Now imagine being tasked with turning that into readable, understandable code.
Don't have to imagine. Well, that's not quite true; I've never done anything on the scale of drum timing. But "disassembly" isn't just "opcode 53 adds X to the accumulator"; that part's (nearly) always been easy and automated. The hard part is going through, figuring out what every single memory location is for, making up your own consistent label for it, understanding the self-modifying part of the code, etc. Disassembly is a labor-intensive human process, not just the output of a "disassembler".
I remember using disassemblers from my Commodore days; the more advanced ones would spot most of the standard, documented KERNAL routines and registers, but for the most part they were opcode translators and editors with good search and replace. (Keep in mind that at the time, "cut and paste" was so novel it didn't even have a common metaphor; some called it "split and glue".)
The art was advanced enough by then that books like "Inside Commodore DOS" had, IIRC, a complete disassembly with comments, as well as the typical "reference guide" of functions and variables (all reverse engineered, of course).
So I'm with Reality Master; yay for keeping the knowledge alive and all that, but this used to not be all that impressive a feat.
You cannot post an article with the words "invisible" or "disappear" willy-nilly! You must be precise! Do you know how many salivating geeks are about to be very disappointed by TFA?
(The gas becomes non-conductive when it's off, so it's "invisible" to radar or something like that. The glass tube holding the gas is perfectly visible. It's not like some sort of light-saber thing.)
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a camera, a phone, a PDA, and a laptop?
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a submarine, a rhubarb, a helium balloon, and a platypus? Do you even know how HARD it is to find a rhubarb in an emergency? It's only convenient if you have it with you - which means it HAS to be built in.
Today though, most switches should not allow an unterminated line access to the rest of the network.
Ah, that makes perfect sense. Still, I thought long wires had reflectivity issues if their capacitance was.. er.. whatever capacitance is when it's bad. High?
Those handy little Fluke handsets use reflection to find the break in a faulty line. Hopefully someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
If you mean the ones that tell you how many feet a way the break is, you are correct. That's the TDR I was referring to - Time Domain Refle.. Reflectro.. well, the origin of the acronym is shrouded in mystery and controversy, is what I'm saying. But it measures the precise time it takes for the signal to propagate to the now-unterminated end where the break is, and reflect back.
Disclaimer: I am not a hardware guy. I wanted to be, when I was little, but I finally realized around age 16 that I was never, ever going to understand how the little minuses got over to the big plus terminal, and that that was the easy part of electronics.
If one wire is wirelessly pushing its signal on to another wire (a phenomenon known as crosstalk), a microprocessor could use the noise from the crosstalk to do error correction on original signal...
The only catch is that crosstalk is considered bad. Wires are often isolated in attempts to reduce or eliminate the problem.
Given my disclaimer: I remember the days of telephone crosstalk, but I never got the impression that it was RF-related; I always assumed it had something to do with ground loops (are there ground loops in balanced telco?) or improper balancing or things like that.
I also have developed the impression that the biggest speed barrier in copper is reflections, not crosstalk, although I suppose that's more true of CAT-5/6 than of untwisted telco wiring, which is what this invention is supposed to work with. Even more confusing is TFA's use of "the same physical copper line"; if they really mean that (a continuous strand of copper), then they can't be talking about crosstalk. But maybe they mean "the same cable (set of wires), and cables are made of copper". It really is vague.
Can any EEs shed some light on this? I imagine the same sort of noise-cancelling, echo-processing DSP that ameliorates crosstalk could also ameliorate reflections; that's why, now that I finally don't need a TDR anymore, the prices have dropped tenfold.
I don't see why they'd limit it; if they're already willing to transmit your whole mailbox via POP3 (which requires looking up every message and transmitting it in toto, attachments and all) they oughta be willing to send down just the headers - especially since IMAP can be very efficient in only getting new/changed headers, and if they're smart, they store the needed headers up in the index and not down in the message.
You could make the legal argument that presenting a certificate as belonging to another organization if fraud
I think you could make the legal argument that presenting a message as coming from a certain IP address is fraud, but I've been shouted down on that one before. Not by lawyers, mind you, just by a fellow IANAL.
Actually, those are page titles, not search terms... you can't just go to "http:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/search terms", you have to go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=search+terms&go=Go".
There probably ARE examples of prior art, but Wikipedia isn't one of them.
No doubt about that! However, if somebody tries to attack in that way it is easier to fend of, because you can allow for a checksum. Instead of making a DB query for each hit, you make a DB query only if the ID lies in the codespace. So certain DOS attacks are more difficult.
D'oh! Excellent point. Can you tell I'm used to having front-line servers do rate limiting and authentication, and not used to talking straight HTTP to the masses?
I'm glad it's not just me that thinks that... why do I even care? The horrible part of baggage claim is waiting for the bags to show up in the first place, and trying to wrench them off the belt with no elbow room, not the delay between first bag and last bag.
And the horrible part of flying is living 20 minutes from the airport, but still having to show up three hours early in case there are traffic delays... inside the airport! Not baggage claim. It's line after line after line, where I'm always mentally alert for *something* I have to do next. If I could somehow just sit in a seat, and start reading a book or using a laptop, and in three hours I'd be slowly but magically transported into my plane seat, I wouldn't even care about the lines.
Pre-9/11, I used to take the Washington/NYC shuttles, where you could show up three minutes before departure and still board. I used to be able to time that within 5 minutes at National. Zip into the parking lot, which at the time was about 50 yards from the terminal doors, dash through the terminal to the gate, holding my one carry-on, get on the plane and sit down.
But baggage claim? Frankly, I'd rather my bag be last. We reach the gate, and everyone rushes to sort-of-stand-up for ten minutes. We get off the plane, and everyone rushes to the claim so they can crowd around it, wait, and jostle. Meanwhile, I relax on the plane till the crowd leaves, I go grab a drink or a snack at a concession stand, make a phone call or two, and saunter down to the carousel, at which point my bag is one of the few that's left, and the crowd is gone. Easy peasy.
you can harden your security by populating the user-id space sparsely. Somebody who is guessing for an user id will have an hard time.
Nah. Any web app that lets you see something you shouldn't see by guessing the ID is broken, period (not to say there aren't a lot of broken web apps). I gotta think Facebook's smarter than that. What if you already knew the ID (because someone used to be your friend) and they delist you? You have to check permissions at the server side.
TFA is a summary of comments made at the Web 2.0 Summit which reference another announcement which summarizes these principles.
Considering who's on the press release - NBC Universal, Disney, Viacom, Fox, Microsoft, MySpace, Dailymotion (who?), veoh (who??) - the proposed principles are actually fairly balanced. They mention fair use four times, including a statement that "When sending notices and making claims of infringement, Copyright Owners should accommodate fair use" and "If the UGC Service is able to identify specific links that solely direct users to particular non-infringing content on such [piracy-oriented] sites, the UGC Service may allow those links while blocking all other links" and even "If a UGC Service adheres to all of these Principles in good faith, the Copyright Owner should not assert a claim of copyright infringement against such UGC Service with respect to infringing user-uploaded content that might remain on the UGC Service despite such adherence to these Principles."
It's worth reading the whole principles statement. I'm sure there are things that could be tweaked, but there are no major outrages that jump out at me; I'm actually kinda impressed.
Even it if it's just user IDs, and not object IDs as another user posted...
* 64-bit user IDs are easier to partition. They could be using the top N bits as a database ID.
* They may want to allocate the IDs randomly instead of sequentially. 64-bit IDs would involve fewer collisions.
* We don't know what their account churn rate is; if people sign up, forget, and create new accounts again frequently, they could have many more than 47 million dormant accounts sitting around.
A 32-bit ID really does get cramped when you have a large user base.
Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have posted that they are leaving Mozilla Corp. My understanding from chats with them weeks ago (I hope I'm not divulging anything that I shouldn't) is that they have decided to start a new venture. They've worked on Thunderbird and its predecessors within Mozilla and Nestcape for a long time, and I can certainly understand their desire to do something different[...]
We're recruiting experienced developers now to focus specifically on Thunderbird and more broadly on improving mail and communications in general. Everyone involved full-time in the development of Thunderbird has been offered a role and we're moving forward as quickly as possible to hire additional developers[...]
The opinions of the core Thunderbird community are more important than many, so if you care about Thunderbird, please let me know what you think. Now is a great time to influence the future of Thunderbird.
Also note that both Scott and David say they'll still be working on TB. Scott's post:
I plan to continue on, as a volunteer, with my role as a module owner for the Thunderbird project.
David's:
I intend to stay involved with Thunderbird and to continue on as a module owner.
Given the timing and very similar wording of their posts, I'm guessing that Ascher's right - they're going off to work on something together.
It does suck; those two know more about TB than anyone, and even when they were full-time employees, TB development was fairly glacial - it's just too big and monolithic for that size development team. But I don't know that this necessarily means the end of TB. I certainly hope not.
Good to know; thanks for the education. I knew they were "officers of the court" but clearly didn't think through what that implied; I was under the impression that sins of omission were a part of the game.
OT, but I'm curious now - I assume that duty extends only to information they know, and it's not a duty to research it? That is, let's say I go to my lawyer, and he files a lawsuit. There are three on-point cases in Westlaw that support my claims, and two that don't. Just so happens my lawyer didn't click on any of the ones that didn't. Is he neglecting his reponsibility to the court?
Or a more likely scenario: My lawyer delegates that research to his paralegal. Is the paralegal also an officer of the court? Or, as long as the paralegal doesn't mention those two cases to the lawyer, is everything kosher?
Or: My lawyer remembers reading about some cases that would contradict my claims, but doesn't recall the details. He studiously avoids accidentally pulling them up in Westlaw so as to avoid the need to cite them. Cool?
Obviously none of this happened in the RIAA case; I'm just curious what the parameters are, since (in my admittedly very limited experience) I've never read a brief that cited case law which would undermine the claims.
If you read the summary, you can see that TVBoxSet are up to season 10, while the production company has only produced up to season 4. I'll bet that the MPAA plans to ditch the production company, and source the episodes directly from TVBoxSet. Just think of the money they'll save: No scripts, no cameras, no sets, no production costs. This is the future - literally. Why should I (as a network) pay millions of dollars to Castle Rock or New Line for a new series when for $150 I can buy residual-free DVDs of the series before it's even written?
That is one thing that I always hated about windows, once you "upgrade" there is no turning back.
The knowledge base article on uninstalling IE7 is awfully lengthy, and the instructions wasn't mentioned in the article summary above until the very end. So I'll summarize it here for convenience:
1. Go to Add/Remove Programs 2. Select 'Show Updates' 3. Select 'Internet Explorer 7' 4. Select 'Uninstall'.
Then, as the KB article states, 'After you uninstall Internet Explorer 7, double-click the Internet Explorer icon to verify that Internet Explorer 6 is restored.'
Just to throw salt in the wound of my smugness, one last quote from the KB article: 'This article is intended for a beginning to intermediate computer user.'
Might it be that long time windows users are as illiterate about computing
No, more that we just generally don't tend to complain that we shouldn't receive updates because they fix too many bugs.
as they were the first months because the window environment wants to redefine everything in its exclusive way to make it painful for people to try getting out?
Admittedly, sterile needles have replaced dirty fingers for the last century
Mostly. There are still rural parts of the U.S. where extruded surgical steel is in short supply, or rusts too easily (think of the humidity in the Mississippi delta), and hypodermic dirty fingers are still used for injections there.
The RIAA certainly sucks, and IANAL, but - do they actually have any obligation to point out to the judge when case law contradicts their stance? Even if it's the very same case that previously supported their stance, and thus was cited by them?
My very limited understanding of the adversarial system of law is that each side is expected to highlight the relevant cases that support their claims, but not necessarily to argue against themselves.
Yes, if you have configured your computer to automatically download and install "high priority" as well as "critical" updates, and if you haven't installed the well-publicized, one-click tool that Microsoft provides that explicitly overrides any other settings and prevents you from ever accidentally installing IE7, you are "forced" to sit there and watch as your computer does exactly what you've configured it to do.
I had a similar problem with Ubuntu the other day - I have this script that automatically apt-gets any updated packages, and damned if the thing didn't force me to update all my packages that had updates! Commie bloodsuckers won't get my money again.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine being tasked with turning that into readable, understandable code.
Don't have to imagine. Well, that's not quite true; I've never done anything on the scale of drum timing. But "disassembly" isn't just "opcode 53 adds X to the accumulator"; that part's (nearly) always been easy and automated. The hard part is going through, figuring out what every single memory location is for, making up your own consistent label for it, understanding the self-modifying part of the code, etc. Disassembly is a labor-intensive human process, not just the output of a "disassembler".
I remember using disassemblers from my Commodore days; the more advanced ones would spot most of the standard, documented KERNAL routines and registers, but for the most part they were opcode translators and editors with good search and replace. (Keep in mind that at the time, "cut and paste" was so novel it didn't even have a common metaphor; some called it "split and glue".)
The art was advanced enough by then that books like "Inside Commodore DOS" had, IIRC, a complete disassembly with comments, as well as the typical "reference guide" of functions and variables (all reverse engineered, of course).
So I'm with Reality Master; yay for keeping the knowledge alive and all that, but this used to not be all that impressive a feat.
You cannot post an article with the words "invisible" or "disappear" willy-nilly! You must be precise! Do you know how many salivating geeks are about to be very disappointed by TFA?
(The gas becomes non-conductive when it's off, so it's "invisible" to radar or something like that. The glass tube holding the gas is perfectly visible. It's not like some sort of light-saber thing.)
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a camera, a phone, a PDA, and a laptop?
Moreover, why is ANYONE "against" convergence? Seriously? Do you really WANT to be carrying around a submarine, a rhubarb, a helium balloon, and a platypus? Do you even know how HARD it is to find a rhubarb in an emergency? It's only convenient if you have it with you - which means it HAS to be built in.
Yes, and if there's one thing everybody on Slashdot knows, it's that a computer is a perfect metaphor for the human brain.
Ah, that makes perfect sense. Still, I thought long wires had reflectivity issues if their capacitance was.. er.. whatever capacitance is when it's bad. High?
If you mean the ones that tell you how many feet a way the break is, you are correct. That's the TDR I was referring to - Time Domain Refle.. Reflectro.. well, the origin of the acronym is shrouded in mystery and controversy, is what I'm saying. But it measures the precise time it takes for the signal to propagate to the now-unterminated end where the break is, and reflect back.
You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.
Disclaimer: I am not a hardware guy. I wanted to be, when I was little, but I finally realized around age 16 that I was never, ever going to understand how the little minuses got over to the big plus terminal, and that that was the easy part of electronics.
If one wire is wirelessly pushing its signal on to another wire (a phenomenon known as crosstalk), a microprocessor could use the noise from the crosstalk to do error correction on original signal...
The only catch is that crosstalk is considered bad. Wires are often isolated in attempts to reduce or eliminate the problem.
Given my disclaimer: I remember the days of telephone crosstalk, but I never got the impression that it was RF-related; I always assumed it had something to do with ground loops (are there ground loops in balanced telco?) or improper balancing or things like that.
I also have developed the impression that the biggest speed barrier in copper is reflections, not crosstalk, although I suppose that's more true of CAT-5/6 than of untwisted telco wiring, which is what this invention is supposed to work with. Even more confusing is TFA's use of "the same physical copper line"; if they really mean that (a continuous strand of copper), then they can't be talking about crosstalk. But maybe they mean "the same cable (set of wires), and cables are made of copper". It really is vague.
Can any EEs shed some light on this? I imagine the same sort of noise-cancelling, echo-processing DSP that ameliorates crosstalk could also ameliorate reflections; that's why, now that I finally don't need a TDR anymore, the prices have dropped tenfold.
Jay
Ever misdirected your snark at a reply instead of the original post?
Thought so.
I don't see why they'd limit it; if they're already willing to transmit your whole mailbox via POP3 (which requires looking up every message and transmitting it in toto, attachments and all) they oughta be willing to send down just the headers - especially since IMAP can be very efficient in only getting new/changed headers, and if they're smart, they store the needed headers up in the index and not down in the message.
You could make the legal argument that presenting a certificate as belonging to another organization if fraud
I think you could make the legal argument that presenting a message as coming from a certain IP address is fraud, but I've been shouted down on that one before. Not by lawyers, mind you, just by a fellow IANAL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
Actually, those are page titles, not search terms... you can't just go to "http:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/search terms", you have to go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=search+terms&go=Go".
There probably ARE examples of prior art, but Wikipedia isn't one of them.
No doubt about that! However, if somebody tries to attack in that way it is easier to fend of, because you can allow for a checksum. Instead of making a DB query for each hit, you make a DB query only if the ID lies in the codespace. So certain DOS attacks are more difficult.
D'oh! Excellent point. Can you tell I'm used to having front-line servers do rate limiting and authentication, and not used to talking straight HTTP to the masses?
I'm glad it's not just me that thinks that... why do I even care? The horrible part of baggage claim is waiting for the bags to show up in the first place, and trying to wrench them off the belt with no elbow room, not the delay between first bag and last bag.
And the horrible part of flying is living 20 minutes from the airport, but still having to show up three hours early in case there are traffic delays... inside the airport! Not baggage claim. It's line after line after line, where I'm always mentally alert for *something* I have to do next. If I could somehow just sit in a seat, and start reading a book or using a laptop, and in three hours I'd be slowly but magically transported into my plane seat, I wouldn't even care about the lines.
Pre-9/11, I used to take the Washington/NYC shuttles, where you could show up three minutes before departure and still board. I used to be able to time that within 5 minutes at National. Zip into the parking lot, which at the time was about 50 yards from the terminal doors, dash through the terminal to the gate, holding my one carry-on, get on the plane and sit down.
But baggage claim? Frankly, I'd rather my bag be last. We reach the gate, and everyone rushes to sort-of-stand-up for ten minutes. We get off the plane, and everyone rushes to the claim so they can crowd around it, wait, and jostle. Meanwhile, I relax on the plane till the crowd leaves, I go grab a drink or a snack at a concession stand, make a phone call or two, and saunter down to the carousel, at which point my bag is one of the few that's left, and the crowd is gone. Easy peasy.
you can harden your security by populating the user-id space sparsely. Somebody who is guessing for an user id will have an hard time.
Nah. Any web app that lets you see something you shouldn't see by guessing the ID is broken, period (not to say there aren't a lot of broken web apps). I gotta think Facebook's smarter than that. What if you already knew the ID (because someone used to be your friend) and they delist you? You have to check permissions at the server side.
TFA is a summary of comments made at the Web 2.0 Summit which reference another announcement which summarizes these principles.
Considering who's on the press release - NBC Universal, Disney, Viacom, Fox, Microsoft, MySpace, Dailymotion (who?), veoh (who??) - the proposed principles are actually fairly balanced. They mention fair use four times, including a statement that "When sending notices and making claims of infringement, Copyright Owners should accommodate fair use" and "If the UGC Service is able to identify specific links that solely direct users to particular non-infringing content on such [piracy-oriented] sites, the UGC Service may allow those links while blocking all other links" and even "If a UGC Service adheres to all of these Principles in good faith, the Copyright Owner should not assert a claim of copyright infringement against such UGC Service with respect to infringing user-uploaded content that might remain on the UGC Service despite such adherence to these Principles."
It's worth reading the whole principles statement. I'm sure there are things that could be tweaked, but there are no major outrages that jump out at me; I'm actually kinda impressed.
Even it if it's just user IDs, and not object IDs as another user posted...
* 64-bit user IDs are easier to partition. They could be using the top N bits as a database ID.
* They may want to allocate the IDs randomly instead of sequentially. 64-bit IDs would involve fewer collisions.
* We don't know what their account churn rate is; if people sign up, forget, and create new accounts again frequently, they could have many more than 47 million dormant accounts sitting around.
A 32-bit ID really does get cramped when you have a large user base.
Open Letter to the Thunderbird Community
Also note that both Scott and David say they'll still be working on TB. Scott's post:
David's:
Given the timing and very similar wording of their posts, I'm guessing that Ascher's right - they're going off to work on something together.
It does suck; those two know more about TB than anyone, and even when they were full-time employees, TB development was fairly glacial - it's just too big and monolithic for that size development team. But I don't know that this necessarily means the end of TB. I certainly hope not.
but on lulls sometimes sound travels.
This is why many establishments vacuum during lulls in traffic. Sound can't travel in a vacuum.
Good to know; thanks for the education. I knew they were "officers of the court" but clearly didn't think through what that implied; I was under the impression that sins of omission were a part of the game.
OT, but I'm curious now - I assume that duty extends only to information they know, and it's not a duty to research it? That is, let's say I go to my lawyer, and he files a lawsuit. There are three on-point cases in Westlaw that support my claims, and two that don't. Just so happens my lawyer didn't click on any of the ones that didn't. Is he neglecting his reponsibility to the court?
Or a more likely scenario: My lawyer delegates that research to his paralegal. Is the paralegal also an officer of the court? Or, as long as the paralegal doesn't mention those two cases to the lawyer, is everything kosher?
Or: My lawyer remembers reading about some cases that would contradict my claims, but doesn't recall the details. He studiously avoids accidentally pulling them up in Westlaw so as to avoid the need to cite them. Cool?
Obviously none of this happened in the RIAA case; I'm just curious what the parameters are, since (in my admittedly very limited experience) I've never read a brief that cited case law which would undermine the claims.
If you read the summary, you can see that TVBoxSet are up to season 10, while the production company has only produced up to season 4. I'll bet that the MPAA plans to ditch the production company, and source the episodes directly from TVBoxSet. Just think of the money they'll save: No scripts, no cameras, no sets, no production costs. This is the future - literally. Why should I (as a network) pay millions of dollars to Castle Rock or New Line for a new series when for $150 I can buy residual-free DVDs of the series before it's even written?
That is one thing that I always hated about windows, once you "upgrade" there is no turning back.
The knowledge base article on uninstalling IE7 is awfully lengthy, and the instructions wasn't mentioned in the article summary above until the very end. So I'll summarize it here for convenience:
1. Go to Add/Remove Programs
2. Select 'Show Updates'
3. Select 'Internet Explorer 7'
4. Select 'Uninstall'.
Then, as the KB article states, 'After you uninstall Internet Explorer 7, double-click the Internet Explorer icon to verify that Internet Explorer 6 is restored.'
Just to throw salt in the wound of my smugness, one last quote from the KB article: 'This article is intended for a beginning to intermediate computer user.'
But a completely different browser
Same browser. New version.
with a different GUI
Same basic GUI. New polish.
and different HTML rendering
Same HTML rendering. Much better CSS rendering.
Might it be that long time windows users are as illiterate about computing
No, more that we just generally don't tend to complain that we shouldn't receive updates because they fix too many bugs.
as they were the first months because the window environment wants to redefine everything in its exclusive way to make it painful for people to try getting out?
Do what?
Admittedly, sterile needles have replaced dirty fingers for the last century
Mostly. There are still rural parts of the U.S. where extruded surgical steel is in short supply, or rusts too easily (think of the humidity in the Mississippi delta), and hypodermic dirty fingers are still used for injections there.
The RIAA certainly sucks, and IANAL, but - do they actually have any obligation to point out to the judge when case law contradicts their stance? Even if it's the very same case that previously supported their stance, and thus was cited by them?
My very limited understanding of the adversarial system of law is that each side is expected to highlight the relevant cases that support their claims, but not necessarily to argue against themselves.
This is essentially a forced update.
Yes, if you have configured your computer to automatically download and install "high priority" as well as "critical" updates, and if you haven't installed the well-publicized, one-click tool that Microsoft provides that explicitly overrides any other settings and prevents you from ever accidentally installing IE7, you are "forced" to sit there and watch as your computer does exactly what you've configured it to do.
I had a similar problem with Ubuntu the other day - I have this script that automatically apt-gets any updated packages, and damned if the thing didn't force me to update all my packages that had updates! Commie bloodsuckers won't get my money again.