I'd say that both of you have a point. On one hand, I'd say that we should value the value of peer review. If a lot of people say that a book is particularly good, then we should likely give it a shot. I still have yet to read (or watch, FWIW) The Count of Monte Cristo, despite a number of recommendations, but I recognize that it's a good idea to do so, and intend to read it.
However, I *also* find it annoying when I see people criticizing literature because it doesn't follow what they consider to be solid writing style. I read an AP article by an English professor about the Harry Potter books (which I also haven't read) about how the books were basically poorly written crap that didn't compare with classical literature, and on how depressing it is that our society now considers *this* good literature. He particularly panned the use of cliches. To me, that seems ridiculous. If most people enjoy a book, then it's doing a good job of being entertaining, at least for a certain target audience. Because of realities of marketing (Stephen King nvels get pushed more these days than Andre Dumas novels), there may be *some* distortion from "the way things would ideally be". However, ultimately, if people are enjoying a work of literature, criticizing that writing is a lost cause. Very few people I know enjoy reading Moby Dick. Perhaps it makes wonderful use of metaphor, and perhaps it has many layers of meaning. Perhaps it even tries to contain a certain degree of insight. However, if it's not enjoyable to read, ultimately the author has failed to do something that I consider an important element of writing. Melville, begone!
Look at the Matrix (yes, film instead of words, but it illustrates my point). My initial reaction to public opinion of the Matrix was to be a bit irritable -- dammit, how *dare* people laud the Matrix for containing the brain-in-a-vat concept? They shouldn't say "wow, it's like we're in the Matrix" -- they should be saying "wow, it's like we're in Descartes' brain-in-a-vat!" But, on a second look, I realized where I'd gone wrong. The Matrix, an infinitely more lowbrow piece of work, had had far more success spreading an important philosophical idea to a large chunk of the population.
This is somewhat interesting. I would have thought that a muscular appearance, being easier to see, would be the parallel that the writer would come up with. Instead, she chose to ask that the male characters be allowed to modify their penis size.
If you gave female characters the ability to set breast size, would it always be maximum?
It's a benefit to enhance sexual attributes normally. But in this case, if everyone's already doing it...well, I'm reminded of Snow Crash. To roughly paraphrase, anyone can be a six-foot talking penis. It's a bit harder to make a realistic human being that looks like you in real life.
As another poster said, you might be surprised. I know a TF player that's gay, though I didn't know that he was gay for ages.
FWIW, a typical TF match conversation not infrequently involves something like "Sniping me from there is so fucking cheap. It was gay as hell." or someone spamming the message systemw. Besides being a semi-hostile environment, there's just not much *point* in most games in someone coming out. I mean, what the heck would you expect -- "gg" "gg" "gg" "Hey, everyone, I'm gay!" ?
I've also run into a few people that have mentioned that they're gay on IRC, an environment where people actually talk to each other. MUDs are probably the closest environment to this, but depending upon the MUD, people are frequently busy role-playing a character, and aren't particularly interested in mixing that character up with their real life self.
I have several homosexual friends--they're stylish, smart people who're usually to be found at the latest bar opening or party or whatever
This, of course, brings up the other possibility -- that people who are very socially active are more likely to come out than a (stereotypically) shy geek type. If someone's drunk and at one of those parties you mention, they might be more willing to say something than someone who spends more time around machines and may have already been harassed in school for being smart/unathletic/overweight/etc.
Incidently, I read an interesting article in the local paper back home (though I believe it was from the AP) about a gay guy who said "Why does everyone expect gay guys to be cultured, socially knowledgeable people? I'm a messy bachelor, just another Joe Sixpack."
And yes, to a man they're significantly less boorish about ogling members of your preferred sex than most of my straight acquaintances:)
It's a not unreasonable guess that it's because they've gone through enough sexuality-related emotional stress that they know what it's like, and aren't going to push it on someone else.
Any game theorists knows that in the long run tit-for-tat is the guaranteed best strategy in any game---> It always allows for win-win, and discourages attempts to take advantage of the other (defecting).
This is clearly incorrect on many levels. First of all, I assume that you're thinking of a particularly simple type of game -- a prisoner's dilemma.
But, even with these constraints, your claim is not true. Let us take a game where double agreement produces a payoff of 1 to each player, where double disagreement produces a payoff of -1 to each player, and where agreement-disagreement produces a benefit of 2 to the disagreeing player and -2 to the agreeing player.
Let player 1 use a tit-for-tat strategy.
Let player 2 use a tit-for-tat strategy, modified to start with an initial disagreement.
In the long run, each player will average no gains or losses.
However, if player 1 switched his strategy to always-agree, he will average a score of 1 per round over the long run. Thus, in this situation, tit-for-tat is worse than another strategy.
You're probably thinking of Axelrod's Tournament, which many people have derived bogus conclusions from.
I do not agree that "Y Windows definitely has the right idea". The author clearly worked very hard on his project but I think he is unfortunately totally misguided. In his thesis he shows he has a very shallow understanding of the architecture of X, which he then proceeds to criticise. It is therefore no surprise he gets the wrong ideas and solves non-existent problems. For example, he says the color model in X is "overly complex", which, for anyone who actually understands color science, is an absurd criticism.
This is interesting, because I frequently post with almost exactly the same sentiments that go through most of your post. I agree that Y Windows is much less of a good idea than Slashdot is treating it. I agree that the Y Windows guy could do with a better appreciation of some of the things that the X architecture achieves. I agree that many of the claims of X being slow and/or RAM-hungry are simply not true.
However, I disagree about the color model in X. It is a severe pain in the ass to write an Xlib application that handles all the color models. Now, the idea is that you should be using an abstraction library that hides the Xlib stuff, but it's still a valid issue. The X color model is not designed around color matching or to-print color. It's designed around supporting oddball in-memory representations of data. You can deal with an X-terminal that uses 6 bits of 16-bit color for green and 5 for red, or visa versa. Frankly, most of this stuff dates back to days when computers were too slow to compress data as it went over the network, when there were more incompatible systems that needed to use X, and when there wasn't enough memory to just stick with 32-bit color. The color model in X is probably the leading thing that it *would* be nice to simplify -- to say "okay, from now on, it's Truecolor or nothing, a byte per R, G, B, in that order".
That being said, the network transparency is essential (the folks pooh-poohing it are nuts) and X *does* have a higher latency than Windows (partly due to serialization of commands and partly due to the context-switch requirement).
Folks who think that network transparency isn't important, that it's important to standardize on a widget set -- have I ever got a solution for you. Use either Qt/Embedded to the frame buffer, or GTK with the frame buffer target. You'll get local display and all the goodies. No nasty XFree86, and you can achieve this today. Of course, your display will be more CPU-intensive than with XFree86 because you lack good hardware acceleration support for every chipset under the sun (all that complicated bloat), but you'll have exactly what you were asking for.
Actually, this is more like someone submitting a decent patch to Linus, and then Linus refusing to accept the patch and giving a reply like "The weather isn't very good today for that sorta thing", as to a "No, because of blah blah technical reason ".
Ironically enough, Linus is not infrequently criticized for silently dropping patches.
Keep in mind that Dawes is probably feeling put-upon as well, having probably recieved tons of nastygrams from the earlier Slashdot story about KP.
Yeah...I see a few too many people backing Harold for the sake of going against XF core (who are Bad People because of Keith Packard).
(a) Harry's probably upset. Very upset. It's a good bet that this has been building up for a while, and he needed to vent. Unfortunately, it looks like XFree86 core decided to flame back. I'd say that neither side dealt with this very well.
(b) No matter what, the ongoing disintegration of the main XFree branch is bad. Good developers are firmly entrenched on each side, and will be lost. Witness the proliferation of Gecko-based browsers -- incredible feature overlap, an insane amount of work.
(c) Why on earth *isn't* there another tree (some people have pointed at something called something like "xovert", which seems to possibly be this) specifically for development work? Keith Packard ran into the same problem. Linux development would work much less well if AC and AM didn't maintain their own trees.
(d) People who want to rewrite X would do well to remember the story of Netscape (who had more resources) and decided that reimplementation was the way to go. Years later, they wound up with something significantly slower and more RAM-hungry, and had lost the userbase to their main competitor. Currently, my copy of Firebird has decided to keep the "Popular Mechanics" URL that I visited earlier today in the URL bar, even though I'm at Slashdot. Gecko-based apps frequently lose touch with the proper state of keyboard/mouse focus, are slow and RAM-hungry, and don't use native widgets.
In order to operate, it would have to create a temporary copy of the program being analysed in memory.
At least in the US, this is an exemption. I've seen it before, darned if I remember where. If you couldn't do this, you couldn't send data over a network, execute binaries, etc.
Many countries have specific provisions to allow reverse engineering, which would probably get you off the hook. However, I don't believe the USA is one of them, which is probably the primary area in which the program would be used.
This is exemption (f) of the DMCA if used to ensure inter-program compatibility.
A tool like this couldn't distinguish between positives and non-positives alone. But it could isolate code to be reviewed by authors -- if it could email the GNOME folks and say "80KB of very similar looking code is in Adobe Photoshop", it'd let people start poking at it. Given a bit of poking at disassembly, it's not that hard to see whether the code's been swiped.
And I'm not sure what you'd mean by "if it *does* become legal"...surely there'd be no legal problems with running something like this.
Even with compiler optimizations and processor specific instructions AND EVEN different compilers, you can actually find and detect "similar HLL code" (there's a tool called DATING that can do that - contact me for a copy, it's hard to find - and which the name is a pun to the IDA FLIRT abilities).
[shrug] If you post a link to a source archive, I expect more than a few people would be interested. I think it would have to go well beyond FLIRT to be useful for this problem, though.
I just took a look at FLIRT -- FLIRT produces a signature based on the first 32 bytes of a function, allowing for holes. This might work for a relatively small function set (such as the library function identification that IDA is trying to allow). However, it's not going to deal with the differences between icc and gcc, even. As a matter of fact, flipping the -fomit-frame-pointer flag to the same version of gcc with the same optimization level is liable to cause it to throw up its hands in disgust.
Look at the techniques. This stuff is designed for use on binary-only software (with the sole exception of the comment embedding, which is easy to strip, and the embedded strings, which are easy to remove/modify).
The approaches they're talking about are done at the compilation phase or post-compilation on Java bytecode.
It's *extremely* difficult to produce good, reliable watermarks, because different compilers will build software differently, as will different optimization options.
I'd essentially say that source-based watermarks are a lost cause (at least with C, and with the current constraints of readability and simplicity on code).
A much better approach would be a project that does fuzzy comparisons on binaries, and is somewhat aware of ELF. Basically, you'd have a program that would have a set of known GPL code (a compiled Linux system would work well) and compare it to a set of compiled code.
This is still not perfect if the person is malicious and just tries using a different compiler. This has happened before with xvid and use of icc. However, there aren't *too* many compilers out there.
Hmm...this is an interesting problem.
A more interesting approach that just occurs to me now -- in general, the proportions of compiled code should be roughly the same, independent of compiler -- adding padding, etc. Generate a call graph of the function tree in a set of GPL code. Then your checker would do fuzzy matching on chunks of that call graph against the suspicious code. It'd take a bit of massaging. It'd also still need some manual looking at the target once identified. However, this should be able to run in a pretty automated manner (even if it takes a long time to run) and could potentially turn up some interesting goodies. It'd certainly discourage commercial folks from ripping off GPL-using authors and companies.
Try taking a Windows system with a lot of installed (non-GPL) software and a Linux system with a lot of (GPL) installed software. Start a comparison running. See what turns up.
By your logic, you would have no problem with having your every phone conversation recorded, and if your life insurance premiums were to suddenly skyrocket or your coverage dropped because the insurance company received a transcript of a private telephone discussion you had with your physician regarding an odd mole you found on your back, that would be OK with you, too.
Your post is predicated upon a slippery slope argument. I certainly do *not* need to agree with the cases you've been arguing to feel that a black box in a car is a good idea.
I simply don't feel the need to say "foo is *always* acceptable" or "foo is *always* unacceptable". Do I feel that monitoring is *always* good or *always* bad? No, of course not. It's something to be weighted, to be taken into account. In this case, there is very little benefit in providing the privacy at issue. It does not allow the government to abuse its position, or even obtain data unless you've crashed. It *does*, however, allow society to distinguish between a madman driving at 120 mph and ramming the back of someone driving at a sane speed and just killed someone and someone who was driving at a sane speed and hit a car that unexpectedly hit their brakes. It provides a deterrent to actions that frequently cause loss of life. Allowing someone to get away with this sort of thing simply lets them get to work slightly faster, at the risk of others' lives. I don't think that this is a remotely reasonable tradeoff. Thus, I feel that the use of black box logging is entirely reasonable.
I would *not* endorse general phone logging, for instance. Phone logging can easily be abused, and only rarely permits the deterrence of severe problems (and that's why wiretap warrants exist, to distingusih between logging everyone and logging a couple of cases where we feel that the social benefits of wiretapping a particlar person outweigh the costs.)
I've thought about approaches like this. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the engineering involved.
It seemed to me that any approach that produces more reflection (running things through a series of turns) also reduces airflow, requiring a louder fan to produce the required airflow. I'm curious as to what the best approach to reducing sound relative to airflow is.
1) you have a big wall (the screen) between you and everyone else.
How short *are* you? Your face and their face are well above the top of a laptop.
2) Typing takes concentration.
Only if you aren't familiar with it. I find it much harder to write and talk to someone than type and talk to someone. Also, I can type and turn away and look at someone, whereas my writing quality suffers greatly if I attempt to do so while writing.
3) Typing is noisy and distracting to others.
Entirely dependent upon the keyboard. Get those gel things and nobody will ever hear them.
What people always seem to forget is that the PocketPC and Smartphones all use the familiar WIN32 API, which is the MOST HEAVILY USED API ON THE PLANET.
Oh, please. Haven't we debunked that argument before? DEC, IBM? Besides which, Microsoft is trying quite hard to transition Windows developers to.NET.
And what's the benefit of a tablet over a laptop for looking something up?
The only real benefits to a tablet and a laptop is that a laptop has a smaller screen size/total size ratio, the tablet has a touch screen, and the tablet may be slightly lighter.
The drawbacks include far slower input speed, a tendancy to get a dirty screen, (currently) higher prices, and worse performance.
The main problem that I can see tends to be input speed. Almost all tasks aside from extremely light data entry and reference purposes are better done with a laptop. Frankly, the primary reason that I can think of that you'd want a tablet over a PDA for a given task is that you want more screen space. However, almost all of the kind of tasks that are light data entry or reference-oriented don't *need* much screen space.
I've never understood the facination that many people have for tablet PCs. They seem to be a pretty useless device, aside from a few tiny niches.
Doesn't say so in the US Constitution, and I don't particularly agree with you. I agree that it is a valuable goal to allow people to travel unhindered, however:
* I don't really want the serial killer imprisoned at the local jail to have the freedom to travel where he wants.
* I don't really want random folks to have the ability to travel onto nuclear silo ground.
* I don't think that having completely open borders between all countries would be a good idea.
I can claim that almost anything is a "fundamental human right. Doesn't make it so.
you think it is a good idea that something I own can then spy on me
Because it can be used to deter you from performing actions that are extremely dangerous to other people, and if someone is killed, can provide information that can either nail you or clear you depending upon what you actually did.
why the existence of this device should be hidden from me,
It isn't hidden from you. Black boxes aren't any more secret than airbags -- I suppose you could not know that a car is equipped with one or the other if you're uninformed, but there is no attempt to prevent you from knowing about them.
and why it should be illegal for me to remove or tamper with it.
For the same reason you can't remove or tamper with warning labels on matresses. Because there's a safety issue.
The issue is making any given citizen culpable for every minute of his/her life.
I don't have a problem with that. If every person was responsible for every minute of their lives:
* Punishments could be vastly reduced, since more than a small percentage of people are caught.
* Crimes are generally crimes for a pretty good reason. This guy could have killed other people quite easily. I'd much rather have him have to get to his bowling game five minutes late than be able to put other innocents in danger of their lives.
Finally, I don't think that privacy is an absolute right. It's certainly a factor that I feel should be weighed in, but driving is a significant cause of death, and allowing people to drive however they want provides few benefits that I can see.
I believe this happened to Apple -- some of the first copy-protected CDs could damage Apple drives. And, yes, the RIAA got blamed, rather than Apple.
It's true, though, that hardware manufacturers should generally strive to keep software from damaging their hardware. This is *definitely* the case for simple hardware like CD drives.
I'd like to know whether the drive manufacturer will provide replacements.
Ah, but we have such a rich culture of victimhood in this country.
More seriously, I'll buy into the fact that this game developer chick is right. If less teenage guys bought games, typical game breast size would be smaller.
On the other hand, most of the time when I see victimhood claims, I'm left very dubious as to whether the person who was supposed to have screwed the victim over was really responsible. Should I still be subsidizing black education because well before my great, great, great grandfather was born, some people who happened to be white happened to enslave some people who happened to be black?
If this developer is irritated that more girls aren't playing games, shouldn't she be irritated with said girls?
Ok, that's it. I'm patenting the Incline(tm), the Pulley(tm), the Lever(tm) and the Wheel(tm). Since every complex machine in use today has one or more of them incorporated, I guess I'm due, say, three quarters of the world's GNP.
Speaking from a non-mechanical-engineer standpoint, I'd have to say that I'd consider the Pentium 4 a "complex machine".
Out of curiosity, what *do* you mean, besides an assumption formed before experience?
Nothing rigorous. When you meet someone for the first time, you form a first impression of them. It may be wrong, but it's your first thought.
I was pointing out that what seems to me to be the expected initial impression is not correct.
you claiming that devices will just stop working if some presupposed natural law is invalidated is plain ludicrous.
No, although now that you posted your reading I can see how you read it that way. First impression assumption.:-)
Here's what I wrote:
If it breaks, then any energy-producing devices that rely on it holding will not function either, contrary to the first impression assumptions.
Let there be a law that all women will prefer to buy a sweater over a jacket in a department store. Economists produce a reliable sales plan that involves never selling jackets, and only selling sweaters, and has a profit-producing system relying upon this law (where all jackets are given nominal value). I discover that I can sell a new type of jacket, one with a knit lining over a sweater, thus breaking the law. I cannot make an infinite amount of money by selling this particular nominally-valued jacket for a significant sum of money and repeating forever. What's the problem? I'm relying on a system that depends upon a law holding, as well as the fact that the law does not hold in a particular situation.
Back to my Maxwell argument -- if the Second Law breaks (more specifically: is clarified in some way that limits where I can apply it, as in this case) -- then I cannot rely on rules that are based upon it always holding. I say that I can theoretically decouple enthalpy and entropy. Fine. If I modify the Second Law to reflect that (saying that it merely *tends* to hold on a grand scale), however, I also can no longer rely upon traditional devices that use the relationship stated in that Law to generate energy.
If Maxwell's Demon held, it would not allow the production of an infinite-energy-producing-system, as one might initially think. It will just allow the use of a device that makes very efficient use of the finite amount of energy present.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that both of you have a point. On one hand, I'd say that we should value the value of peer review. If a lot of people say that a book is particularly good, then we should likely give it a shot. I still have yet to read (or watch, FWIW) The Count of Monte Cristo, despite a number of recommendations, but I recognize that it's a good idea to do so, and intend to read it.
However, I *also* find it annoying when I see people criticizing literature because it doesn't follow what they consider to be solid writing style. I read an AP article by an English professor about the Harry Potter books (which I also haven't read) about how the books were basically poorly written crap that didn't compare with classical literature, and on how depressing it is that our society now considers *this* good literature. He particularly panned the use of cliches. To me, that seems ridiculous. If most people enjoy a book, then it's doing a good job of being entertaining, at least for a certain target audience. Because of realities of marketing (Stephen King nvels get pushed more these days than Andre Dumas novels), there may be *some* distortion from "the way things would ideally be". However, ultimately, if people are enjoying a work of literature, criticizing that writing is a lost cause. Very few people I know enjoy reading Moby Dick. Perhaps it makes wonderful use of metaphor, and perhaps it has many layers of meaning. Perhaps it even tries to contain a certain degree of insight. However, if it's not enjoyable to read, ultimately the author has failed to do something that I consider an important element of writing. Melville, begone!
Look at the Matrix (yes, film instead of words, but it illustrates my point). My initial reaction to public opinion of the Matrix was to be a bit irritable -- dammit, how *dare* people laud the Matrix for containing the brain-in-a-vat concept? They shouldn't say "wow, it's like we're in the Matrix" -- they should be saying "wow, it's like we're in Descartes' brain-in-a-vat!" But, on a second look, I realized where I'd gone wrong. The Matrix, an infinitely more lowbrow piece of work, had had far more success spreading an important philosophical idea to a large chunk of the population.
Otherwise our universities just become off-site research labs for specific companies (i.e. the ones with the money).
They are. Not all research grants come from the government (heck, even the government does classified work that can't be allowed out).
People tend to give grants with strings attached. Don't like it? You can push for more NSF/DoD funding (DoD for computer science).
This is somewhat interesting. I would have thought that a muscular appearance, being easier to see, would be the parallel that the writer would come up with. Instead, she chose to ask that the male characters be allowed to modify their penis size.
I'm not entirely certain of that.
If you gave female characters the ability to set breast size, would it always be maximum?
It's a benefit to enhance sexual attributes normally. But in this case, if everyone's already doing it...well, I'm reminded of Snow Crash. To roughly paraphrase, anyone can be a six-foot talking penis. It's a bit harder to make a realistic human being that looks like you in real life.
I know no gay gamers
:)
As another poster said, you might be surprised. I know a TF player that's gay, though I didn't know that he was gay for ages.
FWIW, a typical TF match conversation not infrequently involves something like "Sniping me from there is so fucking cheap. It was gay as hell." or someone spamming the message systemw. Besides being a semi-hostile environment, there's just not much *point* in most games in someone coming out. I mean, what the heck would you expect -- "gg" "gg" "gg" "Hey, everyone, I'm gay!" ?
I've also run into a few people that have mentioned that they're gay on IRC, an environment where people actually talk to each other. MUDs are probably the closest environment to this, but depending upon the MUD, people are frequently busy role-playing a character, and aren't particularly interested in mixing that character up with their real life self.
I have several homosexual friends--they're stylish, smart people who're usually to be found at the latest bar opening or party or whatever
This, of course, brings up the other possibility -- that people who are very socially active are more likely to come out than a (stereotypically) shy geek type. If someone's drunk and at one of those parties you mention, they might be more willing to say something than someone who spends more time around machines and may have already been harassed in school for being smart/unathletic/overweight/etc.
Incidently, I read an interesting article in the local paper back home (though I believe it was from the AP) about a gay guy who said "Why does everyone expect gay guys to be cultured, socially knowledgeable people? I'm a messy bachelor, just another Joe Sixpack."
And yes, to a man they're significantly less boorish about ogling members of your preferred sex than most of my straight acquaintances
It's a not unreasonable guess that it's because they've gone through enough sexuality-related emotional stress that they know what it's like, and aren't going to push it on someone else.
Any game theorists knows that in the long run tit-for-tat is the guaranteed best strategy in any game---> It always allows for win-win, and discourages attempts to take advantage of the other (defecting).
This is clearly incorrect on many levels. First of all, I assume that you're thinking of a particularly simple type of game -- a prisoner's dilemma.
But, even with these constraints, your claim is not true. Let us take a game where double agreement produces a payoff of 1 to each player, where double disagreement produces a payoff of -1 to each player, and where agreement-disagreement produces a benefit of 2 to the disagreeing player and -2 to the agreeing player.
Let player 1 use a tit-for-tat strategy.
Let player 2 use a tit-for-tat strategy, modified to start with an initial disagreement.
In the long run, each player will average no gains or losses.
However, if player 1 switched his strategy to always-agree, he will average a score of 1 per round over the long run. Thus, in this situation, tit-for-tat is worse than another strategy.
You're probably thinking of Axelrod's Tournament, which many people have derived bogus conclusions from.
Harold,
If Keith Packard and other developers do produce an active fork, would you consider working on that fork?
I do not agree that "Y Windows definitely has the right idea". The author clearly worked very hard on his project but I think he is unfortunately totally misguided. In his thesis he shows he has a very shallow understanding of the architecture of X, which he then proceeds to criticise. It is therefore no surprise he gets the wrong ideas and solves non-existent problems. For example, he says the color model in X is "overly complex", which, for anyone who actually understands color science, is an absurd criticism.
This is interesting, because I frequently post with almost exactly the same sentiments that go through most of your post. I agree that Y Windows is much less of a good idea than Slashdot is treating it. I agree that the Y Windows guy could do with a better appreciation of some of the things that the X architecture achieves. I agree that many of the claims of X being slow and/or RAM-hungry are simply not true.
However, I disagree about the color model in X. It is a severe pain in the ass to write an Xlib application that handles all the color models. Now, the idea is that you should be using an abstraction library that hides the Xlib stuff, but it's still a valid issue. The X color model is not designed around color matching or to-print color. It's designed around supporting oddball in-memory representations of data. You can deal with an X-terminal that uses 6 bits of 16-bit color for green and 5 for red, or visa versa. Frankly, most of this stuff dates back to days when computers were too slow to compress data as it went over the network, when there were more incompatible systems that needed to use X, and when there wasn't enough memory to just stick with 32-bit color. The color model in X is probably the leading thing that it *would* be nice to simplify -- to say "okay, from now on, it's Truecolor or nothing, a byte per R, G, B, in that order".
That being said, the network transparency is essential (the folks pooh-poohing it are nuts) and X *does* have a higher latency than Windows (partly due to serialization of commands and partly due to the context-switch requirement).
Folks who think that network transparency isn't important, that it's important to standardize on a widget set -- have I ever got a solution for you. Use either Qt/Embedded to the frame buffer, or GTK with the frame buffer target. You'll get local display and all the goodies. No nasty XFree86, and you can achieve this today. Of course, your display will be more CPU-intensive than with XFree86 because you lack good hardware acceleration support for every chipset under the sun (all that complicated bloat), but you'll have exactly what you were asking for.
Actually, this is more like someone submitting a decent patch to Linus, and then Linus refusing to accept the patch and giving a reply like "The weather isn't very good today for that sorta thing", as to a "No, because of blah blah technical reason ".
Ironically enough, Linus is not infrequently criticized for silently dropping patches.
Keep in mind that Dawes is probably feeling put-upon as well, having probably recieved tons of nastygrams from the earlier Slashdot story about KP.
Yeah...I see a few too many people backing Harold for the sake of going against XF core (who are Bad People because of Keith Packard).
(a) Harry's probably upset. Very upset. It's a good bet that this has been building up for a while, and he needed to vent. Unfortunately, it looks like XFree86 core decided to flame back. I'd say that neither side dealt with this very well.
(b) No matter what, the ongoing disintegration of the main XFree branch is bad. Good developers are firmly entrenched on each side, and will be lost. Witness the proliferation of Gecko-based browsers -- incredible feature overlap, an insane amount of work.
(c) Why on earth *isn't* there another tree (some people have pointed at something called something like "xovert", which seems to possibly be this) specifically for development work? Keith Packard ran into the same problem. Linux development would work much less well if AC and AM didn't maintain their own trees.
(d) People who want to rewrite X would do well to remember the story of Netscape (who had more resources) and decided that reimplementation was the way to go. Years later, they wound up with something significantly slower and more RAM-hungry, and had lost the userbase to their main competitor. Currently, my copy of Firebird has decided to keep the "Popular Mechanics" URL that I visited earlier today in the URL bar, even though I'm at Slashdot. Gecko-based apps frequently lose touch with the proper state of keyboard/mouse focus, are slow and RAM-hungry, and don't use native widgets.
In order to operate, it would have to create a temporary copy of the program being analysed in memory.
At least in the US, this is an exemption. I've seen it before, darned if I remember where. If you couldn't do this, you couldn't send data over a network, execute binaries, etc.
Many countries have specific provisions to allow reverse engineering, which would probably get you off the hook. However, I don't believe the USA is one of them, which is probably the primary area in which the program would be used.
This is exemption (f) of the DMCA if used to ensure inter-program compatibility.
How do you define false positives?
A tool like this couldn't distinguish between positives and non-positives alone. But it could isolate code to be reviewed by authors -- if it could email the GNOME folks and say "80KB of very similar looking code is in Adobe Photoshop", it'd let people start poking at it. Given a bit of poking at disassembly, it's not that hard to see whether the code's been swiped.
And I'm not sure what you'd mean by "if it *does* become legal"...surely there'd be no legal problems with running something like this.
Even with compiler optimizations and processor specific instructions AND EVEN different compilers, you can actually find and detect "similar HLL code" (there's a tool called DATING that can do that - contact me for a copy, it's hard to find - and which the name is a pun to the IDA FLIRT abilities).
[shrug] If you post a link to a source archive, I expect more than a few people would be interested. I think it would have to go well beyond FLIRT to be useful for this problem, though.
I just took a look at FLIRT -- FLIRT produces a signature based on the first 32 bytes of a function, allowing for holes. This might work for a relatively small function set (such as the library function identification that IDA is trying to allow). However, it's not going to deal with the differences between icc and gcc, even. As a matter of fact, flipping the -fomit-frame-pointer flag to the same version of gcc with the same optimization level is liable to cause it to throw up its hands in disgust.
Look at the techniques. This stuff is designed for use on binary-only software (with the sole exception of the comment embedding, which is easy to strip, and the embedded strings, which are easy to remove/modify).
The approaches they're talking about are done at the compilation phase or post-compilation on Java bytecode.
It's *extremely* difficult to produce good, reliable watermarks, because different compilers will build software differently, as will different optimization options.
I'd essentially say that source-based watermarks are a lost cause (at least with C, and with the current constraints of readability and simplicity on code).
A much better approach would be a project that does fuzzy comparisons on binaries, and is somewhat aware of ELF. Basically, you'd have a program that would have a set of known GPL code (a compiled Linux system would work well) and compare it to a set of compiled code.
This is still not perfect if the person is malicious and just tries using a different compiler. This has happened before with xvid and use of icc. However, there aren't *too* many compilers out there.
Hmm...this is an interesting problem.
A more interesting approach that just occurs to me now -- in general, the proportions of compiled code should be roughly the same, independent of compiler -- adding padding, etc. Generate a call graph of the function tree in a set of GPL code. Then your checker would do fuzzy matching on chunks of that call graph against the suspicious code. It'd take a bit of massaging. It'd also still need some manual looking at the target once identified. However, this should be able to run in a pretty automated manner (even if it takes a long time to run) and could potentially turn up some interesting goodies. It'd certainly discourage commercial folks from ripping off GPL-using authors and companies.
Try taking a Windows system with a lot of installed (non-GPL) software and a Linux system with a lot of (GPL) installed software. Start a comparison running. See what turns up.
By your logic, you would have no problem with having your every phone conversation recorded, and if your life insurance premiums were to suddenly skyrocket or your coverage dropped because the insurance company received a transcript of a private telephone discussion you had with your physician regarding an odd mole you found on your back, that would be OK with you, too.
Your post is predicated upon a slippery slope argument. I certainly do *not* need to agree with the cases you've been arguing to feel that a black box in a car is a good idea.
I simply don't feel the need to say "foo is *always* acceptable" or "foo is *always* unacceptable". Do I feel that monitoring is *always* good or *always* bad? No, of course not. It's something to be weighted, to be taken into account. In this case, there is very little benefit in providing the privacy at issue. It does not allow the government to abuse its position, or even obtain data unless you've crashed. It *does*, however, allow society to distinguish between a madman driving at 120 mph and ramming the back of someone driving at a sane speed and just killed someone and someone who was driving at a sane speed and hit a car that unexpectedly hit their brakes. It provides a deterrent to actions that frequently cause loss of life. Allowing someone to get away with this sort of thing simply lets them get to work slightly faster, at the risk of others' lives. I don't think that this is a remotely reasonable tradeoff. Thus, I feel that the use of black box logging is entirely reasonable.
I would *not* endorse general phone logging, for instance. Phone logging can easily be abused, and only rarely permits the deterrence of severe problems (and that's why wiretap warrants exist, to distingusih between logging everyone and logging a couple of cases where we feel that the social benefits of wiretapping a particlar person outweigh the costs.)
I've thought about approaches like this. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the engineering involved.
It seemed to me that any approach that produces more reflection (running things through a series of turns) also reduces airflow, requiring a louder fan to produce the required airflow. I'm curious as to what the best approach to reducing sound relative to airflow is.
I don't buy it.
1) you have a big wall (the screen) between you and everyone else.
How short *are* you? Your face and their face are well above the top of a laptop.
2) Typing takes concentration.
Only if you aren't familiar with it. I find it much harder to write and talk to someone than type and talk to someone. Also, I can type and turn away and look at someone, whereas my writing quality suffers greatly if I attempt to do so while writing.
3) Typing is noisy and distracting to others.
Entirely dependent upon the keyboard. Get those gel things and nobody will ever hear them.
What people always seem to forget is that the PocketPC and Smartphones all use the familiar WIN32 API, which is the MOST HEAVILY USED API ON THE PLANET.
.NET.
Oh, please. Haven't we debunked that argument before? DEC, IBM? Besides which, Microsoft is trying quite hard to transition Windows developers to
And what's the benefit of a tablet over a laptop for looking something up?
The only real benefits to a tablet and a laptop is that a laptop has a smaller screen size/total size ratio, the tablet has a touch screen, and the tablet may be slightly lighter.
The drawbacks include far slower input speed, a tendancy to get a dirty screen, (currently) higher prices, and worse performance.
The main problem that I can see tends to be input speed. Almost all tasks aside from extremely light data entry and reference purposes are better done with a laptop. Frankly, the primary reason that I can think of that you'd want a tablet over a PDA for a given task is that you want more screen space. However, almost all of the kind of tasks that are light data entry or reference-oriented don't *need* much screen space.
I've never understood the facination that many people have for tablet PCs. They seem to be a pretty useless device, aside from a few tiny niches.
Travel is a FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT.
Doesn't say so in the US Constitution, and I don't particularly agree with you. I agree that it is a valuable goal to allow people to travel unhindered, however:
* I don't really want the serial killer imprisoned at the local jail to have the freedom to travel where he wants.
* I don't really want random folks to have the ability to travel onto nuclear silo ground.
* I don't think that having completely open borders between all countries would be a good idea.
I can claim that almost anything is a "fundamental human right. Doesn't make it so.
you think it is a good idea that something I own can then spy on me
Because it can be used to deter you from performing actions that are extremely dangerous to other people, and if someone is killed, can provide information that can either nail you or clear you depending upon what you actually did.
why the existence of this device should be hidden from me,
It isn't hidden from you. Black boxes aren't any more secret than airbags -- I suppose you could not know that a car is equipped with one or the other if you're uninformed, but there is no attempt to prevent you from knowing about them.
and why it should be illegal for me to remove or tamper with it.
For the same reason you can't remove or tamper with warning labels on matresses. Because there's a safety issue.
The issue is making any given citizen culpable for every minute of his/her life.
I don't have a problem with that. If every person was responsible for every minute of their lives:
* Punishments could be vastly reduced, since more than a small percentage of people are caught.
* Crimes are generally crimes for a pretty good reason. This guy could have killed other people quite easily. I'd much rather have him have to get to his bowling game five minutes late than be able to put other innocents in danger of their lives.
Finally, I don't think that privacy is an absolute right. It's certainly a factor that I feel should be weighed in, but driving is a significant cause of death, and allowing people to drive however they want provides few benefits that I can see.
I believe this happened to Apple -- some of the first copy-protected CDs could damage Apple drives. And, yes, the RIAA got blamed, rather than Apple.
It's true, though, that hardware manufacturers should generally strive to keep software from damaging their hardware. This is *definitely* the case for simple hardware like CD drives.
I'd like to know whether the drive manufacturer will provide replacements.
Ah, but we have such a rich culture of victimhood in this country.
More seriously, I'll buy into the fact that this game developer chick is right. If less teenage guys bought games, typical game breast size would be smaller.
On the other hand, most of the time when I see victimhood claims, I'm left very dubious as to whether the person who was supposed to have screwed the victim over was really responsible. Should I still be subsidizing black education because well before my great, great, great grandfather was born, some people who happened to be white happened to enslave some people who happened to be black?
If this developer is irritated that more girls aren't playing games, shouldn't she be irritated with said girls?
Ok, that's it. I'm patenting the Incline(tm), the Pulley(tm), the Lever(tm) and the Wheel(tm). Since every complex machine in use today has one or more of them incorporated, I guess I'm due, say, three quarters of the world's GNP.
Speaking from a non-mechanical-engineer standpoint, I'd have to say that I'd consider the Pentium 4 a "complex machine".
Out of curiosity, what *do* you mean, besides an assumption formed before experience?
:-)
Nothing rigorous. When you meet someone for the first time, you form a first impression of them. It may be wrong, but it's your first thought.
I was pointing out that what seems to me to be the expected initial impression is not correct.
you claiming that devices will just stop working if some presupposed natural law is invalidated is plain ludicrous.
No, although now that you posted your reading I can see how you read it that way. First impression assumption.
Here's what I wrote:
If it breaks, then any energy-producing devices that rely on it holding will not function either, contrary to the first impression assumptions.
Let there be a law that all women will prefer to buy a sweater over a jacket in a department store. Economists produce a reliable sales plan that involves never selling jackets, and only selling sweaters, and has a profit-producing system relying upon this law (where all jackets are given nominal value). I discover that I can sell a new type of jacket, one with a knit lining over a sweater, thus breaking the law. I cannot make an infinite amount of money by selling this particular nominally-valued jacket for a significant sum of money and repeating forever. What's the problem? I'm relying on a system that depends upon a law holding, as well as the fact that the law does not hold in a particular situation.
Back to my Maxwell argument -- if the Second Law breaks (more specifically: is clarified in some way that limits where I can apply it, as in this case) -- then I cannot rely on rules that are based upon it always holding. I say that I can theoretically decouple enthalpy and entropy. Fine. If I modify the Second Law to reflect that (saying that it merely *tends* to hold on a grand scale), however, I also can no longer rely upon traditional devices that use the relationship stated in that Law to generate energy.
If Maxwell's Demon held, it would not allow the production of an infinite-energy-producing-system, as one might initially think. It will just allow the use of a device that makes very efficient use of the finite amount of energy present.