But, what happens when books become like CDs (easy and inexpensive to
make exact functionality copies)? Would enough people pay for the
hardcopy to support the author enough to put food on his table?
Yes they will. If they value their time and the
book enough. Even if a laser printed copy of
a downloadable is cheaper by a few dollars from
the press-printed book, I strongly believe
that most people would still go for the
convenience and quality of the latter. Why?
Well, 10 dollars is certainly worth much
less than the time that I have to spend printing,
collating and having the book bound professionally.
I would rather pay the extra ten bucks and avoid
the aggravation. So, yes, there will be a market
for open books for as long as the value of the
book is much greater than the cost of buying it.
As I see it, open books will revolutionize
the industry in the following way.
No book will ever be out of print. Troff is
several decades old but it is still alive and kicking
in the form of groff. Because groff is open sourced,
it will continue to exist in the net somewhere and
it will continue to be improved even if only incrementally.
Compare that with say, WordPerfect which is almost on the
way to extinction. (Please no counter-arguments about
warez or how it is still on your hard disk!)
Financially successfull open licensed books
will be of a better quality than comparable
closed-licensed books. Why? Because in order for
the book to succeed it must be of the quality where
people are willing to pay for it when a downloadable
copy is available. This leads to...
Cost of publishing will drop.
Publishers will be able to test probable success of
any book cheaply by having it downloadable on the
net. All the publisher has to do is log all
downloads (in order to count popularity) and
provide a survey form inquiring whether the
reader would buy a hard-copy of this book if
it is available on the market and for how much.
No need to print 10,000 copies of a book and
then discover what a crap it is. However, it
could also mean...
Writing will cease to be as profitable a
profession as it is today. But as RMS himself
will say (with paraphrasing) just because
book writing is not very profitable does not
condemn you to write books. If writing books
won't put food on your table, then perhaps
you better find some other profession.
On the other hand...
Some Joe will discover a hidden talent
in writing. It is so easy to publish an
open book, (put a copy on the net while
he is creating it) that many bored and talented
individuals may just give it a try.
Publishers may just discover the next Stephen
King, Richard Feynmann and Donald Knuth
this way! It could even be you!
If the clones are supposed to be exact replicas, why do the clones
have defects? This suggests we're missing something...Perhaps they're
not exact after all?
You may find the following article
article very interesting.
I think some large companies divide the root password into halves and each half is given to a sysadmin. That way, in order to make changes to system configurations, at least two sysadmins are needed. No one person can install anything in the middle of the night.
I don't know how widespread this procedure is but I think it does put one more hurdle to a malicious BOFH like the article mentioned.
The arab nations in the middle east attacked Israel repeatedly without
provocation. Each defeat has made them more and more hostile. Between
terrorist actions like the slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team and
wars of agression from the First Arab-Israeli War onward, it's easy to
be sympathetic to Israel.
And it is easy to make generalizations if one is unknowledgeable
about the history of Palestine. I think you should read
this in order to understand
the roots of the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Keep this in mind: In the beginning of the 20th century
only one person in 10 living in Palestine is a Jew. Now it
is exactly reversed.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Palestinians: you have
no american supplied F-16s, no Merkava tanks, no way of
waging a Geneva Convention type war. How are you going to
fight for your beliefs, your people and your history?
Is it a wonder that the only way a desperate people
can fight is through suicide bombings?
Please do not immediately label me an anti-semitic.
I do not hate Jews, but I do deplore how the Israeli
(and specially the Sharon) government's treatment of the Palestinian
problem seems to mirror the way Hitler treated the
Jewish problem.
One has only to read Israeli newspapers to realize
that many Israelis themselves are aware of these
and actually criticize their own government.
I know many Jews here will agree with me.
The problem with Israel is that it is not a nation of
Israelis but a Jewish state. For as long as the Israeli
government refuses to make itself into a truly representative,
truly non-discriminatory nation it will continue
to hold the entire world hostage to its ailment.
Jay Burmeister wrote an excellent paper on the
topic of computational Go [uq.edu.au] and I'll use some of his points
to show why many Computer Scientists feel that Go will take
significantly more work than Chess to acheieve a grandmaster level of
play.
The paper cited above is interesting as it shows what some
computer scientists think about the difficulty of a
computer playing ever playing go. However, to put it in proper perspective
it should also be remembered that before the 1980's computer
scientists and chess players are also of the belief
that computers cannot be made to play chess. What a difference
two decades make!
However, let me point out the following two quotes from
Burmeister and my personal opinion on these.
Compared to the Chess programming field, the Go programming field is
not well developed. A strong commitment to research on programming
Chess in the 1960's and 70's has not been replicated in the Go field.
8. For all the reasons discussed above, programming approaches to
chess are amenable to tree searches, with good evaluation criteria.
Such approaches have not succeeded in Go, because the branching factor
is too large for brute force search techniques, and pruning is not a
viable option without good evaluation measures.
These two quotes show the state of Go programming today:
research in go lags behind that of chess.
what works in chess will not necessarily work in go.
Point two is what most people who have an opinion on the
computer chess vs computer go debate fail to consider.
The fact that computers play chess by brute force searching
of tries does not mean that that approach is, ergo, the only
possible approach to computer go.
In fact a bit of computer chess history should dispel that
notion. When researchers first tried to tackle the problem
of computer chess, it was rather obvious that a brute force
approach is not the ideal way to do it.
The number of possible positions in chess is so huge that
it is not possible to solve chess using the technology
available at that time. Instead they went for the heuristic
approach.
In this approach researches looked for a function Eval(p)
such that given a position p, Eval(p) will evaluate whether
one side is ahead or not. If Eval(p) is found, so they think,
then it is possible to use a greedy algorithm to chess. The
computer simply picks that position p_n where Eval(p_n) is
a maximum. No need for brute force! Unfortunately Eval(p)
proved intractable because of one aspect of chess: sacrifice.
In a chess sacrifice, Eval(p) is screwed up by the temporary
giving up of an advantage (material, or position) in order
to gain a future advantage. It turned out that there is
no way to program a chess computer without look-ahead.
And that is essentially how all computer's today play chess,
by brute force lookahead coupled with other heuristics.
The state of computer go is not yet that advanced for either
me or anyone to say for certainty that there is no Eval(p)
for go. But if, as I suspect (let's just say it's a gambler's
gut-feeling reinforced, in fact, by a reading of
Burmeister plus the fact that go stones cannot move
and thus their present fixed position must contribute
to Eval(p)) there is in fact an Eval(p) for go, then go
will prove to be easier to program than chess.
All the above is my opinion only.
There goes my karma.
I've been told that the Japanese (or is it Chinese) game of Go is one
such game.
I keep hearing about how go is much more difficult
for a computer to play than is chess. The number of
possible moves in go has nothing to do with its
difficulty. Computer scientists have been
trying to teach computers to play chess for at
least half a century and it is only now that
computers have become powerful
enough and for the theory to advance
enough that computers can hold the world chess
champion to a tie. Go has not been analyzed and
picked apart enough for us to say that it
us much more difficult than chess.
Go has the advantage that you start with a bare
board. In chess, the game always starts the same
way. A computer that has in its memory a century's
worth of master games should be at a distinct
advantage. The fact that chess engines with million
game databases can only manage a tie against a good
human champion means computers have barely scratched
the surface of chess. When a computer can beat Kasparov
at fischer-random chess, I will concede.
Perhaps with the belief among computer chess
researchers that chess has been solved will Go
soon undergo the same nitpicking that chess has.
My bet is that it will prove to be even easier
than chess.
Here's why I think so.
Go pieces, once placed on the board, cannot move
anymore. Chess pieces can still move from one place
to the other. This means that as more and more
Go pieces are placed on the board, there are less
and less positions the computer has to consider.
Go requires the ability to look at patterns rather
than combinations. Sure, the Go board is larger
and the possible positions are greater but then there
are only three possible ``cells'' to consider: the first
player's stone, the second player's stone and an empty
cell. That should be easier to manage than the
job we are asking computer's nowadays to do: recognize
people from their faces. I believe computers can match
fingerprints easily today. Go should be a walk in the park.
Which do you think is more secure? Given a choice between having an
application run as root [with all the attendant problems that this
entails especially if a security problem is found in the app] versus
giving the application minimal privileges [specifically all it needs
to get the job done and nothing more], how could anyone think the
setuid and setgid approach is better.
setuid and setgid are not perfect and the recent
spate of Linux vulnerabilities certainly
speaks of the need for improvements in this area.
My point is that doing away with setuid and setgid
and replacing it with per system call access privileges
does not seem to be the right way to increase security.
With Posix (and Linux, which is Posix compliant) it is
already possible for an application to drop it's privileges.
This solves the problem of an application running its
entire life as root. With the posix compliant call
to setuid, an application can be setuid root only for
as long as it needs to access privileged resources
and can drop those privileges once it no longer
needs to be root.
However, the above article talks about an application
elevating its privileges and for the kernel
to grant that privilege on a system call basis.
The article is short on the details but elevating
the privileges of an application is certainly a very
dangerous process. If an application asks the kernel
to elevate its privileges, how is the kernel to decide
if it should grant that request? My mind-set tells
me that it should check the effective user id of the
running process but then isn't this setuid and setgid
again? If the kernel will grant this request by checking
a list of applications that is allowed to do this, then
how is this different from a kernel checking if
an application is owned by root?
I have stated my preferences for chroot jails and
for a good reason. Once a system is cracked, the
intruder can do with the filesystem as much as he
pleases. At least with chroot jails, the intruder is restricted
to the chroot directory and cleaning up the mess
is easier. Yes, I know this is not a cure but
I think the idea of jailing applications to a
particular environment is a good idea.
I am an old hand so my mind has petrified
with an imprint of the old ways of doing things.
I could be wrong, but until I
am fully convinced, I will be
among the voices that express caution at the
idea of throwing away setuid and setgid.
how is this better than setuid, setgid?
At least with setuid and setgid, control over
system privileges is given on a per-application
basis. With this per-system call method, the kernel
somehow has to track each system call made by an
application and grant or refuse privileges on some
basis. (On what basis is unclear from the article.)
This seems like a lot of data for a kernel to keep
track of, considering the number of system calls a
typical unix kernel has.
Though I believe improvements to setuid, setgid is needed, per system call access privileges don't seem to be the right approach. I would much rather go with chroot jails for each application.
Stallman is correct. Bitkeeper is a proprietary product produced by a commercial company and that commercial company has the legal means (whether right or not) to suddenly change their license terms.
I quite understand Linus' and Rik's aversion to puritanical arguments against their use of proprietary products when such proprietary products keep them productive.
McVoy is a good guy as far as the Linux kernel hackers are concerned, but what will happen if a certain Mr. Bill Gates offers loads of cash to Mr. McVoy for his company?
Steve: Hey Bill, do I have a deal for you.
Bill: Yeah?
Steve: What do you say to spending just a little over 50 million dollars to derail Linux development on its tracks?
This is an interesting problem. However, my belief is that the different versions of glibc is not to blame but rather the different versions of/usr/include/asm and/usr/include/linux that are the culprit.
If you can somehow make the/usr/include/asm and/usr/include/linux the same across the compiling machines you shouldn't have any problem. Note however that/usr/include/asm and/usr/include/linux should be from versions of the kernel that were used to compile glibc. Failure to realize this is often the cause of many compilation problems.
PS. I am not a Kernel Hacker so please take my observation with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I think I'm alergic to legalese or something. Even looking at the
dumbed down version is making me sick.
Don't be too harsh. Unlike you, the article actually gave me
a bit of deja-vu. It was like the feeling I had
when I was 15 years old and for the first time the
gibberish... err.. source code in K&R
suddenly made sense. It was a wonderful feeling! An
AHA moment!
You
may find it entertaining, but it's not going to help you deal with the
legal issues that you come across in the real world.
Of course! I think no one in his right mind expects a three part explanation
of a single brief to substitute for three years of law and several
more years of experience. The author of the article is only
interested in letting tech-geeks get a peek into
an important and upcoming legal tussle whose outcome
affects us tremendously.
Think of it as the legal equivalent of
a three day MCSE Seminar. Except in this case, lawmeme
doesn't give you a fancy certificate and doesn't
even dangle you the illusion you are now a
``software engineer.''
It's a damn great article and I found myself enjoying it.
I can't believe it is quite possible for
lawyers to be so logical.
I'm late to this discussion so you may not
be able to read this but speaking as a
professional programmer but not necessarily a
graphics expert.
Decide why you want to do this thing. Are you doing
this primarily for (a) the challenge or (b) because you
have an itch that cannot be scratched by what is
available free or otherwise?
If it is the second case then I suggest you
start with what is available and working and extend
or add more functionality to it. For example: A previous
slashdot thread tackled the growing popularity of
mouse gestures. Maybe you would like to add this
capability to blender? How about making it faster?
or how about adding some AI to blender in order to
teach it physics or mechanics? What exactly is missing
in blender that you would like to see?
(I am using blender as an example here but I am
sure there are other packages out there where
source code is available and which you can extend
or experiment with.) If you want
to have something that you can and will use, you have
to take this approach.
If you want to create a Maya-like graphics
package as a challenge,
then that is an entirely different animal altogether.
Remember that the packages you mentioned were created
by teams of professionals that have spent years
polishing and revising their code to get
the finished product you are seeing today.
It is highly unlikely you will be able to
achieve the same alone.
But then, what kind of a hacker does not like
a challenge? I can only advise the following:
Study the source code of what is available,
determine what paradigm they are using. Do you
think their paradigm is the right thing(tm)?
or do you think you have a better paradigm?
If you have a paradigm you want to
prove, then how could that paradigm be
achieved? Perhaps it could be achieved
only by creating an entirely new language,
and building your app with that language.
Paradigm shifts are places where individuals
can still make revolutionary contributions.
Get in touch with the people who
are actively doing this thing. There should be
mailing lists where you can get into the
groove with your peers immediately.
It helps if you can get yourself programmer
friends within the company whose work you
admire. Mine them for ideas.
Start programming right away!
No need to put your ideas on paper first.
Code is a more concrete expression of ideas.
Surround sound is a great idea!! I can put in a recording I made with help from the good people of Scientology and pretty soon, my workers won't need to eat lunch, won't need coffee and would be very happy with the pay they are getting.
Surround sound would surely boost productivity, and reduce costs in any office!
Everyone owns the right of exploitation of their image, but that doesn't mean they own everything with their image on it. I can reprint a painting in my "works of" book without the sitters' permission.
IANAL but, Really? Then you are getting yourself into trouble. A photographer has no right to publish pictures or portraits without the permission of the person in the picture or portrait. That is why there is such a thing as a model release form. Even when a playboy or penthouse magazine photographer takes photographs of a model paid professionally, the model still has to sign the release. So how can a photographer or an artist have rights to a picture for which he (or she) has been paid to create? By all rights the client has the right to the image.
The only case where a photographer is allowed to publish a portrait (or picture) is when the person in the picture is a public figure. The reason being that publishing the picture is covered under the freedom granted to journalists.
In another post, you or someone else reasoned that since you applied your skills (lighting, posings, etc) to create the image then by all rights you own the image you have taken. But, the client owns the wedding and has paid for the location, therefore the client has paid for the means by which you have created your work. The clients money allowed you to create the work. So the location and the event is the client's IP. Right? Think about it.
There was a time when the US passed a law restricting exports of ``supercomputers'' to certain countries. Unfortunately, whether a computer is super or not was decided by technically incompetent desk clerks at the Bureau of Customs. Even the lowly IBM PC was declared a supercomputer that PC manufacturers had to go through hoops in order to export their products. Eventually, Intel and the other manufacturers did the sensible thing and sent their manufacturing facilities overseas, thus skirting the problem.
A similar situation can occur in the case of the DMCA. If the DMCA caused technological leadership to ship overseas, I think congress would sit up and rethink the DMCA.
For example, academics can start the wave by moving all conferences related to computer security and encryption overseas, say to Canada or Japan. (Now that would be delicious!) In fact, to make a point, all electrical engineering conferences should be moved to Japan because then there would be no problem of anyone ever inadvertently violating the DMCA simply because one attended a seminar on the electrical properties of a computer bus, or learned the specific frequencies that satellite broadcasters used to broadcast cable channels. (Hey, that knowledge can be used to build a satellite tuner, thus violating the IP of the poor content providers!)
Eventually MIT, Stanford, Harvard et al, could partner with Universities overseas so that US professors could accomplish their research there; safe from the good fellas at the State and Justice Departments. As you engineers out there know, it is possible to determine the encryption algorithms of satellite broadcasts through the use of a an illegal device called the spectrum analyzer. Hey, Mr. Justice Department, do you know how many spectrum analyzers there are in MIT?
Throughout the 1980's a lot of companies staked their reputations and resources in their efforts to produce intelligent software. The next great advance is just around the corner, so they say. Intelligent and knowledge-based software will herald a revolution in the way humans use and interact with software. Software will no longer be like automatons mindlessly following the same code recipe again and again, instead they shall be able to think and reason.
Of course none of it happened. AI became a disappointment and such a failure that the very same companies that touted their AI and knowledge-based software very soon tried hard to avoid any association of their products with AI.
My question is: why should we even care about AI now? For all we know, we might be repeating the same false hopes and wrong turns that happened 20 years ago. Perhaps there is indeed something in humans that just cannot be duplicated by a machine. What makes you think that a real thinking machine is indeed possible and that AI is a subject worthy of consideration and study?
My built-in doubter says...
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 1
Nope, I haven't read the tome yet. But from the review and my previous acquaintance with cellular automata, I can say this, Mr. Wolfram confuses the model with the real thing.
Attach a brush daubed with paint on a cow's tail, and the flicking tail would paint pretty pictures on a canvas. Some of them may even look like flowers, or grass, or birds hurtling through the sky, or molten lava churning in a lava dome. The fact the pictures look like what they look like doesn't mean that's how those objects were created.
Mr Wolfram creates interesting patterns with his cellular automatons. Now he claims that cellular automatons are the process through which nature creates everything we see. He is arrogant in his belief of his correctness, he calls his theory a ``A New Kind of Science.''
Perhaps, I'll read the book someday. But right now, I'm working on my new theory of Cosmology. And it has something to do with a flicking tail.
Several years ago, IBM introduced the OS/2 operating system. It was supposed to be so stable that it cannot crash. Microsoft destroyed that notion via a simple expedient: a team of MS programmers worked a whole day and night and created a terminator disk: a disk which contains software that crashes OS/2. It was a simple and effective counterfoil. With a single stroke, Microsoft demolished the claims IBM made about the stability of OS/2
Now Microsoft, through ADTI, has made a claim that the very nature of open source makes it vulnerable to cracking. Microsoft had at least since 2000 to make good on that claim. So you experts from ADTI, answer me this: Where is the terminator software? Where is this software or technique that allows you to crack any and all open-source software?
One has to think that with all the propaganda and FUD MS is spreading about open source security, they should at least have some proof. Microsoft, a company that has recruited some of the best programmers out there is unable to crack Linux.
How could they? MS is in a catch-22 situation here. If they do find an exploit, they would have to publish it, and publishing it effectively allows the OS community to patch and improve the system. They will always lose whatever they do. That's why they are doing this FUD tactics.
Don't take away anything from either party with this 'It was about looks' nonsense. If that is what is was about we would be flying nothing but F-14s and...
I don't know. It seems to me that looks have as much to do with the selection as anything. Remember that these planes won't be placed in a museum to be gawked at by a wondering crowd. These planes will be flown by 19 year old jocks who will want to be photographed in front of their fighters and will have posters of these planes pinned on their walls. Would you want to be seen flying one of those pelican like things? Don't forget the psychological effect these would have on their morale. Fighters are not called Tomcat, Eagle, and Falcon without reason. (Pelican? Naaah.)
In an article in Physics Today that I have read years ago in college, the author wondered why objects designed with utility and efficiency in mind often end up looking beautiful. The fighter plane is a very visible example of this phenomenon. Fighters are designed to have a low aerodynamic cross-section, to be able to carry armaments and to house a pilot. Even with these demands uppermost, fighters turn out to be sleek, beautiful and frightening beasts.
The Boeing design is very strange-looking. The air intake is so huge I bet it could gulp a dozen pelicans with one snort. Even if the plane stays up in the air, can you imagine how disgusted the maintenance crew will be? How would it perform in the rain? With so much water pouring into the engines, wouldn't it have an effect on its efficiency? If you have one of these parked on an aircraft carrier, how many times would seagulls see the gaping hole as a chance to relieve their bowels?
Considerations (or trolls if you wish) like my previous paragraph will surely have an effect on the selection process. And all because the aircraft looks ugly. Besides, did it ever occur to you that the Lockheed design performs better therefore it looks better?
...all these little plastic fag fighters that ...
I don't think there are plastic fighters out there. Plastic may be light but it has a very low melting temperature. A plastic fighter will probably disintegrate above Mach 1. Ceramic maybe, but not plastic.
The escape of Osama Bin Laden and the invisibility of the Abu Sayyaff in the jungles of the Philippines show one thing. No amount of high tech weaponry and no surfeit of surveillance equipment can beat a human on the ground. After several months of scrutinizing the tiny island of Basilan, using satellites, aircraft and what not, no trace of the kidnapped Burnhams have been detected. The Abu Sayyaff and their hostages have effectively vanished.
As the US Marine Corps continues to progress towards its vision of the modern warrior, I hope it remembers that human brains and courage is still more valuable than all the modern technology in the world.
That's the lesson of desktop linux - it doesn't matter HOW BAD MS is - what matters is HOW HARD the transition to something else is.
I beg to differ.
The transition is not as hard as you believe it is. Open source office suites are already as easy to use as Office. In fact, most Microsofties, (including Joel Spolsky), tend to argue from the other side: That OS office suites are already as easy to use as MS Office but not as full featured. If the observations of the articles are correct, then lack of features will not be a deterrent to the success of the open office suites because 99% of all users don't use all the features of MS Office anyway.
MS is trying to leave the desktop arena. Because Windows is already installed on 96 or so percent of personal computers, MS has decided to set their sights elsewhere: the enterprise arena which is traditionally dominated by the Unices. If the article can be taken as a guide, we would expect that MS would concentrate less and less on the personal desktop space, thus allowing the disruptive open source suites to eventually capture that segment of the market.
I speculate that MSFT will find it very hard to find a successfull strategy in the enterprise arena because their management culture was forged on the personal desktop arena. For example, enterprises are less interested in ease of use as they are in reliability, security, flexibility and scalability. The very things that Unix is well known for. As every body knows, Microsoft products are known more for their ease of use than for anything else and in fact made a huge business out of user friendliness.
The only way MSFT can successfully attack the enterprise arena is to create a disruptive technology of their own. Unfortunately, it is Linux and Open Source that has provided the disruptive technology in this space.
In conclusion, Open Source (not necessarily Linux) will rule the waves.
OK, this is a troll. But I had to get it out of my system. I for one am, not falling under the spell of this ``futuristic geodesic dome'' mantra.
The first time I heard about Mr. Buckminster Fuller several years ago I was almost convinced that the messiah of modern architecture had at last walked the planet. He is a ``visionary'', a ``genius'', the great pooh-bah, he invented or discovered the geodesic dome. Yeah right, a sphere made up of triangles. So what? It's been known at least from the time of the ancient Egyptians that the triangle is a very rigid structure. Mr. Fuller applied the principle to the sphere and suddenly he is a genius? He even got a molecular configuration named after him. What's next?, an element named buckminsterfullerium?
A post above me even claims that Mr. Fuller's geodesic dome led to advances in chemistry. Now, that is one huge leap of progress in the impending deification of Mr. Fuller, I say. Well kiddo, let me be the devil's advocate. Just what did Mr. Fuller come up with that can compare with
Walmart's selling of OS-less computers is a good
thing --- but only if Linux can take advantage
of it.
I came away from reading the article with the
feeling that unless improvements to ease of installation
of Linux is forthcoming, Walmart
may soon be forced to end its ``experiment.''
While the writer's experience during his
test was satisfactory,
the non-activation of the modem prevented
it from being perfect. Any consumer
buying these machines with the intent
of ``trying out linux'' may be
queueing for a disappointment.
May I suggest that RedHat or Mandrake or
SuSE send a technical team
to Walmart with the express aim of
training the technical and sales people
of Walmart on how to choose components
so that the installation of Linux
will then be brainless? The training should
be done gratis. The financial payback
will come when enough consumers
are able to take the linux plunge successfully.
When I upgrade to XP or
2002 or whatever, I'm going to want to make sure I'm still able to
access the Samba shares. If I can't, I hate to say it, but I may be
forced to switch my network storage box to some Windows variant.
I have a crazy idea. Since Samba is probably used by many
Microsoft-oriented shops too, why can't the Samba Team
embrace and extend the CIFS protocol?
This would be a two pronged attack. One of the
prongs would be the Samba Team which will
extend the CIFS protocol and publish it under the GPL.
The other prong will be a group that will write
win32 applications that will take advantage of
the Samba extensions to the CIFS and distribute
the app for free. Since the OSS community numbers in
the thousands at least, this would be very straightforward
to accomplish.
I wonder what Microsoft will do if the Samba extensions
to the CIFS become a de-facto standard? When is the
next iteration of Windows anyway? Right now could
be a window of opportunity just opening up.
Sigh, I know I'm day dreaming. But, wouldn't it be
nice to give MS a dose of its own medicine?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they will. If they value their time and the book enough. Even if a laser printed copy of a downloadable is cheaper by a few dollars from the press-printed book, I strongly believe that most people would still go for the convenience and quality of the latter. Why?
Well, 10 dollars is certainly worth much less than the time that I have to spend printing, collating and having the book bound professionally. I would rather pay the extra ten bucks and avoid the aggravation. So, yes, there will be a market for open books for as long as the value of the book is much greater than the cost of buying it.
As I see it, open books will revolutionize the industry in the following way.
You may find the following article article very interesting.
I think some large companies divide the root password
into halves and each half is given to a sysadmin.
That way, in order to make changes to system
configurations, at least two sysadmins are needed.
No one person can install anything in the
middle of the night.
I don't know how widespread this procedure is
but I think it does put one more hurdle to
a malicious BOFH like the article mentioned.
And it is easy to make generalizations if one is unknowledgeable about the history of Palestine. I think you should read this in order to understand the roots of the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Keep this in mind: In the beginning of the 20th century only one person in 10 living in Palestine is a Jew. Now it is exactly reversed.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Palestinians: you have no american supplied F-16s, no Merkava tanks, no way of waging a Geneva Convention type war. How are you going to fight for your beliefs, your people and your history? Is it a wonder that the only way a desperate people can fight is through suicide bombings?
Please do not immediately label me an anti-semitic. I do not hate Jews, but I do deplore how the Israeli (and specially the Sharon) government's treatment of the Palestinian problem seems to mirror the way Hitler treated the Jewish problem. One has only to read Israeli newspapers to realize that many Israelis themselves are aware of these and actually criticize their own government.
I know many Jews here will agree with me. The problem with Israel is that it is not a nation of Israelis but a Jewish state. For as long as the Israeli government refuses to make itself into a truly representative, truly non-discriminatory nation it will continue to hold the entire world hostage to its ailment.
The paper cited above is interesting as it shows what some computer scientists think about the difficulty of a computer playing ever playing go. However, to put it in proper perspective it should also be remembered that before the 1980's computer scientists and chess players are also of the belief that computers cannot be made to play chess. What a difference two decades make!
However, let me point out the following two quotes from Burmeister and my personal opinion on these.
These two quotes show the state of Go programming today:
Point two is what most people who have an opinion on the computer chess vs computer go debate fail to consider. The fact that computers play chess by brute force searching of tries does not mean that that approach is, ergo, the only possible approach to computer go.
In fact a bit of computer chess history should dispel that notion. When researchers first tried to tackle the problem of computer chess, it was rather obvious that a brute force approach is not the ideal way to do it. The number of possible positions in chess is so huge that it is not possible to solve chess using the technology available at that time. Instead they went for the heuristic approach.
In this approach researches looked for a function Eval(p) such that given a position p, Eval(p) will evaluate whether one side is ahead or not. If Eval(p) is found, so they think, then it is possible to use a greedy algorithm to chess. The computer simply picks that position p_n where Eval(p_n) is a maximum. No need for brute force! Unfortunately Eval(p) proved intractable because of one aspect of chess: sacrifice. In a chess sacrifice, Eval(p) is screwed up by the temporary giving up of an advantage (material, or position) in order to gain a future advantage. It turned out that there is no way to program a chess computer without look-ahead. And that is essentially how all computer's today play chess, by brute force lookahead coupled with other heuristics.
The state of computer go is not yet that advanced for either me or anyone to say for certainty that there is no Eval(p) for go. But if, as I suspect (let's just say it's a gambler's gut-feeling reinforced, in fact, by a reading of Burmeister plus the fact that go stones cannot move and thus their present fixed position must contribute to Eval(p)) there is in fact an Eval(p) for go, then go will prove to be easier to program than chess.
All the above is my opinion only. There goes my karma.
I keep hearing about how go is much more difficult for a computer to play than is chess. The number of possible moves in go has nothing to do with its difficulty. Computer scientists have been trying to teach computers to play chess for at least half a century and it is only now that computers have become powerful enough and for the theory to advance enough that computers can hold the world chess champion to a tie. Go has not been analyzed and picked apart enough for us to say that it us much more difficult than chess.
Go has the advantage that you start with a bare board. In chess, the game always starts the same way. A computer that has in its memory a century's worth of master games should be at a distinct advantage. The fact that chess engines with million game databases can only manage a tie against a good human champion means computers have barely scratched the surface of chess. When a computer can beat Kasparov at fischer-random chess, I will concede.
Perhaps with the belief among computer chess researchers that chess has been solved will Go soon undergo the same nitpicking that chess has. My bet is that it will prove to be even easier than chess.
Here's why I think so.
setuid and setgid are not perfect and the recent spate of Linux vulnerabilities certainly speaks of the need for improvements in this area. My point is that doing away with setuid and setgid and replacing it with per system call access privileges does not seem to be the right way to increase security.
With Posix (and Linux, which is Posix compliant) it is already possible for an application to drop it's privileges. This solves the problem of an application running its entire life as root. With the posix compliant call to setuid, an application can be setuid root only for as long as it needs to access privileged resources and can drop those privileges once it no longer needs to be root.
However, the above article talks about an application elevating its privileges and for the kernel to grant that privilege on a system call basis. The article is short on the details but elevating the privileges of an application is certainly a very dangerous process. If an application asks the kernel to elevate its privileges, how is the kernel to decide if it should grant that request? My mind-set tells me that it should check the effective user id of the running process but then isn't this setuid and setgid again? If the kernel will grant this request by checking a list of applications that is allowed to do this, then how is this different from a kernel checking if an application is owned by root?
I have stated my preferences for chroot jails and for a good reason. Once a system is cracked, the intruder can do with the filesystem as much as he pleases. At least with chroot jails, the intruder is restricted to the chroot directory and cleaning up the mess is easier. Yes, I know this is not a cure but I think the idea of jailing applications to a particular environment is a good idea.
I am an old hand so my mind has petrified with an imprint of the old ways of doing things. I could be wrong, but until I am fully convinced, I will be among the voices that express caution at the idea of throwing away setuid and setgid.
Just my half cent.
how is this better than setuid, setgid? At least with setuid and setgid, control over system privileges is given on a per-application basis. With this per-system call method, the kernel somehow has to track each system call made by an application and grant or refuse privileges on some basis. (On what basis is unclear from the article.) This seems like a lot of data for a kernel to keep track of, considering the number of system calls a typical unix kernel has.
Though I believe improvements to setuid, setgid is needed, per system call access privileges don't seem to be the right approach. I would much rather go with chroot jails for each application.
Stallman is correct. Bitkeeper is a proprietary product
produced by a commercial company and that commercial
company has the legal means (whether right or not)
to suddenly change their license terms.
I quite understand Linus' and Rik's aversion to
puritanical arguments against their use of proprietary
products when such proprietary products keep
them productive.
McVoy is a good guy as far as the
Linux kernel hackers are concerned, but what will
happen if a certain Mr. Bill Gates offers
loads of cash to Mr. McVoy for his company?
Steve: Hey Bill, do I have a deal for you.
Bill: Yeah?
Steve: What do you say to spending just a little over
50 million dollars to derail Linux development
on its tracks?
This is an interesting problem. However, my belief is
that the different versions of glibc is not to blame
but rather the different
versions of
that are the culprit.
If you can somehow make the
the same across the compiling machines you shouldn't have any
problem. Note however that
kernel that were used to compile glibc.
Failure to realize this is often the cause of
many compilation problems.
PS. I am not a Kernel Hacker so please take my observation
with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Don't be too harsh. Unlike you, the article actually gave me a bit of deja-vu. It was like the feeling I had when I was 15 years old and for the first time the gibberish ... err.. source code in K&R
suddenly made sense. It was a wonderful feeling! An
AHA moment!
I want more of this!
Of course! I think no one in his right mind expects a three part explanation of a single brief to substitute for three years of law and several more years of experience. The author of the article is only interested in letting tech-geeks get a peek into an important and upcoming legal tussle whose outcome affects us tremendously.
Think of it as the legal equivalent of a three day MCSE Seminar. Except in this case, lawmeme doesn't give you a fancy certificate and doesn't even dangle you the illusion you are now a ``software engineer.''
It's a damn great article and I found myself enjoying it. I can't believe it is quite possible for lawyers to be so logical.
I'm late to this discussion so you may not be able to read this but speaking as a professional programmer but not necessarily a graphics expert.
(I am using blender as an example here but I am sure there are other packages out there where source code is available and which you can extend or experiment with.) If you want to have something that you can and will use, you have to take this approach.
But then, what kind of a hacker does not like a challenge? I can only advise the following:
Surround sound is a great idea!!
I can put in a recording I made with
help from the good people of Scientology
and pretty soon, my workers won't need
to eat lunch, won't need coffee and
would be very happy with the pay
they are getting.
Surround sound would surely boost
productivity, and reduce
costs in any office!
IANAL but, Really? Then you are getting yourself into trouble.
A photographer has no right to publish pictures or portraits
without the permission of the person in the picture or portrait.
That is why there is such a thing as a model release form.
Even when a playboy or penthouse magazine photographer takes photographs
of a model paid professionally, the model still has
to sign the release. So how can a photographer or an artist
have rights
to a picture for which he (or she) has been paid to create?
By all rights the client has the right to the image.
The only case where a photographer is allowed to publish
a portrait (or picture) is when the person in the picture
is a public figure. The reason being that publishing
the picture is covered under the freedom granted
to journalists.
In another post, you or someone else reasoned that
since you applied your skills (lighting, posings, etc)
to create the image then by all rights you own the image
you have taken. But, the client owns the wedding and
has paid for the location, therefore the client has paid
for the means by which you have created your work. The clients
money allowed you to create the work. So the location and
the event is the client's IP. Right? Think about it.
There was a time when the US passed a
law restricting exports of ``supercomputers''
to certain countries. Unfortunately, whether
a computer is super or not was decided by
technically incompetent desk clerks at the
Bureau of Customs. Even the lowly IBM PC
was declared a supercomputer that PC manufacturers
had to go through hoops in order to export
their products.
Eventually, Intel and the other manufacturers
did the sensible thing and
sent their manufacturing facilities
overseas, thus skirting the problem.
A similar situation can occur in the case
of the DMCA. If the DMCA caused
technological leadership to
ship overseas, I think congress would sit
up and rethink the DMCA.
For example, academics can start the wave
by moving all conferences related to
computer security and encryption overseas,
say to Canada or Japan. (Now that would be
delicious!) In fact, to make a point, all
electrical engineering conferences should be
moved to Japan because then there would
be no problem of anyone ever inadvertently
violating the DMCA simply because
one attended a seminar on the electrical properties
of a computer bus, or learned the specific
frequencies that satellite broadcasters used
to broadcast cable channels. (Hey, that knowledge
can be used to build a satellite tuner, thus
violating the IP of the poor content providers!)
Eventually MIT, Stanford, Harvard et al, could partner
with Universities overseas so that US professors
could accomplish their research there; safe from
the good fellas at the State and Justice Departments.
As you engineers out there know, it is possible
to determine the encryption algorithms of
satellite broadcasts through the use of
a an illegal device called the spectrum analyzer.
Hey, Mr. Justice Department, do you know how many
spectrum analyzers there are in MIT?
Throughout the 1980's a lot of companies
staked their reputations and resources in their
efforts to produce intelligent software. The next great
advance is just around the corner, so they say.
Intelligent and knowledge-based software
will herald a revolution in the way humans use
and interact with software. Software will no longer be
like automatons mindlessly following the same code recipe
again and again, instead they shall be able to think
and reason.
Of course none of it happened. AI became a disappointment
and such a failure that the very same companies
that touted their AI and knowledge-based software
very soon tried hard to avoid any association
of their products with AI.
My question is: why should we even care about AI now?
For all we know, we might be repeating the
same false hopes and wrong turns that happened 20 years ago. Perhaps
there is indeed something in humans that just cannot be
duplicated by a machine.
What makes you think that a real thinking machine
is indeed possible and that AI is a subject
worthy of consideration and study?
Nope, I haven't read the tome yet.
But from the review and my previous
acquaintance with cellular automata, I can say this,
Mr. Wolfram confuses the model with
the real thing.
Attach a brush daubed with paint
on a cow's tail, and the flicking tail would
paint pretty pictures on a canvas.
Some of them may even look like
flowers, or grass, or birds hurtling
through the sky, or molten lava
churning in a lava dome.
The fact the pictures look
like what they look like doesn't mean
that's how those objects were created.
Mr Wolfram creates interesting patterns
with his cellular automatons. Now he
claims that cellular automatons are
the process through which nature creates
everything we see. He is arrogant in
his belief of his correctness,
he calls his theory a
``A New Kind of Science.''
Perhaps, I'll read the book someday.
But right now, I'm working on my new
theory of Cosmology. And it has something
to do with a flicking tail.
Several years ago, IBM introduced the OS/2
operating system. It was supposed to be so
stable that it cannot crash. Microsoft
destroyed that notion via a simple
expedient: a team of MS programmers worked
a whole day and night and created a terminator
disk: a disk which contains software that
crashes OS/2. It was a simple and effective
counterfoil. With a single stroke, Microsoft
demolished the claims IBM made about the
stability of OS/2
Now Microsoft, through ADTI, has made a claim
that the very nature of open source makes
it vulnerable to cracking. Microsoft had
at least since 2000 to make good on that
claim. So you experts from ADTI, answer me
this: Where is the terminator software?
Where is this software or technique that allows
you to crack any and all open-source
software?
One has to think that with all the propaganda
and FUD MS is spreading about open source
security, they should at least have
some proof. Microsoft, a company that
has recruited some of the best programmers
out there is unable to crack Linux.
How could they? MS is in a catch-22 situation
here. If they do find an exploit, they
would have to publish it, and publishing it
effectively allows the OS community
to patch and improve the system.
They will always lose whatever they
do. That's why they are doing this
FUD tactics.
I don't know. It seems to me that looks have as much to do
with the selection as anything. Remember that these planes
won't be placed in a museum to be gawked at by a wondering
crowd. These planes will be flown by 19 year old jocks who
will want to be photographed in front of their fighters
and will have posters of these planes pinned on their
walls. Would you want to be seen flying one of those pelican
like things? Don't forget the psychological effect these
would have on their morale. Fighters are not called
Tomcat, Eagle, and Falcon without reason.
(Pelican? Naaah.)
In an article in Physics Today that I have read years
ago in college, the author wondered why objects designed with
utility and efficiency in mind often end up looking beautiful.
The fighter plane is a very visible example of this
phenomenon. Fighters are designed to have a low aerodynamic
cross-section, to be able to carry armaments and to house
a pilot. Even with these demands uppermost, fighters turn
out to be sleek, beautiful and frightening beasts.
The Boeing design is very strange-looking. The air intake
is so huge I bet it could gulp a dozen pelicans with one
snort. Even if the plane stays up in the air, can you imagine
how disgusted the maintenance crew will be? How would it perform
in the rain? With so much water pouring into the
engines, wouldn't it have an effect on its efficiency?
If you have one of these parked on an aircraft carrier,
how many times would seagulls see the gaping hole
as a chance to relieve their bowels?
Considerations (or trolls if you wish) like my previous paragraph will
surely have an effect on the selection process. And
all because the aircraft looks ugly. Besides, did it ever occur
to you that the Lockheed design performs better therefore
it looks better?
I don't think there are plastic fighters out there.
Plastic may be light but it has a very low melting
temperature. A plastic fighter will probably disintegrate
above Mach 1. Ceramic maybe, but not plastic.
The escape of Osama Bin Laden and the invisibility
of the Abu Sayyaff in the jungles of the Philippines
show one thing. No amount of high tech weaponry
and no surfeit of surveillance equipment can beat
a human on the ground. After several months of
scrutinizing the tiny island of Basilan, using
satellites, aircraft and what not, no trace
of the kidnapped Burnhams have been detected.
The Abu Sayyaff and their hostages have effectively
vanished.
As the US Marine Corps continues to progress
towards its vision of the modern warrior, I
hope it remembers that human brains and
courage is still more valuable than all the
modern technology in the world.
I beg to differ.
Open source office suites are already as easy to use as Office.
In fact, most Microsofties, (including Joel Spolsky), tend
to argue from the other side: That OS office suites are already
as easy to use as MS Office but not as full featured.
If the observations of the articles are correct, then lack of
features will not be a deterrent to the success of the open office
suites because 99% of all users don't use all the features of
MS Office anyway.
already installed on 96 or so percent of personal computers,
MS has decided to set their sights elsewhere: the enterprise
arena which is traditionally dominated by the Unices. If
the article can be taken as a guide, we would expect that
MS would concentrate less and less on the personal desktop space,
thus allowing the disruptive open source suites to
eventually capture that segment of the market.
a successfull strategy in the enterprise arena because
their management culture was forged on the personal
desktop arena. For example, enterprises are less
interested in ease of use as they are in reliability,
security, flexibility and scalability. The very things
that Unix is well known for. As every body knows, Microsoft
products are known more for their ease of use than for
anything else and in fact made a huge business out of
user friendliness.
The only way MSFT can successfully
attack the enterprise arena is to create
a disruptive technology of their own.
Unfortunately, it is Linux and Open Source that has
provided the disruptive technology in this space.
In conclusion, Open Source (not necessarily Linux)
will rule the waves.
OK, this is a troll. But I had to get it out
of my system. I for one am, not falling under the
spell of this ``futuristic geodesic dome'' mantra.
The first time I heard about Mr. Buckminster Fuller
several years ago I was almost convinced that
the messiah of modern architecture had at last
walked the planet. He is a ``visionary'', a ``genius'',
the great pooh-bah, he invented or
discovered the geodesic dome.
Yeah right, a sphere made up of triangles. So what?
It's been known at least from the time of the
ancient Egyptians that the triangle is a very
rigid structure. Mr. Fuller applied the principle
to the sphere and suddenly he is a genius?
He even got a molecular configuration named
after him. What's next?, an element named
buckminsterfullerium?
A post above me even claims that Mr. Fuller's
geodesic dome led to advances in chemistry.
Now, that is one huge leap of progress
in the impending deification of Mr. Fuller, I say.
Well kiddo, let me be the devil's advocate.
Just what did Mr. Fuller come up with that
can compare with
that deserves all this adulation he is
getting?
Walmart's selling of OS-less computers is a good thing --- but only if Linux can take advantage of it.
I came away from reading the article with the feeling that unless improvements to ease of installation of Linux is forthcoming, Walmart may soon be forced to end its ``experiment.'' While the writer's experience during his test was satisfactory, the non-activation of the modem prevented it from being perfect. Any consumer buying these machines with the intent of ``trying out linux'' may be queueing for a disappointment.
May I suggest that RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE send a technical team to Walmart with the express aim of training the technical and sales people of Walmart on how to choose components so that the installation of Linux will then be brainless? The training should be done gratis. The financial payback will come when enough consumers are able to take the linux plunge successfully.
I have a crazy idea. Since Samba is probably used by many Microsoft-oriented shops too, why can't the Samba Team embrace and extend the CIFS protocol? This would be a two pronged attack. One of the prongs would be the Samba Team which will extend the CIFS protocol and publish it under the GPL. The other prong will be a group that will write win32 applications that will take advantage of the Samba extensions to the CIFS and distribute the app for free. Since the OSS community numbers in the thousands at least, this would be very straightforward to accomplish.
I wonder what Microsoft will do if the Samba extensions to the CIFS become a de-facto standard? When is the next iteration of Windows anyway? Right now could be a window of opportunity just opening up.
Sigh, I know I'm day dreaming. But, wouldn't it be nice to give MS a dose of its own medicine?