Clark has his own set of laws, most of which you have mentioned. He reportably created the first three because Isaac Asimov had three, however over time, a 4th has been added.
ACC Laws
1) "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2) "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
69th) "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."
Why do people still insist on using e-cards?
What possesses people to do it?
Because they think that it is exactly the same as sending you a physical card, just updated for the 21 centry. They have absolutly no idea that there can be a down-side to these things because they are thinking of it in terms of a physical card. They are probably thinking that since you use a computer a lot, then you will like to see a greeting card on your computer. I know, I have a lot of relatives that have done this in the past, and it took a lot of explaning to them why this was a really bad idea.
It would be quite difficult for MS to "prove" that any given developer had seen the purloined source
Simple, they could borrow a trick from SCO and say "It would be impossible for the FOSS developer to do X unless they had seen the M$ code." Unlike SCO, MS will have competent lawyers backed by even more money.
Read the Article. Downloading and personal copies are legal in Canada, distribution (uploading) without permission is not.
Some other issues. The new Canadian fedral privacy law will mean that the ISP's have to be carefull when handing over personal data, meaning, CRIA will probably need court orders. Canadian courts don't rubber stamp search warrents like the American courts do, so resonable proof will have to be given. Also, Candian courts have tended not to like hypothetical or greatly inflated damages. (you lost how much for an album that is out of print and that you no longer have in stock?)
This looks like a trial attempt to see if they can repete what the RIAA is doing, but in Canada. They will probably have much less success. If anyone reading this gets served with one of these notices, get a lawyer.
PS. last time I was in the states, CDs sold for $10 - $15 US and currently sell for about $15-20 Canadian. Check some of the on-line sellers like Amazon.com or bestbuy.com for more up to date American prices.
For example, if i open a private FTP site and i prove that only my friends have access to it, then it falls neatly under 'fair use' clause.
No. This would be an example of distribution, the same as if you made a copy of a CD and gave it to a friend. Both cases are not allowed.
I heard that it was the returns from the paperback novels that killed them. Unlike the rulebooks they sold to the gaming stores, there was a cause in the contracts with the big book chains that allowed them to 'return' unsold merchandise. Actually it is worse then that, as the bookstores to save money, often ripped off the fron cover and only sent those back, thats what the warning at the front of most paperbacks about not buying books without a cover as the author has not been payed is about. TSR apparently lost a lot of money on that.
Having the source you could do a cleanroom implementation of it, have a set of "dirty" developers read and describe the undocumented API's and another set write those API's from scratch
Especially if the Dirty Room is in another country where the copyright laws are different (ie. saner) then the US. The warning given to open source developers about viewing the windows source derived from the NDA that Microsoft forced developers to sign, not seeing the code itself. Copyright law allows the viewing of other works to learn how they are built. Mind you, the US legal system is so f%#$@d-up and M$ has so much money that there is no guarentee that this right will be upheld in court.
Maybe he is implying men are children. ^_^
Seriously, maybe is is a mis-translation of a run on sentence. Wasn't there a story yesturday about how women are the fastest growing gaming demographic, and even so, they are still vastly under represented in the gaming comunity, so maybe he added woman to the end of his list as an afterthought and ment nothing sexist about it.
You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP
In some ways Open Office is better then Word. Try putting a callout on top of a graphic in Word (I tried this in Word 2K). Word put the callout under the graphic. The only way I could get it to work was to create a canvase object, add the graphic, then put the callout on top of that. In OO, I just added the graphic, then put the callout on, and it worked correctly the first time I tried. OK, OO does not have the variety of callout that word does, but it does have the basic functionallity, and new callout could probably be added quite easily. Annother integration feature that OO has that I cannot find in Word is the auto wrap-arround feature that allows the inclusion of a graphic, and allows the test area to flow around it like what you see in magazines. In Word, you can put a rectangular graphic in the document, and have the text squashed to one side, if it puts any text there at all, most of the time it just restarts the text below the graphic.
Remember, this is an Open Source project, if someone (in academia say) doesn't like the functionallity in OO, they can modify the program to do what they want.
Even better, implement a time based crypto knock sequence (the knock sequence would change over time) so that repeating a heard knock would be useless. Combined with the lockout period for wrong knocks could kill sniffer based attacks cold unless they intercepted enough signals to guess the crypto.
I read about a company doing this last year in Wired (I think!). Anyway, it was a porn outfit that was also into spamming. They got people to type in the catchas that were inlined from yahoo as part of a script. Sort of a key punch job. These people sat at a computer, run a program, and these catchas would come up, and they would type in the word. The script would deliver the word to yahoo (before it timed out), and the script would take care of the rest of the details of creating new accounts, and promptly spam from them. Anyway, in exchange for doing this, they got paid in free access to the porn sites.
This story has enough of those details that it appears to a retelling of the same story that has mutated over time, sort of the way urban ledgends do.
I wholeheartedly agree that Serkis should get an award of some type.
There is precedence for the Academy to give special one time awards for extraordinary achievement, sort of like the special Oscar that Disney got for Snow White (One big Oscar, and 12 small Oscars on the same base, presented by Shirley Temple iirc) The Academy probably should have done this last year, and given it to the team that created Gollum (PJ, AS and the sxf team) but we can always hope they will do it this year.
Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?
People have been doing this for as long as there were mods. One of the first replaced all the monsters in Doom with Barney the purple dinosour.
If you wish to use memory mapped IO to your file system, which has some good technical properties, you need a pointer with an address range *at least* as large as the largest possible file you might need to access, and preferably as large as the largest file system you intend to mount.
Err, no. You can mmap a portion of the file up to the limit of the pointer. ie. you can mmap a 1GB section of a 10GB file, and then keep moving the 1GB window till you have processed the entire file using long longs for the offset in the file, and 32 bit pointers for the offset inside the mmap. Watch out, sometimes the OS doesn't let you access the whole 2GB of memory allowed by the signed 32 bit pointer because the OS is using some of it for overhead. (1.8 GB out of 2GB was avaliable on the machine I had this problem on)
There are several things I like about Andromeda (I haven't caught many eps this season due to the show being moved around) was that it didn't take it-self too seriously. They could have a comedic episode every once and a while and not break the series format. They would also expermement with different techniques every once and a while (The Timecode ep was interesting but wierd). It was B-grade SF, and knew it. The best part was the one liners that got tossed arround ("Nothing can blow up a Black hole...... well almost nothing... "). That said, Andromina get the science right more often the Star Trek does. Inter system communication often takes the form of messages that will take x minutes to get to the destination, and hence 2x minutes for a reply message. In short, Andromina is one of my guilty pleasures, and I am surprised that it has stayed on the air as long as it has.
I think that it is much more likely that these cases will be thoughn out of court even faster then in the US, mostly because a) other countries have different laws, and intrepretations of IP, and b) most other countries have a saner legal system then the US.
Ok, what do you, a business owner, do? Pack up and get out. Hell, you've got 2 months to do it.
Two words. Earthquake Tourism
Imagine the potential for people who live in areas that do not have many earthquakes to come to you locality and Live the earthquake experience(TM), You have seen it on TV, now see it in person.
Schedule musical events so people can "shake, rattle and roll" to the music.
Have a love-in so people can experience the earth moving at the right time.
Come on, the opportunities (and the jokes) are endless.
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
They have been doing this for years in various forms. The most popular is called the 'Philoshopy of Science'. It goes back as far as Popper and Godel, and I view it as an attempt by the soft academics to justify (in their little made up world at least) that they are still important. I had these awful (manditory) courses as an undergrad that attempted to introduce the social sciences impotance to the students in teh science depatement. One was 'The Philosophy of Science' and dealt with what philophers thouhht about science. I only thing I remember about this course was the last paragraph in one of the textbooks. It went something like this: "In conclusion, the philoposhy of science does not give a model to do scientific research, conduct or improve experiments, or hint at possible avinues of exploration, and as a result cannot be used to do science." The other course was on 'Ethics in Science' and dealt with things like 'should trees have rights'. I argued that rights only made sense for sentience as it deals with choice. A co-worker had a similar experience in his ethics class in which he was presented with a scenario "A nuclear war is about to happen, and you have limited space in the shelter, who do you want to put in it". The teacher wanted to hear "Artists and stuff" The students replied scientists and engineers so they could rebuild after everyone got out.
Many small programs are no longer memory, or even performance, constrained. As such, a reasonable strategy for a lot of desktop software is to allocate a huge buffer at startup
It has been my experience that this was done when systems were constrained, ie. test to see if there is enough system memory at start-up instead of running out of memory in the middle of execution. This was apparently so prevelent that some vendors (SGI for one) changed malloc to use a "first touched" memory model. In this model, memory is not allocated when you allocate it, but when it is first used. Hogging lots of memory in a multi-process environment that isn't being used means that none of the other prcesses are not using it either. Memory management on modern O/S's is much more efficient when using a just in time approach to memory useage then allocating large blocks because of the expenses related to paging back and forth from and to virtual memory.
Anyone believing something as stupid as "1000 times as powerfull as a playstation 2, and there will be 4 of them in the box" should be shot.
I have to disagree with you there. The patent that Sony filed indicates that IF the ps3 is built according to what is in the patent (standard configuration has 4 cell according to the patent), and IF it works, then it SHOULD be capable of processing 1024 times the number of instructions per second then the ps2. Acording to what I have read, all four cells will be needed to get this level of performance.
Yes lots of big ifs there, and I think that its a stretch to say that 1000x instructions per second means 1000x more powerful. It appears that the 1000x more powerful comment came from management as a challenge to the engineers. Since moores law wouldn't have proceeded this fast in the normal console development cycle, the engineers had to come up with this crazy design to meet expectation, and it looks like they may have succeeded. The Cell, if it ever gets to market, will probably be the first mass produced application of grid computers
One thing that you have to understand about XP is that Kent Beck started using it when programming in smalltalk. Smalltalk has a wide array of tools that allow things to be done to the code that don't exist in most other languages. One of the most popular IDE's in smalltalk is called the "Refactoring Browser" because it has so many refactoring tools built in. These tools are increadably powerful, and many of the refactorings that Beck talks about can quite litterally be done with one or two clicks of the mouse. One philosophy of refactoring is that the codes functionallity should not be changed by the refatoring, just its layout. By this definition, refactoring can be done automaticly, so no errors should be introduced. This alows for the quick and complete isolation of code that you want to change.
Almost all the tools used in smalltalk are themselve written in smalltalk. This may explane why many of these tools have not apeared in other languages (although they should). The refactoring tools is a good example of this, althoug I have also seen a GUI generation tool that created fairly complicated (and fully functional) GUIs with just a few clicks of the mouse (no need to enter code at all, messages to other objects were represented by lines, and when you connected two objects together, it asked you under which trigger event would cause what message to be sent to which method of the second object.) The only problem I had with this tool was that it was possible to create GUIs that were too complicated where precidence rules became necessary (ie. call this object before calling that object). In that cse, it became necessary to write code
This functionality, combined with several features in the Smalltalk language itself turn the modern smalltalk environment into a very high level language. Its sort of like writing a string manipulation program in scratch in C vs. writing a program in Perl that does the same thing. The C program would take lots of planning and time to complete, whereas the same task would only take a few lines of code and about a minute to program in Perl.
I read the XP book before I learned Smalltalk, and I though then (as I still do) that many of the XP practices are dangerous, however now I understand were Beck is coming from when he talks about XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Clark has his own set of laws, most of which you have mentioned. He reportably created the first three because Isaac Asimov had three, however over time, a 4th has been added. ACC Laws
1) "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
2) "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
69th) "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software."
Why do people still insist on using e-cards?
What possesses people to do it?
Because they think that it is exactly the same as sending you a physical card, just updated for the 21 centry. They have absolutly no idea that there can be a down-side to these things because they are thinking of it in terms of a physical card. They are probably thinking that since you use a computer a lot, then you will like to see a greeting card on your computer. I know, I have a lot of relatives that have done this in the past, and it took a lot of explaning to them why this was a really bad idea.
It would be quite difficult for MS to "prove" that any given developer had seen the purloined source
Simple, they could borrow a trick from SCO and say "It would be impossible for the FOSS developer to do X unless they had seen the M$ code." Unlike SCO, MS will have competent lawyers backed by even more money.
Some other issues. The new Canadian fedral privacy law will mean that the ISP's have to be carefull when handing over personal data, meaning, CRIA will probably need court orders. Canadian courts don't rubber stamp search warrents like the American courts do, so resonable proof will have to be given. Also, Candian courts have tended not to like hypothetical or greatly inflated damages. (you lost how much for an album that is out of print and that you no longer have in stock?)
This looks like a trial attempt to see if they can repete what the RIAA is doing, but in Canada. They will probably have much less success. If anyone reading this gets served with one of these notices, get a lawyer.
PS. last time I was in the states, CDs sold for $10 - $15 US and currently sell for about $15-20 Canadian. Check some of the on-line sellers like Amazon.com or bestbuy.com for more up to date American prices.
For example, if i open a private FTP site and i prove that only my friends have access to it, then it falls neatly under 'fair use' clause.
No. This would be an example of distribution, the same as if you made a copy of a CD and gave it to a friend. Both cases are not allowed.
I heard that it was the returns from the paperback novels that killed them. Unlike the rulebooks they sold to the gaming stores, there was a cause in the contracts with the big book chains that allowed them to 'return' unsold merchandise. Actually it is worse then that, as the bookstores to save money, often ripped off the fron cover and only sent those back, thats what the warning at the front of most paperbacks about not buying books without a cover as the author has not been payed is about. TSR apparently lost a lot of money on that.
I thought the rest of it was
... and takes half damage!
Having the source you could do a cleanroom implementation of it, have a set of "dirty" developers read and describe the undocumented API's and another set write those API's from scratch
Especially if the Dirty Room is in another country where the copyright laws are different (ie. saner) then the US.
The warning given to open source developers about viewing the windows source derived from the NDA that Microsoft forced developers to sign, not seeing the code itself. Copyright law allows the viewing of other works to learn how they are built. Mind you, the US legal system is so f%#$@d-up and M$ has so much money that there is no guarentee that this right will be upheld in court.
Maybe he is implying men are children. ^_^
Seriously, maybe is is a mis-translation of a run on sentence. Wasn't there a story yesturday about how women are the fastest growing gaming demographic, and even so, they are still vastly under represented in the gaming comunity, so maybe he added woman to the end of his list as an afterthought and ment nothing sexist about it.
The site has been /.ed. Apparently the Force was not with it.
You assume that OpenOffice is just as good as OfficeXP
In some ways Open Office is better then Word. Try putting a callout on top of a graphic in Word (I tried this in Word 2K). Word put the callout under the graphic. The only way I could get it to work was to create a canvase object, add the graphic, then put the callout on top of that. In OO, I just added the graphic, then put the callout on, and it worked correctly the first time I tried. OK, OO does not have the variety of callout that word does, but it does have the basic functionallity, and new callout could probably be added quite easily. Annother integration feature that OO has that I cannot find in Word is the auto wrap-arround feature that allows the inclusion of a graphic, and allows the test area to flow around it like what you see in magazines. In Word, you can put a rectangular graphic in the document, and have the text squashed to one side, if it puts any text there at all, most of the time it just restarts the text below the graphic.
Remember, this is an Open Source project, if someone (in academia say) doesn't like the functionallity in OO, they can modify the program to do what they want.
Even better, implement a time based crypto knock sequence (the knock sequence would change over time) so that repeating a heard knock would be useless. Combined with the lockout period for wrong knocks could kill sniffer based attacks cold unless they intercepted enough signals to guess the crypto.
I read about a company doing this last year in Wired (I think!). Anyway, it was a porn outfit that was also into spamming. They got people to type in the catchas that were inlined from yahoo as part of a script. Sort of a key punch job. These people sat at a computer, run a program, and these catchas would come up, and they would type in the word. The script would deliver the word to yahoo (before it timed out), and the script would take care of the rest of the details of creating new accounts, and promptly spam from them. Anyway, in exchange for doing this, they got paid in free access to the porn sites.
This story has enough of those details that it appears to a retelling of the same story that has mutated over time, sort of the way urban ledgends do.
I wholeheartedly agree that Serkis should get an award of some type.
There is precedence for the Academy to give special one time awards for extraordinary achievement, sort of like the special Oscar that Disney got for Snow White (One big Oscar, and 12 small Oscars on the same base, presented by Shirley Temple iirc) The Academy probably should have done this last year, and given it to the team that created Gollum (PJ, AS and the sxf team) but we can always hope they will do it this year.
Hey - does this mean I can model Bill Gates' head onto the shoulders of all the monsters that I kill in Doom and Duke Nukem and all those First Person Shooter games?
People have been doing this for as long as there were mods. One of the first replaced all the monsters in Doom with Barney the purple dinosour.
If you wish to use memory mapped IO to your file system, which has some good technical properties, you need a pointer with an address range *at least* as large as the largest possible file you might need to access, and preferably as large as the largest file system you intend to mount.
Err, no. You can mmap a portion of the file up to the limit of the pointer. ie. you can mmap a 1GB section of a 10GB file, and then keep moving the 1GB window till you have processed the entire file using long longs for the offset in the file, and 32 bit pointers for the offset inside the mmap. Watch out, sometimes the OS doesn't let you access the whole 2GB of memory allowed by the signed 32 bit pointer because the OS is using some of it for overhead. (1.8 GB out of 2GB was avaliable on the machine I had this problem on)
There are several things I like about Andromeda (I haven't caught many eps this season due to the show being moved around) was that it didn't take it-self too seriously. They could have a comedic episode every once and a while and not break the series format. They would also expermement with different techniques every once and a while (The Timecode ep was interesting but wierd). It was B-grade SF, and knew it. The best part was the one liners that got tossed arround ("Nothing can blow up a Black hole ... ... well almost nothing ... "). That said, Andromina get the science right more often the Star Trek does. Inter system communication often takes the form of messages that will take x minutes to get to the destination, and hence 2x minutes for a reply message. In short, Andromina is one of my guilty pleasures, and I am surprised that it has stayed on the air as long as it has.
I think that it is much more likely that these cases will be thoughn out of court even faster then in the US, mostly because a) other countries have different laws, and intrepretations of IP, and b) most other countries have a saner legal system then the US.
I think this statement takes the prize for Understatement of the Year
OK its only Jan 13, but still!
Two words. Earthquake Tourism
Imagine the potential for people who live in areas that do not have many earthquakes to come to you locality and
Live the earthquake experience(TM), You have seen it on TV, now see it in person.
Schedule musical events so people can "shake, rattle and roll" to the music.
Have a love-in so people can experience the earth moving at the right time.
Come on, the opportunities (and the jokes) are endless.
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
They have been doing this for years in various forms. The most popular is called the 'Philoshopy of Science'. It goes back as far as Popper and Godel, and I view it as an attempt by the soft academics to justify (in their little made up world at least) that they are still important. I had these awful (manditory) courses as an undergrad that attempted to introduce the social sciences impotance to the students in teh science depatement. One was 'The Philosophy of Science' and dealt with what philophers thouhht about science. I only thing I remember about this course was the last paragraph in one of the textbooks. It went something like this: "In conclusion, the philoposhy of science does not give a model to do scientific research, conduct or improve experiments, or hint at possible avinues of exploration, and as a result cannot be used to do science." The other course was on 'Ethics in Science' and dealt with things like 'should trees have rights'. I argued that rights only made sense for sentience as it deals with choice. A co-worker had a similar experience in his ethics class in which he was presented with a scenario "A nuclear war is about to happen, and you have limited space in the shelter, who do you want to put in it". The teacher wanted to hear "Artists and stuff" The students replied scientists and engineers so they could rebuild after everyone got out.
However, she is implying that there is a God given right for big companies to make obscene profits and pay big bonuses to their executives.
Many small programs are no longer memory, or even performance, constrained. As such, a reasonable strategy for a lot of desktop software is to allocate a huge buffer at startup
It has been my experience that this was done when systems were constrained, ie. test to see if there is enough system memory at start-up instead of running out of memory in the middle of execution. This was apparently so prevelent that some vendors (SGI for one) changed malloc to use a "first touched" memory model. In this model, memory is not allocated when you allocate it, but when it is first used. Hogging lots of memory in a multi-process environment that isn't being used means that none of the other prcesses are not using it either. Memory management on modern O/S's is much more efficient when using a just in time approach to memory useage then allocating large blocks because of the expenses related to paging back and forth from and to virtual memory.
Anyone believing something as stupid as "1000 times as powerfull as a playstation 2, and there will be 4 of them in the box" should be shot.
I have to disagree with you there. The patent that Sony filed indicates that IF the ps3 is built according to what is in the patent (standard configuration has 4 cell according to the patent), and IF it works, then it SHOULD be capable of processing 1024 times the number of instructions per second then the ps2. Acording to what I have read, all four cells will be needed to get this level of performance.
Yes lots of big ifs there, and I think that its a stretch to say that 1000x instructions per second means 1000x more powerful. It appears that the 1000x more powerful comment came from management as a challenge to the engineers. Since moores law wouldn't have proceeded this fast in the normal console development cycle, the engineers had to come up with this crazy design to meet expectation, and it looks like they may have succeeded. The Cell, if it ever gets to market, will probably be the first mass produced application of grid computers
One thing that you have to understand about XP is that Kent Beck started using it when programming in smalltalk. Smalltalk has a wide array of tools that allow things to be done to the code that don't exist in most other languages. One of the most popular IDE's in smalltalk is called the "Refactoring Browser" because it has so many refactoring tools built in. These tools are increadably powerful, and many of the refactorings that Beck talks about can quite litterally be done with one or two clicks of the mouse. One philosophy of refactoring is that the codes functionallity should not be changed by the refatoring, just its layout. By this definition, refactoring can be done automaticly, so no errors should be introduced. This alows for the quick and complete isolation of code that you want to change.
Almost all the tools used in smalltalk are themselve written in smalltalk. This may explane why many of these tools have not apeared in other languages (although they should). The refactoring tools is a good example of this, althoug I have also seen a GUI generation tool that created fairly complicated (and fully functional) GUIs with just a few clicks of the mouse (no need to enter code at all, messages to other objects were represented by lines, and when you connected two objects together, it asked you under which trigger event would cause what message to be sent to which method of the second object.) The only problem I had with this tool was that it was possible to create GUIs that were too complicated where precidence rules became necessary (ie. call this object before calling that object). In that cse, it became necessary to write code
This functionality, combined with several features in the Smalltalk language itself turn the modern smalltalk environment into a very high level language. Its sort of like writing a string manipulation program in scratch in C vs. writing a program in Perl that does the same thing. The C program would take lots of planning and time to complete, whereas the same task would only take a few lines of code and about a minute to program in Perl.
I read the XP book before I learned Smalltalk, and I though then (as I still do) that many of the XP practices are dangerous, however now I understand were Beck is coming from when he talks about XP.