Now, had Disney decided to make the entire movie a classical music feast with cgi visuals, it would have been both innovative and amazing. The reason that they did this is very, very simple: you can't market class and good taste. A talking Dinosaur sells, a Classical music epic does not. While I would take my kids to a viewing of The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, or Aladdin, I know that if I took them to the original Fantasia, they would be both bored and annoyed (or annoying..). The reasoning behind this is because children (and the vast majority of all adults and adolesents) today are media slobbering brain-washed babboons that not only don't want something better, they don't even realise that there COULD BE.
The problem isn't that the majority of people are slobbering idiots. The problem is that we are all idiots outside of the areas we know. The world is too big for a single mind to hold all of it. If you are going to make a movie (record, TV show, etc.) and are going to put a lot of money into it, you need to get a large audience to make back that investment. To do that, you can't aim at small niche markets. You aim for mainstream tastes. You eliminate elements that will alienate the larger audiences.
One of the benefits of the networking of the world is that it reduces the cost of marketting and distributing to niche audiences. Geography is becoming much less relevant. Could copyleft.net have survived as a business before the Internet took off? Probably not. Not because there were fewer geeks, but because we were harder to reach. The Net helps us form virtual communities.
As more people with a greater variety of interests get online we are seeing two trends. The first has already happened. The content of the Net shifted from being primarily geek-oriented to more mainstream a couple of years ago. The second is that communities with a variety of interests are growing. At one time they centered around Usenet groups and maybe a few BBS's and ftp sites. Now any niche group can have a web site and usually does.
The big productions will always aim at large "least common denominator" markets. That is where they can recoup large production and marketting costs. But as entertainment moves online, it makes sense that there will be niche cultural products. There always have been. They are likely to become more diverse and easier to find.
Hey, I thought that new Harry Potter book just came out last week?
Yeah, but the publisher can only print them just so fast. The initial print run was supposed to be 3.8 million. Since there are more English-speaking children than that in the world, and there is no chance getting it from a library in the next 5 years, I think there will be additional printings.
What I want to know is whether anyone has seen a copy of any Harry Potter book on a bookstore shelf or online that wasn't marked down at least 25%.
Essentially, domain names and trademarks should both be viewed as property. Now let's consider what each side had. A domain name corinthians.com, vs. a trademark that should never have been granted trademark status because of it's status for centuries as the title of a couple of chapters in the most widely published book in human history. I think you can see whose side I'm on in this case.
You could sync them up by having them hear a "click track" (i.e. a bunch of electronic metronomes that were synchronized in the same room and then shipped out to them) and not hearing each other. Then you would have all of the sound sources sent to a mixer that has delays built in to each track so they can sync up the incoming tracks according to the distance from the broadcast studio where each player is performing.
In fact, the "click track" could contain timestamps. Those timestamps would be transferred to the data within the packets containing the music (as opposed to being the timestamps on the packets themselves). Then the mixer doesn't have to have the delays preconfigured. It can mix the packets based on the "click track" timestamps that arrived with the music.
The ultimate test will be an astronaut on the moon singing along with ground control on Earth. All of them will be in sync and none of them in key.
This opens up a world of possibilities in interfaces controlled by gestures and facial expressions. Imagine a more general interface that would disable options that cause wrong behavior in response to a simple gesture immediately following any program behavior triggered by that option. Examples are left to the users' imaginations.
So what good then does it do to add more domains without registration restrictions?
In fact, I think that ought to be the criterion used to judge whether a proposed TLD is appropriate:
Does this TLD represent some potential group of sites, across multiple separate organizations, that logically should be grouped together?
Do the existing TLDs fail to provide for this grouping or is there a reason for a parallel to one of them with a different administrative body at the top?
I can see creating country and language specific TLDs so that registrations can be handled by someone acting under the same legal system and speaking the same language. But that has already been done. How fine do we need to slice it?
Stress is having deadlines and not having the tools to meet them.
Yes, I have a laptop at work that goes home with me at night. Usually the only reason I fire it up at home is to sync my personal and work calendars and address books. I spend hours of my time at home online. Most of that is corresponding with friends all over the world who I have met online, friends I wouldn't have otherwise.
I do have too many activities competing for my time. Most of them have nothing to do with technology. When I play with my kids, I use Legos, not NICs. I love to read, and I lose sleep staying up to finish a good novel. And on a good day, my wife and I are both awake enough after the kids go to bed that we can talk for a while.
Technology is not morally neutral, but we can choose whether it is a tool for us to get on with our lives, or a tool for other people to intrude on them. I choose the former.
Not only does this mean my kids will get to play all the great games I grew up on, but it also looks like this is the first step towards Vernor Vinge's idea of a massive database of source code which could be used and modified in the future to really do anything we wanted. (He explains this a bit better in his novel 'A Deepness in the Sky').
Actually, when I read A Deepness In the Sky (nominated for a Hugo this year, BTW) I thought of open source. In almost the same thought, I remembered Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust. I hope someone (RMS maybe) has copies of gcc and login that have never been compiled with uninspected patches.
What is to stop the free software community from creating our own "customer" database. There's a great deal of information that I don't mind revealing about myself that would be a valuable marketting tool and good propaganda for free software be documenting the number of users and developers. Here's a suggested partial list:
What free software do you use?
How many computers do you use it on?
Do you use any proprietary software?
If you use Linux, which distribution(s)?
Are you a developer?
If so, which languages do you program in?
Which free software web sites do you visit regularly (more than once a week)?
There would have to be a way to link the answers to people if it is going to sell. But a free software organization could collect such information from people willing to volunteer it and sell it, using the proceeds to fund projects. And a summary of the data could be a powerful argument for the size of the free software community whether or not it is sold.
There was a technique that was rather widely publicized in the wake of the famous Internet Worm. Since it was written up in Communications of the ACM, I think one can say that there is a credible source. However, I can agree with the professor on this one because it isn't general; it only works for executables. You run it, and unlink the directory entry while it is running. The inode continues to exist for the life of the process, but the file has no name. Of course, when the process exits, the inode will go away as well.
Back when "automatic programming" was invented, it was assumed that programmers would become obsolete. Computing would be forever changed. The Users would be able to program for themselves. There was one problem with that. Automatic programming was a term for compiling code written in a higher level language. It didn't eliminate programming. All it did was redefine the skill set required by inroducing a level of abstraction. The processor is still there and so is the object code.
A couple of decades later, fourth generation languages were once again going to make programmers obsolete. Once again, The User would be able to program for himself. It didn't quite work out that way. It seems that the Users still enjoy the leverage of having specialists make their tools for them.
As for not mattering what operating system you are running, well if all the interfaces are the same, no it doesn't. That's the benefit of RFCs, POSIX, etc. But Gelernter neatly inverted the bits versus paper dichotomy that is well dealt with in The Unix Philosophy. Data shouldn't be printed to be used. It is printed as a fixed record of its state at a point in time. Paper data is dead. The power of the Unix model is the power of treating all of your files as streams of bytes and having a set of powerful tools for manipulating those bytes.
As for his point about files having no name, one name, many names, being in no directory, one or many, and a directory having one or many files. He said that three of these were currently legal and the other five not. That shows a clear lack of knowledge of the Unix separation of inodes and directory entries.
Even though Pillsbury had assured its employees not only that the email accounts were private, but that they would never intercept email communications or use them as grounds for termination, these mails were intercepted, and Smyth was fired. He sued, and lost. The court found that "even if we found that an employee had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his email communications over the company email system, we do not find that a reasonable person would consider the defendants' [Pillsbury's] interception of these communications to be a substantial and highly offensive invasion of his privacy."
This sounds like the court determined that what was essentially a contract between an employer and employee was invalid because no reasonable person would expect a company to keep it's word on something like that. Am I alone here in assuming that there are ethical people in the business world who certainly keep secrets from each other, but don't lie to each other?
Re:Public needs to stop pretending there is no iss
on
CNet On Online Freedom
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· Score: 5
I am dismayed when my friends exclaim that the CIA will never read my email, because I am not important, nor have I done anything wrong or have something to hide.
Far too many people have a model of privacy that only assumes that the government will spy on you and that only criminals need to fear that. It is trivial to find other examples of a need for security. Consider a regular family vacation. You and your spouse have been going out of town every year to spend New Year's Eve with your parents and New Year's Day with your in-laws. Do you want a burglar to know that you aren't home? Any of the following could reveal that:
Unencrypted e-mail to your families
Phone calls over cordless phones or analog cell phones
Poorly protected credit card records showing yor purchase of plane tickets
A poor web site for your newspaper allowing you to sspend home delivery while you are gone that reveals that to someone else
A security hole in the airline's frequent flier program web site that revealed which flights you have already received mileage for
You haven't done anything wrong. You are a law-abiding citizen visiting family. Unfortunately, the two guys who are filling a truck with every valuable in your home aren't such upstanding people.
We use some limited automated testing at work. Where I find it most useful is when I intend to rewrite a piece of code (for efficiency, to extract a common piece into a library, whatever) without changing the behavior or interface. I construct a few tests that treat it as a black box, make them work on the original version and then make sure I don't break them in making my changes.
In general, any piece of code htat has to test some output is relying on the programmer that wrote it knowing the answer in advance. I know from experience that unless there is a spec that spells it out, there is a decent chance that somebody will mess up. Of course, there's a decent chance of bugs in the spec too.
Yes, we have some design specs in the form of RFCs, POSIX and so on, but we certainly don't do rigorous compliance testing for them with each new release.
Is there anything preventing building automated test suites? I would think that there are plenty of excellent tools to build the actual software: Expect, perl, etc. The problem is what tests to run and the time for someone to write code that doesn't extend the functionality of the system. It is useful, but until it actually catches some bugs before they are found by other means, there isn't any glory in it.
I submit that this is a problem with media that has no true intrest or ties to the community it is reporting on/about. Even other groups have this problem, and I'm sure we won't be the first to deal with it.
Yeah, I stopped believing that the mainstream press was correct, accurate, complete or up-to-date years ago. Every time they report events that I have first-hand knowledge of, they are dead wrong on at least a few important aspects of it. By Occam's Razor, I assume that the same is true when they report on things I wasn't already familiar with.
Part, and only part, of the problem arises from the model of the press as an entity that practices unbiased journalism. Those two words hold the key to the problem. There is nothing wrong with the hope that we can get a view of every side of a controversial issue. But it is common for press reports to reduce it to two competing sides. As for journalism, there are too many reporters out there who know how to write stories for newspapers and magazines and too little about what they are reporting on.
I prefer press with a background knowledge and a viewpoint. I don't have to agree with that viewpoint, so long as I know what it is.
Mojo, go ahead and quote me. It isn't like my comments ever got anyone else anything.
You are dead on with this in one sense, but you have missed an important point. We, the hackers, have recognized ESR, RMS, Larry Wall, etc. as spokesmen for our causes. We have done this in part because they have articulated what motivates us. Unfortunately, the rest of the world now considers them, and particularly ESR, to be "sources" for information and quotes about open source/free software. I certainly hope that ESR never reaches the point where he is so busy talking to the media that he forgets to talk to the hackers. Bad Mojo is right. We'll stampede to a new leader. But it could be months or years before the talking heads notice. It took them years to notice that we existed in the first place.
And it doesn't matter who I am; my point stands (or falls) on its own.
I agree with this statement completely. I rarely pay much attention to who said what here until after I read the comments themselves. If the comments do cut it, a name attached to them doesn't fix the problem.
As for disagreeing with ESR or his arrogance, I haven't been able to get to the page because it is severely Slashdotted at the moment. I can guess at the psychology of what he said. I would construe the expression "we hackers think...." in the heat of an argument to mean something like "I'm a hacker. Many of us think that...." Since I have the benefit of writing this calmly and with some thought, I won't presume to speak for ESR. Even if I did, he certainly has the time and energy to defend against anything I might say about him.
The point I am getting at is an old one. Emotion of any kind, vocal inflection, factial expressions, pauses and so forth, are missing in text, especially text written quickly online. I try to guess at possible motivations on the part of the writer when I read something that annoys me. Usually, the answer I come up with is that somebody posted too quickly and stuck his foot in his mouth. Sometimes, I gain a different perspective and learn something that the writer was trying to say and didn't convey well at all.
I see no reason to post this as an AC, so flame on if you disagree.
And how will the "lawsuits prohibited against anyone in the.alt TLD" be agreed to and given teeth? Simple. Make that an agreed to condition for everyone registering OR RENEWING a domain AND for registrars renewing their registrar status, just like ICANN did with its current domain name dispute policy. After 2 years or so, the policy will trickle down to all registrants and be in full force. Anyone who disagreed will be gone from DNS. Then open up.alt to accept anything-goes registrations.
There's one hole left to be plugged. What about people who haven't registered a domain, but have registered a trademark? A better approach would be to put the.alt TLD in the hands of a registrar within a jurisdiction that is willing to legislate that domains will be registered on a first come first served basis within that domain. Sue all you want, but if the company handling the registration is in a jurisdiction that won't recognize your rights to a domain name that someone else paid for, you can't shut it down.
Using the same kind of instruments and analysis, can they find evidence of water on Earth. Then when we actually go look at the spot in question, is the water there? It seems like that would be a useful, and relatively inexpensive confirmation of the method used.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the location in the pictures is a good candidate for a landing site for an upcoming probe.
Get a copy of The Unix Philosophy by Mike Gancarz. You can read more about it or buy from fatbrain.com . The first sentence of their description explains its relevance:
Unlike so many books that focus on how to use UNIX, The UNIX Philosophy concentrates on answering the question, "Why use UNIX in the first place?"
Even a good crypto algorithm won't protect you from a number of possible mistakes (failure to wipe buffers, bad pseudo-RNG, bad method of selecting keys, etc.). Availability of the encryption method as a library under a license that will permit its use in a free software project would be an important factor. With some projects, reimplementation from scratch is an option. For others, it isn't all that desirable.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem isn't that the majority of people are slobbering idiots. The problem is that we are all idiots outside of the areas we know. The world is too big for a single mind to hold all of it. If you are going to make a movie (record, TV show, etc.) and are going to put a lot of money into it, you need to get a large audience to make back that investment. To do that, you can't aim at small niche markets. You aim for mainstream tastes. You eliminate elements that will alienate the larger audiences.
One of the benefits of the networking of the world is that it reduces the cost of marketting and distributing to niche audiences. Geography is becoming much less relevant. Could copyleft.net have survived as a business before the Internet took off? Probably not. Not because there were fewer geeks, but because we were harder to reach. The Net helps us form virtual communities.
As more people with a greater variety of interests get online we are seeing two trends. The first has already happened. The content of the Net shifted from being primarily geek-oriented to more mainstream a couple of years ago. The second is that communities with a variety of interests are growing. At one time they centered around Usenet groups and maybe a few BBS's and ftp sites. Now any niche group can have a web site and usually does.
The big productions will always aim at large "least common denominator" markets. That is where they can recoup large production and marketting costs. But as entertainment moves online, it makes sense that there will be niche cultural products. There always have been. They are likely to become more diverse and easier to find.
Yeah, but the publisher can only print them just so fast. The initial print run was supposed to be 3.8 million. Since there are more English-speaking children than that in the world, and there is no chance getting it from a library in the next 5 years, I think there will be additional printings.
What I want to know is whether anyone has seen a copy of any Harry Potter book on a bookstore shelf or online that wasn't marked down at least 25%.
Essentially, domain names and trademarks should both be viewed as property. Now let's consider what each side had. A domain name corinthians.com, vs. a trademark that should never have been granted trademark status because of it's status for centuries as the title of a couple of chapters in the most widely published book in human history. I think you can see whose side I'm on in this case.
In fact, the "click track" could contain timestamps. Those timestamps would be transferred to the data within the packets containing the music (as opposed to being the timestamps on the packets themselves). Then the mixer doesn't have to have the delays preconfigured. It can mix the packets based on the "click track" timestamps that arrived with the music.
The ultimate test will be an astronaut on the moon singing along with ground control on Earth. All of them will be in sync and none of them in key.
This opens up a world of possibilities in interfaces controlled by gestures and facial expressions. Imagine a more general interface that would disable options that cause wrong behavior in response to a simple gesture immediately following any program behavior triggered by that option. Examples are left to the users' imaginations.
In fact, I think that ought to be the criterion used to judge whether a proposed TLD is appropriate:
I can see creating country and language specific TLDs so that registrations can be handled by someone acting under the same legal system and speaking the same language. But that has already been done. How fine do we need to slice it?
Stress is having deadlines and not having the tools to meet them.
Yes, I have a laptop at work that goes home with me at night. Usually the only reason I fire it up at home is to sync my personal and work calendars and address books. I spend hours of my time at home online. Most of that is corresponding with friends all over the world who I have met online, friends I wouldn't have otherwise.
I do have too many activities competing for my time. Most of them have nothing to do with technology. When I play with my kids, I use Legos, not NICs. I love to read, and I lose sleep staying up to finish a good novel. And on a good day, my wife and I are both awake enough after the kids go to bed that we can talk for a while.
Technology is not morally neutral, but we can choose whether it is a tool for us to get on with our lives, or a tool for other people to intrude on them. I choose the former.
Actually, when I read A Deepness In the Sky (nominated for a Hugo this year, BTW) I thought of open source. In almost the same thought, I remembered Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust. I hope someone (RMS maybe) has copies of gcc and login that have never been compiled with uninspected patches.
There would have to be a way to link the answers to people if it is going to sell. But a free software organization could collect such information from people willing to volunteer it and sell it, using the proceeds to fund projects. And a summary of the data could be a powerful argument for the size of the free software community whether or not it is sold.
Friday NPR's All Things Considered show ran a story about the Toysmart mailing list debacle. You can find it here or for the bandwidth challenged here.
There was a technique that was rather widely publicized in the wake of the famous Internet Worm. Since it was written up in Communications of the ACM, I think one can say that there is a credible source. However, I can agree with the professor on this one because it isn't general; it only works for executables. You run it, and unlink the directory entry while it is running. The inode continues to exist for the life of the process, but the file has no name. Of course, when the process exits, the inode will go away as well.
Back when "automatic programming" was invented, it was assumed that programmers would become obsolete. Computing would be forever changed. The Users would be able to program for themselves. There was one problem with that. Automatic programming was a term for compiling code written in a higher level language. It didn't eliminate programming. All it did was redefine the skill set required by inroducing a level of abstraction. The processor is still there and so is the object code.
A couple of decades later, fourth generation languages were once again going to make programmers obsolete. Once again, The User would be able to program for himself. It didn't quite work out that way. It seems that the Users still enjoy the leverage of having specialists make their tools for them.
As for not mattering what operating system you are running, well if all the interfaces are the same, no it doesn't. That's the benefit of RFCs, POSIX, etc. But Gelernter neatly inverted the bits versus paper dichotomy that is well dealt with in The Unix Philosophy. Data shouldn't be printed to be used. It is printed as a fixed record of its state at a point in time. Paper data is dead. The power of the Unix model is the power of treating all of your files as streams of bytes and having a set of powerful tools for manipulating those bytes.
As for his point about files having no name, one name, many names, being in no directory, one or many, and a directory having one or many files. He said that three of these were currently legal and the other five not. That shows a clear lack of knowledge of the Unix separation of inodes and directory entries.
This sounds like the court determined that what was essentially a contract between an employer and employee was invalid because no reasonable person would expect a company to keep it's word on something like that. Am I alone here in assuming that there are ethical people in the business world who certainly keep secrets from each other, but don't lie to each other?
Far too many people have a model of privacy that only assumes that the government will spy on you and that only criminals need to fear that. It is trivial to find other examples of a need for security. Consider a regular family vacation. You and your spouse have been going out of town every year to spend New Year's Eve with your parents and New Year's Day with your in-laws. Do you want a burglar to know that you aren't home? Any of the following could reveal that:
You haven't done anything wrong. You are a law-abiding citizen visiting family. Unfortunately, the two guys who are filling a truck with every valuable in your home aren't such upstanding people.
We use some limited automated testing at work. Where I find it most useful is when I intend to rewrite a piece of code (for efficiency, to extract a common piece into a library, whatever) without changing the behavior or interface. I construct a few tests that treat it as a black box, make them work on the original version and then make sure I don't break them in making my changes.
In general, any piece of code htat has to test some output is relying on the programmer that wrote it knowing the answer in advance. I know from experience that unless there is a spec that spells it out, there is a decent chance that somebody will mess up. Of course, there's a decent chance of bugs in the spec too.
Is there anything preventing building automated test suites? I would think that there are plenty of excellent tools to build the actual software: Expect, perl, etc. The problem is what tests to run and the time for someone to write code that doesn't extend the functionality of the system. It is useful, but until it actually catches some bugs before they are found by other means, there isn't any glory in it.
When I read your comment, I realized that my last sentence was ambiguous. I was talking about not posting my own comment anonymously.
I submit that this is a problem with media that has no true intrest or ties to the community it is reporting on/about. Even other groups have this problem, and I'm sure we won't be the first to deal with it.
Yeah, I stopped believing that the mainstream press was correct, accurate, complete or up-to-date years ago. Every time they report events that I have first-hand knowledge of, they are dead wrong on at least a few important aspects of it. By Occam's Razor, I assume that the same is true when they report on things I wasn't already familiar with.
Part, and only part, of the problem arises from the model of the press as an entity that practices unbiased journalism. Those two words hold the key to the problem. There is nothing wrong with the hope that we can get a view of every side of a controversial issue. But it is common for press reports to reduce it to two competing sides. As for journalism, there are too many reporters out there who know how to write stories for newspapers and magazines and too little about what they are reporting on.
I prefer press with a background knowledge and a viewpoint. I don't have to agree with that viewpoint, so long as I know what it is.
Mojo, go ahead and quote me. It isn't like my comments ever got anyone else anything.
You are dead on with this in one sense, but you have missed an important point. We, the hackers, have recognized ESR, RMS, Larry Wall, etc. as spokesmen for our causes. We have done this in part because they have articulated what motivates us. Unfortunately, the rest of the world now considers them, and particularly ESR, to be "sources" for information and quotes about open source/free software. I certainly hope that ESR never reaches the point where he is so busy talking to the media that he forgets to talk to the hackers. Bad Mojo is right. We'll stampede to a new leader. But it could be months or years before the talking heads notice. It took them years to notice that we existed in the first place.
I agree with this statement completely. I rarely pay much attention to who said what here until after I read the comments themselves. If the comments do cut it, a name attached to them doesn't fix the problem.
As for disagreeing with ESR or his arrogance, I haven't been able to get to the page because it is severely Slashdotted at the moment. I can guess at the psychology of what he said. I would construe the expression "we hackers think
The point I am getting at is an old one. Emotion of any kind, vocal inflection, factial expressions, pauses and so forth, are missing in text, especially text written quickly online. I try to guess at possible motivations on the part of the writer when I read something that annoys me. Usually, the answer I come up with is that somebody posted too quickly and stuck his foot in his mouth. Sometimes, I gain a different perspective and learn something that the writer was trying to say and didn't convey well at all.
I see no reason to post this as an AC, so flame on if you disagree.
There's one hole left to be plugged. What about people who haven't registered a domain, but have registered a trademark? A better approach would be to put the
I suggest .parody. No serious/legitimate organization can use it.
Using the same kind of instruments and analysis, can they find evidence of water on Earth. Then when we actually go look at the spot in question, is the water there? It seems like that would be a useful, and relatively inexpensive confirmation of the method used.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the location in the pictures is a good candidate for a landing site for an upcoming probe.
Even a good crypto algorithm won't protect you from a number of possible mistakes (failure to wipe buffers, bad pseudo-RNG, bad method of selecting keys, etc.). Availability of the encryption method as a library under a license that will permit its use in a free software project would be an important factor. With some projects, reimplementation from scratch is an option. For others, it isn't all that desirable.