An allergist is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of allergies, specifically as a preventative against life threatening allergiec reactions, e.g. anaphylactic shock.
Allergic reactions are reactions to substances with particular protein coats, which an allergic persons immune system responds to, and, as one of the effects, manufactures a chemical called histamine. Generally, this is the result of the immune system over-generalizing, and mistaking the substance for the protein coat of an invading virus or bacterium.
People with food allergies to e.g. peanuts, tree nuts, legumes, etc. will often *die* if they eat these substances. This is why foods with certain allergens, such as peanuts, are required to be labelled, even if it is only manufactured in a facility that also handles peanuts (accidents happen; then people die).
The threat of dying is usually enough to keep people with food allergies from eating things which will kill them.
Since different people with food allergies die from different foods or combinations of foods, they make an ideal test bed for what elimination of certain foods and combinations of foods from ones diet mean to attributes like body weight, etc..
It's very easy to eliminate people who do not rigidly follow elimination of specific foods from their diet, once you know this.
Just don't include anyone in the study, if they are already dead.
It's not about the bandwidth used. That's just a red herring. And it's not about "theft of services": they are being paid for their services. And it's not about bandwidth or transfer caps: many companies already enforce them anyway.
We all know that, eventually, as soon as someone deploys a directory service capable of handling it, circuit switched telephony, along with the long distance carrier charges that are based on the source and destination nodes for your VOIP packets, will go away. And so will the revenue model based on distance between endpoints, as the carriers are commoditized into fat packet-pipes.
So... I rather expect that the cable people are more concerned with the 17 other apartments within 300 feet of yours that get wireless access without paying them $$$, than they are with roaming wireless hordes.
They are facing the same problem than the long distance carriers face with IP telephony: there has been a technological sea change that will require them to go from charging for the source/destination of a packet to charging for the pipe size.
They are being commoditized, and they don't like it. Well, "welcome to consumer driven demand for a conversion to packet switched networks".
In other words, it's about a reduction in total market size. They want the market to be as big as possible, and for that to happen and ppermit them to maximize revenues, they have to achieve the same market penetration.
As supporting evidence, I'll offer the following:
They aren't going after people who leave their curtains open while they watch HBO on their big screen TV visable, and often audible, from the sidewalk in front of the house.
They also aren't going after the little 2.4GHz television repeaters. They aren't being bashed because cable television run out through one is circuit switched by channel: it's unlikely that all of your neighbors will want to watch "Attack of the Zombie Bimbos" (unless you live in a Fraternity House). So they end up buying cable so they can change the channel.
Of course you agree with them: it's *your* customers who would be getting the free wireless access, so it's *your* market that's eroded by them not paying *you* for what they get for free.
There are plenty of non-corn products. They are just not easy to find in a typical supermarket. Only a tiny percentage of food does not have corn in it, in one form or another.
You can even eat "very fattening" things, e.g.: "Mother's Old Fashioned Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies", Many types of Ben & Jerry's and Hagen Daas Ice Cream, even frozen pizza (any Tony's "Original Crust" pizza), Snyder's Pretzels, Potato chips cooked in peanut oil or Olestra (e.g. "Ruffles WoW"), etc..
"With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's."
Gee.
That's the same time we went from granulated sugar as a sweetener to High Fructose Corn Syrup, because it was easier for the food industry to deal with liquid rather than powdered supplies; welcome to "Old Coke"/"New Coke"/"Old Coke But Not Really".
At the same time, we went from peanut and palm kernel oil to... corn oil ("and/or corn oil" on a label means "whatever's cheapest, and it's always corn").
Try and find a food product in the grocery store today without corn oil/corn meal/corn starch/corn syrup/corn syrup solids/corn/corn/corn.
And just what is it that we feed to cows and pigs to fatten them up?...corn?
Try an experiment: weigh yourself. Then, for one month, read the labels on everything you buy; and if it has corn products in it... don't buy it. Then weigh yourself again after the one month is up. If you lose weight, please send me the money you would have sent to Dr. Atkins... 8-).
It turns out that all this fuss is over nothing... it seems that it was just Verisign sending out another one of those fradulent "renewal notices". You think people would have learned to read the fine print on the back, by now...
A bunch of Open Source people arguing about usability, when it's clear that Open Source projects can't productize code to save their lives?
Having been on both sides of the fence here, it's undeniable that Open Source volunteers rarely volunteer effort on boring code like that necessary for usability. About the closest thing to it are the vendors like Red Hat, which pay people to do the unsexy work, and most of that's pointed at installers.
This article declaring uasability undesirable won't make it so...
The problem you are complaining about profiling having is that it can't profile threaded programs. Don't write threaded programs, and the problem is solved.
Frankly, I've always considered threading useful for only a few situations:
o When you have an SMP system, and you need to scale your applicaiton to multiple CPUs so that you can throw hardware at the problem instead of solving it the right way
o When you have programmers who can't write finite state automata, because they don't understand computer science, and should really be asking "Would you like fries with that?" somewhere, instead of cranking out code
o When your OS doesn't support async I/O, and you need to interleave your I/O in order to achieve better virtual concurrency
Other than those situations, threads don't make a lot of sense: you have all this extra context switching overhead, and you have all sorts of other problems -- like an iniability to reasonably profile the code with a statistical profiler.
OK... Whew! Boy do I feel better! 8-).
Statistically examining the PC, unless it's done on a per thread basis, is just a waste of time in threaded programs.
If you want to solve the profiling problem for threaded programs, then you need to go to non-statistical profiling. This requires compiler support. The compiler needs to call a profile_enter and profile_exit for each function, with the thread ID as one of the arguments. THis lets you create an arc-list per thread ID, and seperately deal with the profiling, as if you has written the threads as seperate programs. It also catches out inter-thread stalls.
You asked: "Why do today's software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it?".
That's the wrong question: they don't expect that.
What they expect is that they will be able to fire up their new toy" and have it be usable. That's a *lot* different then expecting to "have a complete understanding of how to use it".
And the answer to the real question is "because they paid good money for the thing, it should do what it says it does without me having to wave a dead chicken over it".
http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/2000/0817-decision. pd f
I don't understand why 2600 attempted to argue the definition of "effectively" as the layman's definition, instead of arguing that the ability to play DVD's on computers at all, with other software permitted by the Plaintiffs, means that CSS does not effectively control the ability to copy (etc.) the material.
I also don't understand why they did not argue this on the basis of the existance of the ability to make verbatim copies of DVD discs indicates that the CSS mechanism is in fact flawed by design, and therefore does not effectively control (etc.).
Finally, I don't understand that they did not argue that the keys used by DeCSS were in fact the important part of the equation, and the DeCSS itself was not therefore a mechanism, without the keys, and that it was the keys, not the scrambling mechanism itself, which constitute the disclosure. That would imply that the keys were trade secrets... and anyone who followed the USL vs. BSDI and UC Berkeley case back in the early 1990's should be able to tell you that, once disclosed, a trade secret is no longer a trade secret.
I have great respect for the Mandrake Linux, or any other Linux distribution, for that matter. Making a distribution of any software is hard, and an OS is more complex than most.
But Mandrake is missing the boat... and so is United Linux.
In Mandrake's FAQ entry, explaining why they have decided not to participate in United Linux, they state:
"Since all distributors use the same base
components, there are relatively few binary
incompatibility issues. And even when a
binary compatibility problem arises, it's
easy to recompile an application for a given
Linux distribution."
and they claim:
"It is extremely hard for us to understand
why some software publishers and hardware
manufacturers only support one Linux
distribution."
To me, the answer is obvious: a third party developer would have to not only internally certify their software for support purposes, but it would have to also maintain seperate SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) for each of the Linux versions on which it runs. For commercial applications, "recompile" is not as easy as the act itself. It's clear, these people have never produced a third party shrink-wrapped packaged software product intended to run on a UNIX system.
The intent of United Linux is to try and make it possible for a manufacturer to build shrink-wrapped product that they can know will run on any United Linux labelled platform.
But here, United Linux must fail, as the LSB has failed.
In the original UNIX Wars (of which I am a battle-scarred veteran), the problem was that each distribution of UNIX, even for the same processor family, was "standard plus extensions". Each vendor tried to provide "value add"... and, in doing that, they introduced incompatability between nominally standards compliant platforms.
So paying lip-service to a standard gets you nowhere. The LSB gets you nowhere, and POSIX gets you nowhere. You may be able to compile the same source code on each of these platforms, and, if you are lucky, and did not need to use any platform proprietary information to build your product, it may run without errors. But all you've achieved with this is source compatability.
The LSB doesn't give you binary compatability, and neither does United Linux. And it won't, even if they specify the ABI, even to the point of install tools and other minutia, like IBCS2 did (and neither BSD nor Linux has *full* IBCS2 compliance, until the IBCS2 installation and packaging tools also work -- it's not *just* the ABI, it's the environment).
Why will United Linux fail, since that's what I'm leading up to?
United Linux will fail because it's not possible to *turn off* the vendor "value add".
This seems counter-intuitive at first, but it's a fact. It's the same reason the LSB has failed to deliver on the same promise. And it's the same reason UNIX was never able to be defragmented, when everyone started using Intel processors and commodity PC hardware. Here is the reason:
Standard plus extensions is inherently non-standard.
Let me repeat that:
Standard plus extensions is inherently non-standard.
Until it's possible to turn off *everything* that isn't covered by a standard, it will be impossible for a third party developer to build something that they *know* will run on all platforms that conform to the standard.
Linux vendors: if you want to become the #1 developement platform for United Linux, then strip out everything that isn't covered by the definition of United Linux.
That -- and only that! -- will guarantee that any program that runs on your platform will run on any United Linux platform.
It will guarantee that there is no possibility of a third party developer accidently using a vendor specific extension (OK: "enhancement", but we know that it's really there for vendor lock-in).
It will also make you a commodity.
*This* is what the vendors in the UNIX Wars feared, and refused to let happen. And, in doing that, they lost all the third party development resources to Windows, which *was* a commodity, even if it was one only because of the Microsoft Monopoly.
Will this happen? Will the Linux Vendors wake up to the fact that they nust agree to *commoditize themselves*? Probably not. It's a lot easier for Caldera or Mandrake or Red Hat to compete among themselves, and try and beat each other down, than it is for them to try and take on Microsoft.
So Mandrake... you're avoiding doing the wrong thing by not participating in United Linux, given it's current vender differentiation model permitting vendor lock-in of third party developers.
*But*... you are doing it for the wrong reasons, and as long as you stick to your guns, you aren't going to be doing the right thing for the right reasons, either.
"The point is that he is not supposed to have to go through that route"...
We don't have the history. It may be that he asked the Audit Committee instead of the full board, so he asked the wrong people. If I send a driver's license renewal into the Secretary of State for the state, I will be lucky to get a response at all, whereas if I send it into th DMV, I'm much more likely to get what I set out to get.
The real question is how was he asking, in such as way that the request was denied by this committee.
The name of the committee, the "Audit Committee", is somewhat of a giveaway as to what he was asking about the information: he appears to have wanted an audit.
In any event, it will be very hard to get a court to order the release of records that ICANN claims he can have by asking the right people.
The implication in the story is that the company -- not the Audit Comittee of the Board of Directors -- denied the request. But in Vint Cerf's statement #2, it's clearly implied that it was a subset of the Board of Directors that denied the request.
If I were in Vint Cerf's shoes, with a fiduciary responsibility to the company, and, I'll presume, a desire to See The Right Thing Happen, I could make it no clearer without legal risk. To me, he is saying:
"Mr. Auerbach, PLEASE request full ICANN Board
review of the Audit Committee's determination
regarding the arrangements for your inspection
of the corporate records, pursuant to Section
6 of the ICANN Inspection Procedures, so that
I can help you."
It's nearly impossible for me to read this any other way.
Some people have suggested "Microsoft"; others have suggested "Larry Ellison"; still others have suggested various X-Box competitors, based on the idea that the hardware retails for $200 but has a COGS of $350 (are you ready to spend 1.3 times $X just to cost Microsoft $X?).
Microsoft is right out; discrediting their digital rights management scheme in place in the X-Box would be bad news for them; success in phase "B" of the project does just that.
Larry is a good guess... the deadline date is obviously there so that this can be claimed against a tax bill. But as has been pointed out, Larry is unlikely to be anonymous on purpose.
The X-Box competitor angle is also a red herring, do to the economics of trying to outspend Microsoft, at a sub-1 (.75) value multiplier for each dollar spent.
A good option might be someone competing with Microsoft for the Digital Rights Management pie. This is actually not that likely: eventually, if it works out to have value for this purpose, the hand signing the checks will become public knowledge. A failure of Microsoft in this arena will also tar anyone else trying to enter that market with the same brush of impossibility. So that dog won't hunt.
So what's left?
My odds-on favorite for this is... drumroll, please... hidden in the rule:
"To be honored, work must be submitted to the
"xbox-linux" project at Sourceforge. It is not
enough to publish information/code somewhere
else. We want people to work together, so
there has to be a central point where all work
concentrates."
That's right... Sourceforge. They get to prove that their site "works" for creating and maintaining a successful, highly visible Open Source project. They get a lot of geeks trained up on using it, and they get press release rights, among "other valuable considerations".
FWIW, here is a transcription of the statement that included the publication of Gilmore's e-mail to Vint Cerf, transcribed from the PDF image from the link linked to by the article.
It looked to me that Vint was doing everything he could legally do, to do the right thing.
----------- I, Vinton Cerf, declare:
1. I am the Chairman of the Board of Defendant Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"). I have personal knowledge of the matters set forth herein and am competent to testify to those matters. 2. Mr. Auerbach has never, pursuant to Section 6 of the ICANN Inspection Procedures, requested full ICANN Board review of the Audit Committee's determination regarding the arrangements for his inspection of the corporate records. 3. On March 18, 1002, I received an e-mail from John Gilmore, in which he asserts that he "contributed significant funding for" this lawsuit. Mr. Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization providing representation for Mr. Auerbach in this lawsuit. A true and correct copy of the e-mail from Mr. Gilmore is attached hereto as Exhibit 1.
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.
This declaration was signed on April 16, 2002 at Washington, D.C.
[ Signature ]
Vinton Cerf
[ Attached e-mail ] -----------
I seems to me that Vint is pointing out that the decision was made by a subset of the Board of Directors, the "Audit Committee". It also points out that there is recourse available to Auerbach that he has not exercised, prior to filing the lawsuit.
It also seems (to me) that the statement numbered "3" was minimal, in not drawing any conclusions based on it. Thus the "terse statement" condemnation of Vint Cerf's statement in the article isn't really a very strong condemnation; it looks to me that, by leaving out the social context, Vint allows for interpretation favorable to the case.
This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the statement numbered "2" seems to go out of its way to point out a way around the "Audit Committee", as if it were a tightly controlled minority clique of the full board, and in pointing out seems to imply success might be achievable via that route.
At the very least, Auerbach needs to try to avail himself of that route, so that if it fails, he can counter a motion for dismissal (i.e. it's arguable that this case is only a matter for the courts if all other reasonable recourse has been exhausted, which it has not been, according to this statement).
I have a very hard time believing that Vint would not have been as explicit or terse as this, were it not for the legal liability issue as the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Defendant.
I had a long response prepared, refuting you point by point, and going into detail as to how you could do all this cheaply, and how even an individual could do it, if they wanted, for around $20 a trace.
Then I thought better of it. Let people pay people to figure out how to do it, if they don't already know.
Let me point out that the biggest problem facing deployment of any technology like this is directory services. If someone owns the directory, then they own the network... that's why the phone companies don't worry about IP telephony damaging their long distance services with local-IP-IP-local hopping: endpoint identification means you'll have a hard time penetrating their markets. As long as the directory is ownable, then such solutions are not deployable.
The problem will always come down to getting to a participating node, without getting to the originating node.
If it comes down to a design discussion, this should probably be taken offline.
Going into the store with you significant other...
"Ah! Joe Johansen! Good to see you again! We just received a new batch of KY in butterscotch, your favorite flavor, according the Basking Robbins!
We know you normally buy KY down at Big Al's Porn Shoppe on 32nd, but this store is 4 blocks closer to your home, and we know how awkward it is to get those 50 gallon drums home on the public slideway! Why not have one of our friendly clerks help you out to your car with one of the store's hand-trucks? Remember, we provide free curb service, where Big Al's doesn't!
How is Millie, your Yak, by the way? Has the infection she had responded to the Penicillin you purchased two weeks ago from Bob's Veterinary Supply? Is she still down in U-Store-It Storage Unit #15? We have a co-marketing agreement with U-Store-It, where if you buy from us today, you will get 5% off your next month's rent!
The first obvious problem is that by connecting to a number of servers, I don't even need a spanning tree attack to trace the source of the broadcast; I can do it all with the latency differential, to find the "root" node.
The second obvious problem is that you can't find a broadcast source unless it's advertised, and once it's advertised, it can be found.
The third obvious problem is that, even if you solve the second obvious problem using a distribguted naming service and... for lack of a better name for it... "AntiBGP", you still have the problem of being able to use differential to find the source of the inital advertisement.
The fourth obvious problem is that you can find the source through traffic analysis: it's the one without an equal number of packets in and out.
Something like this can only ever be effective with a distributed flood-fill model, where you can trust your nearest neighbor, or your nearest neighbor doesn't actually know what he has. Effectively, this means that you have to go to a store-and-forward model, use hard crypto on the interconnects, and then generate bogus traffic to avoid analysis.
At that point, you would have to find a legitimate an legal use for the network before deploying it, or you are minimally an accessory before the fact and/or involved in a conspiracy to commit. If they can point at your node in the network and prove intent, then you are screwed.
"BlackNet" is really unsuitable for streaming data.
Do they allow the indexing of the content by web spiders?
Are we going to get search engines polluted with "hits" for which registration is required in order to view the pages?
If so, how long before we have browsers that pretend they are spiders?
How long before search engines are mostly useless without a Microsoft Passport so you can follow the links search engines return, without explicit sign-on?
"I live in Asia but I read the nytimes nearly daily."
We know. You've accumulated a total subversive index of 173.
But don't worry; we only send the men in trenchcoats after you if your rolling average goes over 60; the highest *your* rolling monthly average has ever gotten is 23, on May 17, 2002.
Since your demographic information indicates that you are not employed as a teacher, there's no need to worry about a high quarterly rolling average landing you in a reeducation camp, but for your own sake, I'd really recommend reading fewer articles on labor unions, until after Monday.
All of you people talking about removing/subverting/ignoring/legally challenging/etc. the EULA are ignoring an important fact.
It doesn't *matter* if you legally accept the terms of the EULA or not, since those terms merely spell out *how the software will operate anyway*.
Say there is a magic "Get out of EULA Free" card that came with your Microsoft Monopoly game.
Say you use it.
That's not going to stop the software from disabling other software on your machine, interfering with its operation in a supposed attempt to ensure "Digital Rights" are observed, or installing other components into your OS automatically, without asking you for permission.
The software *doesn't know from EULA*.
In other words, you can debate the legality all you want, but that's not going to change how the code operates, once it has been installed on your machine.
-- Terry
Help! I've fallen, and I can't sign up!
on
Can You Hear Me Now?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"Help! I've fallen, and I can't sign up!"
...for a new long distance service, until you rescue me from this cliff...
Yeah, it's annoying when a web catalog business pretends to be a search engine, but instead of returning "best match" returns "catalog item #53715".
With the current state of affairs, you have something that looks like a gas station, is labelled like a gas station, has credit-card operated pumps like a gas station, and, after you insert your credit card, pump a tank full, get billed, and go to start your car, you find out they are actually selling chocolate syrup, but pretending it's gas, because no one wants to buy chocolate syrup.
I think that this is as necessary as the little label bars with "Advertisement" in them above and below fake magazine articles in magazines these days.
Slashdot Mirror
An allergist is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of allergies, specifically as a preventative against life threatening allergiec reactions, e.g. anaphylactic shock.
Allergic reactions are reactions to substances with particular protein coats, which an allergic persons immune system responds to, and, as one of the effects, manufactures a chemical called histamine. Generally, this is the result of the immune system over-generalizing, and mistaking the substance for the protein coat of an invading virus or bacterium.
People with food allergies to e.g. peanuts, tree nuts, legumes, etc. will often *die* if they eat these substances. This is why foods with certain allergens, such as peanuts, are required to be labelled, even if it is only manufactured in a facility that also handles peanuts (accidents happen; then people die).
The threat of dying is usually enough to keep people with food allergies from eating things which will kill them.
Since different people with food allergies die from different foods or combinations of foods, they make an ideal test bed for what elimination of certain foods and combinations of foods from ones diet mean to attributes like body weight, etc..
It's very easy to eliminate people who do not rigidly follow elimination of specific foods from their diet, once you know this.
Just don't include anyone in the study, if they are already dead.
8-).
-- Terry
It's not about the bandwidth used. That's just a red herring. And it's not about "theft of services": they are being paid for their services. And it's not about bandwidth or transfer caps: many companies already enforce them anyway.
We all know that, eventually, as soon as someone deploys a directory service capable of handling it, circuit switched telephony, along with the long distance carrier charges that are based on the source and destination nodes for your VOIP packets, will go away. And so will the revenue model based on distance between endpoints, as the carriers are commoditized into fat packet-pipes.
So... I rather expect that the cable people are more concerned with the 17 other apartments within 300 feet of yours that get wireless access without paying them $$$, than they are with roaming wireless hordes.
They are facing the same problem than the long distance carriers face with IP telephony: there has been a technological sea change that will require them to go from charging for the source/destination of a packet to charging for the pipe size.
They are being commoditized, and they don't like it. Well, "welcome to consumer driven demand for a conversion to packet switched networks".
In other words, it's about a reduction in total market size. They want the market to be as big as possible, and for that to happen and ppermit them to maximize revenues, they have to achieve the same market penetration.
As supporting evidence, I'll offer the following:
They aren't going after people who leave their curtains open while they watch HBO on their big screen TV visable, and often audible, from the sidewalk in front of the house.
They also aren't going after the little 2.4GHz television repeaters. They aren't being bashed because cable television run out through one is circuit switched by channel: it's unlikely that all of your neighbors will want to watch "Attack of the Zombie Bimbos" (unless you live in a Fraternity House). So they end up buying cable so they can change the channel.
-- Terry
Of course you agree with them: it's *your* customers who would be getting the free wireless access, so it's *your* market that's eroded by them not paying *you* for what they get for free.
-- Terry
Find an allergist.
;^)).
Ask him or her about the relative weights of their patients vis-a-vis food allergies of different types, including corn.
Be enlightened (and lightened
-- Terry
There are plenty of non-corn products. They are just not easy to find in a typical supermarket. Only a tiny percentage of food does not have corn in it, in one form or another.
You can even eat "very fattening" things, e.g.: "Mother's Old Fashioned Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies", Many types of Ben & Jerry's and Hagen Daas Ice Cream, even frozen pizza (any Tony's "Original Crust" pizza), Snyder's Pretzels, Potato chips cooked in peanut oil or Olestra (e.g. "Ruffles WoW"), etc..
Just "no corn".
-- Terry
Do I have to let everyone come sit in my living room when it's hot outside?
-- Terry
"With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's."
...corn?
Gee.
That's the same time we went from granulated sugar as a sweetener to High Fructose Corn Syrup, because it was easier for the food industry to deal with liquid rather than powdered supplies; welcome to "Old Coke"/"New Coke"/"Old Coke But Not Really".
At the same time, we went from peanut and palm kernel oil to... corn oil ("and/or corn oil" on a label means "whatever's cheapest, and it's always corn").
Try and find a food product in the grocery store today without corn oil/corn meal/corn starch/corn syrup/corn syrup solids/corn/corn/corn.
And just what is it that we feed to cows and pigs to fatten them up?
Try an experiment: weigh yourself. Then, for one month, read the labels on everything you buy; and if it has corn products in it... don't buy it. Then weigh yourself again after the one month is up. If you lose weight, please send me the money you would have sent to Dr. Atkins... 8-).
-- Terry
It turns out that all this fuss is over nothing... it seems that it was just Verisign sending out another one of those fradulent "renewal notices". You think people would have learned to read the fine print on the back, by now...
-- Terry
Anyone else find this incredibly ironic?
A bunch of Open Source people arguing about usability, when it's clear that Open Source projects can't productize code to save their lives?
Having been on both sides of the fence here, it's undeniable that Open Source volunteers rarely volunteer effort on boring code like that necessary for usability. About the closest thing to it are the vendors like Red Hat, which pay people to do the unsexy work, and most of that's pointed at installers.
This article declaring uasability undesirable won't make it so...
-- Terry
Don't use threads.
The problem you are complaining about profiling having is that it can't profile threaded programs. Don't write threaded programs, and the problem is solved.
Frankly, I've always considered threading useful for only a few situations:
o When you have an SMP system, and you need to scale your applicaiton to multiple CPUs so that you can throw hardware at the problem instead of solving it the right way
o When you have programmers who can't write finite state automata, because they don't understand computer science, and should really be asking "Would you like fries with that?" somewhere, instead of cranking out code
o When your OS doesn't support async I/O, and you need to interleave your I/O in order to achieve better virtual concurrency
Other than those situations, threads don't make a lot of sense: you have all this extra context switching overhead, and you have all sorts of other problems -- like an iniability to reasonably profile the code with a statistical profiler.
OK... Whew! Boy do I feel better! 8-).
Statistically examining the PC, unless it's done on a per thread basis, is just a waste of time in threaded programs.
If you want to solve the profiling problem for threaded programs, then you need to go to non-statistical profiling. This requires compiler support. The compiler needs to call a profile_enter and profile_exit for each function, with the thread ID as one of the arguments. THis lets you create an arc-list per thread ID, and seperately deal with the profiling, as if you has written the threads as seperate programs. It also catches out inter-thread stalls.
-- Terry
You asked: "Why do today's software and consumer electronics users expect to be able to fire up their new toy and magically have a complete understanding of how to use it?".
That's the wrong question: they don't expect that.
What they expect is that they will be able to fire up their new toy" and have it be usable. That's a *lot* different then expecting to "have a complete understanding of how to use it".
And the answer to the real question is "because they paid good money for the thing, it should do what it says it does without me having to wave a dead chicken over it".
-- Terry
Kaplan's findings of fact begin on page 32 of:
. pd f
http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/2000/0817-decision
I don't understand why 2600 attempted to argue the definition of "effectively" as the layman's definition, instead of arguing that the ability to play DVD's on computers at all, with other software permitted by the Plaintiffs, means that CSS does not effectively control the ability to copy (etc.) the material.
I also don't understand why they did not argue this on the basis of the existance of the ability to make verbatim copies of DVD discs indicates that the CSS mechanism is in fact flawed by design, and therefore does not effectively control (etc.).
Finally, I don't understand that they did not argue that the keys used by DeCSS were in fact the important part of the equation, and the DeCSS itself was not therefore a mechanism, without the keys, and that it was the keys, not the scrambling mechanism itself, which constitute the disclosure. That would imply that the keys were trade secrets... and anyone who followed the USL vs. BSDI and UC Berkeley case back in the early 1990's should be able to tell you that, once disclosed, a trade secret is no longer a trade secret.
Can someone shed some light on this for me?
-- Terry
If your phone number is 555-1212, then write it down like this:
555-NOSPAM-1212
Everyone on Slashdot seems to believe it works with email addresses... it must work everywhere, right?
-- Terry
I have great respect for the Mandrake Linux, or any other Linux distribution, for that matter. Making a distribution of any software is hard, and an OS is more complex than most.
But Mandrake is missing the boat... and so is United Linux.
In Mandrake's FAQ entry, explaining why they have decided not to participate in United Linux, they state:
"Since all distributors use the same base
components, there are relatively few binary
incompatibility issues. And even when a
binary compatibility problem arises, it's
easy to recompile an application for a given
Linux distribution."
and they claim:
"It is extremely hard for us to understand
why some software publishers and hardware
manufacturers only support one Linux
distribution."
To me, the answer is obvious: a third party developer would have to not only internally certify their software for support purposes, but it would have to also maintain seperate SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) for each of the Linux versions on which it runs. For commercial applications, "recompile" is not as easy as the act itself. It's clear, these people have never produced a third party shrink-wrapped packaged software product intended to run on a UNIX system.
The intent of United Linux is to try and make it possible for a manufacturer to build shrink-wrapped product that they can know will run on any United Linux labelled platform.
But here, United Linux must fail, as the LSB has failed.
In the original UNIX Wars (of which I am a battle-scarred veteran), the problem was that each distribution of UNIX, even for the same processor family, was "standard plus extensions". Each vendor tried to provide "value add"... and, in doing that, they introduced incompatability between nominally standards compliant platforms.
So paying lip-service to a standard gets you nowhere. The LSB gets you nowhere, and POSIX gets you nowhere. You may be able to compile the same source code on each of these platforms, and, if you are lucky, and did not need to use any platform proprietary information to build your product, it may run without errors. But all you've achieved with this is source compatability.
The LSB doesn't give you binary compatability, and neither does United Linux. And it won't, even if they specify the ABI, even to the point of install tools and other minutia, like IBCS2 did (and neither BSD nor Linux has *full* IBCS2 compliance, until the IBCS2 installation and packaging tools also work -- it's not *just* the ABI, it's the environment).
Why will United Linux fail, since that's what I'm leading up to?
United Linux will fail because it's not possible to *turn off* the vendor "value add".
This seems counter-intuitive at first, but it's a fact. It's the same reason the LSB has failed to deliver on the same promise. And it's the same reason UNIX was never able to be defragmented, when everyone started using Intel processors and commodity PC hardware. Here is the reason:
Standard plus extensions is inherently non-standard.
Let me repeat that:
Standard plus extensions is inherently non-standard.
Until it's possible to turn off *everything* that isn't covered by a standard, it will be impossible for a third party developer to build something that they *know* will run on all platforms that conform to the standard.
Linux vendors: if you want to become the #1 developement platform for United Linux, then strip out everything that isn't covered by the definition of United Linux.
That -- and only that! -- will guarantee that any program that runs on your platform will run on any United Linux platform.
It will guarantee that there is no possibility of a third party developer accidently using a vendor specific extension (OK: "enhancement", but we know that it's really there for vendor lock-in).
It will also make you a commodity.
*This* is what the vendors in the UNIX Wars feared, and refused to let happen. And, in doing that, they lost all the third party development resources to Windows, which *was* a commodity, even if it was one only because of the Microsoft Monopoly.
Will this happen? Will the Linux Vendors wake up to the fact that they nust agree to *commoditize themselves*? Probably not. It's a lot easier for Caldera or Mandrake or Red Hat to compete among themselves, and try and beat each other down, than it is for them to try and take on Microsoft.
So Mandrake... you're avoiding doing the wrong thing by not participating in United Linux, given it's current vender differentiation model permitting vendor lock-in of third party developers.
*But*... you are doing it for the wrong reasons, and as long as you stick to your guns, you aren't going to be doing the right thing for the right reasons, either.
-- Terry
"The point is that he is not supposed to have to go through that route" ...
We don't have the history. It may be that he asked the Audit Committee instead of the full board, so he asked the wrong people. If I send a driver's license renewal into the Secretary of State for the state, I will be lucky to get a response at all, whereas if I send it into th DMV, I'm much more likely to get what I set out to get.
The real question is how was he asking, in such as way that the request was denied by this committee.
The name of the committee, the "Audit Committee", is somewhat of a giveaway as to what he was asking about the information: he appears to have wanted an audit.
In any event, it will be very hard to get a court to order the release of records that ICANN claims he can have by asking the right people.
The implication in the story is that the company -- not the Audit Comittee of the Board of Directors -- denied the request. But in Vint Cerf's statement #2, it's clearly implied that it was a subset of the Board of Directors that denied the request.
If I were in Vint Cerf's shoes, with a fiduciary responsibility to the company, and, I'll presume, a desire to See The Right Thing Happen, I could make it no clearer without legal risk. To me, he is saying:
"Mr. Auerbach, PLEASE request full ICANN Board
review of the Audit Committee's determination
regarding the arrangements for your inspection
of the corporate records, pursuant to Section
6 of the ICANN Inspection Procedures, so that
I can help you."
It's nearly impossible for me to read this any other way.
-- Terry
Who wins from this? Here is my educated guess...
Some people have suggested "Microsoft"; others have suggested "Larry Ellison"; still others have suggested various X-Box competitors, based on the idea that the hardware retails for $200 but has a COGS of $350 (are you ready to spend 1.3 times $X just to cost Microsoft $X?).
Microsoft is right out; discrediting their digital rights management scheme in place in the X-Box would be bad news for them; success in phase "B" of the project does just that.
Larry is a good guess... the deadline date is obviously there so that this can be claimed against a tax bill. But as has been pointed out, Larry is unlikely to be anonymous on purpose.
The X-Box competitor angle is also a red herring, do to the economics of trying to outspend Microsoft, at a sub-1 (.75) value multiplier for each dollar spent.
A good option might be someone competing with Microsoft for the Digital Rights Management pie. This is actually not that likely: eventually, if it works out to have value for this purpose, the hand signing the checks will become public knowledge. A failure of Microsoft in this arena will also tar anyone else trying to enter that market with the same brush of impossibility. So that dog won't hunt.
So what's left?
My odds-on favorite for this is... drumroll, please... hidden in the rule:
"To be honored, work must be submitted to the
"xbox-linux" project at Sourceforge. It is not
enough to publish information/code somewhere
else. We want people to work together, so
there has to be a central point where all work
concentrates."
That's right... Sourceforge. They get to prove that their site "works" for creating and maintaining a successful, highly visible Open Source project. They get a lot of geeks trained up on using it, and they get press release rights, among "other valuable considerations".
Remember: you heard it here first.
-- Terry
FWIW, here is a transcription of the statement that included the publication of Gilmore's e-mail to Vint Cerf, transcribed from the PDF image from the link linked to by the article.
It looked to me that Vint was doing everything he could legally do, to do the right thing.
-----------
I, Vinton Cerf, declare:
1. I am the Chairman of the Board of Defendant Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN"). I have personal knowledge of the matters set forth herein and am competent to testify to those matters.
2. Mr. Auerbach has never, pursuant to Section 6 of the ICANN Inspection Procedures, requested full ICANN Board review of the Audit Committee's determination regarding the arrangements for his inspection of the corporate records.
3. On March 18, 1002, I received an e-mail from John Gilmore, in which he asserts that he "contributed significant funding for" this lawsuit. Mr. Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization providing representation for Mr. Auerbach in this lawsuit. A true and correct copy of the e-mail from Mr. Gilmore is attached hereto as Exhibit 1.
I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and correct.
This declaration was signed on April 16, 2002 at Washington, D.C.
[ Signature ]
Vinton Cerf
[ Attached e-mail ]
-----------
I seems to me that Vint is pointing out that the decision was made by a subset of the Board of Directors, the "Audit Committee". It also points out that there is recourse available to Auerbach that he has not exercised, prior to filing the lawsuit.
It also seems (to me) that the statement numbered "3" was minimal, in not drawing any conclusions based on it. Thus the "terse statement" condemnation of Vint Cerf's statement in the article isn't really a very strong condemnation; it looks to me that, by leaving out the social context, Vint allows for interpretation favorable to the case.
This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the statement numbered "2" seems to go out of its way to point out a way around the "Audit Committee", as if it were a tightly controlled minority clique of the full board, and in pointing out seems to imply success might be achievable via that route.
At the very least, Auerbach needs to try to avail himself of that route, so that if it fails, he can counter a motion for dismissal (i.e. it's arguable that this case is only a matter for the courts if all other reasonable recourse has been exhausted, which it has not been, according to this statement).
I have a very hard time believing that Vint would not have been as explicit or terse as this, were it not for the legal liability issue as the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Defendant.
-- Terry
I had a long response prepared, refuting you point by point, and going into detail as to how you could do all this cheaply, and how even an individual could do it, if they wanted, for around $20 a trace.
Then I thought better of it. Let people pay people to figure out how to do it, if they don't already know.
Let me point out that the biggest problem facing deployment of any technology like this is directory services. If someone owns the directory, then they own the network... that's why the phone companies don't worry about IP telephony damaging their long distance services with local-IP-IP-local hopping: endpoint identification means you'll have a hard time penetrating their markets. As long as the directory is ownable, then such solutions are not deployable.
The problem will always come down to getting to a participating node, without getting to the originating node.
If it comes down to a design discussion, this should probably be taken offline.
-- Terry
Going into the store with you significant other...
"Ah! Joe Johansen! Good to see you again! We just received a new batch of KY in butterscotch, your favorite flavor, according the Basking Robbins!
We know you normally buy KY down at Big Al's Porn Shoppe on 32nd, but this store is 4 blocks closer to your home, and we know how awkward it is to get those 50 gallon drums home on the public slideway! Why not have one of our friendly clerks help you out to your car with one of the store's hand-trucks? Remember, we provide free curb service, where Big Al's doesn't!
How is Millie, your Yak, by the way? Has the infection she had responded to the Penicillin you purchased two weeks ago from Bob's Veterinary Supply? Is she still down in U-Store-It Storage Unit #15? We have a co-marketing agreement with U-Store-It, where if you buy from us today, you will get 5% off your next month's rent!
..."
[and on and on...]
Uh, no thank you!
The first obvious problem is that by connecting to a number of servers, I don't even need a spanning tree attack to trace the source of the broadcast; I can do it all with the latency differential, to find the "root" node.
The second obvious problem is that you can't find a broadcast source unless it's advertised, and once it's advertised, it can be found.
The third obvious problem is that, even if you solve the second obvious problem using a distribguted naming service and... for lack of a better name for it... "AntiBGP", you still have the problem of being able to use differential to find the source of the inital advertisement.
The fourth obvious problem is that you can find the source through traffic analysis: it's the one without an equal number of packets in and out.
Something like this can only ever be effective with a distributed flood-fill model, where you can trust your nearest neighbor, or your nearest neighbor doesn't actually know what he has. Effectively, this means that you have to go to a store-and-forward model, use hard crypto on the interconnects, and then generate bogus traffic to avoid analysis.
At that point, you would have to find a legitimate an legal use for the network before deploying it, or you are minimally an accessory before the fact and/or involved in a conspiracy to commit. If they can point at your node in the network and prove intent, then you are screwed.
"BlackNet" is really unsuitable for streaming data.
-- Terry
Do they allow the indexing of the content by web spiders?
Are we going to get search engines polluted with "hits" for which registration is required in order to view the pages?
If so, how long before we have browsers that pretend they are spiders?
How long before search engines are mostly useless without a Microsoft Passport so you can follow the links search engines return, without explicit sign-on?
-- Terry
"I live in Asia but I read the nytimes nearly daily."
We know. You've accumulated a total subversive index of 173.
But don't worry; we only send the men in trenchcoats after you if your rolling average goes over 60; the highest *your* rolling monthly average has ever gotten is 23, on May 17, 2002.
Since your demographic information indicates that you are not employed as a teacher, there's no need to worry about a high quarterly rolling average landing you in a reeducation camp, but for your own sake, I'd really recommend reading fewer articles on labor unions, until after Monday.
-- Terry
All of you people talking about removing/subverting/ignoring/legally challenging/etc. the EULA are ignoring an important fact.
It doesn't *matter* if you legally accept the terms of the EULA or not, since those terms merely spell out *how the software will operate anyway*.
Say there is a magic "Get out of EULA Free" card that came with your Microsoft Monopoly game.
Say you use it.
That's not going to stop the software from disabling other software on your machine, interfering with its operation in a supposed attempt to ensure "Digital Rights" are observed, or installing other components into your OS automatically, without asking you for permission.
The software *doesn't know from EULA*.
In other words, you can debate the legality all you want, but that's not going to change how the code operates, once it has been installed on your machine.
-- Terry
"Help! I've fallen, and I can't sign up!"
...for a new long distance service, until you rescue me from this cliff...
-- Terry
Yeah, it's annoying when a web catalog business pretends to be a search engine, but instead of returning "best match" returns "catalog item #53715".
With the current state of affairs, you have something that looks like a gas station, is labelled like a gas station, has credit-card operated pumps like a gas station, and, after you insert your credit card, pump a tank full, get billed, and go to start your car, you find out they are actually selling chocolate syrup, but pretending it's gas, because no one wants to buy chocolate syrup.
I think that this is as necessary as the little label bars with "Advertisement" in them above and below fake magazine articles in magazines these days.
-- Terry