If you leave users to manage their own machines, why do you think just one single machine will get compromised?
I'm basing this on a naive assumption that most users will want to not be compromised, and will thus start securing their machines. I'm also assuming that the more sensitive stuff is stored on the network (where it should be anyway), meaning it's on a server under IT's control, and that is locked down tight.
Even if no data is lost, and your network stays up, why would you want any of your machines turned into botnets?
It's not that I want that, it's that I don't care. Block outbound port 25, and spam botnets are no longer an issue. Secure the network, not the machine.
Users are not the enemy. They don't want to screw up their machines - most of them just don't know what the safe choices are.
They also either assume it's not their problem, or that security isn't an issue. Or they don't care.
Because if they really did care about security, they would ask, and educate themselves, on what the safe choices are. The problem is making them care.
I'm not suggesting that they're the enemy. I'm suggesting giving them enough responsibility, clearly spelled out, that they start to care -- and I'm suggesting that this is cheaper than having IT babysit every single computer.
In a corporation, you hire people for their domain-knowlege. Marketing/accounts/finance/HR etc. aren't expected to be IT experts.
Let me put it this way: Tuning a guitar is pretty much a menial task that has very little to do with playing music. Storing and transporting a guitar are similarly unrelated to the actual playing of the music. You could be Eric Clapton, you could be the best guitarist in the world, and still not have a clue about guitar maintenance.
And for rock stars, maybe that works. They can afford to pay someone to keep a bunch of guitars tuned and ready, and to go buy new ones if they destroy any. I've seen this before -- at an Umphrey's McGee concert, one guitarist broke a string, and the rest of the band kept right on playing... someone brought him a brand-new guitar, and took his old one backstage to change the string.
But not everyone is a rockstar, and it really does not take very much to learn how to tune your own guitar. Sure, you might not be able to build one from parts, but you can at least take care of the one you have.
That's what I'm proposing here: Marketing, accounts, finance, and HR people, this computer is your tool. You are by definition somewhat of a "computer person", because it is the tool of your trade. You would do well to learn just a bit about it. You don't have to be an expert -- you don't have to be able to build one from parts -- but at least the basics. Let IT do the hard stuff, not clean up after you failing to do the simple stuff.
One more analogy: We make people go through driver's education before they drive a car. That's a hell of a lot of specialized knowledge. You don't have to know how to change your oil, but you should at least know how to adjust the mirrors.
Consider a desktop for somebody in accounts -- this is a grey area between the kiosk and consultant situations.
That is what I'm discussing here. The kiosk isn't as relevant -- there's far fewer ways to screw it up, which means far less work for IT to do. And how much work do you spend, in a large company, supporting kiosks -- versus that desktop in accounting?
Developers will always want to have completely unfettered access to their machines, with minimal (but some) policy enforced -- AV, patches, blacklists.
If every computer in the company except the developers' has AV, patches, and blacklists, and mine is completely 0wned, what's the problem?
And as a developer, I tend to prefer very minimal AV, yes to patches, no to b
That works too. Still something you could do in five minutes.
It may work for BOFHs, but in most cases users need to have their data backed up prior to re-imaging.
At least one other admin seemed to agree with me -- the only way to teach users to have their data stored on the appropriate network shares, and not on their local disks, is to tell them that this is corporate policy, and blow anything on the local disk away.
It doesn't have to be CEO, re-imaging anyone 4 levels down from CEO without a notice will get your ass handed to you.
The point is not to do it without notice. The point is to be very clear what re-imaging entails -- thus, if anyone at that level finds their machine running slowly, and they ask for a re-image, you've got documentation saying they asked for it, and it is officially Their Fault.
I am not saying this could necessarily work at your organization. But I do believe it could work on an organization of that scale, with any amount of sanity.
2. Patches are applied / Software is installed.
For this, I'd generate images more frequently, and pre-load them with more software.
3. Entire hard drive (80-120 GB) is encrypted.
Why isn't this step 1?
That is -- why not either encrypt the image itself, or unpack the image itself onto an encrypted drive? And why does the entire drive have to be encrypted initially? I doubt images+software add up to more than 10 gigs or so, which would be quite a bit faster. The rest of the drive can still be in the encrypted volume, but it's meaningless garbage either way until users put something there.
Moreover, remote users have to ship their laptops to techs, who do the imaging and ship the machines back to the users.
Yikes. Given a fast enough Internet connection, I suppose you could send them an image remotely...
You are right, but this only works in smaller companies. In large companies departments are so separated that IT dept. can't really loan any equipment to the business unit.
Weird. You're right, I don't understand the politics/legalities of large corporations.
I wasn't considering it a loan, I was considering it a trade. Give everyone hardware which is close enough to identical. If the user has an older machine, they get an upgrade, and you phase out the box.
Trying to change the discussion from what is legal to what is moral?
You started out talking about rights. There are legal rights, and there are moral rights. You didn't specify which.
How about we talk about laws and not subjective morals, or is your mind too fucking small to grasp that?
Apparently yours is, or why would you have brought up "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Answer this question: Why do we have laws? I'll give you a hint: It has something to do with morality.
It allows the producers of a work to benefit and profit from their work. I know you don't think anyone should profit if it will cost you money
Apparently your mind is also too small to grasp the difference between the freedom to use what I legally fucking purchased, and free as a dollar amount.
That's right: I cannot legally take a DVD that I own and copy it, format-shift it, or do any of the other things considered "fair use", and which I might have assumed I was paying for. Yes, copying it is considered fair use -- maybe making a copy for the kids to watch, so I can burn them another when they destroy that one -- something which you would know if you had read that article. By the way, don't bother to reply again if you won't.
Please explain to me how you not being able to rip (which comes from the phrase "rip off", meaning to steal) content from a DVD prevents you from creating original content?
How's that relevant?
No, it prevents me from making a legitimate use of a product I own.
Now, why aren't you railing against the real reason that provision exists, people violating the rights of the copyright holders?
Because that's offtopic.
Also, I haven't personally been pirated from, whereas I personally have been burned by DRM.
Now, you are probably thinking something along the lines of "An immoral law should not be followed."
Or perhaps an immoral law should be changed.
Well, in that case, we can let the kids who kill Matthew Shepard out of jail because they were following their morals and not the law.
Looks like you have some reading to do about civil disobedience. Hint: It has nothing to do with getting out of jail. If I break the DRM on something, go ahead, sue me. If the majority of the population agrees that I violated the law, I'll be punished.
I don't think the majority of the population agrees that DRM should not be circumventable, or even that it should exist. I think the majority of the population simply doesn't have a clue.
If morals trump the law, then the law is meaningless because all someone has to say is "I was doing what I believe is morally correct."
And if law trumps morality, then "it's legal to do so" can become an excuse for anything that is, well, legal to do. There's even the excuse of "the law made me do it." I'm sure the women being stoned to death in the middle east will be happy to know that they're being killed -- as a punishment for being raped -- because it's the legal thing to do.
I see you still haven't addressed the laws about eating onions after 6 PM. Nice.
Note that if it makes even 10 sales per year, then the cost per song is $0.04. What's the average number of sales a song makes, I wonder?
And it's also assuming a fairly long (30 minutes or more) FLAC. Divide any cost by five or so to get how much it would cost for the same song in AAC. Divide by another five or so to get how long a typical song is.
Which means Apple's standard cut is more than the worst-case scenario, which isn't happening -- and that's assuming Amazon is involved; Apple might be able to find someone cheaper, or pressure Amazon into cutting prices a bit for them.
I never thought about the way things worked there - did they just "patch" the software (so that the function returns TRUE, or whatever the environment expects it to return) or did they actually learn those abilities?
It's actually much simpler than that... and I thought this was obvious to everyone.
Go back and watch the original movie. Neo lies down, jacks in. Tank picks up a disc, inserts it into the ship's computer, and pushes a button. Neo's eyes flutter for a bit, as computer/data sounds are made.
They are downloading the knowledge and experience into his brain. (I'm fairly sure the word "downloading" did appear on screen at this point, too.) Chances are, these are memories of actual training, possibly some wiring of his own chemistry... Think of it as installing software, not "hacking".
Then, after he's spent 12 hours straight downloading stuff into his brain: "I know Kung Fu." "Show me." At which point, he enters an actual training simulation with Morpheus. He already knows kung fu at this point -- Morpheus is teaching him to push beyond the boundaries of the artificial world. This is the "hacking".
These skills don't carry over to the real world, obviously, because the real world is real, and can't be manipulated that way -- at least in the first movie, when things made sense. However, things like flying a helicopter would, if there were any helicopters remaining in the real world -- anyone can learn this skill.
What is learning? It's copying information into your brain, and integrating it with the information you already know. Skills can be seen as software -- and if you see the brain as a computer, then learning facts is just downloading files, and learning a skill is just installing software. Yes, there's a physical component, too -- his muscles in the real world won't be able to do everything he learned just because he learned them -- but building muscle is much easier than training to become a world-class martial artist. (To abuse the metaphor, your body is just the "hardware" that it runs on.)
It is nice to be able to drag-and-drop, manage databases, debug, and make an installer all in one IDE.
Make an installer doesn't seem like it should be a priority, especially given the number of packaging systems for Linux. But if "make install" counts as an installer, that's covered.
Everything else you mentioned exists in IDEs that work on Linux. Eclipse is pretty good.
There's also the fact that some environments -- Rails, for instance -- focus more on providing good tools than providing a flashy GUI. Exactly what will drag-and-drop buy me vs script/generate?
Microsoft's anwer to Java? How about C#, which I'm always reading people bash as a clone of Java.
No, Microsoft's answer to actual Java development. That is: Someone has dictated that you must use Java for a given project. What's the best IDE for it? Certainly nothing out of Microsoft.
It's not that we don't have the technology -- that's only part of it. It's that we don't have the technology, and it's a retarded idea in the first place.
How do I choose what data is "poured"? And once I do so, why do I have to actually watch it being poured? Why is "spilling" better than simply pushing a button on a projector? It looks like a portable holographic multitouch interface, which is very cool -- but WTF is with the coffee concept?
This is more like Ed Land giving his engineers a baseball and telling them to not only build an instant camera that size, but in that shape, and instead of pressing a shutter button, you throw it at what you're trying to take a picture of. It's an interesting idea, by why would you want to ever use it? And who would pay for someone to design it?
The comparison is to OS X Classic -- it's virtualization, emulation, and an all-around compatibility layer.
If know half the bullshit Microsoft goes through to ensure that new versions of Windows are backwards-compatible... MS will fix a bug, only to find that certain old programs rely on said bug. So they will then have to deliberately implement the old, buggy behavior, at least for that one app. I have a new respect for Wine developers after reading about some of the more horrible hacks they do...
We're talking about software which would read the version number into a buffer that was exactly right for Windows 3.1, but not Windows 3.11, where changing the version number will cause a buffer overflow and crash the app.
In light of that, is it any wonder that Linux has so much less cruft? We're not afraid of breaking buggy apps -- we have the source code to most of them anyway. People who do stupid things like the above either learn very quickly, or become irrelevant.
So this is pretty much the best possible way Microsoft could support backwards compatibility, and pretty much the only way they could do so while actually improving the system.
It's also something that I've been advocating for a long time, and something that I argued that they should have done with Vista. I'm not going to complain about it now just because it's from Microsoft. Good ideas should be acknowledged.
I agree it's probably not going to work as full-blown analysis, especially as typing patterns change...
But I did have a very simple variant of this: I imposed a timeout. I had a 20-character (roughly) password that I could type in about two seconds, so I set the screensaver password timeout to five seconds. That, and it was in dvorak. So someone had to know my password and be able to type dvorak as fast as I can to login, but there was little chance that a change in typing patterns would lock me out, unless my typing speed suddenly slowed for some reason.
However, in the overall analysis Visual Studio is a better C# and.NET IDE and that is what is keeping many of us developers in the Microsoft fold.
Because C# and.NET were developed by Microsoft, and Mono will, naturally, be playing catch-up.
However, there are other options on Linux. There are software development platforms specific to Linux, and there are platforms that simply work better on Linux -- "scripting" languages (Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP) in particular. And there's the fact that you can help fix the deficiencies you see in Eclipse, whereas there's nothing you can do about deficiencies in Visual Studio.
If I was a C# developer, I might be on Windows, but there is more to it than C#. Does Microsoft have an answer to Eclipse for Java programming?
Oh no, they learned kung fu, and they kept that in the real world.
What you don't get to take to the real world is your virtual muscles (which can be as toned as you want), and the ability to do things that are physically impossible. But that's no reason the knowledge would suddenly go away.
But the photorealism has been there in movies and TV for some time now.
If it's going to affect people, the damage is already (being) done.
Oh, and keep in mind... you don't have to beat the whores to death with baseball bats. That's the interesting thing about GTA. It's a tradition that goes back to Ultima -- let the players do whatever they want, even if some of these things might be downright horrible. It's a test of their morality (or lack thereof), and they still have the chance to do the "right thing".
Yeah, that bothered me too, but "cyberspace" bothers me just as much.
Call it what it is: photorealistic graphics. And just graphics -- no tactile feedback, no direct neural interface, and no convincing AIs -- barely passable physics -- and it says nothing of the actual structure behind it.
That, and Gibson's cyberspace, at least in Neuromancer, wasn't even trying to be photorealistic. It was more like an acid trip, or like Tron without the humanoids -- it would have either had basic geometry, or it'd be using your brain's own imagination.
That said, The Matrix was the first place I saw it go the other way -- where the humans are trapped inside the VR, with no knowledge that it isn't real, and they must break out and fight back. It may have been done before, but that was the first place I saw it -- and it brings in the much more powerful philosophical questions of "Are we living in The Matrix right now? Or is this real? What is real?..."
Gibson's Cyberspace, on the other hand, was just the next step in UIs and communications -- it was never meant to be realistic, let alone to fool people into thinking it was real.
Try something like WoW. It may not be exactly good, but it's certainly addictive.
Or try something like Second Life.
Of course, making it photorealistic is not "Matrix-Like VR", that requires a better interface. Nor should photorealism be regarded as a sign of any kind of "intelligence", and comparing it to a Turing test is absurd.
Or just dumb people down a bit, or use "idle" brainpower, explaining the feeling of a "splinter in your mind."
Which would also make the "hacking" believable, even that it's something that's all in your head, that it's effectively like lucid dreaming -- the machines' mistake for using untrusted nodes for their distributed computer -- although it doesn't explain why they'd make quite such a trivial mistake; I'd expect machines to be able to code flawlessly secure virtualization in a brain between human consciousness and whatever the machine needs.
It'd also explain how an Agent can "take over" a human.
However, that doesn't explain the lack of lag. I'm too lazy to run the calculations, but if you had two people at opposite ends of the globe, what's the minimum latency you can have? That might be prohibitive.
It also doesn't explain the motivation. Blatant disregard for conservation of energy just about kills that movie for me...
And it doesn't explain why it's impossible to unplug at any time, or why Smith was the first actual worm (or why humans couldn't develop a counter-worm)...
Ok, let's assume we're talking about a very long flac file. Most of mine are less than 100 megs, so let's be generous and assume 100 megs. To make the math easier, let's assume that's a tenth of a gig.
A quick glance at Amazon S3, and assuming a worst-case scenario -- that Apple hasn't broken the 10 TB/mo limit -- and that the song only makes one sale in an entire year:
18 cents to host the song for a year.
1.8 cents for the one download.
1 cent for the upload.
Approximately a thousanth of a cent for the PUT request. I'll ignore this.
Approximately one ten-thousanth of a cent for the GET request -- if you're generous, maybe another for a HEAD request. I'll ignore this too.
Rounding up, that's 22 cents out of a song that's been up for a year and is only sold once. That might make sense, especially if the credit card fees are bad -- and especially if Apple doesn't consolidate multiple purchases into one charge.
But that doesn't seem likely, for most music. Assume a song makes, oh, ten sales per year -- then the initial upload and hosting cost for the year is about 2 cents per sale. Adding it up, hosting and distribution now costs a little less than 4 cents per sale. At 100 songs, it's about 2 cents, and approaching that 1.8 cents for purely bandwidth -- which becomes 1.6 cents after Apple transfers 10 TB (total, across ALL music, and anything else they put on S3...)
That's assuming a 100 meg flac -- which would usually be distributed as a 10 or 20 meg MP3.
I live in a small town in Iowa, and I've got 100 mbit fiber at home and at work -- my best guess is it's 15 mbits up. The hardware supposedly supports gigabit, but they're not offering that yet.
And it costs me $60/mo. Cheaper, faster, more reliable, and no active P2P blocking that I know of.
My guess is, there's absolutely no way Comcast can compete with fiber, anywhere fiber is possible to get. Which means that this is just staving off the inevitable. I'd suggest that anyone who does have to deal with Comcast, try to avoid any long-term contracts, in case some upstart does start running fiber around the neighborhood...
it is in general not possible for a compiler to see what parameters a function will be called with, as the function could be called with the result of an arbitrary function
It is, however, possible for a VM to watch what parameters a function is actually called with. I'm afraid I've fallen into the habit of calling any tool a "compiler", occasionally.
Both this code and myfunc() might be behaving as they should, but their interaction could result in a type error, which would be trivial to catch for a statically typed language.
That is one example. I haven't had enough sleep for a proper reply, so I am not sure if I can find a good code example, but I'm going to suggest that you can have things like this occur in an explicitly-typed language. Templates and anywhere you typecast are places you could have potentially interesting interactions.
And that would likely be caught by a functional test -- though you're right, you can't catch everything.
More importantly, you have to wonder at the wisdom of myfunc returning these incompatible types in the first place -- what is so complex about myfunc that it can't return something predictable? Is this something which could be helped by simplifying the design?
I'm not sure I can say much more, though, without context.
Instead, you will be debugging a production problem with some helpful message ala "type error: cannot convert Fixnum to String".
And a healthy stacktrace.
Like looking up in a hash table, but accidentially using a converted form (say, to string) of the key instead of the intended key.
I honestly cannot ever remember doing that. Not once.
It's simple stuff, and they could be prevented with good pre and postcondition checks, but I know that everyone forgets at least some of those. Besides, it clutters the code.
Well, I find explicit typing to be that much more clutter. I don't need pre and postcondition checks everywhere.
Of course you can:) You even write it yourself with the grep below, integrate your grep with the language and you've got it.
It's not a guarantee, just a test. Unless I've also got a grep which blocks all 'eval' statements, for instance -- not that I use many of those, but they do have legitimate uses.
There is a keyword for handling that case. mutable, if you want to check up on it.
I'll have to let that digest for a bit. My initial reaction is that this is still less flexible -- I realize that's on purpose, of course.
But one thing I love about accessors in the first place is the ability to shift the implementation around underneath of whatever's using it. I'm not sure mutable covers everything I might want to do with a former accessor.
Yeah, I read that article too. As I recall, The author was incapable of writing even remotely efficient C++, and mistook that for VM efficiency
You're thinking of a different article.
Imagine, instead, that you write an emulator for x86 -- like virtualization (running multiple OSes at once), only it actually emulates instead. And you find that Windows inside this emulation is faster than Windows on the bare metal -- of the same machine that's running the emulator.
Now, it wasn't x86, and again, I can't find the article. (Probably some flavor of RISC?) But I think that, if anything, proves that VMs could be written which would beat native code, current implementations notwithstanding.
compare this to equivalent Java, and the Java runtime will realize that it doesn't need to create the object on the heap. Of course, if you write the C++ naturally void func() { MyObject obj; }
It looks as if that wasn't testing runtime optimizations, but compiler optimizations
Kubuntu 7.10, 64-bit, pretty standard setup. Ktorrent is particularly bad, as I can almost reliably crash that by doing things like "check data integrity", then try to remove that torrent.
But Konqueror crashes too. Worse, it crashes most often when I'm editing a textarea, usually doing some editing, moving stuff around, copy/paste with the keyboard (shift+arrows to select) -- not reliably enough that I can make a decent bugreport of it, but invariably, when it does crash, it's at the end of a relatively long post that I'll have to go back and retype from scratch.
That's right -- it's illegal to eat onions in certain cities and at certain hours. I assert that I have the right to eat onions whenever the fuck I want.
(c) Prohibition on Circumvention of the System. No person shall import, manufacture, or distribute any device, or offer or perform any service, the primary purpose or effect of which is to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent any program or circuit which implements, in whole or in part, a system described in subsection (a).
Is that the "right" you're defending? The right to require that no one ever circumvent your copy protection, no matter what the reason? Does it ever occur to you that there might be a legitimate reason?
What does preventing me from ripping a DVD to an iPod have to do with "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? Sounds to me like it does exactly the opposite, which is why people actually creating content (instead of trolling on Slashdot) are signing up with Amazon MP3.
Looks to me like I read what you linked to, but you didn't even give what I linked to a chance. Try again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm basing this on a naive assumption that most users will want to not be compromised, and will thus start securing their machines. I'm also assuming that the more sensitive stuff is stored on the network (where it should be anyway), meaning it's on a server under IT's control, and that is locked down tight.
It's not that I want that, it's that I don't care. Block outbound port 25, and spam botnets are no longer an issue. Secure the network, not the machine.
They also either assume it's not their problem, or that security isn't an issue. Or they don't care.
Because if they really did care about security, they would ask, and educate themselves, on what the safe choices are. The problem is making them care.
I'm not suggesting that they're the enemy. I'm suggesting giving them enough responsibility, clearly spelled out, that they start to care -- and I'm suggesting that this is cheaper than having IT babysit every single computer.
Let me put it this way: Tuning a guitar is pretty much a menial task that has very little to do with playing music. Storing and transporting a guitar are similarly unrelated to the actual playing of the music. You could be Eric Clapton, you could be the best guitarist in the world, and still not have a clue about guitar maintenance.
And for rock stars, maybe that works. They can afford to pay someone to keep a bunch of guitars tuned and ready, and to go buy new ones if they destroy any. I've seen this before -- at an Umphrey's McGee concert, one guitarist broke a string, and the rest of the band kept right on playing... someone brought him a brand-new guitar, and took his old one backstage to change the string.
But not everyone is a rockstar, and it really does not take very much to learn how to tune your own guitar. Sure, you might not be able to build one from parts, but you can at least take care of the one you have.
That's what I'm proposing here: Marketing, accounts, finance, and HR people, this computer is your tool. You are by definition somewhat of a "computer person", because it is the tool of your trade. You would do well to learn just a bit about it. You don't have to be an expert -- you don't have to be able to build one from parts -- but at least the basics. Let IT do the hard stuff, not clean up after you failing to do the simple stuff.
One more analogy: We make people go through driver's education before they drive a car. That's a hell of a lot of specialized knowledge. You don't have to know how to change your oil, but you should at least know how to adjust the mirrors.
That is what I'm discussing here. The kiosk isn't as relevant -- there's far fewer ways to screw it up, which means far less work for IT to do. And how much work do you spend, in a large company, supporting kiosks -- versus that desktop in accounting?
If every computer in the company except the developers' has AV, patches, and blacklists, and mine is completely 0wned, what's the problem?
And as a developer, I tend to prefer very minimal AV, yes to patches, no to b
That works too. Still something you could do in five minutes.
At least one other admin seemed to agree with me -- the only way to teach users to have their data stored on the appropriate network shares, and not on their local disks, is to tell them that this is corporate policy, and blow anything on the local disk away.
The point is not to do it without notice. The point is to be very clear what re-imaging entails -- thus, if anyone at that level finds their machine running slowly, and they ask for a re-image, you've got documentation saying they asked for it, and it is officially Their Fault.
I am not saying this could necessarily work at your organization. But I do believe it could work on an organization of that scale, with any amount of sanity.
For this, I'd generate images more frequently, and pre-load them with more software.
Why isn't this step 1?
That is -- why not either encrypt the image itself, or unpack the image itself onto an encrypted drive? And why does the entire drive have to be encrypted initially? I doubt images+software add up to more than 10 gigs or so, which would be quite a bit faster. The rest of the drive can still be in the encrypted volume, but it's meaningless garbage either way until users put something there.
Yikes. Given a fast enough Internet connection, I suppose you could send them an image remotely...
Weird. You're right, I don't understand the politics/legalities of large corporations.
I wasn't considering it a loan, I was considering it a trade. Give everyone hardware which is close enough to identical. If the user has an older machine, they get an upgrade, and you phase out the box.
You started out talking about rights. There are legal rights, and there are moral rights. You didn't specify which.
Apparently yours is, or why would you have brought up "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?
Answer this question: Why do we have laws? I'll give you a hint: It has something to do with morality.
Apparently your mind is also too small to grasp the difference between the freedom to use what I legally fucking purchased, and free as a dollar amount.
That's right: I cannot legally take a DVD that I own and copy it, format-shift it, or do any of the other things considered "fair use", and which I might have assumed I was paying for. Yes, copying it is considered fair use -- maybe making a copy for the kids to watch, so I can burn them another when they destroy that one -- something which you would know if you had read that article. By the way, don't bother to reply again if you won't.
How's that relevant?
No, it prevents me from making a legitimate use of a product I own.
Because that's offtopic.
Also, I haven't personally been pirated from, whereas I personally have been burned by DRM.
Or perhaps an immoral law should be changed.
Looks like you have some reading to do about civil disobedience. Hint: It has nothing to do with getting out of jail. If I break the DRM on something, go ahead, sue me. If the majority of the population agrees that I violated the law, I'll be punished.
I don't think the majority of the population agrees that DRM should not be circumventable, or even that it should exist. I think the majority of the population simply doesn't have a clue.
And if law trumps morality, then "it's legal to do so" can become an excuse for anything that is, well, legal to do. There's even the excuse of "the law made me do it." I'm sure the women being stoned to death in the middle east will be happy to know that they're being killed -- as a punishment for being raped -- because it's the legal thing to do.
I see you still haven't addressed the laws about eating onions after 6 PM. Nice.
That was the worst-case scenario.
Note that if it makes even 10 sales per year, then the cost per song is $0.04. What's the average number of sales a song makes, I wonder?
And it's also assuming a fairly long (30 minutes or more) FLAC. Divide any cost by five or so to get how much it would cost for the same song in AAC. Divide by another five or so to get how long a typical song is.
Which means Apple's standard cut is more than the worst-case scenario, which isn't happening -- and that's assuming Amazon is involved; Apple might be able to find someone cheaper, or pressure Amazon into cutting prices a bit for them.
Actually, the government paid to lay it, so installation was free.
Are you suggesting that the cost of actually maintaining the service after the fact is higher than that?
It's actually much simpler than that... and I thought this was obvious to everyone.
Go back and watch the original movie. Neo lies down, jacks in. Tank picks up a disc, inserts it into the ship's computer, and pushes a button. Neo's eyes flutter for a bit, as computer/data sounds are made.
They are downloading the knowledge and experience into his brain. (I'm fairly sure the word "downloading" did appear on screen at this point, too.) Chances are, these are memories of actual training, possibly some wiring of his own chemistry... Think of it as installing software, not "hacking".
Then, after he's spent 12 hours straight downloading stuff into his brain: "I know Kung Fu." "Show me." At which point, he enters an actual training simulation with Morpheus. He already knows kung fu at this point -- Morpheus is teaching him to push beyond the boundaries of the artificial world. This is the "hacking".
These skills don't carry over to the real world, obviously, because the real world is real, and can't be manipulated that way -- at least in the first movie, when things made sense. However, things like flying a helicopter would, if there were any helicopters remaining in the real world -- anyone can learn this skill.
What is learning? It's copying information into your brain, and integrating it with the information you already know. Skills can be seen as software -- and if you see the brain as a computer, then learning facts is just downloading files, and learning a skill is just installing software. Yes, there's a physical component, too -- his muscles in the real world won't be able to do everything he learned just because he learned them -- but building muscle is much easier than training to become a world-class martial artist. (To abuse the metaphor, your body is just the "hardware" that it runs on.)
Make an installer doesn't seem like it should be a priority, especially given the number of packaging systems for Linux. But if "make install" counts as an installer, that's covered.
Everything else you mentioned exists in IDEs that work on Linux. Eclipse is pretty good.
There's also the fact that some environments -- Rails, for instance -- focus more on providing good tools than providing a flashy GUI. Exactly what will drag-and-drop buy me vs script/generate?
No, Microsoft's answer to actual Java development. That is: Someone has dictated that you must use Java for a given project. What's the best IDE for it? Certainly nothing out of Microsoft.
It's not that we necessarily can't build it. It's a question of whether it's a good idea.
It's not a question of whether we'll ever have tactile holograms. The more relevant question is, WTF is with the coffee cup metaphor?
This isn't.
It's not that we don't have the technology -- that's only part of it. It's that we don't have the technology, and it's a retarded idea in the first place.
How do I choose what data is "poured"? And once I do so, why do I have to actually watch it being poured? Why is "spilling" better than simply pushing a button on a projector? It looks like a portable holographic multitouch interface, which is very cool -- but WTF is with the coffee concept?
This is more like Ed Land giving his engineers a baseball and telling them to not only build an instant camera that size, but in that shape, and instead of pressing a shutter button, you throw it at what you're trying to take a picture of. It's an interesting idea, by why would you want to ever use it? And who would pay for someone to design it?
The comparison is to OS X Classic -- it's virtualization, emulation, and an all-around compatibility layer.
If know half the bullshit Microsoft goes through to ensure that new versions of Windows are backwards-compatible... MS will fix a bug, only to find that certain old programs rely on said bug. So they will then have to deliberately implement the old, buggy behavior, at least for that one app. I have a new respect for Wine developers after reading about some of the more horrible hacks they do...
We're talking about software which would read the version number into a buffer that was exactly right for Windows 3.1, but not Windows 3.11, where changing the version number will cause a buffer overflow and crash the app.
In light of that, is it any wonder that Linux has so much less cruft? We're not afraid of breaking buggy apps -- we have the source code to most of them anyway. People who do stupid things like the above either learn very quickly, or become irrelevant.
So this is pretty much the best possible way Microsoft could support backwards compatibility, and pretty much the only way they could do so while actually improving the system.
It's also something that I've been advocating for a long time, and something that I argued that they should have done with Vista. I'm not going to complain about it now just because it's from Microsoft. Good ideas should be acknowledged.
I agree it's probably not going to work as full-blown analysis, especially as typing patterns change...
But I did have a very simple variant of this: I imposed a timeout. I had a 20-character (roughly) password that I could type in about two seconds, so I set the screensaver password timeout to five seconds. That, and it was in dvorak. So someone had to know my password and be able to type dvorak as fast as I can to login, but there was little chance that a change in typing patterns would lock me out, unless my typing speed suddenly slowed for some reason.
Because C# and .NET were developed by Microsoft, and Mono will, naturally, be playing catch-up.
However, there are other options on Linux. There are software development platforms specific to Linux, and there are platforms that simply work better on Linux -- "scripting" languages (Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP) in particular. And there's the fact that you can help fix the deficiencies you see in Eclipse, whereas there's nothing you can do about deficiencies in Visual Studio.
If I was a C# developer, I might be on Windows, but there is more to it than C#. Does Microsoft have an answer to Eclipse for Java programming?
Oh no, they learned kung fu, and they kept that in the real world.
What you don't get to take to the real world is your virtual muscles (which can be as toned as you want), and the ability to do things that are physically impossible. But that's no reason the knowledge would suddenly go away.
Yes, games are interactive, and there's that...
But the photorealism has been there in movies and TV for some time now.
If it's going to affect people, the damage is already (being) done.
Oh, and keep in mind... you don't have to beat the whores to death with baseball bats. That's the interesting thing about GTA. It's a tradition that goes back to Ultima -- let the players do whatever they want, even if some of these things might be downright horrible. It's a test of their morality (or lack thereof), and they still have the chance to do the "right thing".
Yeah, that bothered me too, but "cyberspace" bothers me just as much.
Call it what it is: photorealistic graphics. And just graphics -- no tactile feedback, no direct neural interface, and no convincing AIs -- barely passable physics -- and it says nothing of the actual structure behind it.
That, and Gibson's cyberspace, at least in Neuromancer, wasn't even trying to be photorealistic. It was more like an acid trip, or like Tron without the humanoids -- it would have either had basic geometry, or it'd be using your brain's own imagination.
That said, The Matrix was the first place I saw it go the other way -- where the humans are trapped inside the VR, with no knowledge that it isn't real, and they must break out and fight back. It may have been done before, but that was the first place I saw it -- and it brings in the much more powerful philosophical questions of "Are we living in The Matrix right now? Or is this real? What is real?..."
Gibson's Cyberspace, on the other hand, was just the next step in UIs and communications -- it was never meant to be realistic, let alone to fool people into thinking it was real.
But yes, "Matrix-like" is retarded.
Well, the "blue pill" was "believe whatever you want to believe", which sounds a bit like people who believe this.
Or you say no to drugs...
Right, and aside from tactile feedback, the visuals are just about there. Or, if you're into Anime, they're aready here.
That, and the tactile feedback still wouldn't be the real thing. It's supposed to be about human contact.
Well, aside from wasting time on YouTube...
Try something like WoW. It may not be exactly good, but it's certainly addictive.
Or try something like Second Life.
Of course, making it photorealistic is not "Matrix-Like VR", that requires a better interface. Nor should photorealism be regarded as a sign of any kind of "intelligence", and comparing it to a Turing test is absurd.
Or just dumb people down a bit, or use "idle" brainpower, explaining the feeling of a "splinter in your mind."
Which would also make the "hacking" believable, even that it's something that's all in your head, that it's effectively like lucid dreaming -- the machines' mistake for using untrusted nodes for their distributed computer -- although it doesn't explain why they'd make quite such a trivial mistake; I'd expect machines to be able to code flawlessly secure virtualization in a brain between human consciousness and whatever the machine needs.
It'd also explain how an Agent can "take over" a human.
However, that doesn't explain the lack of lag. I'm too lazy to run the calculations, but if you had two people at opposite ends of the globe, what's the minimum latency you can have? That might be prohibitive.
It also doesn't explain the motivation. Blatant disregard for conservation of energy just about kills that movie for me...
And it doesn't explain why it's impossible to unplug at any time, or why Smith was the first actual worm (or why humans couldn't develop a counter-worm)...
Not unless such a "P2P" effort is at least seeded by the labels themselves.
Ok, let's assume we're talking about a very long flac file. Most of mine are less than 100 megs, so let's be generous and assume 100 megs. To make the math easier, let's assume that's a tenth of a gig.
A quick glance at Amazon S3, and assuming a worst-case scenario -- that Apple hasn't broken the 10 TB/mo limit -- and that the song only makes one sale in an entire year:
Rounding up, that's 22 cents out of a song that's been up for a year and is only sold once. That might make sense, especially if the credit card fees are bad -- and especially if Apple doesn't consolidate multiple purchases into one charge.
But that doesn't seem likely, for most music. Assume a song makes, oh, ten sales per year -- then the initial upload and hosting cost for the year is about 2 cents per sale. Adding it up, hosting and distribution now costs a little less than 4 cents per sale. At 100 songs, it's about 2 cents, and approaching that 1.8 cents for purely bandwidth -- which becomes 1.6 cents after Apple transfers 10 TB (total, across ALL music, and anything else they put on S3...)
That's assuming a 100 meg flac -- which would usually be distributed as a 10 or 20 meg MP3.
So, Apple's $0.29 cut seems a bit high.
I live in a small town in Iowa, and I've got 100 mbit fiber at home and at work -- my best guess is it's 15 mbits up. The hardware supposedly supports gigabit, but they're not offering that yet.
And it costs me $60/mo. Cheaper, faster, more reliable, and no active P2P blocking that I know of.
My guess is, there's absolutely no way Comcast can compete with fiber, anywhere fiber is possible to get. Which means that this is just staving off the inevitable. I'd suggest that anyone who does have to deal with Comcast, try to avoid any long-term contracts, in case some upstart does start running fiber around the neighborhood...
It is, however, possible for a VM to watch what parameters a function is actually called with. I'm afraid I've fallen into the habit of calling any tool a "compiler", occasionally.
That is one example. I haven't had enough sleep for a proper reply, so I am not sure if I can find a good code example, but I'm going to suggest that you can have things like this occur in an explicitly-typed language. Templates and anywhere you typecast are places you could have potentially interesting interactions.
And that would likely be caught by a functional test -- though you're right, you can't catch everything.
More importantly, you have to wonder at the wisdom of myfunc returning these incompatible types in the first place -- what is so complex about myfunc that it can't return something predictable? Is this something which could be helped by simplifying the design?
I'm not sure I can say much more, though, without context.
And a healthy stacktrace.
I honestly cannot ever remember doing that. Not once.
Well, I find explicit typing to be that much more clutter. I don't need pre and postcondition checks everywhere.
It's not a guarantee, just a test. Unless I've also got a grep which blocks all 'eval' statements, for instance -- not that I use many of those, but they do have legitimate uses.
I'll have to let that digest for a bit. My initial reaction is that this is still less flexible -- I realize that's on purpose, of course.
But one thing I love about accessors in the first place is the ability to shift the implementation around underneath of whatever's using it. I'm not sure mutable covers everything I might want to do with a former accessor.
You're thinking of a different article.
Imagine, instead, that you write an emulator for x86 -- like virtualization (running multiple OSes at once), only it actually emulates instead. And you find that Windows inside this emulation is faster than Windows on the bare metal -- of the same machine that's running the emulator.
Now, it wasn't x86, and again, I can't find the article. (Probably some flavor of RISC?) But I think that, if anything, proves that VMs could be written which would beat native code, current implementations notwithstanding.
It looks as if that wasn't testing runtime optimizations, but compiler optimizations
Kubuntu 7.10, 64-bit, pretty standard setup. Ktorrent is particularly bad, as I can almost reliably crash that by doing things like "check data integrity", then try to remove that torrent.
But Konqueror crashes too. Worse, it crashes most often when I'm editing a textarea, usually doing some editing, moving stuff around, copy/paste with the keyboard (shift+arrows to select) -- not reliably enough that I can make a decent bugreport of it, but invariably, when it does crash, it's at the end of a relatively long post that I'll have to go back and retype from scratch.
Do you truly believe law defines morality?
That's right -- it's illegal to eat onions in certain cities and at certain hours. I assert that I have the right to eat onions whenever the fuck I want.
How about we talk about rights, and not laws?
Ah, yes, that would be this right. Specifically:
Is that the "right" you're defending? The right to require that no one ever circumvent your copy protection, no matter what the reason? Does it ever occur to you that there might be a legitimate reason?
What does preventing me from ripping a DVD to an iPod have to do with "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? Sounds to me like it does exactly the opposite, which is why people actually creating content (instead of trolling on Slashdot) are signing up with Amazon MP3.
Looks to me like I read what you linked to, but you didn't even give what I linked to a chance. Try again.