You need to port applications from XP to Vista? Microsoft is normally very good about keeping backwards compatibility - indeed, the need to stay compatible with old badly-written apps is the cause of much of the cruft in Windows. Do you have any examples of software that works in XP and needs rewriting for Vista?
In the past when European courts and regulators have required Microsoft to document their protocols they have done so only with a licence agreement designed to exclude free software such as Samba. After you pay your ten thousand euros, are you then free to implement the specification in free software? This is the crucial point and one that the article didn't mention.
Yes, there are good uses and bad uses. The technology can certainly be put to work for the user's benefit. Indeed, most digital rights management is altruistic in some sense, since it prevents the user from accidentally infringing copyright and perhaps even committing a crime, which they surely would not want to do.
The fundamental argument is not whether good or bad policies are possible, but about freedom and whether you have control over your own computer. If doing e-commerce, can I program my computer to lie and send back a response saying it is not tampered with even when I have changed the software? If I cannot do this, then I no longer have control over the computer and it is no longer my computer. However, the other end of the e-commerce transaction would be foolish to rely on this no-tampering check. Even if ordinary users cannot break the security on the TPM module, a determined criminal organization probably could.
As I understand it, the meaning of Trusted Computing is not that the system administrator will be able to provide a locked-down system. That has long been available with ordinary security measures on Linux and other systems. Rather it means that even the system administrator - even the owner of the computer - will not be able to make the computer do what he wishes rather than what the record industry or movie studios want it to do. This is done by Intel or others supplying some special hardware which won't reveal its private encryption key unless it detects that authorized, signed code is running. Not authorized by the legitimate owner of the computer who is Intel's customer - no, that wouldn't do at all. Rather, that the code is signed by some third party such as Microsoft and there is a secure boot sequence to prevent 'tampering' (i.e., the computer's owner trying to reprogram his or her system).
I don't think the author of the article has understood what Trusted Computing means at all. He is just talking about thin clients and locked-down systems in school environments, which is not really the same thing.
Most of those terms seem pretty reasonable, or if not reasonable then at least necessary. They use P2P to distribute the files, so clearly a user must agree to be part of the P2P network. Accepting 'all liability' seems a necessary safeguard to stop litigious people suing the BBC (it may not be enough); so is the standard stuff about not being responsible for damage to your system (read any software licence and see the parts about NO WARRANTY).
Allowing automatic updates is a bit fishy. You should have a choice whether to update or not. But really, if you're willing to install some binary-only program with full administrator rights, it's not really any greater risk to install later versions of it too.
If the iPlayer agreement is so objectionable, are you happy with the licence terms for the operating system you must use it on?
Flash is just as much a proprietary standard as Microsoft Windows (and more proprietary than Silverlight). Unless the BBC commits to using the subset of Flash that has been reimplemented by Gnash and other projects, I don't think it's a big step forward.
I've heard that a lot... that Logo is extensible, it's based on Lisp, etc etc. But I never saw any cases where it was more powerful than a half-decent implementation of Basic. All I really remember from trying to program in Logo is being unable to make a string containing a space character (because the quote character " begins a string but there is no closing " character) and thinking 'WTF?'.
Thanks for the link. I see that 'up' can indeed be classed as an adverb. So the rule about not ending sentences with a preposition is even sillier than it first appears, since in many of these cases the offending word (e.g. 'up' in 'make up') is really an adverb.
However, I am concerned that the category adverb is getting too big to be useful. If 'up' is sometimes an adverb (as well as sometimes being a preposition, as you say) then how do you distinguish words like 'quickly' or 'clockwise'? Wikipedia's entry for adverbs doesn't mention anything about these prepositions-used-as-adverbs, so it seems that Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster disagree on the matter.
How did you get the idea that 'up' is an adverb and not a preposition? This is just a question of naming, since we both understand that 'up' and 'down' in 'put up' and 'sit down' are there to modify the verb, but I'd be interested to know if this is common usage.
Surely they should get paid for it in the countries where it is used. If someone in Taiwan is using their patented process to manufacture hard disks, they should sue and receive royalties in Taiwan. Unless the patent is infringed by merely using a finished disk, banning the import of disks seems inappropriate. The import rule looks like a fishy attempt to make the US patent system apply to other countries.
If the program you are using is free software, then you have a choice of who to get support from. Anyone can start a maintained, supported fork of the program and offer their services. This competition (or even just the possibility of competition) will tend to give a better deal to the customer.
With Urchin, the only people supporting it are those 'trained' and authorized by one company, Google. There is no chance for any independent third party to get the code and start offering services.
Maybe you're not a car mechanic yourself, but still you wouldn't buy a car with the hood welded shut.
This story sounds vaguely familiar... didn't Novell try to rewrite Netware to run on top of SVR4 Unix and call it UnixWare? Whatever happened to that, eh?
Yes, and all that Benny here said is that if you don't buy our insurance, your restaurant might accidentally be burned to the ground by some future event.
As long as Apple continue to distribute firmware as an unreadable binary blob, with no independent way to check what it is doing to your phone, they'll continue to have this cloud of suspicion about what the update is really doing.
However, the reason why an RTS is important is because Chess is a limited game to a certain subset of rules that a computer can brute force all possible best moves.
No, it can't. What gave you that idea? The space of possible games is huge.
Your suggestion of testing with Go is a good one. If someone makes an 'illogical' or 'emotional' algorithm to play Go, and it turns out better than existing computer players (which are not that good), then this will be a significant finding. However note that Go, just as much as chess, has only a limited set of moves. Both are finite and both huge enough that you can't brute-force them.
Yeah you know the rule: once a computer can do it, it's no longer AI. I just wrote AI as a shorthand for 'algorithm which chooses the move to make for the current game state'.
OK so they made a program that was better than some existing AI for some strategy game whose rules are particular to that game. This doesn't tell us a lot because we don't know how strong the existing AI was, and have no real way to measure that. It could just be that the 'neurotic' program happened to exploit flaws existing in the current computer player. That doesn't tell us much about how well it would fare against humans.
To get a meaningful result they'd need to test the different programs against experienced, intelligent human opposition. Or better, stop messing around with real-time strategy games and design AI for a game whose rules are already well-known. If a 'neurotic' or 'emotional' player program starts beating the 'purely logical' computer engines in chess, then I'll take notice. We know that the existing AI for chess is quite good (and there is a choice of several strong engines to test against) so any advance over that is likely to be genuine and not just exploiting obvious flaws in some existing program.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to port applications from XP to Vista? Microsoft is normally very good about keeping backwards compatibility - indeed, the need to stay compatible with old badly-written apps is the cause of much of the cruft in Windows. Do you have any examples of software that works in XP and needs rewriting for Vista?
Naked and petrified?
In the past when European courts and regulators have required Microsoft to document their protocols they have done so only with a licence agreement designed to exclude free software such as Samba. After you pay your ten thousand euros, are you then free to implement the specification in free software? This is the crucial point and one that the article didn't mention.
Yes, there are good uses and bad uses. The technology can certainly be put to work for the user's benefit. Indeed, most digital rights management is altruistic in some sense, since it prevents the user from accidentally infringing copyright and perhaps even committing a crime, which they surely would not want to do.
The fundamental argument is not whether good or bad policies are possible, but about freedom and whether you have control over your own computer. If doing e-commerce, can I program my computer to lie and send back a response saying it is not tampered with even when I have changed the software? If I cannot do this, then I no longer have control over the computer and it is no longer my computer. However, the other end of the e-commerce transaction would be foolish to rely on this no-tampering check. Even if ordinary users cannot break the security on the TPM module, a determined criminal organization probably could.
As I understand it, the meaning of Trusted Computing is not that the system administrator will be able to provide a locked-down system. That has long been available with ordinary security measures on Linux and other systems. Rather it means that even the system administrator - even the owner of the computer - will not be able to make the computer do what he wishes rather than what the record industry or movie studios want it to do. This is done by Intel or others supplying some special hardware which won't reveal its private encryption key unless it detects that authorized, signed code is running. Not authorized by the legitimate owner of the computer who is Intel's customer - no, that wouldn't do at all. Rather, that the code is signed by some third party such as Microsoft and there is a secure boot sequence to prevent 'tampering' (i.e., the computer's owner trying to reprogram his or her system).
I don't think the author of the article has understood what Trusted Computing means at all. He is just talking about thin clients and locked-down systems in school environments, which is not really the same thing.
Yes, they should be platform neutral. That surely means not depending on a single proprietary platform such as Flash.
Most of those terms seem pretty reasonable, or if not reasonable then at least necessary. They use P2P to distribute the files, so clearly a user must agree to be part of the P2P network. Accepting 'all liability' seems a necessary safeguard to stop litigious people suing the BBC (it may not be enough); so is the standard stuff about not being responsible for damage to your system (read any software licence and see the parts about NO WARRANTY).
Allowing automatic updates is a bit fishy. You should have a choice whether to update or not. But really, if you're willing to install some binary-only program with full administrator rights, it's not really any greater risk to install later versions of it too.
If the iPlayer agreement is so objectionable, are you happy with the licence terms for the operating system you must use it on?
Flash is just as much a proprietary standard as Microsoft Windows (and more proprietary than Silverlight). Unless the BBC commits to using the subset of Flash that has been reimplemented by Gnash and other projects, I don't think it's a big step forward.
I've heard that a lot... that Logo is extensible, it's based on Lisp, etc etc. But I never saw any cases where it was more powerful than a half-decent implementation of Basic. All I really remember from trying to program in Logo is being unable to make a string containing a space character (because the quote character " begins a string but there is no closing " character) and thinking 'WTF?'.
Your link says 17+17. Ah, the joys of Wikipedia...
Thanks for the link. I see that 'up' can indeed be classed as an adverb. So the rule about not ending sentences with a preposition is even sillier than it first appears, since in many of these cases the offending word (e.g. 'up' in 'make up') is really an adverb.
However, I am concerned that the category adverb is getting too big to be useful. If 'up' is sometimes an adverb (as well as sometimes being a preposition, as you say) then how do you distinguish words like 'quickly' or 'clockwise'? Wikipedia's entry for adverbs doesn't mention anything about these prepositions-used-as-adverbs, so it seems that Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster disagree on the matter.
Truly an American icon.
How did you get the idea that 'up' is an adverb and not a preposition? This is just a question of naming, since we both understand that 'up' and 'down' in 'put up' and 'sit down' are there to modify the verb, but I'd be interested to know if this is common usage.
Surely they should get paid for it in the countries where it is used. If someone in Taiwan is using their patented process to manufacture hard disks, they should sue and receive royalties in Taiwan. Unless the patent is infringed by merely using a finished disk, banning the import of disks seems inappropriate. The import rule looks like a fishy attempt to make the US patent system apply to other countries.
What happens if you have all your directory names in Finnish?
What do they mean, 'new verbs entering English, such as "google," are universally regular.'? Everyone knows that it's
I google
I gaigle
I have googlen
I think this is not a fair comparison. It should be
installing proprietary software and paying for it versus installing free software and paying for it
or if you want to compare the no-money case,
installing proprietary software without paying anything versus installing free software without paying anything
If the program you are using is free software, then you have a choice of who to get support from. Anyone can start a maintained, supported fork of the program and offer their services. This competition (or even just the possibility of competition) will tend to give a better deal to the customer.
With Urchin, the only people supporting it are those 'trained' and authorized by one company, Google. There is no chance for any independent third party to get the code and start offering services.
Maybe you're not a car mechanic yourself, but still you wouldn't buy a car with the hood welded shut.
Surely they should have zero critical vulnerabilities?
This story sounds vaguely familiar... didn't Novell try to rewrite Netware to run on top of SVR4 Unix and call it UnixWare? Whatever happened to that, eh?
Why would you ever want to type 'rm -rf ./'?
Yes, and all that Benny here said is that if you don't buy our insurance, your restaurant might accidentally be burned to the ground by some future event.
As long as Apple continue to distribute firmware as an unreadable binary blob, with no independent way to check what it is doing to your phone, they'll continue to have this cloud of suspicion about what the update is really doing.
No, it can't. What gave you that idea? The space of possible games is huge.
Your suggestion of testing with Go is a good one. If someone makes an 'illogical' or 'emotional' algorithm to play Go, and it turns out better than existing computer players (which are not that good), then this will be a significant finding. However note that Go, just as much as chess, has only a limited set of moves. Both are finite and both huge enough that you can't brute-force them.
Yeah you know the rule: once a computer can do it, it's no longer AI. I just wrote AI as a shorthand for 'algorithm which chooses the move to make for the current game state'.
OK so they made a program that was better than some existing AI for some strategy game whose rules are particular to that game. This doesn't tell us a lot because we don't know how strong the existing AI was, and have no real way to measure that. It could just be that the 'neurotic' program happened to exploit flaws existing in the current computer player. That doesn't tell us much about how well it would fare against humans.
To get a meaningful result they'd need to test the different programs against experienced, intelligent human opposition. Or better, stop messing around with real-time strategy games and design AI for a game whose rules are already well-known. If a 'neurotic' or 'emotional' player program starts beating the 'purely logical' computer engines in chess, then I'll take notice. We know that the existing AI for chess is quite good (and there is a choice of several strong engines to test against) so any advance over that is likely to be genuine and not just exploiting obvious flaws in some existing program.