I'm from India, and we have kids doing this a lot back there, especially in math. I once talked to a math professor who's met some of these kids and who actually knows what he's talking about, and he says most of the time they are not even remotely qualified to be enter university, even though they might be somewhat precocious. Usually the parents make the kid do it because they are publicity whores, and the university plays along for the same reason.
Home video can be really cheap if you spend wisely. I share a monthly blockbuster subscription with my roomie which works out to less than a dollar per person per movie.
Now that's funny, I've read pretty much every single word on philosophy on the FSF site, many of the articles I've read several times over I've also listened to of his speeches on the site and attended one of his talks as well (and even got to ask him a few questions. Odds are that's better than you). With the yo' momma stuff out of the way:
Obviously I was exaggerating a bit with my earlier comment, but RMS has repeatedly stated his opinion that software is science and all scientific knowledge should be available to everyone without restriction; and has also stated (perhaps not consistently; I'm not sure) that in is ideal world there would be no need for copyright, and that the GPL was only an intermediate stage because we live in an opressive world and have to play by the rules. So there's no question what his answer to the question I raised would be, which was what my point was.
If they've really achieved 25-30% over jpg, and it looks like they have, then its a truly amazing invention considering that jpeg has been around for so long. It would save at least about ten dollars worth of space on every digital camera. If you look at the humongous image archives that NASA and other research projects generate and the cost of tape to store them all, we're talking tens of billions of dollars of savings here.
So, a question to slashdotters: do you think this kind of invention deserves to be protected by a patent? The standard response "software is already protected by copyright, patents are unnecessary" doesn't work, because anyone can study the code (even the binary will do), describe the algorithm to someone else, who can then reimplement it. Standard cleanroom process; takes only a couple of days for a competent team.
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public, but the majority of us will agree that that's a tad extreme. So whaddya'll think? Myself, I'm totally undecided.
The conclusion the article is making seems to be more or less identical to the point of open source, as opposed to Free software: people use OSS not because its Free but because it works. Go read one of those ESR essays from 1998. I don't really see what's new here.
LJ has 5.6 million user accounts. 2.4 million of which are active. Far more than slashdot. However, as Brad points out, its an "inward facing" community. I'd never heard of the site until a few months ago. They sure could use better marketing. And better integration with the broader blogging world (with TrackBack). TFA repeatedly states that SixApart aren't out to destroy LJ, but they can do that even without intending to. Let's wait and see.
"It is not a matter of if--it is a matter of when. As long as I have the technology in my living room to watch it for myself, I can modify the system to extract the video. They can make it hard, but they can't make it impossible.
"They are living in a fantasy world," he concludes.
Some X protocol round trip reduction improvements have made it to this release, so if you've been frustrated by a gnome program over an ssh session taking 30 seconds to start (I sure have!) then 2.6 will probably speed things up.
A. Please wait a few hours, my watch is compiling gentoo.
Re:amazing programing in 256k, and no serious bugs
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I went to Johnson space center at Houston recently. One of the guided tours was to the mission control room used for the Apollo landings (which was used until 1996). There was pneumatic equipment(!) which was used for console-to-console communication. Much (most?) of the computing machinery was analog. The guide told the audience that their average PC had 300 times more computing power than the entire Mission Control at the time of Apollo. (Half the audience gave out a collective disbelieving gasp, the other half thought she was making some kind of joke.) I don't think of us kids these days has any feel what it must have been like to build high-reliability systems in that kind of impoverished computing environment.
newsforge.com has the most immature bunch of knee-jerk readers. Ever. About a hundred times worse than slashdot. The story is clearly humor and says so right at the top, yet half the responses are from inflamed posters who took it seriously. Sheesh. (Disclaimer: I'm not an unbiased observer since I've written a few articles for newsforge.)
India is also the place where the locals bring their own sharps to the hospital to avoid contamination from inadequately sterilized second-hand needles.
That's complete nonsense. Sure, public hospitals in India (which are free) are in a horrible state, but no one's talking about them. In private hospitals, as the blurb mentions, the quality is about as good as in the U.S. I know, I'm from India. So quit spreading FUD.
Wrong. I've read Jay Beale's paper, and he argues that while "security implemented solely through obscurity is bad", obscurity can be a useful extra layer to improve security. But "security implemented solely through obscurity" is precisely what is happening in the ICC case, and a little reverse engineering renders the system completely defenseless. The theoretical reason why the reverse engg. was inevitable is the impossibility of obfuscating programs.
John Black (first author) presented this at the Crypto 2004 rump session. It was a fantastic talk, and I was fortunate to be there.
In general the timestamping problem is clearly an insoluble one, because the server has no way to tell if the human took only as much time to think as the client software claims. Obfuscation is a stopgap solution that deters the casual attacker, but there is no cryptographic solution apart from "trusted" hardware (yikes).
The way the music/movie industry has tackled the problem is to go on the offensive and call everyone a criminal. Let's see what the ICC does.
"If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
Agree. (i.e, agree with the author's disagreement to this statement). However, the statement is generally only aimed at someone who simply flames developers without offering anything constructive, in which case its valid.
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems".
That statement is aimed at companies, not home users. Know why gimp is popular in hollywood, despite competing proprietary software having a lot more features? That's right, studios can (and do) pay dozens of programmers, and with gimp they get the source.
"All software should be free"
Hello? That's RMS's philosophy, and maybe the philosophy of the Free Software movement. The "open source" movement differs from RMS on precisely this point. Author's long rant about this is completely wasted, because it is a minority of FS/OSS proponents who believe that all software should be free.
"Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software"
Find me 5 people who believe that.
"Scratching the personal itch"
Well, that's the explanation of how unpaid OSS gets written. Commercial OSS is a whole different thing. I don't think anyone confuses the two. The author assumes that people do, and then goes on to explain why they shouldn't. Duh.
"More choice is always better"
Yes and no. That's why we have distros. If you are a linux vendor, more choice is always better. The vendors pick and choose and put together a coherent product so that the end user needs to make one choice (which distro to use) and nothing more. They get a usable system right away. If the end user wants to choose, they can, that's why you have debian, gentoo etc.
Conclusion: these statements aren't myths at all, except in the author's mind, or have important caveats which the author ignores.
Sorry to see this troll has gotten on the/. front page. This guy is a spammer, he has spammed various open source forums for a long time with his rants (remember "gnome armageddon")?
Here's what I posted a while back about this in my livejournal:
Finally, one of the (vocal minority of)
whining lusers who complain about GNOME in every message board and
mailing list in existence has decided to get off his ass and do
something about it. The result is "
project GoneME",
which hopes to eventually fork GNOME. Currently all that there is is a
patch that reverses the button order, which the author calls "fixing"
the button order.
While the decision to do something other than
whining is a laudable one, I don't think much will come of this project
because the author displays the same ignorance that characterizes all
the other complainers. For instance, he thinks there's little
difference between gconf and the windows registry, even though gnome
devs have repeatedly explained why that's not the case in a manner even
a 12 year old can understand. He also makes the moronic assertion that
gconf XML files are "unreadable". They are in fact more readable than
old-school plain text config files because they are in a standard
format and because each key reports its type. The author doesn't seem
to have an open-minded attitude towards programming either. "I for my
own never ever used Python and I don't plan to learn or use Python in
the future". I think the author believes in writing everything in C for
speed. I wonder for how many more years such opinions will continue to
persist?
Update: Since I posted this entry he has posted some more ideas on the site.
"Actually I do like GNOME because of the fact that it is written in C (and therefore fits in the UNIX world)".
That
confirms what I surmised earlier. But I'm ROTFLMAO at the "fits the
UNIX world" comment. Writing everything in C was the UNIX philosophy back in the 80s when the rest of the world was still stuck with assembly. For quite a long time now the UNIX philosophy has been to not
write everything in C. The UNIX way is in fact to choose the most high
level language that makes sense for the given task. See what ESR's The Art of Unix Programming has to say on the subject of programming languages.
While I agree with elephantum and eightpixelshigh that this project will die, I think that won't happen very soon. My prognosis is as follows:
Everything
is going to be hunky dory as long as it is a set of patches to GNOME.
They'll revert the button order and remove spatial nautilus and
generally undo whatever usability improvements have happened over the
last two years. There are quite a few people who will greatly applaud
these changes, who think of themselves as "advanced UNIX users" and
whom I call "desktop masochists". They want their desktop to be a way
to show off their geekiness, and nothing more. They live under the
illusion that it makes them "more efficient". (I know a couple such
guys in my lab. I will be recommending gomeME to them;-)
The
problem for GoneME will start when they actually decide to fork GNOME.
Due to their doing everything in C and in general avoiding any
technology invented within the last decade because it is "bloat", GNOME
will pull far ahead of them the moment they no longer inherit GNOME
code changes. But that'd be the least of their worries. They'll be big
on "listening to their users", and everyone will want to do thi
I'm sure you're correct. But it doesn't contradict what I said. All I claimed is that Linux PCs are being bought (simply because they're cheaper because of not paying the windows tax, with the buyers not even knowing they're buying a Linux PC) and then get pirated windows installed right after being purchased. Do you have any info on whether this kind of thing is happening or not? I know its happening massively in India and China (I live in India).
Museum tour guide: This fossil is two million and nine years old.
Surprised visitor: How can you tell the date so accurately?
Guide: Easy. I've been working here nine years, and it was two million years old when I joined.
My point is, the Drake equation has so many variables that we can't even get a ballpark estimate of that any prediction based on it could easily be off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm from India, and we have kids doing this a lot back there, especially in math. I once talked to a math professor who's met some of these kids and who actually knows what he's talking about, and he says most of the time they are not even remotely qualified to be enter university, even though they might be somewhat precocious. Usually the parents make the kid do it because they are publicity whores, and the university plays along for the same reason.
I use xine, and it overrides whatever restrictions are on the DVD. Never once have I been forced to sit through something I didn't want to.
Home video can be really cheap if you spend wisely. I share a monthly blockbuster subscription with my roomie which works out to less than a dollar per person per movie.
RIAA Piracy Dragnet Snares Popular Female Musician, Deceased Man, and Three-Legged Kitten
Dancing robots help preserve culture - In Japan!
Obviously I was exaggerating a bit with my earlier comment, but RMS has repeatedly stated his opinion that software is science and all scientific knowledge should be available to everyone without restriction; and has also stated (perhaps not consistently; I'm not sure) that in is ideal world there would be no need for copyright, and that the GPL was only an intermediate stage because we live in an opressive world and have to play by the rules. So there's no question what his answer to the question I raised would be, which was what my point was.
If they've really achieved 25-30% over jpg, and it looks like they have, then its a truly amazing invention considering that jpeg has been around for so long. It would save at least about ten dollars worth of space on every digital camera. If you look at the humongous image archives that NASA and other research projects generate and the cost of tape to store them all, we're talking tens of billions of dollars of savings here.
So, a question to slashdotters: do you think this kind of invention deserves to be protected by a patent? The standard response "software is already protected by copyright, patents are unnecessary" doesn't work, because anyone can study the code (even the binary will do), describe the algorithm to someone else, who can then reimplement it. Standard cleanroom process; takes only a couple of days for a competent team.
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public, but the majority of us will agree that that's a tad extreme. So whaddya'll think? Myself, I'm totally undecided.
The conclusion the article is making seems to be more or less identical to the point of open source, as opposed to Free software: people use OSS not because its Free but because it works. Go read one of those ESR essays from 1998. I don't really see what's new here.
LJ has 5.6 million user accounts. 2.4 million of which are active. Far more than slashdot. However, as Brad points out, its an "inward facing" community. I'd never heard of the site until a few months ago. They sure could use better marketing. And better integration with the broader blogging world (with TrackBack). TFA repeatedly states that SixApart aren't out to destroy LJ, but they can do that even without intending to. Let's wait and see.
"They are living in a fantasy world," he concludes.
Some X protocol round trip reduction improvements have made it to this release, so if you've been frustrated by a gnome program over an ssh session taking 30 seconds to start (I sure have!) then 2.6 will probably speed things up.
You mean like the Apple 1984 ad. I think there's a serious chance that something like that might happen.
A. Please wait a few hours, my watch is compiling gentoo.
I went to Johnson space center at Houston recently. One of the guided tours was to the mission control room used for the Apollo landings (which was used until 1996). There was pneumatic equipment(!) which was used for console-to-console communication. Much (most?) of the computing machinery was analog. The guide told the audience that their average PC had 300 times more computing power than the entire Mission Control at the time of Apollo. (Half the audience gave out a collective disbelieving gasp, the other half thought she was making some kind of joke.) I don't think of us kids these days has any feel what it must have been like to build high-reliability systems in that kind of impoverished computing environment.
newsforge.com has the most immature bunch of knee-jerk readers. Ever. About a hundred times worse than slashdot. The story is clearly humor and says so right at the top, yet half the responses are from inflamed posters who took it seriously. Sheesh. (Disclaimer: I'm not an unbiased observer since I've written a few articles for newsforge.)
That's complete nonsense. Sure, public hospitals in India (which are free) are in a horrible state, but no one's talking about them. In private hospitals, as the blurb mentions, the quality is about as good as in the U.S. I know, I'm from India. So quit spreading FUD.
Wrong. I've read Jay Beale's paper, and he argues that while "security implemented solely through obscurity is bad", obscurity can be a useful extra layer to improve security. But "security implemented solely through obscurity" is precisely what is happening in the ICC case, and a little reverse engineering renders the system completely defenseless. The theoretical reason why the reverse engg. was inevitable is the impossibility of obfuscating programs.
In general the timestamping problem is clearly an insoluble one, because the server has no way to tell if the human took only as much time to think as the client software claims. Obfuscation is a stopgap solution that deters the casual attacker, but there is no cryptographic solution apart from "trusted" hardware (yikes).
The way the music/movie industry has tackled the problem is to go on the offensive and call everyone a criminal. Let's see what the ICC does.
Step Two: Hit Enter
You'd be amazed to know that more than one person has asked me for help because they didn't know they had to do step two.
If it weren't true it'd be so funny :-(
"If you're not willing to help fix it then you shouldn't complain about it"
Agree. (i.e, agree with the author's disagreement to this statement). However, the statement is generally only aimed at someone who simply flames developers without offering anything constructive, in which case its valid.
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems".
That statement is aimed at companies, not home users. Know why gimp is popular in hollywood, despite competing proprietary software having a lot more features? That's right, studios can (and do) pay dozens of programmers, and with gimp they get the source.
"All software should be free"
Hello? That's RMS's philosophy, and maybe the philosophy of the Free Software movement. The "open source" movement differs from RMS on precisely this point. Author's long rant about this is completely wasted, because it is a minority of FS/OSS proponents who believe that all software should be free.
"Open Source software is always better than closed, proprietary software"
Find me 5 people who believe that.
"Scratching the personal itch"
Well, that's the explanation of how unpaid OSS gets written. Commercial OSS is a whole different thing. I don't think anyone confuses the two. The author assumes that people do, and then goes on to explain why they shouldn't. Duh.
"More choice is always better"
Yes and no. That's why we have distros. If you are a linux vendor, more choice is always better. The vendors pick and choose and put together a coherent product so that the end user needs to make one choice (which distro to use) and nothing more. They get a usable system right away. If the end user wants to choose, they can, that's why you have debian, gentoo etc.
Conclusion: these statements aren't myths at all, except in the author's mind, or have important caveats which the author ignores.
Here's what I posted a while back about this in my livejournal:
Yes, obviously it was meant to be funny. But I see the humor didn't get across. I'll try to do better next time.
Bonus points if you answer the question without using the technique described in the article.
P.S I'm not claiming credit for it; it used to be on his website but isn't anymore.
I'm sure you're correct. But it doesn't contradict what I said. All I claimed is that Linux PCs are being bought (simply because they're cheaper because of not paying the windows tax, with the buyers not even knowing they're buying a Linux PC) and then get pirated windows installed right after being purchased. Do you have any info on whether this kind of thing is happening or not? I know its happening massively in India and China (I live in India).
Museum tour guide: This fossil is two million and nine years old.
Surprised visitor: How can you tell the date so accurately?
Guide: Easy. I've been working here nine years, and it was two million years old when I joined.
My point is, the Drake equation has so many variables that we can't even get a ballpark estimate of that any prediction based on it could easily be off by a couple of orders of magnitude.