever it is) when needed, it should idle at an extremely low speed, like 120 RPM (no, I didn't forget a zero), so it can handle occasional small tasks slower than normal but without needing to spin up at all.
Here's the thinking: my typical workload when I'm mobile tends to generate a single I/O once every 70 seconds or so. As a result, my HD spins unnecessariy for about a minute, spins down, and, about five seconds later, forces the application to freeze for two or three seconds while it spins back up to answer a single I/O request, and then continues spinning unnecessarily. Rinse and repeat until battery is drained. Meanwhile suffer a three-second latency for common actions.
Okay, it's not quite that pathological, but I'm not exaggerating by much. I'm mostly reading and editing, which involves hardly any I/O at all once my files are open. So my HD should be idle all the time, right? Well, sorta. The thing is, every now and then I click a control, switch windows, or save a buffer, which generates a small but nonzero amount of activity.
This is where the extremely-slow-but-not-stopped mode would come in: 120 RPM = 1/2 second per rotation = 1/4 second per half rotation, so the mean latency would be a quarter of a second. Pretty horrible compared to the typical 8 milliseconds at normal speed, right? Well, yeah, but since it takes two to three seconds to reach normal speed, this would actually be much better. Of course, you'd still want it to spin all the way up when you do something big, like a compile or launching or quitting an application. Also, maybe you'd want to double the speed to a whopping 240, or even 300 RPM to keep the max latency under the quarter-second annoyance threshold, but I think that with some work, this Could be a really good idea.
You are wrong on the number of communication links. It most certainly does grow exponentially.
No I'm not, and no it doesn't.
Each person may communicate with N others.
Yes. (Actually, N-1 unless you count people talking to themselves, but that doesn't make much difference.)
That's N^N.
No, that's N times N, also known as N^2. (Again, actually N(N-1) unless people talk to themselves, and N(N-1)/2 if the links are undirected.) You multiply the number of links per person by the number of people. N links per person times N people = N^2 total links. The number of possible edges in a graph with N vertices (counting direction and self-loops) is N^2. Not that it has much to do with counting edges, but the number of possible graphs is 2^(n^2) and the log of this is N^2.
As far as Brooks' Law goes, I still agree with the spirit of it: there may also be some sense in which the (administrative?) cost associated with each link increases along with the total number of links. Also, the set of possible committees that the team can form is the power set of the team, or 2^N, but that's a different matter. Besides, a quadratic increase is already pretty expensive. However, none of that applies to counting the edges in the graph, and the misuse of the word "exponential" is still a pet peeve of mine.
As for the analogy with RSA: first of all, I hope you noticed that the statement about "factoring large prime numbers" was wrong. Factoring large prime numbers is easy. If you give me a prime number P, then no matter how large it is, I can assure you that its factors are 1 and P. That's what it means to be prime. The statement should say "factoring products of large prime numbers", or simply "factoring large numbers". It's a silly mistake, I'll admit it doesn't really have anything to do with the graph question, and I don't mean to imply that you don't know all this, but it's surprising how often people make that mistake. It seems to happen practically every time a cryptography story is posted here. The person is promptly pounced on and it's a lot of fun, but it's still a distressingly significant error. I remember someone's sig had the quote in which Bill Gates said it. I mentioned it here because it is an error that seems to involve a similar slip to that of confusing quadratic and exponential.
As for the stuff about drawing graphs, I was just trying to drive in how different the two equations y=x^2 and y=2^x are. I would have included a drawing, but Taco's (ironically lame) "lameness filter" rejected it for being ASCII art.
Finally, by "moderating logic", I assume you mean the fact that my post has (Score:2), and you don't think it deserved to be marked up? That's because it started that way; nobody has marked it up, though I do think it deserved to be. Being so late and so far down, you're probably about the only person who saw it.
I know I said "finally" in the previous paragraph, but I can't resist this:
I think that you are correct about the graph, but it's obviously just chance.
Sure, given that there are two of us, and only one can count, I guess in a way it's just chance that I'm that one.
The size of the graph description is quadratic in the number of vertices, not exponential. That's O(n^2), not O(2^n). Big difference. By the way, this particular mistake makes a good pet peeve -- it's in the same class as saying that RSA encryption depends on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. I think I've seen Brooks' Law justified by the argument that "the number of communication links between people grows exponentially with the number of people"? NO! QUADRATICALLY! NOT EXPONENTIALLY!
This is even worse, though, because it indicates a real misunderstanding of the concepts. A lot of people seem not to appreciate the difference between the equations y = x^2 and y = 2^x: they seem to think the two are almost the same because their graphs look so similar (they both curve sharply upward, right?). Well, that's true if you only look at them for small y, like y < 10 or 20 (and, of course, positive x). But try relabelling your axes to use x values from 0 to 33 and y values from 0 to 1000 and graph the two functions again: y = 2^x looks a lot steeper, doesn't it? Now, try x values to 1000 and y values to 1,000,000: y = x^2 still looks about the same, but you can hardly draw y = 2^x as anything but a (nearly) vertical line, since, if the width of the paper is 1000, 20 is so close to zero. See the difference yet?
I also got Pac Bell DSL in Oakland, but more recently (in March), and I also have nothing but good to say about it. It did take most of the day and many phone calls (by the installation guy, not me) to get it activated at the other end (which, as far as I know, was just a matter of the right person flipping a switch), but it was done that day, and it has only been out once, for a day or so, since then.
I was getting a pretty steady 1.2 Mbps, which is about twice what my friend has been getting on his cable modem. He only chose cable because he was just a bit out of range for DSL (literally, his next-door neighbor could get it, but he couldn't -- I suggested they throw an Ethernet cable over the fence and split the bill, but...). He just found out that they installed a new repeater (or whatever it is), so now he can "upgrade", so to speak.
Now I've moved, and I'm back to modems -- I've found out that my new house is in range, but haven't ordered it yet. I like the DSL service, but I don't know enough about prices to say how good theirs is. Specifically, how much extra is it worth paying to get the "enhanced" package, which gives you five static IPs (on your own 3-bit subnet, with your own router, I think) vs. the "basic" package's dynamic IPs? They charge about $40/month for basic and $80/month for enhanced. Does anyone know if that's particularly good or bad compared to other providers?
When I was at Berkeley, the CS department had several badly overcrowded labs full of HP-UX boxes (712/66, or something, I think), and the policy was that if someone left a workstation unattended for more than 15 minutes, you could log him out and take it. A friend once told me that he had made the mistake of doing this to the wrong guy: the guy came back a bit later, which led to the following conversation:
Guy: "Hey, what are you doing on my workstation?"
My friend: "I logged you out; you were gone for half an hour, so the policy says it's mine."
Guy: I see. [walks away]
A few minutes later, bad things started happening to my friend's session, as in, it stopped responding and eventually died. The guy must have gone to some other machine and done something evil to this one. Our best guess was that he had fired off about a dozen compiles (it only took three or four to bring those things to their knees at the best of times), or maybe a forkbomb (I tried that once, and it didn't handle it any better than the last Linux box I tried it on). I now suspect that he must have done something like what you describe (cat a binary to his/dev/tty6. By the way, does it have to be a binary file, i.e., illegal input, or is the problem just contention on the device?)
I guess it was one of those "Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger and have no need of subtlety" things. The lesson was that those labs can be a dangerous place, since you never know who's capable of what. As long as you figure that the average person in there knows more than you do, you want to step carefully.
DeCSS SHOULD be OK under DMCA since it is used to view legitimatly purchased DVDs (an allowable thing)
Sorry, not allowable. Viewing is, of course, a non-infringing use, but using DeCSS, even for that, still involves "circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work", so it's still illegal under DMCA. The real problem is this equivocation between "copy protection" and "access control", since that is where the notion of "fair use" gets forgotten. Even worse, it can cover uses for which you would not even have needed to invoke "fair use" (such as viewing), if the publisher adds a more restrictive access control. This seems to be where the DMCA's constitutionality really needs to be challenged.
DMCA does make exception for things which have a legitimate purpose.
I am not a lawyer, but I've been known to play one on Slashdot, and it looks to me like there are two separate things here: the act of circumventingan access-control mechanism and the distribution of tools with which to do so. The DMCA does make exceptions for legitimate purposes to the prohibition against circumventing, but not to the one against distributing tools for circumvention:
About circumvention, it says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (1201(a)(1)(A)), and later "The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title" (1201(a)(1)(B)).
Then about distributing, it says "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that- (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." (1201(a)(2)). Note that those disclaimers about other significant purposes sound nice, but don't really help much: A DVD player based on DeCSS (like LiViD) should be legitimate, since it is has nothing to do with infringing copyrights, but it would still be out because it it all about circumventing access controls.
It kind of makes sense (albeit in a Salem-witch-trial sort of way: "If you do drown, you must not be a witch. Congratulations, you're acquitted!"), since in the latter case, the person distributing the tools is not doing any actual circumventing, legitimate or otherwise, so there's nothing to which to make the exception apply. The crime is making the tools available to others, presumably because you have no control over whether or not they use it legitimately.
The catch, of course, is that the tools are necessary in order to perform those legitimate circumventions. The only ways one can do it are to develop the tools oneself or to acquire them from someone else. Breaking CSS is beyond the abilities of nearly everyone, which only leaves getting DeCSS from someone else -- making it illegal for people to distribute it makes those legitimate uses impossible for all but the extremely few people who can do it themselves. The effect is still to eliminate fair use, though indirectly, by making it impossible rather than illegal.
This seems to be where the DMCA's constitutionality needs to be attacked. CSS and, really, all copy-protection (let alone access-control) mechanisms are really attacks by the publishers against people's fair use rights. They can't exactly be called "unconstitutional", because they're not laws -- they're not even done by the government -- but they are dirty tricks. Until now, at least, it was an arguably fair game between the publishers and the community: their best efforts to make strong protection mchanisms against our best efforts to circumvent them. Now, however, DMCA allows them to cheat in the game by running whining to the government whenever we succeed. It "effectively" gives force of law to whatever restrictions the publishers want to put on the use of their works.
a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work [...] "effectively" might be interpreted in such a way that rot13, etc. would be interpreted out of the picture
There seems to be an even deeper ambiguity than some unknown criterion for how strong the protection has to be. Does "effectively controls access" mean that it is an effective means of controlling access, or just that its effect is to control access?
If it's the former, then there are the questions the rest of you have been talking about, namely, "How 'effective' does it have to be?" -- and, strictly speaking, as soon as it has been cracked, doesn't it by definition cease to be "effective"?
But if it's the latter, which seems to me to make more sense semantically, "effectively" doesn't mean that it is actually effective, but only that that is what its effect is, i.e., that that is what it is intended to do. The phrase simply refers to any copy-protection or access-control mechanism (the equivocation between copy-protection and access-control, by the way, is an even bigger problem, since that's the part that ignores fair use). So, yes, I guess rot13 (or XOR, for binary data) would qualify, since simply applying it to a standard file format would cause the files to appear unreadable to a standard application and a naive user.
For a similar example, have you ever seen a multimedia CD-ROM on which the media files were in a folder with a "hidden" flag set, so it wouldn't appear on the desktop? To get at the files, you have to copy the entire disk to your hard drive (where the directories are writable), then use a low-level filesystem editor to unset the flag. Now I think that would count as "effectively" controlling access, since to a naive user, or a knowledgable but unmotivated one, its effect is to make it so the content can only be accessed through the accompanying application, even though it is trivial for a knowledgable and determined user to get around it. I don't think that this would make low-level filesystem editors illegal (at least I hope not) because this is clearly not their primary function, but perhaps public posting of the technique would be, (uh-oh!) since it makes it possible for people who already have the necessary tools but don't know how to do it. This could be another interesting case, since the circumvention does not require any specific tools, but simply a bit of knowledge.
Or buy a copy every ten years or so. [...] This is Very Scary stuff here. The idea is that the content (book) is now controlled by a company who can turn off the content because someone hasn't payed up in the last year.
Reminds me of some hypotheticals that a former co-worker and I were tossing around a while ago -- I was trying to make the point that the capabilities and/or limitations of a technology can affect the de facto operation of a medium, setting parameters on it that do not necessarily correspond to the law and/or morality (big distinction, by the way), and yet these parameters come to be taken for granted, so that they are assumed to be part of the legal and/or moral nature of the thing, rather than mere side-effects. Whichever party is receiving the extra benefits comes to feel entitled to them, and then, when changes in the technology change these parameters, they protest. Here goes:
Suppose that at some time in the past, paper and printing technology were such that books would deteriorate and become unreadable after some period of time (like before acid-free paper, non-fading inks, etc., but say the period was much shorter and more regular, i.e., that a book would last exactly five years). For some books that you only buy to read once for light entertainment, it wouldn't be so bad, but for anything that you want to have in a personal library, e.g., great literature or reference material like dictionaries and encyclopedias, let alone technical literature or journals, you'd basically have to replace everything peiodically, buying a new copy of the same book every five years. Basically, there would be no such thing as owning a book in the normal sense -- sure, the volume would be your property while it lasts, but you'd really only be renting the contents. All else being equal, the books would probably be somewhat cheaper, because you're not getting as much value. Publishers might even offer some sort of discount on the replacements, e.g., 50% off a new copy of the same title when you bring your old one to be recycled. They could do this as a promotion, to encourage you to replace your books, but this would be entirely promotional, there's not necessarily any notion that by buying it the first time, you had in some sense bought a right to have its contents available to you forever.
Now, suppose an advance in printing technology makes it possible for books to last forever. It's most likely, of course, that publishers would just resist adopting the new technology (see DVD-audio). How about this instead: suppose someone invents a process that can be applied to a book to make it last longer (e.g., a chemical treatment to prevent the paper from yellowing, the ink from fading, etc.). In this case, people would go buy the chemical, treat their existing books, and never again need to buy replacements. Now the publishers would protest, arguing that "When you buy a book, what you're buying is the right to have access to its contents for five years; if you want to keep it past that point, you have to pay again," and they would try to insist that customers still owe them a payment for every five-year period that they own a book -- they might even argue that the books' deterioration serves as a copyright-protection mechanism, since it "effectively controls access", and try to have the chemical banned on the grounds that it makes it impossible for them to collect their payments. Customers would argue back, "No, we bought the book, to do with as we please. Before, we were buying a new book each time, not renewing our rights to the old one. The only reason we had to keep paying before was because of a technological limitation; you're not actually entitled to those ongoing payments."
How does that sound? Maybe when you buy an Encyclopaedia Britannica set, they'd say that if you pay extra for the gold coating on the edges, you're not just buying a few grams of gold, or paying for the extra production costs, but actually paying for the right to own the books for a longer time. And no, you can't paint a gold coating on them yourself, becuase that would be violating their copyright.
But we do have a lot of common views and an emergent group identity, and we could easily move to a situation where a geek who worked for the Big Media was socially ostracised by other geeks
In my recent job search, I interviewed with and briefly considered working for a company that's involved in developing secure formats for digital content. I don't know very much about exactly where they fit into the picture with MP3 vs. SoDoMI, etc., but it seemed close enough to pose a moral conflict for me. I mentioned it to a few friends and they speculated (at least, I hope, part-jokingly) that they wouldn't be able to hang out with me anymore if accepted that job. I wouldn't say that that decided it for me, since I had just about reached the same decision on my own (namely, that I couldn't work there because I didn't agree morally with their goals), but I think the whole story is close enough to your suggestion to be relevant.
I hate to say it, but your response [well, that part of it, anyway] is essentially a well-written (I must say) [thanks] version of, "I don't have a problem with it, it must be okay for everyone!" But the truth is, caffeine, and pretty much ANY drug, doesn't have the same effect on everyone else that it will on you.
Point taken. If nothing else, it would be related to body size and dosage; I'm fairly big (6', 175 lb.), and I guess four Mountain Dews a day, which I thought of as pretty extreme, is not that much compared to a three-pot-a-day coffee drinker. And of course you're right that different people would be affected differently, so the mere fact that it's not so bad for me doesn't mean that it isn't bad at all. On the other hand, the same argument works conversely: the original comment (magnushuckvale's, not Rimbo's) claimed that caffeine is "evil", but that's only true for some people and not, e.g., me. To be fair, the original comment seemed to be a bit of a "rant mode"-style exaggeration wrapped around a good point about the importance of healthy activities and a balanced lifestyle, so I won't get too hung up on the "evil" thing.
Also, I just want to say that I had intended for the second half of my comment to be the main point, namely, the suggestion about taking a laptop to a coffee shop to get some work done. I just did so myself -- I left right after posting my previous comment, finished a problem that I've been working on for a few days, and came home to see your reply and write this. That's often a problem with the way I write my comments: I start out by rambling about some side point, and by the time I get around to my real point, people have stopped reading. Just to be nice and recursive, here I am doing it again.
I like caffeine. For one thing, it does help with the occasional hundred-hour coding session (no, really: I officially logged four back-to-back all-nighters on at least three occasions back in school), which I guess is the kind of hacker bravado that you are against, and in which the rest of use are revelling. Mainly, I think (speaking just for myself, of course), it's just fun to talk like that -- we're not really quite as unhealthy as we claim to be.
In reality, though, I don't see that caffeine really does that much at all. I remember that for a while back in school I was in the habit of grabbing a can of iced coffee on my way to class in the morning, but it was mainly that I liked the taste, and maybe for the placebo effect of "I've had caffeine, so I must be awake now" -- I didn't really feel noticeably different. I did notice a couple of times, though, that when I forgot to do it, I fell asleep in the middle of the lecture, but then, I also wasn't sleeping enough at the time. I'll grant that my general-well-being level dipped during the period about a year and a half ago when I was up to four Mountain Dews a day, but that was an extreme. Besides, the sugar was probably worse than the caffeine -- you can't just add nearly half a pound of sugar to your daily diet without consequences. I also wouldn't say it's much of an addiction -- I've gone on and off of it without really paying much attention (it just some months is, and some months is not, part of my daily routine), and I haven't missed it much, or generally noticed any difference.
I agree with you, though, about the need for various mind-clearing activities, and your list looks pretty good. I would add, under "Go fetch a smoothie", "Go get a Mountain Dew" (like this guy, except he said "Diet Coke". Ugh! Who can stand that stuff?).
Back to the original question about "Programmer's Block", I have one other suggestion along the same lines as most of the others I've seen: a change of scenery is good, but it doesn't have to be a break from work. Try taking a laptop to a cafe or some such public place and working there for a bit. In the past couple months, I've found myself getting some of my best work done sitting in a coffee shop sipping lattes (Oops, there's that caffeine again) and coding in periods of two to four hours. Or, to remove yourself a bit more from the intricacies of the problem, you could just take a notepad and scribble down some thoughts and pseudo-code instead of staring at the actual code. You might think that the noise and people would be too distracting, but I've found that it's just a very pleasant environment to be in. Plus, you're away from the other distractions (including the Internet, and especially Slashdot) that you have in your office, house, or whatever.
Depending on the state you're in, changing scenery like this while continuing to work at least partly on the problem, could be better than a complete break. For one thing, the work stays fresh in your mind -- you don't have to flush it and subsequently page it all back in. Also, you're working while in the relaxed state, rather than just getting away for a while and then coming back to the same thing -- Sometimes I've come back to work after a vacation (including my honeymoon, no less), taken one look around, checked my e-mail and bug list, and said, "God, I need a vacation!"
Maybe. You bring up two questions: "Could they?" and "Would they?", i.e., would it still be possible for them to play the interoperability games that I am concerned about, and would it still be in their interest to do so.
You're right that there would no longer be the operating system integration and bundling connection, but consider just the world of web browsers and web servers: even without an operating system involved, if they were selling both IE and IIS, it certainly would be in the interest of "MS Internet, Inc." to tie the browser and the server together, since that would allow them to basically control the entire Web.
Users aren't completely stupid - they want to use something that works with everything.
Hence the phrase "Embrace and Extend" -- perhaps you've heard it? This is why they don't break standard features of either server or browser (or at least, not at first), but rather add features to each that only work with both together.
The only reason MS is getting away with it now is due to their market dominace.
True, but the operating system is no longer their only market-dominating product. The question really comes down to whether IE's market dominance is solid enough to stand on its own, or is being articifially supported by leverage from the operating systems. If separated from the OS, would IE continue to dominate, or would it be beaten by (or at least on an even footing with), e.g., Mozilla? If it does not dominate, then you're right and there's no problem, but if does, then letting IE and IIS stay together would be dangerous.
I personally believe that Mozilla will do at least well enough to keep interoperability important in people's minds, so I'm not too worried, but I still think it's a bit too close -- a web browser and a web server product just don't belong together in a single company with a record like theirs. David Gould
Putting IIS and IE together in the same company would sort of defeat the purpose, since it would allow them to play interoperability games between the browser and the server, e.g., adding spiffy new features to the browser that only work on sites running their server, or even breaking regular features in their browser for sites running other servers -- in short, they could leverage their dominance in the browser market to force people to adopt their server. Even without the operating system involved, this sort of problem is exactly what was wrong in the first place.
Best kind, and I believe that's called the "Churchill Martini" -- the recipe is:
Strain chilled extra dry gin into glass
Look at a bottle of extra dry vermouth
Serve
Even if I didn't want it quite that dry, it would still beat the half-and-half thing that I usually get when I forget to be specific enough in ordering. It's got to be dry (though I actually prefer Bombay Sapphire even though it's not as dry as Tanqueray or Beefeater). That orange juice thing sounds interesting in its own right, but THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SWEET MARTINI! I feel better now. By the way, I've discovered that really good things happen to the martini when you mix it in advance and keep it in the freezer overnight before drinking (shake it hard before pouring, though). Try it.
As for whiskey: a twelve-year-old single-malt scotch is where it starts being drinkable, but it should really be eighteen. However, once you're there, drinking it any way but straight would be a waste. Spending >$40/bottle also has the nice side effect of preventing you from drinking too much.
Also, about you guys having a thousand moderator points: assuming you were at least partly serious, why bother giving yourselves points instead of just unlimited access?
Finally, this may not have been the longest one you've ever done (by my clculations, it's actually the second longest, after number 25), but I'm pretty sure it's the longest that you've ever gone on after saying that you were done. Were the last eight seconds intentional?
Sorry, but I think this is "Interesting" enough to cancel out the "Offtopic"-ness. Would someone care to explain this thing? From the context, I guessed that it would cause something "Bad" to happen, as in to give the hypothetical Windows-liker something to think about, though a crash seemed a bit much to hope for, since, come on -- it's just a local URL.
So, I fired up the ole VirtualPC, after making a copy of my C-drive disk image file (let's see you back up and restore a real PC that easily), and tried it. I first looked for the corresponding file, but I didn't see anything called "con" on my "C:"; I thought maybe it was just an NT thing (I only virtually run Win95 on my G4), but it still worked -- at least VPC is bug-for-bug compatible with the real thing. Now I have to know: What is this thing? From the form of the URL, I guessed that it might be some sort of system executable, maybe being called recursively and causing a stack overflow or something. Is that even close? Also, on what versions of Windows does it work?
By the way, IJLS:...but think of the children, d00d.
I also have to agree with EnglishTim who, further down, wonders how good an idea this is from an advocacy standpoint: after suffering unknown loss of data and/or damage to his system, will the victim blame: (a) Microsoft, for making such a shoddy OS; (b) himself, for being stupid enough to bite at an obvious trap; or (c) you, for putting it there?
An even worse thought: what if some script kiddy, instead of defacing a web site he had "0wn3d" with juvenile graffiti, were to just replace the "HREF=" of some of the site's links with this, so that people would see the site as usual, but get unexplained crashes?
That doesn't work because the links on the Apple and New Line page connect you to some incy wincy 9k.mov file, whereupon you will be sent the trailer as streaming video.
You still need to have the QuickTime player to be able to receive and watch the stream, but then at least you can save the file. Just look for the temp file on your drive (they try to hide it soemwhere) where QuickTime buffers the stream -- it saves the entire file so you can jump around and watch more than once without downloading again, but it deletes it when you (I'm not sure which) close the window or quit the application. The file is called something like "QTPluginTemp1234567", or just search for files created today, sorted by size. Then just copy it somewhere else before it gets deleted.
I do wish they'd quit trying to obfuscate things this way; it's so silly. For one thing, like CSS, SDMI, etc., it can never really work, so all they'll accomplish is making legitimate use (not that there's necessarily even anything illegitimate about the other uses, even if they don't like them) less convenient and pissing off customers, but they also should not even try. I understand that the "content providers" want to keep some control on where their content goes, but half the point of putting it on the web in a digital format is that people can save it, to view at their pleasure, or to show off to friends. Especially that last -- given that this is a trailer for an upcoming movie, wouldn't you think that they'd want it to be seen by as many people as possible? Letting us keep local copies can only be good for them. Probably half a dozen people will see this as a result of my keeping a local copy who wouldn't see it otherwise. They should pay me for the publicity.
But even when it's not actually better for them, they should realize that accessibility is desirable. If I just wanted to watch the content as they present it, I'd watch it on TV instead of in a low-res window on a small screen; hence, if they only want me to watch it that way, they should just broadcast it on TV. Keeping the file is what I as a customer want, and it doesn't cost them anything, so why should they go to all that trouble trying to inconvenience me, especially when it won't work anyway?
...to sneak up into my room under cover of darkness and put ether over my face and to do terrible thing and photograph them and put them on the Internet...
That had to be one of the best "reason-not-to-piss-off-the-scary-psychotic-guy"-t ype things I've ever heard.
Anyway, version numbering in certain free software projects can sometimes tend toward the dizzying. It seems as though whenever they release a new version, rather than incrementing the version number, as a normal person would expect, they add another significant figure to it. This is what leads to things like "Perl five dot oh oh five oh four" (which caused all kilnds of pain for my project at SGI, where I no longer work).
Reluctance to increment the more significant digits in favor of the less significant ones also leads to "Linux two dot one dot sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-five". (They only bumped it up to "two dot two dot oh" to avoid a sixteen-bit overflow on some of the older architectures.) Then again, I guess it's not as bad as Windows skipping 91.9 versions a few yaers back.
By the way, I'm pretty sure "...it was Earth all along", not "us".
Finally, about Comedy Central: South Park and The Daily Show -- Yep, that's pretty much it. But we can't forget The Man Show, which fills part of the gap left by Dick Dietrich's Night Stand, or Win Ben Stein's Money which makes the (as far as I know) unprecedented accomplishment of being a game show that's actually entertaining.
The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.
I just noticed that, by basing their arguments on the claim that digital technology is "worse" (for them) because it allows copying without generational loss, they are really pushing another hidden assumption on us: they make it sound like the casual copying that people have been doing all this time with analog media was okay only because there was generational loss. Or rather, that they were just being nice and letting us get away with it because the generational loss prevented it from doing any real damage. This carries a heavy connotation of "Okay, kids, we've been going easy on you long enough, but it's time you started playing fair now, so no more copying. 'Mkay?" Also, like the story a while back about them "allowing" DJs to use MP3 rippings of their own collections, it implies that they are an authority that is capable of "allowing" or "disallowing" such things in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, how effectively I'm able to copy the music has nothing to do with how wrong it is to do so (which is a separate question). How badly it hurts them is irrelevant to me: if copying is wrong, it's wrong, and if not, not. Being digital doesn't make it any more or less wrong, even if the impact on them is different.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo?
It's not even a separate thing: This is just a few levels down in their hierarchically-organized index.
When do I get my feeling of smugness?
David Gould
First of all, I am a software guy and I took only as many hardware classes as were required, so consider most of the following to be phrased in the form of a question (as in "Does this make any sense at all?"). That said:
It seems the speed of light must be becoming a significant factor here. At 1 GHz, light in a vacuum will only propagate about 30 cm during a clock cycle (3*10^8 m/s / 10^9 cycles/s = 3*10^-1 m/cycle), and at 5 GHz that drops to 6 cm. I don't know the speed of electrical impulses in silicon, but even if it's not much less, that means a signal can't be doing too many laps back and forth across the chip (up and down the data path, etc.), i.e., you're working in a time scale where you can see the clock pulses rippling across the chip. Then no matter how fast the gates themselves are switching, the number of them that the signal can go through is limited by the time it takes for it to travel the total distance.
When the speed-of-light propagation time from one end of the chip to the other is a measurably large percentage of the clock period, that would seem to make for some incredibly funky new design problems, due to clock events having occurred in one place but not another, signals that take different paths not reaching the same place at the same time, etc. Or if you just wait for everything to catch up between steps, that would cut down the number of steps per cycle even more. This would be another reason why smaller feature size allows higher clock rates for the same design: it reduces the distance the signals have to travel.
David Gould
It does sound kind of similar. In fact, here's what seems to be a common theme:
Nobody wants to be first, but everybody wants to be second.
I haven't been watching this as closely (I'm happy with my PowerBook G3), but it did seem to go a bit like this: for a long time everybody was interested but nobody was actually announcing anything; then somebody announced a product, and everybody else rushed to follow suit; now everybody is backing off. I guess the optimistic view would be to suppose that everybody wants to do it but they are nervous about the risk of being the first to test the waters, and that once somebody finally does it, the rest will again follow.
David Gould
What bothered me was the claim in the other direction, i.e., the suggestion that the lack of the ability to change the connections dynamically is some sort of fundamental limitation on what can be computed (or, more generally, "done") by a traditional digital computer. I don't know how applicable this is here, but it always bothers me when people say things like that because it seems to indicate a complete lack of understanding of the layer of abstraction that exists between hardware and software.
That is, a digital computer can simulate a neural network, with all the flexible connections you could want, in software. The neurons, connections, etc., are data structures in the computer's memory, not actual pieces of circuitry, and the structure of the network can be changed arbitrarily simply by changing the appropriate values in memory. People don't seem to have much trouble with this in other contexts: when you draw a "box-and-pointer" diagram of a data structure and use it to step through an algorithm, changing values by breaking arrows and drawing new ones, nobody protests, "Wait! You can't change the connections in the computer because they are 'wired back at the factory'!" Nor do you hear arguments like "Computers can't model three-dimensional objects because their memory is structured one-dimensionally," or "Computers can't process text because all they have are ones and zeroes -- no letters." Why, then, is there this fundamental confusion of levels when we talk about computers simulating brains?
To say that breaking the connections among the computer's transistors would crash it is more like saying that breaking enough connections within the nuclei of the atoms in my brain (as in nuclear fission) would cause it to "crash". Well, yeah, but how is that a limitation on my brain's computational abilities?
David Gould
Thanks. I suspected as much, but I wasn't sure, and I figured I'd already rambled enough... Any idea what minimum speed is required by the air cushion? Maybe there could still be an intermediate state between off and on, to better handle the usage characteristics I described, even if it couldn't be that slow. Or is the whole idea just ridiculous? Oh, well.
David Gould
Hard drives already have a "power saving mode", which is the reason why if you leave your computer unattended for more than a few minutes, it porks out making you wait while the disk spins up. [...]
This arrangement is decidedly sub-optimal for certain sparse workloads, e.g., mine, which I suspect is why Xeger said:
Why not produce a hard drive that "idles" at low RPM [...]
It sounds like he was thinking the same thing I am, namely that instead of stopping when idle and spinning all the way up to 4800 RPM (or whatever it is) when needed, it should idle at an extremely low speed, like 120 RPM (no, I didn't forget a zero), so it can handle occasional small tasks slower than normal but without needing to spin up at all.
Here's the thinking: my typical workload when I'm mobile tends to generate a single I/O once every 70 seconds or so. As a result, my HD spins unnecessariy for about a minute, spins down, and, about five seconds later, forces the application to freeze for two or three seconds while it spins back up to answer a single I/O request, and then continues spinning unnecessarily. Rinse and repeat until battery is drained. Meanwhile suffer a three-second latency for common actions.
Okay, it's not quite that pathological, but I'm not exaggerating by much. I'm mostly reading and editing, which involves hardly any I/O at all once my files are open. So my HD should be idle all the time, right? Well, sorta. The thing is, every now and then I click a control, switch windows, or save a buffer, which generates a small but nonzero amount of activity.
This is where the extremely-slow-but-not-stopped mode would come in: 120 RPM = 1/2 second per rotation = 1/4 second per half rotation, so the mean latency would be a quarter of a second. Pretty horrible compared to the typical 8 milliseconds at normal speed, right? Well, yeah, but since it takes two to three seconds to reach normal speed, this would actually be much better. Of course, you'd still want it to spin all the way up when you do something big, like a compile or launching or quitting an application. Also, maybe you'd want to double the speed to a whopping 240, or even 300 RPM to keep the max latency under the quarter-second annoyance threshold, but I think that with some work, this Could be a really good idea.
David Gould
You are wrong on the number of communication links. It most certainly does grow exponentially.
No I'm not, and no it doesn't.
Each person may communicate with N others.
Yes. (Actually, N-1 unless you count people talking to themselves, but that doesn't make much difference.)
That's N^N.
No, that's N times N, also known as N^2. (Again, actually N(N-1) unless people talk to themselves, and N(N-1)/2 if the links are undirected.) You multiply the number of links per person by the number of people. N links per person times N people = N^2 total links. The number of possible edges in a graph with N vertices (counting direction and self-loops) is N^2. Not that it has much to do with counting edges, but the number of possible graphs is 2^(n^2) and the log of this is N^2.
As far as Brooks' Law goes, I still agree with the spirit of it: there may also be some sense in which the (administrative?) cost associated with each link increases along with the total number of links. Also, the set of possible committees that the team can form is the power set of the team, or 2^N, but that's a different matter. Besides, a quadratic increase is already pretty expensive. However, none of that applies to counting the edges in the graph, and the misuse of the word "exponential" is still a pet peeve of mine.
As for the analogy with RSA: first of all, I hope you noticed that the statement about "factoring large prime numbers" was wrong. Factoring large prime numbers is easy. If you give me a prime number P, then no matter how large it is, I can assure you that its factors are 1 and P. That's what it means to be prime. The statement should say "factoring products of large prime numbers", or simply "factoring large numbers". It's a silly mistake, I'll admit it doesn't really have anything to do with the graph question, and I don't mean to imply that you don't know all this, but it's surprising how often people make that mistake. It seems to happen practically every time a cryptography story is posted here. The person is promptly pounced on and it's a lot of fun, but it's still a distressingly significant error. I remember someone's sig had the quote in which Bill Gates said it. I mentioned it here because it is an error that seems to involve a similar slip to that of confusing quadratic and exponential.
As for the stuff about drawing graphs, I was just trying to drive in how different the two equations y=x^2 and y=2^x are. I would have included a drawing, but Taco's (ironically lame) "lameness filter" rejected it for being ASCII art.
Finally, by "moderating logic", I assume you mean the fact that my post has (Score:2), and you don't think it deserved to be marked up? That's because it started that way; nobody has marked it up, though I do think it deserved to be. Being so late and so far down, you're probably about the only person who saw it.
I know I said "finally" in the previous paragraph, but I can't resist this:
I think that you are correct about the graph, but it's obviously just chance.
Sure, given that there are two of us, and only one can count, I guess in a way it's just chance that I'm that one.
David Gould
The size of the graph description is quadratic in the number of vertices, not exponential. That's O(n^2), not O(2^n). Big difference. By the way, this particular mistake makes a good pet peeve -- it's in the same class as saying that RSA encryption depends on the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. I think I've seen Brooks' Law justified by the argument that "the number of communication links between people grows exponentially with the number of people"? NO! QUADRATICALLY! NOT EXPONENTIALLY!
This is even worse, though, because it indicates a real misunderstanding of the concepts. A lot of people seem not to appreciate the difference between the equations y = x^2 and y = 2^x: they seem to think the two are almost the same because their graphs look so similar (they both curve sharply upward, right?). Well, that's true if you only look at them for small y, like y < 10 or 20 (and, of course, positive x). But try relabelling your axes to use x values from 0 to 33 and y values from 0 to 1000 and graph the two functions again: y = 2^x looks a lot steeper, doesn't it? Now, try x values to 1000 and y values to 1,000,000: y = x^2 still looks about the same, but you can hardly draw y = 2^x as anything but a (nearly) vertical line, since, if the width of the paper is 1000, 20 is so close to zero. See the difference yet?
David Gould
Huh?
David Gould
I also got Pac Bell DSL in Oakland, but more recently (in March), and I also have nothing but good to say about it. It did take most of the day and many phone calls (by the installation guy, not me) to get it activated at the other end (which, as far as I know, was just a matter of the right person flipping a switch), but it was done that day, and it has only been out once, for a day or so, since then.
I was getting a pretty steady 1.2 Mbps, which is about twice what my friend has been getting on his cable modem. He only chose cable because he was just a bit out of range for DSL (literally, his next-door neighbor could get it, but he couldn't -- I suggested they throw an Ethernet cable over the fence and split the bill, but...). He just found out that they installed a new repeater (or whatever it is), so now he can "upgrade", so to speak.
Now I've moved, and I'm back to modems -- I've found out that my new house is in range, but haven't ordered it yet. I like the DSL service, but I don't know enough about prices to say how good theirs is. Specifically, how much extra is it worth paying to get the "enhanced" package, which gives you five static IPs (on your own 3-bit subnet, with your own router, I think) vs. the "basic" package's dynamic IPs? They charge about $40/month for basic and $80/month for enhanced. Does anyone know if that's particularly good or bad compared to other providers?
David Gould
When I was at Berkeley, the CS department had several badly overcrowded labs full of HP-UX boxes (712/66, or something, I think), and the policy was that if someone left a workstation unattended for more than 15 minutes, you could log him out and take it. A friend once told me that he had made the mistake of doing this to the wrong guy: the guy came back a bit later, which led to the following conversation:
Guy: "Hey, what are you doing on my workstation?"
My friend: "I logged you out; you were gone for half an hour, so the policy says it's mine."
Guy: I see. [walks away]
A few minutes later, bad things started happening to my friend's session, as in, it stopped responding and eventually died. The guy must have gone to some other machine and done something evil to this one. Our best guess was that he had fired off about a dozen compiles (it only took three or four to bring those things to their knees at the best of times), or maybe a forkbomb (I tried that once, and it didn't handle it any better than the last Linux box I tried it on). I now suspect that he must have done something like what you describe (cat a binary to his
I guess it was one of those "Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger and have no need of subtlety" things. The lesson was that those labs can be a dangerous place, since you never know who's capable of what. As long as you figure that the average person in there knows more than you do, you want to step carefully.
David Gould
DeCSS SHOULD be OK under DMCA since it is used to view legitimatly purchased DVDs (an allowable thing)
Sorry, not allowable. Viewing is, of course, a non-infringing use, but using DeCSS, even for that, still involves "circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work", so it's still illegal under DMCA. The real problem is this equivocation between "copy protection" and "access control", since that is where the notion of "fair use" gets forgotten. Even worse, it can cover uses for which you would not even have needed to invoke "fair use" (such as viewing), if the publisher adds a more restrictive access control. This seems to be where the DMCA's constitutionality really needs to be challenged.
David Gould
DMCA does make exception for things which have a legitimate purpose.
I am not a lawyer, but I've been known to play one on Slashdot, and it looks to me like there are two separate things here: the act of circumventingan access-control mechanism and the distribution of tools with which to do so. The DMCA does make exceptions for legitimate purposes to the prohibition against circumventing, but not to the one against distributing tools for circumvention:
About circumvention, it says "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title" (1201(a)(1)(A)), and later "The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title" (1201(a)(1)(B)).
Then about distributing, it says "No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that- (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." (1201(a)(2)). Note that those disclaimers about other significant purposes sound nice, but don't really help much: A DVD player based on DeCSS (like LiViD) should be legitimate, since it is has nothing to do with infringing copyrights, but it would still be out because it it all about circumventing access controls.
It kind of makes sense (albeit in a Salem-witch-trial sort of way: "If you do drown, you must not be a witch. Congratulations, you're acquitted!"), since in the latter case, the person distributing the tools is not doing any actual circumventing, legitimate or otherwise, so there's nothing to which to make the exception apply. The crime is making the tools available to others, presumably because you have no control over whether or not they use it legitimately.
The catch, of course, is that the tools are necessary in order to perform those legitimate circumventions. The only ways one can do it are to develop the tools oneself or to acquire them from someone else. Breaking CSS is beyond the abilities of nearly everyone, which only leaves getting DeCSS from someone else -- making it illegal for people to distribute it makes those legitimate uses impossible for all but the extremely few people who can do it themselves. The effect is still to eliminate fair use, though indirectly, by making it impossible rather than illegal.
This seems to be where the DMCA's constitutionality needs to be attacked. CSS and, really, all copy-protection (let alone access-control) mechanisms are really attacks by the publishers against people's fair use rights. They can't exactly be called "unconstitutional", because they're not laws -- they're not even done by the government -- but they are dirty tricks. Until now, at least, it was an arguably fair game between the publishers and the community: their best efforts to make strong protection mchanisms against our best efforts to circumvent them. Now, however, DMCA allows them to cheat in the game by running whining to the government whenever we succeed. It "effectively" gives force of law to whatever restrictions the publishers want to put on the use of their works.
David Gould
a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work [...] "effectively" might be interpreted in such a way that rot13, etc. would be interpreted out of the picture
There seems to be an even deeper ambiguity than some unknown criterion for how strong the protection has to be. Does "effectively controls access" mean that it is an effective means of controlling access, or just that its effect is to control access?
If it's the former, then there are the questions the rest of you have been talking about, namely, "How 'effective' does it have to be?" -- and, strictly speaking, as soon as it has been cracked, doesn't it by definition cease to be "effective"?
But if it's the latter, which seems to me to make more sense semantically, "effectively" doesn't mean that it is actually effective, but only that that is what its effect is, i.e., that that is what it is intended to do. The phrase simply refers to any copy-protection or access-control mechanism (the equivocation between copy-protection and access-control, by the way, is an even bigger problem, since that's the part that ignores fair use). So, yes, I guess rot13 (or XOR, for binary data) would qualify, since simply applying it to a standard file format would cause the files to appear unreadable to a standard application and a naive user.
For a similar example, have you ever seen a multimedia CD-ROM on which the media files were in a folder with a "hidden" flag set, so it wouldn't appear on the desktop? To get at the files, you have to copy the entire disk to your hard drive (where the directories are writable), then use a low-level filesystem editor to unset the flag. Now I think that would count as "effectively" controlling access, since to a naive user, or a knowledgable but unmotivated one, its effect is to make it so the content can only be accessed through the accompanying application, even though it is trivial for a knowledgable and determined user to get around it. I don't think that this would make low-level filesystem editors illegal ( at least I hope not ) because this is clearly not their primary function, but perhaps public posting of the technique would be, (uh-oh!) since it makes it possible for people who already have the necessary tools but don't know how to do it. This could be another interesting case, since the circumvention does not require any specific tools, but simply a bit of knowledge.
David Gould
Or buy a copy every ten years or so. [...] This is Very Scary stuff here. The idea is that the content (book) is now controlled by a company who can turn off the content because someone hasn't payed up in the last year.
Reminds me of some hypotheticals that a former co-worker and I were tossing around a while ago -- I was trying to make the point that the capabilities and/or limitations of a technology can affect the de facto operation of a medium, setting parameters on it that do not necessarily correspond to the law and/or morality (big distinction, by the way), and yet these parameters come to be taken for granted, so that they are assumed to be part of the legal and/or moral nature of the thing, rather than mere side-effects. Whichever party is receiving the extra benefits comes to feel entitled to them, and then, when changes in the technology change these parameters, they protest. Here goes:
Suppose that at some time in the past, paper and printing technology were such that books would deteriorate and become unreadable after some period of time (like before acid-free paper, non-fading inks, etc., but say the period was much shorter and more regular, i.e., that a book would last exactly five years). For some books that you only buy to read once for light entertainment, it wouldn't be so bad, but for anything that you want to have in a personal library, e.g., great literature or reference material like dictionaries and encyclopedias, let alone technical literature or journals, you'd basically have to replace everything peiodically, buying a new copy of the same book every five years. Basically, there would be no such thing as owning a book in the normal sense -- sure, the volume would be your property while it lasts, but you'd really only be renting the contents. All else being equal, the books would probably be somewhat cheaper, because you're not getting as much value. Publishers might even offer some sort of discount on the replacements, e.g., 50% off a new copy of the same title when you bring your old one to be recycled. They could do this as a promotion, to encourage you to replace your books, but this would be entirely promotional, there's not necessarily any notion that by buying it the first time, you had in some sense bought a right to have its contents available to you forever.
Now, suppose an advance in printing technology makes it possible for books to last forever. It's most likely, of course, that publishers would just resist adopting the new technology (see DVD-audio). How about this instead: suppose someone invents a process that can be applied to a book to make it last longer (e.g., a chemical treatment to prevent the paper from yellowing, the ink from fading, etc.). In this case, people would go buy the chemical, treat their existing books, and never again need to buy replacements. Now the publishers would protest, arguing that "When you buy a book, what you're buying is the right to have access to its contents for five years; if you want to keep it past that point, you have to pay again," and they would try to insist that customers still owe them a payment for every five-year period that they own a book -- they might even argue that the books' deterioration serves as a copyright-protection mechanism, since it "effectively controls access", and try to have the chemical banned on the grounds that it makes it impossible for them to collect their payments. Customers would argue back, "No, we bought the book, to do with as we please. Before, we were buying a new book each time, not renewing our rights to the old one. The only reason we had to keep paying before was because of a technological limitation; you're not actually entitled to those ongoing payments."
How does that sound? Maybe when you buy an Encyclopaedia Britannica set, they'd say that if you pay extra for the gold coating on the edges, you're not just buying a few grams of gold, or paying for the extra production costs, but actually paying for the right to own the books for a longer time. And no, you can't paint a gold coating on them yourself, becuase that would be violating their copyright.
David Gould
But we do have a lot of common views and an emergent group identity, and we could easily move to a situation where a geek who worked for the Big Media was socially ostracised by other geeks
In my recent job search, I interviewed with and briefly considered working for a company that's involved in developing secure formats for digital content. I don't know very much about exactly where they fit into the picture with MP3 vs. SoDoMI, etc., but it seemed close enough to pose a moral conflict for me. I mentioned it to a few friends and they speculated (at least, I hope, part-jokingly) that they wouldn't be able to hang out with me anymore if accepted that job. I wouldn't say that that decided it for me, since I had just about reached the same decision on my own (namely, that I couldn't work there because I didn't agree morally with their goals), but I think the whole story is close enough to your suggestion to be relevant.
David Gould
I hate to say it, but your response [well, that part of it, anyway] is essentially a well-written (I must say) [thanks] version of, "I don't have a problem with it, it must be okay for everyone!" But the truth is, caffeine, and pretty much ANY drug, doesn't have the same effect on everyone else that it will on you.
Point taken. If nothing else, it would be related to body size and dosage; I'm fairly big (6', 175 lb.), and I guess four Mountain Dews a day, which I thought of as pretty extreme, is not that much compared to a three-pot-a-day coffee drinker. And of course you're right that different people would be affected differently, so the mere fact that it's not so bad for me doesn't mean that it isn't bad at all. On the other hand, the same argument works conversely: the original comment (magnushuckvale's, not Rimbo's) claimed that caffeine is "evil", but that's only true for some people and not, e.g., me. To be fair, the original comment seemed to be a bit of a "rant mode"-style exaggeration wrapped around a good point about the importance of healthy activities and a balanced lifestyle, so I won't get too hung up on the "evil" thing.
Also, I just want to say that I had intended for the second half of my comment to be the main point, namely, the suggestion about taking a laptop to a coffee shop to get some work done. I just did so myself -- I left right after posting my previous comment, finished a problem that I've been working on for a few days, and came home to see your reply and write this. That's often a problem with the way I write my comments: I start out by rambling about some side point, and by the time I get around to my real point, people have stopped reading. Just to be nice and recursive, here I am doing it again.
David Gould
I like caffeine. For one thing, it does help with the occasional hundred-hour coding session (no, really: I officially logged four back-to-back all-nighters on at least three occasions back in school), which I guess is the kind of hacker bravado that you are against, and in which the rest of use are revelling. Mainly, I think (speaking just for myself, of course), it's just fun to talk like that -- we're not really quite as unhealthy as we claim to be.
In reality, though, I don't see that caffeine really does that much at all. I remember that for a while back in school I was in the habit of grabbing a can of iced coffee on my way to class in the morning, but it was mainly that I liked the taste, and maybe for the placebo effect of "I've had caffeine, so I must be awake now" -- I didn't really feel noticeably different. I did notice a couple of times, though, that when I forgot to do it, I fell asleep in the middle of the lecture, but then, I also wasn't sleeping enough at the time. I'll grant that my general-well-being level dipped during the period about a year and a half ago when I was up to four Mountain Dews a day, but that was an extreme. Besides, the sugar was probably worse than the caffeine -- you can't just add nearly half a pound of sugar to your daily diet without consequences. I also wouldn't say it's much of an addiction -- I've gone on and off of it without really paying much attention (it just some months is, and some months is not, part of my daily routine), and I haven't missed it much, or generally noticed any difference.
I agree with you, though, about the need for various mind-clearing activities, and your list looks pretty good. I would add, under "Go fetch a smoothie", "Go get a Mountain Dew" (like this guy, except he said "Diet Coke". Ugh! Who can stand that stuff?).
Back to the original question about "Programmer's Block", I have one other suggestion along the same lines as most of the others I've seen: a change of scenery is good, but it doesn't have to be a break from work. Try taking a laptop to a cafe or some such public place and working there for a bit. In the past couple months, I've found myself getting some of my best work done sitting in a coffee shop sipping lattes (Oops, there's that caffeine again) and coding in periods of two to four hours. Or, to remove yourself a bit more from the intricacies of the problem, you could just take a notepad and scribble down some thoughts and pseudo-code instead of staring at the actual code. You might think that the noise and people would be too distracting, but I've found that it's just a very pleasant environment to be in. Plus, you're away from the other distractions (including the Internet, and especially Slashdot) that you have in your office, house, or whatever.
Depending on the state you're in, changing scenery like this while continuing to work at least partly on the problem, could be better than a complete break. For one thing, the work stays fresh in your mind -- you don't have to flush it and subsequently page it all back in. Also, you're working while in the relaxed state, rather than just getting away for a while and then coming back to the same thing -- Sometimes I've come back to work after a vacation (including my honeymoon, no less), taken one look around, checked my e-mail and bug list, and said, "God, I need a vacation!"
David Gould
Maybe. You bring up two questions: "Could they?" and "Would they?", i.e., would it still be possible for them to play the interoperability games that I am concerned about, and would it still be in their interest to do so.
You're right that there would no longer be the operating system integration and bundling connection, but consider just the world of web browsers and web servers: even without an operating system involved, if they were selling both IE and IIS, it certainly would be in the interest of "MS Internet, Inc." to tie the browser and the server together, since that would allow them to basically control the entire Web.
Users aren't completely stupid - they want to use something that works with everything.
Hence the phrase "Embrace and Extend" -- perhaps you've heard it? This is why they don't break standard features of either server or browser (or at least, not at first), but rather add features to each that only work with both together.
The only reason MS is getting away with it now is due to their market dominace.
True, but the operating system is no longer their only market-dominating product. The question really comes down to whether IE's market dominance is solid enough to stand on its own, or is being articifially supported by leverage from the operating systems. If separated from the OS, would IE continue to dominate, or would it be beaten by (or at least on an even footing with), e.g., Mozilla? If it does not dominate, then you're right and there's no problem, but if does, then letting IE and IIS stay together would be dangerous.
I personally believe that Mozilla will do at least well enough to keep interoperability important in people's minds, so I'm not too worried, but I still think it's a bit too close -- a web browser and a web server product just don't belong together in a single company with a record like theirs.
David Gould
Putting IIS and IE together in the same company would sort of defeat the purpose, since it would allow them to play interoperability games between the browser and the server, e.g., adding spiffy new features to the browser that only work on sites running their server, or even breaking regular features in their browser for sites running other servers -- in short, they could leverage their dominance in the browser market to force people to adopt their server. Even without the operating system involved, this sort of problem is exactly what was wrong in the first place.
David Gould
Best kind, and I believe that's called the "Churchill Martini" -- the recipe is:
- Strain chilled extra dry gin into glass
- Look at a bottle of extra dry vermouth
- Serve
Even if I didn't want it quite that dry, it would still beat the half-and-half thing that I usually get when I forget to be specific enough in ordering. It's got to be dry (though I actually prefer Bombay Sapphire even though it's not as dry as Tanqueray or Beefeater). That orange juice thing sounds interesting in its own right, but THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A SWEET MARTINI! I feel better now. By the way, I've discovered that really good things happen to the martini when you mix it in advance and keep it in the freezer overnight before drinking (shake it hard before pouring, though). Try it.As for whiskey: a twelve-year-old single-malt scotch is where it starts being drinkable, but it should really be eighteen. However, once you're there, drinking it any way but straight would be a waste. Spending >$40/bottle also has the nice side effect of preventing you from drinking too much.
Also, about you guys having a thousand moderator points: assuming you were at least partly serious, why bother giving yourselves points instead of just unlimited access?
Finally, this may not have been the longest one you've ever done (by my clculations, it's actually the second longest, after number 25), but I'm pretty sure it's the longest that you've ever gone on after saying that you were done. Were the last eight seconds intentional?
David Gould
Sorry, but I think this is "Interesting" enough to cancel out the "Offtopic"-ness. Would someone care to explain this thing? From the context, I guessed that it would cause something "Bad" to happen, as in to give the hypothetical Windows-liker something to think about, though a crash seemed a bit much to hope for, since, come on -- it's just a local URL.
So, I fired up the ole VirtualPC, after making a copy of my C-drive disk image file (let's see you back up and restore a real PC that easily), and tried it. I first looked for the corresponding file, but I didn't see anything called "con" on my "C:"; I thought maybe it was just an NT thing (I only virtually run Win95 on my G4), but it still worked -- at least VPC is bug-for-bug compatible with the real thing. Now I have to know: What is this thing? From the form of the URL, I guessed that it might be some sort of system executable, maybe being called recursively and causing a stack overflow or something. Is that even close? Also, on what versions of Windows does it work?
By the way, IJLS:
I also have to agree with EnglishTim who, further down, wonders how good an idea this is from an advocacy standpoint: after suffering unknown loss of data and/or damage to his system, will the victim blame: (a) Microsoft, for making such a shoddy OS; (b) himself, for being stupid enough to bite at an obvious trap; or (c) you, for putting it there?
An even worse thought: what if some script kiddy, instead of defacing a web site he had "0wn3d" with juvenile graffiti, were to just replace the "HREF=" of some of the site's links with this, so that people would see the site as usual, but get unexplained crashes?
David Gould
Right click on the link, and save it to the disk!
That doesn't work because the links on the Apple and New Line page connect you to some incy wincy 9k
You still need to have the QuickTime player to be able to receive and watch the stream, but then at least you can save the file. Just look for the temp file on your drive (they try to hide it soemwhere) where QuickTime buffers the stream -- it saves the entire file so you can jump around and watch more than once without downloading again, but it deletes it when you (I'm not sure which) close the window or quit the application. The file is called something like "QTPluginTemp1234567", or just search for files created today, sorted by size. Then just copy it somewhere else before it gets deleted.
I do wish they'd quit trying to obfuscate things this way; it's so silly. For one thing, like CSS, SDMI, etc., it can never really work, so all they'll accomplish is making legitimate use (not that there's necessarily even anything illegitimate about the other uses, even if they don't like them) less convenient and pissing off customers, but they also should not even try. I understand that the "content providers" want to keep some control on where their content goes, but half the point of putting it on the web in a digital format is that people can save it, to view at their pleasure, or to show off to friends. Especially that last -- given that this is a trailer for an upcoming movie, wouldn't you think that they'd want it to be seen by as many people as possible? Letting us keep local copies can only be good for them. Probably half a dozen people will see this as a result of my keeping a local copy who wouldn't see it otherwise. They should pay me for the publicity.
But even when it's not actually better for them, they should realize that accessibility is desirable. If I just wanted to watch the content as they present it, I'd watch it on TV instead of in a low-res window on a small screen; hence, if they only want me to watch it that way, they should just broadcast it on TV. Keeping the file is what I as a customer want, and it doesn't cost them anything, so why should they go to all that trouble trying to inconvenience me, especially when it won't work anyway?
David Gould
First of all, IJLS:
That had to be one of the best "reason-not-to-piss-off-the-scary-psychotic-guy"-
Anyway, version numbering in certain free software projects can sometimes tend toward the dizzying. It seems as though whenever they release a new version, rather than incrementing the version number, as a normal person would expect, they add another significant figure to it. This is what leads to things like "Perl five dot oh oh five oh four" (which caused all kilnds of pain for my project at SGI, where I no longer work).
Reluctance to increment the more significant digits in favor of the less significant ones also leads to "Linux two dot one dot sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-five". (They only bumped it up to "two dot two dot oh" to avoid a sixteen-bit overflow on some of the older architectures.) Then again, I guess it's not as bad as Windows skipping 91.9 versions a few yaers back.
By the way, I'm pretty sure "...it was Earth all along", not "us".
Finally, about Comedy Central: South Park and The Daily Show -- Yep, that's pretty much it. But we can't forget The Man Show, which fills part of the gap left by Dick Dietrich's Night Stand, or Win Ben Stein's Money which makes the (as far as I know) unprecedented accomplishment of being a game show that's actually entertaining.
David Gould
The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.
I just noticed that, by basing their arguments on the claim that digital technology is "worse" (for them) because it allows copying without generational loss, they are really pushing another hidden assumption on us: they make it sound like the casual copying that people have been doing all this time with analog media was okay only because there was generational loss. Or rather, that they were just being nice and letting us get away with it because the generational loss prevented it from doing any real damage. This carries a heavy connotation of "Okay, kids, we've been going easy on you long enough, but it's time you started playing fair now, so no more copying. 'Mkay?" Also, like the story a while back about them "allowing" DJs to use MP3 rippings of their own collections, it implies that they are an authority that is capable of "allowing" or "disallowing" such things in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, how effectively I'm able to copy the music has nothing to do with how wrong it is to do so (which is a separate question). How badly it hurts them is irrelevant to me: if copying is wrong, it's wrong, and if not, not. Being digital doesn't make it any more or less wrong, even if the impact on them is different.
David Gould