Yeah - notice the date from the article - 2000. It's now five years later, Vorbis is certainly a viable competitor, and no patent suit has been filed, despite Thompson's recent practice of enforcing its patents. Which implies that Vorbis does not infringe, though even Thompson had trouble believing it at first (which they've apparently overcome).
While that is true (not necessairily for the iPod, I dunno), there are two mitigating factors. One, players are becoming more and more powerful, because there are so many formats that need to be supported now, and because of the perpetual fall of hardware prices. And also, Vorbis decoder chips do exist, see a list here.
Probably not. Even assuming Real's agreement with Thompson allowed them to release source code, it probably wouldn't allow them to transfer the patent licence to others. Which means Real couldn't release it under the GPL, and even if they released it under some other open source licence, we'd be in the same position we're in now - we have good open source MP3 codecs, but we aren't allowed to use them. Anyway, I'd guess the decoder will be binary and non-Free, just as some other codecs that come with HelixPlayer are.
But a step in the right direction for DRM is, well, a step in the wrong direction. If want to follow the law but hate DRM, then just buy CDs until such time as someone tries selling unencumbered music. If DRM gets consolidated and starts actually not getting in people's way, that's a bad thing - because then it will become popular, and 10 years from now, when DRM is second nature to us and we've forgotten we even had fair use rights, things will be totally locked down. Competition won't stop them; the music industry has been devoid of competition for quite some time now.
While your argument is correct, I think it's very dangerous thinking, because it ignores the practical ease with which the restrictions can be circumvented. Ideally it would be legal and easy. Currently, it's illegal but still easy - all it takes is software, and thankfully, governments currently can't effictively stop the flow of information (=software) between internet-connected nations. However, if you just crawl into your hole of optimism for the next few years, you'll wake up and realize that to excercize fair use rights, you'll need physical objects (modchips, soundcards that ignore watermarks, etc.) to excercize your fair use rights - and governments can control objects, especially those that need a fabrication lab to create, much more effectively. Yes, it will still be possible to "crack" the restrictions -- but if I have to buy used soundcards from shady guy in the alley with his eyes gouged out or swallow modchips wrapped in condoms to smuggle them into the Land of the Free from countries being bombed because the cyberterrorists they harbor create Weapons of Mass Circumvention - well, I think that would suck.
The larger question is, how do you decide what should be taken literally and what shouldn't? One way, blasphemous as it is, is to compare what the Bible says with observable facts, such as pi != 3, and when they are at odds, go with with the observations. Which is the core of the issue - some people greatly convolute their worldview to not contradict the Bible, when it would make so much more sense to just accept that while the Bible is great for moral guidance, it's rather backwards when it comes to things like precise definitions of constants and, dare I say, the history of life.
All you need is a printer, some staples, and duct tape, and you could put that post in a book, an honest-to-goodness book! How can you question it then? It's in a book!!! It's even been blessed by DUCT TAPE!
Honestly, it's plain as day: JanneM 1:1 -- Invisible magical blue-scaled lizard midgets. How can you not believe the book? It was written by the lizard-midgets themselves.
Frankly, I don't mind at all that it's a plan to make money, as long as the licenses really are open and irrevocable. IBM is trying to move away from selling software, so open source doesn't really compete with them (though it does compete with some of their competitors). They obviously get a huge amount of goodwill with this move. And honestly, because open source tends to be tons of mostly independant modules, instead of big monolithic "integrated" software that's more common in closed source, there's more of a service market for making the software work well together, so IBM would do better in a predominantly open world than a closed one. And they can explain it all to their investors by quoting the profits they've gotten from Linux so far. Symbiosis.
I'm too young to remember when IBM was evil - but I sure hope in 20 years, Microsoft is acting the same way.
Try giving a straight (correct) answer to the question, "Is Light a Partical or a Wave?"
Both.
If you don't think that's straight enough, tough cookies!, because it is, to the best of our knowledge, correct. Correctness is more important than the ability to express something as a sound byte, or to put some phenomenon into just one of two not-necessarily-disjoint sets.
The Theory of Realitivity is much more intricate than just saying "it's all relative" with a wave of the hand. The laws of physics "breaking down" at the speed of light doesn't mean they're inconsistent, it means our theories are. (If the laws were inconsistent, then we could theorize "The laws are inconsistent," and the laws would be consistent with that theory, right?) Similarly, quantum mechanics and string theory have some great explanations of light at the small scale, but they don't yet explain large things. Does that mean the universe is inconsistent? No, we just haven't found a theory that explains them. This is why we haven't stopped trying.
Science, as I'm sure you know, works by evaluating predictive and falsifiable theories based on how well they fit the current body of observations, while continually generating new theories and observations. This process generates a series of increasingly good approxmations of reality. But it hinges on the theories being predictive (otherwise, what's the point?) and testable (otherwise, how can you evaluate them?). So divine intervention, and by extension, the existence of God, is external to science, because it isn't very predictive and it certainly isn't falsifiable. This absolutely does not, however, preclude the existance of God - the theory that God doesn't exist is similarly outside science.
I'm agnostic, if you can't tell. But I'm right, dammit!:-)
I'm interested as to how you can define self-awareness in such a Boolean manner as you seem to. Do you draw a line, perhaps between humans and (other?) animals, where everything on one side isn't self-aware and everything on the other side has been given additional help, and thus is self-aware?
I personally don't see how one can draw such a line without a clear definition of self-awareness, and I can't think of (but am open to suggestions) any definition besides something like a Turing test. How else can you determine whether a given entity is self-aware?
My philosophy, when "self-awareness" is simplified to a scalar, leads to a spectrum, probably one which gets exponentially more sparse at the top, where I'd put healthy awake humans. Monkeys, dolphins, dogs, other "intelligent" animals might be around halfway down, the rest of the mamals say halfway down from them, and so on. I guess everything (except maybe a perfect crystal at 0 K) would have some nonzero self-awareness.
If you look at the multitude of things that exist very coarsely, you would see one class of things (objects) that have, for all intents and purposes, almost no self-awareness, and another class of things (humans) that are positively seething with it, and very few (animals) somewhere in between. But I like the spectrum idea, and with that idea, I can't think of a non-arbitrary place to draw the line as to which things evolved without guidance and which things were given the divine spark of self-awareness.
Feel free to disregard this as a straw-man argument, as you never explicitly said you drew a line between self-awareness haves and have-nots. But if you have, I really would be interested to know how you decided where to make the cut.
And when talking about programming, there's many cases where code just says it more clearly and less ambiguously than human languages could hope to. Not that you should do that in a freshman comp class, unless the subject matter is very technical.
Cool, it's nice to know that this API is documented. Kinda sad that Cygwin doesn't use it.
I fully agree that forking is a workaround, and it's better not to have the app crash, but better still is both forking and having the app not crash. It's like having computers in a LAN secure from each other - yes, the firewall should work, but it's better not to depend on that.
Threads have the same address space, so when one thread changes something, the other thread sees those changes as well. fork() creates a seperate process with a seperate address space that happens to have the same contents as the parent, so changes made in one process won't be seen by the other. (To do what CreateProcess does in unix, the parent fork()s, and then the new child exec()s, which completely replaces its memory with the new executable.)
To the programmer, it appears that fork() makes a copy of all the memory, but internally, both processes have all their pages marked as copy-on-write. When one process tries to write to such a page, the CPU raises a page fault interrupt (This sounds scary, but it's not - it's also how demand loading of executables and virtual memory works). The kernel intercepts this, and makes a new copy of the page for that process to write on. The overhead is minimal - at fork() time, some tables are copied, and the first time you change something on a page, a pagefault occurs. The CPU was performing the writable check on every instruction anyway.
Disclaimer - I say this without specific knowledge of the technical issues facing the Apache developers or of the reason for their choice.
I blame Windows.
fork(2) is way better than threads in any application where the forked part doesn't need much communication with the parent. Because when a forked process crashes, there's no way for it to harm the parent. Even if you do need communication, fork mixed with pipes, sockets, signals, or shared memory can be great - a little more programming effort than threads, but you can have better-defined interfaces, you limit the damage a single failure can cause, and you often needn't worry as much about synchronization. Copy-on-write, implicit in fork, is also very useful - I just had to make a threaded program, and I basically had to implement copy-all-the-time (or I could have, at the cost of speed, implemented copy-on-write). If I could have just forked, I could have had processor-supported copy-on-write, which would have been faster, simpler, and smaller.
But alas, for whatever reason, Windows has no fork. (Let me qualify that - Microsoft SFU has it by somehow going outside the Win32 subsystem (has Microsoft released this API? If not, why not?), and Cygwin somehow fakes it in an inefficient way.) It's a really bad situation - all reasonable definitions of "cross-platform" include Windows, and thus exclude fork(2), so we're all stuck with the fragile solution of using threads and rolling our own copy-on-write.
I'd guess a test tube of bacteria could easily contain orders of magnitude more protein encodings than we could simulate with computers in a reasonable time. The key is to make the bacteria's survival dependant on their destruction of the target molecule. But once you do that, you have practically infinite parallelism for free. I'm way too lazy to dig up a source, but I remeber reading about scientists using RNA and DNA matching to give probable solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem - just mix and stir - and the only speed limit is how fast you can interpret the results.
I believe hearing people talk on cell phones is more annyoing because you only hear one side of a conversation. You'll be walking along, and someone behind you will loudly say "Hello!" to nobody in particular, or perhaps to the entire crowd. When nobody else responds, you turn around to see if it's someone you know.
And don't think I'm just bored because I can't eavesdrop on an entire conversation. It's that hearing only half a conversation is unnatural, and thus harder for you to filter and ignore. Even if you only hear the faintest echoes of speech, a part of your brain interprets its intonation, and, when it satisfies itself that the participants are satisfied and nobody's trying to talk to you, then, and only then, can you ignore it.
The result of this isn't really constant paranoid glances over my shoulder, it's just that since cell phone conversations are harder to ignore, they get noticed more, they interupt your train of thought more, and they are thus more annoying.
I think it's clear that when you post something to Usenet, you understand that it will be copied, without any further permission requested from you, onto news servers and to news clients around the world. If someone doesn't like that, they shouldn't have posted - they have no right to tell Google whether or not they can charge people for their interface (one of many) to access the newsgroups. (Obviously, one can only licence their own copyrights, so I'm not saying you can share other people's copyrighted stuff.)
It could print the pages on toilet paper, and when you were done, you would use it. Much more sanitary than reading in the bathroom, and a lot cooler too.
I don't have much experience with this, but I thought there were options that allow OpenOffice to simply pass the macros along unchanged. Don't they work?
I think the grandparent was refering to story's question about the effect on evolution - which will be nil (excluding the evolution of viruses, bacteria or prions), because obviously the chimera sheep's offspring will be fully sheep. I agree with what you say otherwise.
I'd like to move your line a little. I think the point where DRM becomes evil is when it gets legal protections like the DMCA, which allow it to completely circumvent what little fair use protections we have. Oh, and it's evil when, due to the completely non-competetive nature of the market, there are no viable studios willing to trust in humanity by offering non-DRM stuff and letting market forces decide.
Yeah, boo advertising. But picure what could be - imagine if some shows were, aside from being broadcast with ads, also offered for paid torrent download without ads, or for a much cheaper (often free) torrent download with ads, or free with DRM but no skipping of the ads, or illegally for free without ads. My guess is, of those who don't get broadcast or cable, 60% will choose the cheap ad torrent, 34% the ad-free torrent (dependant on price), 1% the DRM version, and 5% the illegal version. If this were allowed to happen, everyone would be happy - cheapskates would get free programming, people with a disposable income (or who are feeling lucky) could get ad-free versions, IP lawyers could masturbate to mandatory ad viewing, advertisers would be happy, and while cable companies would lose cable revenue, they'd gain broadband revenue.
Unfortunately this will almost certainly never happen, because all the industries have their head so deep in the DRM sand that by the time they die, they will have destroyed the last semblence of sanity in our copyright laws, crippled the internet, and generally fucked society over, unless somthing drastic changes soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah - notice the date from the article - 2000. It's now five years later, Vorbis is certainly a viable competitor, and no patent suit has been filed, despite Thompson's recent practice of enforcing its patents. Which implies that Vorbis does not infringe, though even Thompson had trouble believing it at first (which they've apparently overcome).
While that is true (not necessairily for the iPod, I dunno), there are two mitigating factors. One, players are becoming more and more powerful, because there are so many formats that need to be supported now, and because of the perpetual fall of hardware prices. And also, Vorbis decoder chips do exist, see a list here.
Probably not. Even assuming Real's agreement with Thompson allowed them to release source code, it probably wouldn't allow them to transfer the patent licence to others. Which means Real couldn't release it under the GPL, and even if they released it under some other open source licence, we'd be in the same position we're in now - we have good open source MP3 codecs, but we aren't allowed to use them. Anyway, I'd guess the decoder will be binary and non-Free, just as some other codecs that come with HelixPlayer are.
But a step in the right direction for DRM is, well, a step in the wrong direction. If want to follow the law but hate DRM, then just buy CDs until such time as someone tries selling unencumbered music. If DRM gets consolidated and starts actually not getting in people's way, that's a bad thing - because then it will become popular, and 10 years from now, when DRM is second nature to us and we've forgotten we even had fair use rights, things will be totally locked down. Competition won't stop them; the music industry has been devoid of competition for quite some time now.
While your argument is correct, I think it's very dangerous thinking, because it ignores the practical ease with which the restrictions can be circumvented. Ideally it would be legal and easy. Currently, it's illegal but still easy - all it takes is software, and thankfully, governments currently can't effictively stop the flow of information (=software) between internet-connected nations. However, if you just crawl into your hole of optimism for the next few years, you'll wake up and realize that to excercize fair use rights, you'll need physical objects (modchips, soundcards that ignore watermarks, etc.) to excercize your fair use rights - and governments can control objects, especially those that need a fabrication lab to create, much more effectively. Yes, it will still be possible to "crack" the restrictions -- but if I have to buy used soundcards from shady guy in the alley with his eyes gouged out or swallow modchips wrapped in condoms to smuggle them into the Land of the Free from countries being bombed because the cyberterrorists they harbor create Weapons of Mass Circumvention - well, I think that would suck.
The larger question is, how do you decide what should be taken literally and what shouldn't? One way, blasphemous as it is, is to compare what the Bible says with observable facts, such as pi != 3, and when they are at odds, go with with the observations. Which is the core of the issue - some people greatly convolute their worldview to not contradict the Bible, when it would make so much more sense to just accept that while the Bible is great for moral guidance, it's rather backwards when it comes to things like precise definitions of constants and, dare I say, the history of life.
Honestly, it's plain as day: JanneM 1:1 -- Invisible magical blue-scaled lizard midgets. How can you not believe the book? It was written by the lizard-midgets themselves.
God's existance, for most definitions of "God," is not a scientific theory, because it is not falsifiable.
I'm too young to remember when IBM was evil - but I sure hope in 20 years, Microsoft is acting the same way.
At that point, suicide is probably your only viable option.
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/238/ 23842.html
Both.
If you don't think that's straight enough, tough cookies!, because it is, to the best of our knowledge, correct. Correctness is more important than the ability to express something as a sound byte, or to put some phenomenon into just one of two not-necessarily-disjoint sets.
The Theory of Realitivity is much more intricate than just saying "it's all relative" with a wave of the hand. The laws of physics "breaking down" at the speed of light doesn't mean they're inconsistent, it means our theories are. (If the laws were inconsistent, then we could theorize "The laws are inconsistent," and the laws would be consistent with that theory, right?) Similarly, quantum mechanics and string theory have some great explanations of light at the small scale, but they don't yet explain large things. Does that mean the universe is inconsistent? No, we just haven't found a theory that explains them. This is why we haven't stopped trying.
Science, as I'm sure you know, works by evaluating predictive and falsifiable theories based on how well they fit the current body of observations, while continually generating new theories and observations. This process generates a series of increasingly good approxmations of reality. But it hinges on the theories being predictive (otherwise, what's the point?) and testable (otherwise, how can you evaluate them?). So divine intervention, and by extension, the existence of God, is external to science, because it isn't very predictive and it certainly isn't falsifiable. This absolutely does not, however, preclude the existance of God - the theory that God doesn't exist is similarly outside science.
I'm agnostic, if you can't tell. But I'm right, dammit! :-)
I personally don't see how one can draw such a line without a clear definition of self-awareness, and I can't think of (but am open to suggestions) any definition besides something like a Turing test. How else can you determine whether a given entity is self-aware?
My philosophy, when "self-awareness" is simplified to a scalar, leads to a spectrum, probably one which gets exponentially more sparse at the top, where I'd put healthy awake humans. Monkeys, dolphins, dogs, other "intelligent" animals might be around halfway down, the rest of the mamals say halfway down from them, and so on. I guess everything (except maybe a perfect crystal at 0 K) would have some nonzero self-awareness.
If you look at the multitude of things that exist very coarsely, you would see one class of things (objects) that have, for all intents and purposes, almost no self-awareness, and another class of things (humans) that are positively seething with it, and very few (animals) somewhere in between. But I like the spectrum idea, and with that idea, I can't think of a non-arbitrary place to draw the line as to which things evolved without guidance and which things were given the divine spark of self-awareness.
Feel free to disregard this as a straw-man argument, as you never explicitly said you drew a line between self-awareness haves and have-nots. But if you have, I really would be interested to know how you decided where to make the cut.
And when talking about programming, there's many cases where code just says it more clearly and less ambiguously than human languages could hope to. Not that you should do that in a freshman comp class, unless the subject matter is very technical.
I fully agree that forking is a workaround, and it's better not to have the app crash, but better still is both forking and having the app not crash. It's like having computers in a LAN secure from each other - yes, the firewall should work, but it's better not to depend on that.
To the programmer, it appears that fork() makes a copy of all the memory, but internally, both processes have all their pages marked as copy-on-write. When one process tries to write to such a page, the CPU raises a page fault interrupt (This sounds scary, but it's not - it's also how demand loading of executables and virtual memory works). The kernel intercepts this, and makes a new copy of the page for that process to write on. The overhead is minimal - at fork() time, some tables are copied, and the first time you change something on a page, a pagefault occurs. The CPU was performing the writable check on every instruction anyway.
I blame Windows.
fork(2) is way better than threads in any application where the forked part doesn't need much communication with the parent. Because when a forked process crashes, there's no way for it to harm the parent. Even if you do need communication, fork mixed with pipes, sockets, signals, or shared memory can be great - a little more programming effort than threads, but you can have better-defined interfaces, you limit the damage a single failure can cause, and you often needn't worry as much about synchronization. Copy-on-write, implicit in fork, is also very useful - I just had to make a threaded program, and I basically had to implement copy-all-the-time (or I could have, at the cost of speed, implemented copy-on-write). If I could have just forked, I could have had processor-supported copy-on-write, which would have been faster, simpler, and smaller.
But alas, for whatever reason, Windows has no fork. (Let me qualify that - Microsoft SFU has it by somehow going outside the Win32 subsystem (has Microsoft released this API? If not, why not?), and Cygwin somehow fakes it in an inefficient way.) It's a really bad situation - all reasonable definitions of "cross-platform" include Windows, and thus exclude fork(2), so we're all stuck with the fragile solution of using threads and rolling our own copy-on-write.
I'd guess a test tube of bacteria could easily contain orders of magnitude more protein encodings than we could simulate with computers in a reasonable time. The key is to make the bacteria's survival dependant on their destruction of the target molecule. But once you do that, you have practically infinite parallelism for free. I'm way too lazy to dig up a source, but I remeber reading about scientists using RNA and DNA matching to give probable solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem - just mix and stir - and the only speed limit is how fast you can interpret the results.
If I were you, I'd get a mirror to go on my monitor - frankly, I'd be freaked out if people could enter my room/cube without my noticing.
And don't think I'm just bored because I can't eavesdrop on an entire conversation. It's that hearing only half a conversation is unnatural, and thus harder for you to filter and ignore. Even if you only hear the faintest echoes of speech, a part of your brain interprets its intonation, and, when it satisfies itself that the participants are satisfied and nobody's trying to talk to you, then, and only then, can you ignore it.
The result of this isn't really constant paranoid glances over my shoulder, it's just that since cell phone conversations are harder to ignore, they get noticed more, they interupt your train of thought more, and they are thus more annoying.
I think it's clear that when you post something to Usenet, you understand that it will be copied, without any further permission requested from you, onto news servers and to news clients around the world. If someone doesn't like that, they shouldn't have posted - they have no right to tell Google whether or not they can charge people for their interface (one of many) to access the newsgroups. (Obviously, one can only licence their own copyrights, so I'm not saying you can share other people's copyrighted stuff.)
It could print the pages on toilet paper, and when you were done, you would use it. Much more sanitary than reading in the bathroom, and a lot cooler too.
I don't have much experience with this, but I thought there were options that allow OpenOffice to simply pass the macros along unchanged. Don't they work?
I think the grandparent was refering to story's question about the effect on evolution - which will be nil (excluding the evolution of viruses, bacteria or prions), because obviously the chimera sheep's offspring will be fully sheep. I agree with what you say otherwise.
Yeah, boo advertising. But picure what could be - imagine if some shows were, aside from being broadcast with ads, also offered for paid torrent download without ads, or for a much cheaper (often free) torrent download with ads, or free with DRM but no skipping of the ads, or illegally for free without ads. My guess is, of those who don't get broadcast or cable, 60% will choose the cheap ad torrent, 34% the ad-free torrent (dependant on price), 1% the DRM version, and 5% the illegal version. If this were allowed to happen, everyone would be happy - cheapskates would get free programming, people with a disposable income (or who are feeling lucky) could get ad-free versions, IP lawyers could masturbate to mandatory ad viewing, advertisers would be happy, and while cable companies would lose cable revenue, they'd gain broadband revenue.
Unfortunately this will almost certainly never happen, because all the industries have their head so deep in the DRM sand that by the time they die, they will have destroyed the last semblence of sanity in our copyright laws, crippled the internet, and generally fucked society over, unless somthing drastic changes soon.