Are any of the Mortimer Adler "great" books not public domain? I wonder if he would think a book could be capital-g "Great" if you could not create derivative works from it.
First off, unicode 85H is NEXT LINE; ASCII 85H is ellipses. unicode 2028H is LINE SEPARATOR. AH and DH are the infamous CR/LF which annoy MS/UNIX text convertors.
Anyways, it sounds like a problem comes up here: must be as if the XML processor normalized all line breaks in external parsed entities (including the document entity) on input, before parsing,
That seems to be the sticking point there.
I suppose the charset is specified in the document, but then again I'm not sure how literally they intend implementors to take the phrase "before parsing", since getting at the charset description involves some degree of parsing the document
Conceivably. I don't think M$ will make deliberately malicious code so much as I think it will be poorly-designed and insecure code.
But at any rate I wouldn't consider Windows any more "trustworthy" than the proprietary Unices because ultimately they're just handing me a black box and saying "don't worry; it works. really"
Only Free software that I can, if need be, verify line by line in its source, can really be "trustworthy", so I don't see why Microsoft is pushing so hard for trustworthy software.
But, to defend my original point, I don't think that pulling a Milli Vanilli in your customer testimonial ad makes me any less likely to trust a company's software.
As much as I dislike M$, that seemed like a cheap shot on the article's part. "Trustworthy computing" is a M$ initiative to make computing power, in general, more distributed by increasing its reliability. It doesn't have anything to do with my trusting or not trusting a business's practices. The trust they're talking about is in the reliability and integrity of the software, not in the groups that distribute it.
How many computer authentication usernames and passwords do you have? (28)
How many keys do you have for your house? (4: front door, deadbolt, back door, side door)
How many keys do you have for your office? (12: front door, deadbolt, back door, back deadbolt, personal office, server room, HR file cabinet, front corridor, upstairs offices, conference room, supply closet, second supply closet)
Is it annoying to have to dig through my keys for the right one? Yes. Would I get rid of some of that annoyance by having a single key for all those doors? Not on your life
Heh heh... I loved the gratuitous mention of the blind guitarist in the article
This is great. Really. It's an incentive for webcasters to look for sources of content not controlled by a media cartel. If you can't find decent bands who are willing to let you broadcast their music for free, you probably shouldn't be running an Internet radio station.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Funny, by a rather strict reading of that passage, there could be no copyright protection past the death of the author or inventor since the exclusive right is secured only to the author or inventor -- and it's not really "his" to give away to the company he works for; it's a grant from Congress.
I think I'll write my representative and suggest copyright protection be changed to 20 years after the first publication of the work or the death of the human author; whichever happens first (and stick with just plain 20 years after publication if the work was "authored" by a group).
A random number sequence is simply a sequence that can't be predicted, and you can obtain one in many ways, like listening to radio noise, having a computer record from the microphone entry with no microphone connected (to record the noise introduced by ambient and electronics), or using data from the mouse, network, keyboard and disk access like the Linux kernel does.
Plato wrote his works with 0 copyright protection. Come to think of it, Plato didn't publish his works. He made money from tuition to his academy and used his dialogues as teaching aides. After his death, his students published his dialogues from his notes (same thing happened to Aristotle's lectures)
Shakespeare (or de Veere, or whoever) wrote most of his works on (I believe) a 2-year exclusive performance contract with the theater he wrote them for and no effective copyright protection (most of the Quarto publications, after all, were essentially pirated... warez tragedy, as it were; the first "official" publication, the Folio, was almost a decade after his death and done by actors reconstructing the plays from their partbooks). His only "protection" came from the exclusive performance rights he would grant to troupes and from the fact that his style was original enough that nobody could pass off his work as their own.
Maybe the solution should be that only the actual human being who created a work can hold its copyright... silly and unworkable, I know, but so is the current system.
...now promise E coli-free food for an extra fee. A spokesperson for McDonalds said, "Our revenue model doesn't normally lend itself to our being held responsible for the hygenic quality of our food; however, for a fee as disclosed in our End Eater License Agreement, we will make sure your burgers don't carry a horrid, filthy plague."
We had one get into our network. It didn't disable NAV on the machine and it was pretty easy to remove (just clear out the "Startup" folder in %root_drive%:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Start Menu\Programs, reboot and backup to a known-good registry. You keep a known-good registry backup, right?... If not, delete any keys in HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Windows->RunOnce)
Also, run Task Manager and kill-9 (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) any random 3- or 4-letter processes after you've cleared the Run Once keys and Startup folder.
I think the executable is printing its own binary when it tries to infect a printer.
As always, patched machines should do OK; the one that got through only did because it was still running IE 5 without any updates. YMMV.
Um, HT doesn't require supersentient compilers, it requires mildly sentient developers. Namely, developers have to make their programs multithreaded. In the Windows world, this happens already, far less so in the Linux world.
I guess I should have been more clear in my original post. The multiple "threads" in a hyperthreaded processor set may or may not bear any relationship to the threads in a well-designed program using a threads library. Just because I spawn multiple threads safely in my language of choice doesn't mean that those threads will run as distinct threads on distinct processors.
Threads spawned in a program are scheduled by the OS (or by the host/VM, depending on what language we're talking about; Java, after all, is "multi-threaded" in this sense), and no OS or VM that I know of guarantees that an arbitrary "thread" in a program will run as an independent thread on an SMP or HT processor set.
That's why I mentioned the hypothetical "super-sentient" compiler. A compiler has to set up the "threads" so that the OS will schedule them as honest-to-God Threads for the hardware. Compilers' mileage will vary; that in itself is why I think we should be focusing more energy on better compilers and assemblers right now until they catch up with the capabilities of the processors out there.
Yes, but since no one has a supersentient compiler and assembler like ht requires, very few programs are able to really take advantage of this.
I dig innovation. I dig more impressive chips. But it's getting to the point where boxes with top of the line CPUs are like those old VWs with Porsche engines in them: there comes a point when improving one part doesn't really matter any more.
What if you could tell your IDE that a certain gesture meant "entering a 'for' block" and that another meant "defining a subroutine", etc.?
You could tie gestures to operators and library functions beforehand, and probably there could be a way to make new gestures for your own functions. Maybe eventually you would only have to type variable names and you could gesture the rest of the program. Then again, that might not be a good idea...
Judging by ITR the big crash happened around 8 am Eastern time... maybe everybody got to work in the Boston-to-DC corridor, checked their email and said "A bugbear? That sounds cute", sending millions of emails and backdoor remote attack sessions over an internetwork that is already having trouble because of a hurricane.
Meanwhile, everyone who was on a system that doesn't use Outlook was slamming the FTP servers for RH8 or Lunar 1.
How odd that petswarehouse.com includes a "forum" on its front page with posts about the lawsuit and detrimental comments about Novak. Maybe he's going to sue himself next?
"Your honor, I demand that I pay myself 1 million dollars and sign over my own domain name to myself..."
RIAA wants DRM precisely so they can shut out John Q. Garage band.
So?
So, that's a combination in restraint of trade and therefore illegal, and a detriment to the public good
Mine don't. But more to the point, what bands are these, and where can I download their music? I've found the free stuff out there to be crap. (I assume these are non-RIAA artists who own the copyright on their own music).
Geez, there must be a thousand unsigned band directories on the web... try looking up "unsigned bands" in a search engine.
Do a lot of them suck? Yes. But very few suck as much as the drek that the labels put out.
What's more important is that rather than having to sift the detritus that makes it through a label's A&R for the occasional gem, you can go listen to the music that's actually being made by real musicians.
Non-mediated media (ha ha) scares the companies who have up until now been distributing media because it's becoming clear what a horrible job they've been doing of selecting music for us.
But more to my point, even if Sony and Elektra were doing great jobs picking bands, they're kind of pointless considering today's technology. I don't need someone to pick bands for me now that I can hear music from anyone who feels like recording something just by clicking a mouse. I don't need them (and neither do you) to decide what bands I'm going to select from in the first place.
The cliché of the moment is that pharmaceutical companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, developing drugs that interact with the limited number of enzymes and molecules that we already understand and have thoroughly modeled.
And some luddite famously quit the Patent office in 1870-something because he determined everything that could possibly be invented had already been invented.
Corporations aren't like people. If you leave a guy alone to do his job, he generally does it and even finds a better, more eficient way to do it than you taught him. If you leave a corporation alone to fulfill its mission statement, it tends to get lazier and lazier and do less and less
Before the free-market theologians jump in and remind me that a corporation's sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders, let me quote some mission statements from phramaceutical companies:
Pfizer: "We will become the world's most valued company to patients, customers, colleagues, investors, business partners, and the communities where we work and live."
Genentech: "Our mission is to be the leading biotechnology company, using human genetic information to discover, develop, manufacture and commercialize biotherapeutics that address significant unmet medical needs."
Merck: "The mission of Merck is to provide society with superior products and services -- innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs -- to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities and investors with a superior rate of return."
Those were just the first three I happened to look at; the rest seem similar. So, there you have it straight from the horse's ass^H^H^H mouth: these companies' missions are not primarily to return profit (Genentech doesn't even mention that); all three have medical innovation and discovery as their primary mission. Just goes to show you can't trust a corporation to do what it sets out to do.
And becasue some customers might really not need them for their particular circumstances. A failure or security breach isn't necessarily the end of the world...[simile snipped]...Sure, sometimes that's false economy based on bad estimates and wishful thinking, but sometimes it might be valid.
I'm still amazed at how may PHB's I've met who are so "concerned about security" that they insist on spending thousands to "secure" a static marketing website that contains nothing anyone would want to look at, yet still use their dog's name as the password to secure the HR files on their intranet.
I guess since the Web seems "out there" [gesturing genericly towards the horizon], a lot of people worry that their website will get "hacked" and altered by someone (though when you ask who would do that, or why, they get very vague), whereas the actual security risk, confidential info stored on an office computer, seems so mundane that nobody cares about it.
RIAA wants DRM precisely so they can shut out John Q. Garage band.
Why do you think the record companies hate music-swapping networks? These people aren't idiots, though they play them on TV; they know they make money when people hear music, like it and go buy albums. IMO, Napster didn't get killed because it allowed people to swap NSYNC tunes. It got killed because it was allowing musicians to distribute music without going through big labels. Obviously the labels wouldn't want to admit that, so they came up with this cover story about "piracy".
My favorite bands all encourage tape, CD and MP3 swapping among their fans (well, Tom Waits doesn't to my knowledge; the rest of my favorites do). Why? Because more people hearing their music = more people buying tickets to their shows, buying their commercial albums, and buying their T-shirts and other geedunk. Record labels don't like that because it takes away their power to "make" rock stars. DRM is designed to resecure that power.
Imagine this: the major labels get together and come up with a DRM scheme that lets you register to listen to their music online. You can't copy the music, and you can't share it with your friends. But the download is free; all you have to do is register and put up with the annoying spam that comes whenever you're entered into a marketing database. Sounds painless enough that most people wouldn't object; all they do is secure their media files with some kind of key that you get from registering with the studio.
However, before too long the major Media Player suites will *only* play properly secured content (again, in the name of fighting piracy -- the record execs will get on camera looking very hurt and say "we're giving the music away for free; we only ask that you register with us -- how cruel are you people?"). Once that happens, musicians who aren't signed by big labels can't distribute their music anymore. That's what the labels are after, not pay-per-listen msic.
Slashdot Mirror
Are any of the Mortimer Adler "great" books not public domain? I wonder if he would think a book could be capital-g "Great" if you could not create derivative works from it.
(plus, glad to see another Johnny on /.)
I know what Win2k is trying to say, but I always chuckle when I see this:
"Fatal Error: Inaccessible Boot Device"
after the kernel has booted.
Good catch
Maybe you mean "ANSI", the generic name that Microsoft OSes use when they mean "platform default"
It's even worse: I was thinking of HTML escape sequences. … (decimal 0x85) is ellipses. I humbly cower.
First off, unicode 85H is NEXT LINE; ASCII 85H is ellipses. unicode 2028H is LINE SEPARATOR. AH and DH are the infamous CR/LF which annoy MS/UNIX text convertors.
Anyways, it sounds like a problem comes up here:
must be as if the XML processor normalized all line breaks in external parsed entities (including the document entity) on input, before parsing,
That seems to be the sticking point there.
I suppose the charset is specified in the document, but then again I'm not sure how literally they intend implementors to take the phrase "before parsing", since getting at the charset description involves some degree of parsing the document
Conceivably. I don't think M$ will make deliberately malicious code so much as I think it will be poorly-designed and insecure code. But at any rate I wouldn't consider Windows any more "trustworthy" than the proprietary Unices because ultimately they're just handing me a black box and saying "don't worry; it works. really" Only Free software that I can, if need be, verify line by line in its source, can really be "trustworthy", so I don't see why Microsoft is pushing so hard for trustworthy software. But, to defend my original point, I don't think that pulling a Milli Vanilli in your customer testimonial ad makes me any less likely to trust a company's software.
As much as I dislike M$, that seemed like a cheap shot on the article's part. "Trustworthy computing" is a M$ initiative to make computing power, in general, more distributed by increasing its reliability. It doesn't have anything to do with my trusting or not trusting a business's practices. The trust they're talking about is in the reliability and integrity of the software, not in the groups that distribute it.
How many PINs do you have? (2)
How many computer authentication usernames and passwords do you have? (28)
How many keys do you have for your house? (4: front door, deadbolt, back door, side door)
How many keys do you have for your office? (12: front door, deadbolt, back door, back deadbolt, personal office, server room, HR file cabinet, front corridor, upstairs offices, conference room, supply closet, second supply closet)
Is it annoying to have to dig through my keys for the right one? Yes. Would I get rid of some of that annoyance by having a single key for all those doors? Not on your life
Heh heh... I loved the gratuitous mention of the blind guitarist in the article
This is great. Really. It's an incentive for webcasters to look for sources of content not controlled by a media cartel. If you can't find decent bands who are willing to let you broadcast their music for free, you probably shouldn't be running an Internet radio station.
I got Microsoft XP for free with my new Dell.
Heh heh. And you got that anti-oxidation sealant on your car for "free" too, right? Cause you know, they put that sealant on at the factory...
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
Funny, by a rather strict reading of that passage, there could be no copyright protection past the death of the author or inventor since the exclusive right is secured only to the author or inventor -- and it's not really "his" to give away to the company he works for; it's a grant from Congress.
I think I'll write my representative and suggest copyright protection be changed to 20 years after the first publication of the work or the death of the human author; whichever happens first (and stick with just plain 20 years after publication if the work was "authored" by a group).
A random number sequence is simply a sequence that can't be predicted, and you can obtain one in many ways, like listening to radio noise, having a computer record from the microphone entry with no microphone connected (to record the noise introduced by ambient and electronics), or using data from the mouse, network, keyboard and disk access like the Linux kernel does.
All of which can, in principle, be predicted.
Plato wrote his works with 0 copyright protection. Come to think of it, Plato didn't publish his works. He made money from tuition to his academy and used his dialogues as teaching aides. After his death, his students published his dialogues from his notes (same thing happened to Aristotle's lectures)
Shakespeare (or de Veere, or whoever) wrote most of his works on (I believe) a 2-year exclusive performance contract with the theater he wrote them for and no effective copyright protection (most of the Quarto publications, after all, were essentially pirated... warez tragedy, as it were; the first "official" publication, the Folio, was almost a decade after his death and done by actors reconstructing the plays from their partbooks). His only "protection" came from the exclusive performance rights he would grant to troupes and from the fact that his style was original enough that nobody could pass off his work as their own.
Maybe the solution should be that only the actual human being who created a work can hold its copyright... silly and unworkable, I know, but so is the current system.
A 'one time pad' that isn't completely random is NOT A ONE-TIME PAD.
Then, for that matter, there are no "true" one time pads since truly ideal random number sequences still elude us.
...now promise E coli-free food for an extra fee. A spokesperson for McDonalds said, "Our revenue model doesn't normally lend itself to our being held responsible for the hygenic quality of our food; however, for a fee as disclosed in our End Eater License Agreement, we will make sure your burgers don't carry a horrid, filthy plague."
We had one get into our network. It didn't disable NAV on the machine and it was pretty easy to remove (just clear out the "Startup" folder in %root_drive%:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Start Menu\Programs, reboot and backup to a known-good registry. You keep a known-good registry backup, right?... If not, delete any keys in HKLM->Software->Microsoft->Windows->RunOnce)
Also, run Task Manager and kill-9 (or whatever the Windows equivalent is) any random 3- or 4-letter processes after you've cleared the Run Once keys and Startup folder.
I think the executable is printing its own binary when it tries to infect a printer.
As always, patched machines should do OK; the one that got through only did because it was still running IE 5 without any updates. YMMV.
Um, HT doesn't require supersentient compilers, it requires mildly sentient developers. Namely, developers have to make their programs multithreaded. In the Windows world, this happens already, far less so in the Linux world.
I guess I should have been more clear in my original post. The multiple "threads" in a hyperthreaded processor set may or may not bear any relationship to the threads in a well-designed program using a threads library. Just because I spawn multiple threads safely in my language of choice doesn't mean that those threads will run as distinct threads on distinct processors.
Threads spawned in a program are scheduled by the OS (or by the host/VM, depending on what language we're talking about; Java, after all, is "multi-threaded" in this sense), and no OS or VM that I know of guarantees that an arbitrary "thread" in a program will run as an independent thread on an SMP or HT processor set.
That's why I mentioned the hypothetical "super-sentient" compiler. A compiler has to set up the "threads" so that the OS will schedule them as honest-to-God Threads for the hardware. Compilers' mileage will vary; that in itself is why I think we should be focusing more energy on better compilers and assemblers right now until they catch up with the capabilities of the processors out there.
Yes, but since no one has a supersentient compiler and assembler like ht requires, very few programs are able to really take advantage of this.
I dig innovation. I dig more impressive chips. But it's getting to the point where boxes with top of the line CPUs are like those old VWs with Porsche engines in them: there comes a point when improving one part doesn't really matter any more.
Depends on how customizable these are.
What if you could tell your IDE that a certain gesture meant "entering a 'for' block" and that another meant "defining a subroutine", etc.?
You could tie gestures to operators and library functions beforehand, and probably there could be a way to make new gestures for your own functions. Maybe eventually you would only have to type variable names and you could gesture the rest of the program. Then again, that might not be a good idea...
Judging by ITR the big crash happened around 8 am Eastern time... maybe everybody got to work in the Boston-to-DC corridor, checked their email and said "A bugbear? That sounds cute", sending millions of emails and backdoor remote attack sessions over an internetwork that is already having trouble because of a hurricane.
Meanwhile, everyone who was on a system that doesn't use Outlook was slamming the FTP servers for RH8 or Lunar 1.
How odd that petswarehouse.com includes a "forum" on its front page with posts about the lawsuit and detrimental comments about Novak. Maybe he's going to sue himself next?
"Your honor, I demand that I pay myself 1 million dollars and sign over my own domain name to myself..."
So, that's a combination in restraint of trade and therefore illegal, and a detriment to the public good
Geez, there must be a thousand unsigned band directories on the web... try looking up "unsigned bands" in a search engine.
Do a lot of them suck? Yes. But very few suck as much as the drek that the labels put out.
What's more important is that rather than having to sift the detritus that makes it through a label's A&R for the occasional gem, you can go listen to the music that's actually being made by real musicians.
Non-mediated media (ha ha) scares the companies who have up until now been distributing media because it's becoming clear what a horrible job they've been doing of selecting music for us.
But more to my point, even if Sony and Elektra were doing great jobs picking bands, they're kind of pointless considering today's technology. I don't need someone to pick bands for me now that I can hear music from anyone who feels like recording something just by clicking a mouse. I don't need them (and neither do you) to decide what bands I'm going to select from in the first place.
The cliché of the moment is that pharmaceutical companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, developing drugs that interact with the limited number of enzymes and molecules that we already understand and have thoroughly modeled.
And some luddite famously quit the Patent office in 1870-something because he determined everything that could possibly be invented had already been invented.
Corporations aren't like people. If you leave a guy alone to do his job, he generally does it and even finds a better, more eficient way to do it than you taught him. If you leave a corporation alone to fulfill its mission statement, it tends to get lazier and lazier and do less and less
Before the free-market theologians jump in and remind me that a corporation's sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders, let me quote some mission statements from phramaceutical companies:
Those were just the first three I happened to look at; the rest seem similar. So, there you have it straight from the horse's ass^H^H^H mouth: these companies' missions are not primarily to return profit (Genentech doesn't even mention that); all three have medical innovation and discovery as their primary mission. Just goes to show you can't trust a corporation to do what it sets out to do.
And becasue some customers might really not need them for their particular circumstances. A failure or security breach isn't necessarily the end of the world...[simile snipped]...Sure, sometimes that's false economy based on bad estimates and wishful thinking, but sometimes it might be valid.
I'm still amazed at how may PHB's I've met who are so "concerned about security" that they insist on spending thousands to "secure" a static marketing website that contains nothing anyone would want to look at, yet still use their dog's name as the password to secure the HR files on their intranet.
I guess since the Web seems "out there" [gesturing genericly towards the horizon], a lot of people worry that their website will get "hacked" and altered by someone (though when you ask who would do that, or why, they get very vague), whereas the actual security risk, confidential info stored on an office computer, seems so mundane that nobody cares about it.
RIAA wants DRM precisely so they can shut out John Q. Garage band.
Why do you think the record companies hate music-swapping networks? These people aren't idiots, though they play them on TV; they know they make money when people hear music, like it and go buy albums. IMO, Napster didn't get killed because it allowed people to swap NSYNC tunes. It got killed because it was allowing musicians to distribute music without going through big labels. Obviously the labels wouldn't want to admit that, so they came up with this cover story about "piracy".
My favorite bands all encourage tape, CD and MP3 swapping among their fans (well, Tom Waits doesn't to my knowledge; the rest of my favorites do). Why? Because more people hearing their music = more people buying tickets to their shows, buying their commercial albums, and buying their T-shirts and other geedunk. Record labels don't like that because it takes away their power to "make" rock stars. DRM is designed to resecure that power.
Imagine this: the major labels get together and come up with a DRM scheme that lets you register to listen to their music online. You can't copy the music, and you can't share it with your friends. But the download is free; all you have to do is register and put up with the annoying spam that comes whenever you're entered into a marketing database. Sounds painless enough that most people wouldn't object; all they do is secure their media files with some kind of key that you get from registering with the studio.
However, before too long the major Media Player suites will *only* play properly secured content (again, in the name of fighting piracy -- the record execs will get on camera looking very hurt and say "we're giving the music away for free; we only ask that you register with us -- how cruel are you people?"). Once that happens, musicians who aren't signed by big labels can't distribute their music anymore. That's what the labels are after, not pay-per-listen msic.
I use meta tags on my intranet for searching; makes things a lot easier. The idea that remote crawlers would use them strikes me as silly, though.