I think in this case it would have been a gross discourtesy not to have CC'd the sender. The sender didn't have to respond with a profanity laced email and then threats of lawsuits. He could have responded, and CC'd his ISP
I'm sorry, my email reached you in error. I was under the impression that this address was one used by Concordia University to accept resumes.
And _then_ this whole mess could have been avoided by both sides. (err, actually, probably not, the spammer seems pretty persistently dumb).
No, I don't think it would "really suck" to have to document stuff before you make accusations that could ruin someones reputation. Managers are people too. If there were no libel/slander laws the managers could retaliate by saying the employee's were fired for sexual harrasment. Good luck getting a job then.
You can't prove a statement like "Manager X is homophobic" but you can prove that you had a reasonable basis for making that judgement. You don't have to 'document' everything, usually you rely on other witnesses. From the (admitedly brief) description in the article and the volume of posts it sounded like a delibrate smear campaign.
Clearly, if you can patent a bunch of "slightly different bottle caps" then the patent is not common, but specific. The problem with many patents, especially software patents, is that they are specific things interpreted very broadly. For instance, I think that extended there concept of a "bonding identifier" to include (I presume) the nesting that defines parent-child relationships in XML to be very sketchy. You're supposed to be able to patent methods, not goals.
I believe that he was talking about speed efficency in this case. Templated code tends to size bloat because each template instantiation is a seperate codebase.
You are definetely taking the remark out of context...of course, so did the original poster.
I highly recommend you read the post, as it's fairly well written. At the risk of creating a strawman, BrettGlass argues that making failed software free will tend to hurt for-profit development in the same area, since they will still have to charge for their products. He asserts that it would be even worse if the orphaned code was relicensed under the GPL.
I have to disagree with him on the degree of harm that would be caused to commercial development efforts by this. The market has already shown a tendancy to go with commercially supported solutions. Now, as far as a brand-new product that just got dropped, yes, that could have a chilling effect on the market for a while. But that's not the kind of orphaned code the article talked about most. Besides, if the product could cause your companies death, don't you think you'd try to raise the money to buy the code?
I agree with him about releasing the code under the GPL, however. Doing that would prevent any commercial company from incorperating any of the code in there projects. At the same time, there would be no existing community of GPL-developers willing to work on the project and familiar with the codebase.
"compromise" doesn't include DoS (ping of death, etc)
"remote" apparently means the user doesn't have to do anything. I mean, come on, when you try to read your mail with Outlook Express, everyone knows that your system is as good as cracked already.
I have know idea why he used the phrase 'network-based, remote' Is there some other remote way of talking to Microsoft computers? Some radio signal you can send that instantly gives you full access?
The article claims that various governments claim that the US is violating treaty-level contractual obligations by making a budget cutback. Maybe, but they certainly don't cite convincing sources. Can anyone do better?
Also, while other countries may have poured billions of dollars (US) into the project, note that even according to the article this is a small percentage. The article states that the Canadian robot arm cost $1.4 billion and gives them 2.3 % of the research space. The European module is quoted as costing the same. That means Canada and Europe, total, have 4.6% of the research space. Assuming Japan's contribution isn't vastly more expensive, or there isn't some other big player the article didn't mention, that means about 90% of the research space, and presumably the budget, came from the US.
If there were treaties to prevent the US from doing this, then the US should be constrained by them. If not, the US should at least be willing to provide use of launching facilities and shuttles at a reasonable cost. But beyond that, pay up. "He who pays the piper calls the tune"--and that includes telling him to go away. Unless otherwise negotiated, the US has no obligation to let other people piggyback their space efforts on its own.
There's a difference between "stick with what we know works" and "Stick with the RFCs." RFCs are dynamic. The TCP and UDP ones have both gone through several revisions. The difference is if you stick with the RFCs you have a bunch of engineers from a bunch of different companies, schools, etc. look at your protocol and make sure it can be implemented from the spec. They also try to balance out its effect on internet traffic as a whole.
UDP is a perfectly legitimate method of moving data, especially if you can tolerate loss. It has been the general position of the IETF for years that you shouldn't reimplement retransmission--that's TCPs job. However, from descriptions it sounds more like this is a smart form of connection blasting, which isn't reinventing the wheel but can be hard on networks.
Speaking of that, it isn't the network that breaks because of UDP--it's your program. If you start sending large amounts of UDP data and chewing up the bandwith on my router, according to the spec I can start not even attempting to process the packets. This is the problem with blasting protocls--by taking up more bandwith than TCP for the same data transfer rate they invite administrative blockage.
I deliberately made a poor choice in equations-I was trying to show that you couldn't just pick any four equations. However, I had tried to find a bigger set of independant equations myself and couldn't. Probably because it was 7 AM and I'd been up all night.
However, we're not out of the woods yet--if you use the "chance per packet" calculation of loss, you still have a chance of not getting all the data--a 25% chance, if a quick calculation doesn't mislead me. You can reduce this to an arbitrarily small percentage by sending more linearly independent equations, but that takes more bandwith.
You can only solve a linear system of equations with two unkowns and two equations if the equations are independant. And you can't have more independant equations than you have variables. So your calculation is very optomistic. Imagine if I send you the following data:
X+Y=4
X+2Y=5
2X+4Y=10
2X+2Y=8
With 50% packet loss (as opposed to a 50% chance of loss per packet*) you only get two useful equations 2/3 of the time. Of course, these boxes are expensive and can do a lot more number crunching than just linear algebra. But of course, I wouldn't really have expected a good comparison from a company whose veep of marketing said "FedEx is a hell of a lot more reliable than FTP when you're running 20 Mbytes" Clearly all those game demo sites on the net need to get with the program.
*Computing the chance of loss per packet gives:
1/16 chance of getting all four, 100% success
3/16 chance of getting 3 of 4, 100% success
8/16 chance of getting 2 of 4, 66.666% success
3/16 chance of getting 1 of 4, 0% success
1/16 chance of getting none, 0% success
or 28/48 is a little more than 4/7, slightly worse odds than if you always got 2 of 4.
I think this patent makes (1) less likely--sure Microsoft has deep pockets, but this obvious a giveaway would be hard to justify and garuntee lots of opposition dollars from every other OS manufacturer and most industry groups.
Microsoft will be the only developer of DRM in the OS. Looking at the security record of their products, bugs will continue to ensure that fair use is possible (and piracy, but hey, the content companies made that bed).
Eventually, the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft will all go down. We will all live happily ever after in a new age of the world. Or something like that.
Hitler: Homosexuals were probably commiting a 'crime' in Nazi Germany, since homosexual sex was against the law in Britain at the time. That's why I said most. And Jews may have been accused of in general being traitors, frauds, and parasites, but the reason they were put in camps was soley because of their ethnicity.
Stalin: First, it took three years before Krushchev's 'Secret Speach' denouncing Stalin to the 20th Party Congress and eight years before the public denunciation. (According to A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky). Yes, during the Terror, Stalin got rid of opponents by associating them with criminal groups and having them executed. That is not at all what the original poster said. He said Stalin controlled the population by demonizing and then persecuting groups. Stalin controlled the populace through his control of party structure, and the party by his persecution of individuals.
McCarthy: Plenty of people dared to speak against 'Tail-Gunner Joe' He was brought down because he went after the army. I think less than four years of turmoil as a result of which no one was killed isn't bad for a democracy. Not as good as it could be, true, but hardly in line with the Inquisition, Hitler, or Stalin. True, it did send Hollywood into paroxysms of mutual accusation, instantiating the famous 'blacklist' era. I hardly think that constitutes getting 'total control' over the US population.
The Inquisition: The Church didn't want to control Jews, it wanted to get rid of them. Yes, Muslims also bathed and "false converts" from Islam were Inquisition targets. But the actual Muslims didn't threaten the church's power as they were being pushed back militarily at the time of the Spanish Inquisiton (the Inquisition itself had been going on sporadically for several hundred years). You are right that it targeted witches as well--I hadn't realized that it was extened to that in the 14th century. I'd be interested in a scholarly source that shows how the inquistion was used against 'strong women' by accusing them of witchcraft. Most witchhunts I'm familar with were not nearly that discriminate, but I'm more used to talking about Protestant witchhunts, especially in Germany. I'd also be interested to see examples of how the Inquisition was used against 'intellectuals'.
However, as I admitted in my post, the Inquisition comes pretty close to following the model in the original post. However, I would say that the twin weapons of anathema and crusades were used far more effectively by the Church to keep rulers and heretic groups (like the Cathars) from threatening their power.
Can you think of any other 'history' I need to learn? Want to actually cite dates or books? I'll cite more too, and we'll actually have a real argument. Oh, and I know this is petty: I can live with the grammar errors, but could you please capitalize your proper nouns? It's harder to read when you don't.
"What kind of steps can people use to protect themselves now"
Never ever choose "open file from its current location" no matter what you think the name is, unless you are willing to give trust the site with any data on your system.
Of course, since no data has been released, I'm not sure this fixes all the problems, but from the description in the article it would. (Somewhere above someone says that IE executes certain MIME types, namely audio, automatically. However, AFAIK, in that case it would attempt to use the correct plugin, and this vunerability would not apply).
I don't think this will do major damage. There seems to be a real easy workaround. I think michael is blowing things a bit out of proportion in his article. On the other hand, I do agree that this is a perfect example of how Microsoft's refusal to divulge information has nothing to do with protecting customers. Sure there is no "patch" for the vunerability yet. But NONE IS NEEDED! In no case is any legitimate usage made immpossible (check me on this--Microsoft may have implemented some stupid "copy protection" where you can only open a file but not save it). It is only made less convienent. Users can be protected the instant they see the alert, Black Hats will take time to set up an exploit even if tools are made easily available.
Most of Hitler's victims were never accussed of violating any law. Stalin comes a bit closer, although 'counter-revolution' was already illegal before he took power. He just extended it into witch hunts. McCarthy's smear tatics damaged the careers and lives of many people before he was brought down. But again, he passed no new laws. The Communist activities that he targeted were treason and espionage. He didn't 'attain total control' because most American Communists were not in fact guilty of this. Oh, and the Inquisition's main target was "Secret Jews." But other than that, I guess that actually does follow the model, with lists of "Jewish" practices like bathing widely distributed.
Your attempt to extend the analogy to software theft is equally sketchy. The sites that were raided had activities that were illegal long before the DMCA--this is just good old fashioned theft. And I don't really see the 'harsh new penalties either'.
Tivo and SonicBlue didn't "wait until after a PVR market had built up" to file for their patents, it just that they weren't granted until now. You can't patent something that you publically released or even demo'd. That's why so many things say "Patent Pending" on them.
If Tivo and SonicBlue entered into a mutual liscensing agreement, they would have to craft the terms carefully to avoid anti-trust laws. But I think it could be done.
"Cold War propaganda and misinformation"? It may be unfair to automatically associate Communism, and especially Marxism, with evil, but the movements certainly brought it upon there own heads. Or do you have some shining new source that shows how millions of Russians, Ukranians, Volga Germans, Chechnyans, and others dissappeared without it being a result of Stalin's extension of Lenin's policies against counter-revolution? An explanation of why no other political system, even Nazism, managed to exterminate as large a percentage of the people it held sway over as Pol Pot's Communism?
Of course, you apologize in advance, saying Marxism "has yet to be properly implemented" and that its basis is to benefit society as a whole. Well, the basis behind driving drunk may be to get home safely, but the evidence suggests it's a goddamn stupid idea. Of course, maybe it just isn't always properly implemented.
You seem to agree that Free Software is Marxist. Do you think it will succeed then? You and the other both cite the ability of anyone to take whatever they want without giving back to the community. The author even boasts about how he's never contributed anything!
I guess I'm the technological equivalent of a kulak, since while I'm willing to contribute (as I have) to the body of free software, and not willing to give up my livelyhood for others. Luckily, I agree with you that "Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon" so I don't worry about being rounded up and shot.
Yeah, but the numbers have been "the bad way" for over a year at least. And while marketeers are heavily influenced by user numbers, that isn't the only thing they look for. Two other reasons why "IE Only" makes sense from their perspective: 1) People with the tech savvy to use a non de-facto standard browser are less likely to buy stupid shit. 2) New tech creates more effective ads--even if fewer people see them, this can still be a win.
It makes perfect sense to me. By offering items for auction, Lucasfilm forgoes a source of potential profit to funnel money from people with enough disposable income to buy collectibles to the needy.
Lucasfilm can't really donate "some of the revenues from the films", I'm sure almost all of that money has already been spent. Sure, they could donate some proceeds from ongoing liscensing--"Buy a Jar-Jar Binks doll to Help America"--Bleck. I think it's much cooler to offer relatively unique items then to be yet another company funneling off pennies here and there.
Good list. Here's how I would modify it for todays world:
System has a dedicated function (not general purpose)
Real-time capabilities for some systems
Scarse resources (relative to general purpose systems)
Code rarely updated
Code stored on ROM, Flash, etc., not disk based.
The parts about assembly language and operating systems I think are now obsolete. Resources are still scare, but there are plenty to write in C and have a small operating system to do scheduling and memory management.
There is a problem with running any variant of UN*X with a real-time system
Actually, I believe Solaris has kernel extensions which can be used to garuntee a process a minimum amount of runtime. But I could be wrong.
I agree with most of your comment, though. Although "real-time" has a very good definition (A real-time problem is any problem in which the time taken to arrive at the answer is part of its correctness) people abuse the definition horribly. Embedded has no agreed on meaning.
This reminds me a bit of the previous slashdot article on "XP-embedded". That's the product I think Linux has a chance to beat. High reliability, fat budget systems--embedded but not really real time.
Oh--and I am an embedded developer. I love Linux. But 60us interrupt latency on a 800 MHz CPU* just ins't acceptable for a hard real-time system. If it means a compression artifact in my Tivo, no problem. If it means 60 kb of data loss from my Gigabit ethernet card, that's not cool. If it means none of my avionics systems respond for that long, it's out of here!
*The guy says "Pentium" which is probably incorrect--I don't think they ever clocked those old chips that high. Not a very good author.
I agree with much more than Joel. Of course, being able to hit the program with a testing suite that encapsulates all the known bugs implies you have such a thing. But code that has "all these little fixes" and all this "programmer knowledge" in its twistly little lines leads to bugs too. Dependancies get hidden, comments become out of date, an unsafe hack is put in for one particular operating system.
Joel seems to conclude that because a lot of prominent companies have failed at code rewrites that they are a bad idea. He's right that you can't put your existing product on hold while you rewrite the code from the ground up. But if you don't take the hit one time, it will cost you in lots of little ways over a long time. Would he advocate never upgrading a companies IT infrastructure because of the disruption that would cause? Probably not. The key is to test stuff first, and try to get everything switched over when it will inconvience the fewest people.
One big problem with rewrites that he doesn't address is the "second system effect" from The Mythical Man-Month. This is the urge of, when your doing your redesign, to but everything into it, conquer the world, put every single feature in. This, in my opinion, is what happened with Netscape. Joel seems to think that this kind of problem is inevitable with rewrites, I disagree.
The buisness side of the equation I think he missed is all the companies that have disappeared because their product couldn't be updated for changing times, and they couldn't afford to do a rewrite. Some startup, or a new arm of Microsoft, comes and throws tons of money at a done from scratch solution, and becomes the next leader.
Anyway, that's what I'd tell Joel if I worked for him on some project that was riddled with crappy code. And if he fired me, hey, plenty of other jobs.
Comments are important to readability, but phrasing the requirement as "Copious Comments" is asking for trouble. You shouldn't need paragraphs of comment to document a few lines of code except if it is a key interface function. While English is nice, the compiler ignores it, and code that is thick on interlaced English make it hard to follow the flow of what the program is actually doing. Clearly written, explanatory, and consise comments are easier to read and maintain than bloat.
I agree that patents have an extremely important roll in protecting some forms of innovation. Drugs companies, for instance, pour massive amounts of money into researching drugs. If they didn't have patent protection to prevent other companies from chemically cloning their work and issuing a generic drug, they wouldn't do the research.
Patents serve another important purpose as well--they encourage companies to _publish_ their techinical innovations, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. This allows people to build on the ideas in the patents, even if they may have to pay royalties. Also, patents to have limited duration--eventually the work reverts to the public domain. The secret of making half-silvered mirrors was jealously guarded in Europe for years, retarding the development of optics.
However, not all fields need patent protection. Buisiness Innovations, for instance, are one of the stupidest things patentable under todays system. A company derives benefits from using a buisiness innovation first, regardless of how many other people copy it.
I am also of the opinion that software does not need to be patented. Copyright protection protects the specific implemenation from being stolen. The patentability of mathematical algoritms protects many other research intensive software projects. Most other software patents seem to be "using computers and software to do X." Maybe software patents could be fixed by a more strict application of the principle "nothing is patentable that is obvious to a practitioner of the art," but unless you can come up with some good examples of software innovation that wouldn't have occured without patent protection, I'll still favor eliminating them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think in this case it would have been a gross discourtesy not to have CC'd the sender. The sender didn't have to respond with a profanity laced email and then threats of lawsuits. He could have responded, and CC'd his ISP
I'm sorry, my email reached you in error. I was under the impression that this address was one used by Concordia University to accept resumes.
And _then_ this whole mess could have been avoided by both sides. (err, actually, probably not, the spammer seems pretty persistently dumb).
No, I don't think it would "really suck" to have to document stuff before you make accusations that could ruin someones reputation. Managers are people too. If there were no libel/slander laws the managers could retaliate by saying the employee's were fired for sexual harrasment. Good luck getting a job then.
You can't prove a statement like "Manager X is homophobic" but you can prove that you had a reasonable basis for making that judgement. You don't have to 'document' everything, usually you rely on other witnesses. From the (admitedly brief) description in the article and the volume of posts it sounded like a delibrate smear campaign.
Clearly, if you can patent a bunch of "slightly different bottle caps" then the patent is not common, but specific. The problem with many patents, especially software patents, is that they are specific things interpreted very broadly. For instance, I think that extended there concept of a "bonding identifier" to include (I presume) the nesting that defines parent-child relationships in XML to be very sketchy. You're supposed to be able to patent methods, not goals.
I beleive you also get a substantial amount of overhead if you enable exceptions. Many embedded systems use C++ but disable exceptions.
I believe that he was talking about speed efficency in this case. Templated code tends to size bloat because each template instantiation is a seperate codebase.
You are definetely taking the remark out of context...of course, so did the original poster.
I highly recommend you read the post, as it's fairly well written. At the risk of creating a strawman, BrettGlass argues that making failed software free will tend to hurt for-profit development in the same area, since they will still have to charge for their products. He asserts that it would be even worse if the orphaned code was relicensed under the GPL.
I have to disagree with him on the degree of harm that would be caused to commercial development efforts by this. The market has already shown a tendancy to go with commercially supported solutions. Now, as far as a brand-new product that just got dropped, yes, that could have a chilling effect on the market for a while. But that's not the kind of orphaned code the article talked about most. Besides, if the product could cause your companies death, don't you think you'd try to raise the money to buy the code?
I agree with him about releasing the code under the GPL, however. Doing that would prevent any commercial company from incorperating any of the code in there projects. At the same time, there would be no existing community of GPL-developers willing to work on the project and familiar with the codebase.
It's all in the spin...
"desktop system" means not running any servers
"compromise" doesn't include DoS (ping of death, etc)
"remote" apparently means the user doesn't have to do anything. I mean, come on, when you try to read your mail with Outlook Express, everyone knows that your system is as good as cracked already.
I have know idea why he used the phrase 'network-based, remote' Is there some other remote way of talking to Microsoft computers? Some radio signal you can send that instantly gives you full access?
Also, while other countries may have poured billions of dollars (US) into the project, note that even according to the article this is a small percentage. The article states that the Canadian robot arm cost $1.4 billion and gives them 2.3 % of the research space. The European module is quoted as costing the same. That means Canada and Europe, total, have 4.6% of the research space. Assuming Japan's contribution isn't vastly more expensive, or there isn't some other big player the article didn't mention, that means about 90% of the research space, and presumably the budget, came from the US.
If there were treaties to prevent the US from doing this, then the US should be constrained by them. If not, the US should at least be willing to provide use of launching facilities and shuttles at a reasonable cost. But beyond that, pay up. "He who pays the piper calls the tune"--and that includes telling him to go away. Unless otherwise negotiated, the US has no obligation to let other people piggyback their space efforts on its own.
There's a difference between "stick with what we know works" and "Stick with the RFCs." RFCs are dynamic. The TCP and UDP ones have both gone through several revisions. The difference is if you stick with the RFCs you have a bunch of engineers from a bunch of different companies, schools, etc. look at your protocol and make sure it can be implemented from the spec. They also try to balance out its effect on internet traffic as a whole.
UDP is a perfectly legitimate method of moving data, especially if you can tolerate loss. It has been the general position of the IETF for years that you shouldn't reimplement retransmission--that's TCPs job. However, from descriptions it sounds more like this is a smart form of connection blasting, which isn't reinventing the wheel but can be hard on networks.
Speaking of that, it isn't the network that breaks because of UDP--it's your program. If you start sending large amounts of UDP data and chewing up the bandwith on my router, according to the spec I can start not even attempting to process the packets. This is the problem with blasting protocls--by taking up more bandwith than TCP for the same data transfer rate they invite administrative blockage.
I deliberately made a poor choice in equations-I was trying to show that you couldn't just pick any four equations. However, I had tried to find a bigger set of independant equations myself and couldn't. Probably because it was 7 AM and I'd been up all night.
However, we're not out of the woods yet--if you use the "chance per packet" calculation of loss, you still have a chance of not getting all the data--a 25% chance, if a quick calculation doesn't mislead me. You can reduce this to an arbitrarily small percentage by sending more linearly independent equations, but that takes more bandwith.
You can only solve a linear system of equations with two unkowns and two equations if the equations are independant. And you can't have more independant equations than you have variables. So your calculation is very optomistic. Imagine if I send you the following data:
X+Y=4
X+2Y=5
2X+4Y=10
2X+2Y=8
With 50% packet loss (as opposed to a 50% chance of loss per packet*) you only get two useful equations 2/3 of the time. Of course, these boxes are expensive and can do a lot more number crunching than just linear algebra. But of course, I wouldn't really have expected a good comparison from a company whose veep of marketing said "FedEx is a hell of a lot more reliable than FTP when you're running 20 Mbytes" Clearly all those game demo sites on the net need to get with the program.
*Computing the chance of loss per packet gives:
1/16 chance of getting all four, 100% success
3/16 chance of getting 3 of 4, 100% success
8/16 chance of getting 2 of 4, 66.666% success
3/16 chance of getting 1 of 4, 0% success
1/16 chance of getting none, 0% success
or 28/48 is a little more than 4/7, slightly worse odds than if you always got 2 of 4.
It's not neccessarily all that bad.
I think this patent makes (1) less likely--sure Microsoft has deep pockets, but this obvious a giveaway would be hard to justify and garuntee lots of opposition dollars from every other OS manufacturer and most industry groups.
Microsoft will be the only developer of DRM in the OS. Looking at the security record of their products, bugs will continue to ensure that fair use is possible (and piracy, but hey, the content companies made that bed).
Eventually, the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft will all go down. We will all live happily ever after in a new age of the world. Or something like that.
Stalin: First, it took three years before Krushchev's 'Secret Speach' denouncing Stalin to the 20th Party Congress and eight years before the public denunciation. (According to A History of Russia by Nicholas Riasanovsky). Yes, during the Terror, Stalin got rid of opponents by associating them with criminal groups and having them executed. That is not at all what the original poster said. He said Stalin controlled the population by demonizing and then persecuting groups. Stalin controlled the populace through his control of party structure, and the party by his persecution of individuals.
McCarthy: Plenty of people dared to speak against 'Tail-Gunner Joe' He was brought down because he went after the army. I think less than four years of turmoil as a result of which no one was killed isn't bad for a democracy. Not as good as it could be, true, but hardly in line with the Inquisition, Hitler, or Stalin. True, it did send Hollywood into paroxysms of mutual accusation, instantiating the famous 'blacklist' era. I hardly think that constitutes getting 'total control' over the US population.
The Inquisition: The Church didn't want to control Jews, it wanted to get rid of them. Yes, Muslims also bathed and "false converts" from Islam were Inquisition targets. But the actual Muslims didn't threaten the church's power as they were being pushed back militarily at the time of the Spanish Inquisiton (the Inquisition itself had been going on sporadically for several hundred years). You are right that it targeted witches as well--I hadn't realized that it was extened to that in the 14th century. I'd be interested in a scholarly source that shows how the inquistion was used against 'strong women' by accusing them of witchcraft. Most witchhunts I'm familar with were not nearly that discriminate, but I'm more used to talking about Protestant witchhunts, especially in Germany. I'd also be interested to see examples of how the Inquisition was used against 'intellectuals'.
However, as I admitted in my post, the Inquisition comes pretty close to following the model in the original post. However, I would say that the twin weapons of anathema and crusades were used far more effectively by the Church to keep rulers and heretic groups (like the Cathars) from threatening their power.
Can you think of any other 'history' I need to learn? Want to actually cite dates or books? I'll cite more too, and we'll actually have a real argument. Oh, and I know this is petty: I can live with the grammar errors, but could you please capitalize your proper nouns? It's harder to read when you don't.
"What kind of steps can people use to protect themselves now"
Never ever choose "open file from its current location" no matter what you think the name is, unless you are willing to give trust the site with any data on your system.
Of course, since no data has been released, I'm not sure this fixes all the problems, but from the description in the article it would. (Somewhere above someone says that IE executes certain MIME types, namely audio, automatically. However, AFAIK, in that case it would attempt to use the correct plugin, and this vunerability would not apply).
I don't think this will do major damage. There seems to be a real easy workaround. I think michael is blowing things a bit out of proportion in his article. On the other hand, I do agree that this is a perfect example of how Microsoft's refusal to divulge information has nothing to do with protecting customers. Sure there is no "patch" for the vunerability yet. But NONE IS NEEDED! In no case is any legitimate usage made immpossible (check me on this--Microsoft may have implemented some stupid "copy protection" where you can only open a file but not save it). It is only made less convienent. Users can be protected the instant they see the alert, Black Hats will take time to set up an exploit even if tools are made easily available.
I don't think your model really works.
Most of Hitler's victims were never accussed of violating any law. Stalin comes a bit closer, although 'counter-revolution' was already illegal before he took power. He just extended it into witch hunts. McCarthy's smear tatics damaged the careers and lives of many people before he was brought down. But again, he passed no new laws. The Communist activities that he targeted were treason and espionage. He didn't 'attain total control' because most American Communists were not in fact guilty of this. Oh, and the Inquisition's main target was "Secret Jews." But other than that, I guess that actually does follow the model, with lists of "Jewish" practices like bathing widely distributed.
Your attempt to extend the analogy to software theft is equally sketchy. The sites that were raided had activities that were illegal long before the DMCA--this is just good old fashioned theft. And I don't really see the 'harsh new penalties either'.
If Tivo and SonicBlue entered into a mutual liscensing agreement, they would have to craft the terms carefully to avoid anti-trust laws. But I think it could be done.
Of course, you apologize in advance, saying Marxism "has yet to be properly implemented" and that its basis is to benefit society as a whole. Well, the basis behind driving drunk may be to get home safely, but the evidence suggests it's a goddamn stupid idea. Of course, maybe it just isn't always properly implemented.
You seem to agree that Free Software is Marxist. Do you think it will succeed then? You and the other both cite the ability of anyone to take whatever they want without giving back to the community. The author even boasts about how he's never contributed anything!
I guess I'm the technological equivalent of a kulak, since while I'm willing to contribute (as I have) to the body of free software, and not willing to give up my livelyhood for others. Luckily, I agree with you that "Marxism/Communism is about to make a comeback in the political/economic arena any time soon" so I don't worry about being rounded up and shot.
Yeah, but the numbers have been "the bad way" for over a year at least. And while marketeers are heavily influenced by user numbers, that isn't the only thing they look for. Two other reasons why "IE Only" makes sense from their perspective: 1) People with the tech savvy to use a non de-facto standard browser are less likely to buy stupid shit. 2) New tech creates more effective ads--even if fewer people see them, this can still be a win.
It makes perfect sense to me. By offering items for auction, Lucasfilm forgoes a source of potential profit to funnel money from people with enough disposable income to buy collectibles to the needy.
Lucasfilm can't really donate "some of the revenues from the films", I'm sure almost all of that money has already been spent. Sure, they could donate some proceeds from ongoing liscensing--"Buy a Jar-Jar Binks doll to Help America"--Bleck. I think it's much cooler to offer relatively unique items then to be yet another company funneling off pennies here and there.
Good list. Here's how I would modify it for todays world:
System has a dedicated function (not general purpose)
Real-time capabilities for some systems
Scarse resources (relative to general purpose systems)
Code rarely updated
Code stored on ROM, Flash, etc., not disk based.
The parts about assembly language and operating systems I think are now obsolete. Resources are still scare, but there are plenty to write in C and have a small operating system to do scheduling and memory management.
Actually, I believe Solaris has kernel extensions which can be used to garuntee a process a minimum amount of runtime. But I could be wrong.
I agree with most of your comment, though. Although "real-time" has a very good definition (A real-time problem is any problem in which the time taken to arrive at the answer is part of its correctness) people abuse the definition horribly. Embedded has no agreed on meaning.
This reminds me a bit of the previous slashdot article on "XP-embedded". That's the product I think Linux has a chance to beat. High reliability, fat budget systems--embedded but not really real time.
Oh--and I am an embedded developer. I love Linux. But 60us interrupt latency on a 800 MHz CPU* just ins't acceptable for a hard real-time system. If it means a compression artifact in my Tivo, no problem. If it means 60 kb of data loss from my Gigabit ethernet card, that's not cool. If it means none of my avionics systems respond for that long, it's out of here!
*The guy says "Pentium" which is probably incorrect--I don't think they ever clocked those old chips that high. Not a very good author.
Joel seems to conclude that because a lot of prominent companies have failed at code rewrites that they are a bad idea. He's right that you can't put your existing product on hold while you rewrite the code from the ground up. But if you don't take the hit one time, it will cost you in lots of little ways over a long time. Would he advocate never upgrading a companies IT infrastructure because of the disruption that would cause? Probably not. The key is to test stuff first, and try to get everything switched over when it will inconvience the fewest people.
One big problem with rewrites that he doesn't address is the "second system effect" from The Mythical Man-Month. This is the urge of, when your doing your redesign, to but everything into it, conquer the world, put every single feature in. This, in my opinion, is what happened with Netscape. Joel seems to think that this kind of problem is inevitable with rewrites, I disagree.
The buisness side of the equation I think he missed is all the companies that have disappeared because their product couldn't be updated for changing times, and they couldn't afford to do a rewrite. Some startup, or a new arm of Microsoft, comes and throws tons of money at a done from scratch solution, and becomes the next leader.
Anyway, that's what I'd tell Joel if I worked for him on some project that was riddled with crappy code. And if he fired me, hey, plenty of other jobs.
Comments are important to readability, but phrasing the requirement as "Copious Comments" is asking for trouble. You shouldn't need paragraphs of comment to document a few lines of code except if it is a key interface function. While English is nice, the compiler ignores it, and code that is thick on interlaced English make it hard to follow the flow of what the program is actually doing. Clearly written, explanatory, and consise comments are easier to read and maintain than bloat.
I agree that patents have an extremely important roll in protecting some forms of innovation. Drugs companies, for instance, pour massive amounts of money into researching drugs. If they didn't have patent protection to prevent other companies from chemically cloning their work and issuing a generic drug, they wouldn't do the research.
Patents serve another important purpose as well--they encourage companies to _publish_ their techinical innovations, rather than keeping them as trade secrets. This allows people to build on the ideas in the patents, even if they may have to pay royalties. Also, patents to have limited duration--eventually the work reverts to the public domain. The secret of making half-silvered mirrors was jealously guarded in Europe for years, retarding the development of optics.
However, not all fields need patent protection. Buisiness Innovations, for instance, are one of the stupidest things patentable under todays system. A company derives benefits from using a buisiness innovation first, regardless of how many other people copy it.
I am also of the opinion that software does not need to be patented. Copyright protection protects the specific implemenation from being stolen. The patentability of mathematical algoritms protects many other research intensive software projects. Most other software patents seem to be "using computers and software to do X." Maybe software patents could be fixed by a more strict application of the principle "nothing is patentable that is obvious to a practitioner of the art," but unless you can come up with some good examples of software innovation that wouldn't have occured without patent protection, I'll still favor eliminating them.