C, and hence languages derived from it like Perl, gets the year from a struct that really contains the year minus 1900. Therefore about half of the 2-digit year formats out there will be 3 digits next year.
Just today we shipped some files with cashflow calculations that settle a few days from now - in Y2K - and they were rejected as "old files" because the file-name went from 99 to 00.
Most of Y2K is small stuff like that. Stuff you won't hear about, but which people have to stay on top of.
But - big but - there will be some bigger things. For instance a friend of mine who works in Troy, Michigan has an inte resting story about the traffic lights...
Cheers, Ben
PS and OT: That discussion software is kind of impressive. They produce - completely dynamically - over a million pages/day with over 20K posts. Yet their pages are pretty much always *very* fast. Their secret? Smalltalk and the knowledge that threaded software is not a good problem for a relational database. Oh, and yes, they run on Linux.
Most animals are very good at making themselves scarce when confronted with people. People have not developed that reflex. Therefore people are easier to hunt than most other animals. (Particularly in crowded urban environments.)
So this is not a case of has/does not have edible resources. It is a case of being edible resources!
"As you know, some people are stocking up on food and water to prepare for the upcoming collapse of civilization. I'm not. I'm stocking up on guns and ammunition so I can *take* the food and water from all those people who didn't figure out what collapse of civilization means!"
The reference to cracking code available for DVD back in 1997 is very interesting and relevant to the case.
I couldn't follow the links either, but the way that it worked (apparently) was to capture the information put out by the usual commercial program. It would be extremely good if the exact reference could be tracked down and the DVD response (or lack of it) to that situation. This is extremly relevant to the DeCSS case. Particularly since the main thing that DeCSS makes possible which the previous break did not is to run DVD without an official decoder (eg on Linux where there is no such decoder).
So if piracy is the concern, what was the response before?
If it is not, then why are they going after DeCSS?
Yes, if you can copy it, you don't need to read it.
However a lot of piracy concerns would be over other formats (eg MPEG) that are more easily copied/downloaded, and you do need to decrypt to put the data into those formats.
But the kind of professional thieves that they have to worry about for the most part won't need to decrypt a thing.
The fact is that lawyers do have special powers within the structure of the US government. I gave one example of a right that lawyers have. And this right is fundamental - you won't see Congress lightly trying to repeal this right. In fact the right is (unlike your other examples) not even an explicit law - instead it comes from centuries of common law. In other words lawyers have a right here that is granted to lawyers by the practice of law outside of the normal legislative channels that are responsible for the other rights you list. Isn't that special?
Incidentally law is one of three basic branches of the government of the USA. Therefore special rights with regards to the law are special rights with respect to the mechanisms of government. The operation of the law *is* part of the action of the government.
So you can continue your list if you wish, but I don't think a single element on there is in the same ballpark as client-attorney privilege.
For instance lawyers cannot be made to testify about conversations with their clients. That is not generally true. For instance a number of priests are today in jail because they refused to repeat what was said in confession.
They don't have a reasonable case or position. They can threaten - they are threatening, but the threat is much more of a bluff than a threat. If you back down the instant that someone says, "Boo", then what value does your right to speak up have?
Back before most people had even heard of the Internet (and before the web was widely known) I was doing a lot more than text on it. Such as playing chess in real time, and playing a (now defunct) Mac game called bolo.
Of course there was a huge text focus, think Usenet, but it has not been strictly text for a very long time.
Seriously, I have known people that squeezed extra performance out of certain types of parallel calculations by having them done on the video-card. That facility was supposed to be there for preparing a new screen while the old was still displayed, but video cards are better suited to massively parallel calculations than standard CPUs are...
So data processing might indeed benefit from having lots of video memory, even if you are not displaying anything.
Alphas offer better performance than Intel, plus they are 64-bit. If you are tossing around GB of data the ability to directly address very large amounts of memory is going to matter. Linux on Intel today is able to handle 2-4 GB of RAM (depending on patches) but you can't address all of that. (You can map it - which is what databases want to do with it.) Likewise 2.4 extends that to 64 GB, but you cannot address it all.
Another benefit is security. Look at the LinuxPPC test. Even without their fixing a known hole, nobody could break in for a long time because you have to write assembler for the PowerPC chip which few people know. Alphas are not Intel, and that could well work to their advantage...
That darned closed-source programming gets people into bad habits..
First of all with current versions of Perl the srand call is not needed.
Secondly I would recommend using qw() because it is more legible for lists.
Thirdly a little information hiding works well. There is no need to have to synchronize the length of the list with the argument to rand.
And -w is always worthwhile
So rewritten we get
#!/bin/perl -w
@prefix = qw(Pent It Max Ath Cort Trit); @suffix = qw(ium alon ex anium oricon agon on eres obos ymede itan erion); @tag = qw(II III IV Pro MMS Deluxe);
I mean, many of us actually went so far as to provide real websites, email addresses, and other identifiers. Guess we wanted to be really hard to identify.
I somehow don't think that any questions need to be asked of/. to identify, for instance, Chris Dibona. Oops, I just posted a link to a link, perhaps I should link the code directly. Ack, perhaps an email would help them. Whoops, that is an anonymous address, ah well, if they ask me at that address I will be willing to give them a more direct contact. (Hint, I live in New York City.)
My point? The USA was founded on the idea that citizens have the right to protest unfair legal actions. Posting code and links here is a form of protest. Protesters usually don't mind being identified, after all if they cannot be identified, what is the point of having protested?
Right.
They can claim the law is on their side. They can claim that the algorithm was secure. They can claim that what I did is unfair to them.
That doesn't make them right.
Another example. Sign a lease for an apartment in New York City. It says that your landlord can enter any time. In fact that is false, no matter what the paper says, that is a right you cannot sign away. But they are allowed to try to convince you that you have signed away that right, even though you have not. And you are free to tell them to get lost.
Well guess what?
I don't think they have a case.
Even if they did, I do not agree with the substance of their position and would not agree with the laws that they could possibly have the case under.
And if forcing the point brings DVDs to Linux sooner, well so much the better.
The DVD association did not create a Linux client and have no desire to do so. So Linux people set about trying to create a Linux client just like they try to for every other closed-source device out there. Step 1 is to break the encryption so you can read the bloody DVD.
As mentioned by someone else, copying a DVD is not worthwhile at today's storage costs so piracy is hardly an issue (for now).
Several months ago I began predicting that someday someone would find a buffer overflow in the various Windows TCP-IP stacks and use it to write a worm that would bring down the Microsoft part of the Internet and cause so much traffic as to effectively shut down everything else. I further predict that until an event of this magnitude happens, the general public will not really learn the basic lessons about security that the *nix world was forced to learn from the first worm.
What are your thoughts on this prediction? (Timeline, reasonableness, etc.)
I gain the guarantee that my wishes are respected regarding the distribution of my works.
Read the GPL closely, you don't need to agree to it to use the software, only to distribute it. In other words it isn't the act of downloading that is the point of agreement, it is the point of putting it on your ftp site.
Slashdot Mirror
A number of operating systems (including Linux - at least on 64-bit systems) use 64-bit integers for time, making them Y(ManyGB) compliant!
So there!
Cheers,
Ben
It took me a second.
I must be getting pathetic in my old age..
Cheers,
Ben
C, and hence languages derived from it like Perl, gets the year from a struct that really contains the year minus 1900. Therefore about half of the 2-digit year formats out there will be 3 digits next year.
Cheers,
Ben Tilly
Just today we shipped some files with cashflow calculations that settle a few days from now - in Y2K - and they were rejected as "old files" because the file-name went from 99 to 00.
Most of Y2K is small stuff like that. Stuff you won't hear about, but which people have to stay on top of.
But - big but - there will be some bigger things. For instance a friend of mine who works in Troy, Michigan has an inte resting story about the traffic lights...
Cheers,
Ben
PS and OT: That discussion software is kind of impressive. They produce - completely dynamically - over a million pages/day with over 20K posts. Yet their pages are pretty much always *very* fast. Their secret? Smalltalk and the knowledge that threaded software is not a good problem for a relational database. Oh, and yes, they run on Linux.
Some animals are people.
Most animals are very good at making themselves scarce when confronted with people. People have not developed that reflex. Therefore people are easier to hunt than most other animals. (Particularly in crowded urban environments.)
So this is not a case of has/does not have edible resources. It is a case of being edible resources!
HTH,
Ben
I thought it was him, but I wasn't sure.
So I made sure I didn't make it sound like it was original.
BTW another unoriginal quote I like...
"If you can't laugh at yourself, eventually other people will."
Showed up in a discussion on why a spoof of slashdot keeps on getting rejected when people submit it...
Cheers,
Ben
"As you know, some people are stocking up on food and water to prepare for the upcoming collapse of civilization. I'm not. I'm stocking up on guns and ammunition so I can *take* the food and water from all those people who didn't figure out what collapse of civilization means!"
Cheers,
Ben
The reference to cracking code available for DVD back in 1997 is very interesting and relevant to the case.
I couldn't follow the links either, but the way that it worked (apparently) was to capture the information put out by the usual commercial program. It would be extremely good if the exact reference could be tracked down and the DVD response (or lack of it) to that situation. This is extremly relevant to the DeCSS case. Particularly since the main thing that DeCSS makes possible which the previous break did not is to run DVD without an official decoder (eg on Linux where there is no such decoder).
So if piracy is the concern, what was the response before?
If it is not, then why are they going after DeCSS?
Sincerely,
Ben
The data has to be decrypted before you can put it in another format. But as you point out, you don't necessarily have to know how that was done... :-)
Cheers,
Ben
Yes, if you can copy it, you don't need to read it.
However a lot of piracy concerns would be over other formats (eg MPEG) that are more easily copied/downloaded, and you do need to decrypt to put the data into those formats.
But the kind of professional thieves that they have to worry about for the most part won't need to decrypt a thing.
Cheers,
Ben
The fact is that lawyers do have special powers within the structure of the US government. I gave one example of a right that lawyers have. And this right is fundamental - you won't see Congress lightly trying to repeal this right. In fact the right is (unlike your other examples) not even an explicit law - instead it comes from centuries of common law. In other words lawyers have a right here that is granted to lawyers by the practice of law outside of the normal legislative channels that are responsible for the other rights you list. Isn't that special?
Incidentally law is one of three basic branches of the government of the USA. Therefore special rights with regards to the law are special rights with respect to the mechanisms of government. The operation of the law *is* part of the action of the government.
So you can continue your list if you wish, but I don't think a single element on there is in the same ballpark as client-attorney privilege.
Cheers,
Ben
PS +1 given up because this is getting off topic.
For instance lawyers cannot be made to testify about conversations with their clients. That is not generally true. For instance a number of priests are today in jail because they refused to repeat what was said in confession.
Cheers,
Ben
No.
They don't have a reasonable case or position. They can threaten - they are threatening, but the threat is much more of a bluff than a threat. If you back down the instant that someone says, "Boo", then what value does your right to speak up have?
Sincerely,
Ben Tilly
Back before most people had even heard of the Internet (and before the web was widely known) I was doing a lot more than text on it. Such as playing chess in real time, and playing a (now defunct) Mac game called bolo.
Of course there was a huge text focus, think Usenet, but it has not been strictly text for a very long time.
Regards,
Ben
Seriously, I have known people that squeezed extra performance out of certain types of parallel calculations by having them done on the video-card. That facility was supposed to be there for preparing a new screen while the old was still displayed, but video cards are better suited to massively parallel calculations than standard CPUs are...
So data processing might indeed benefit from having lots of video memory, even if you are not displaying anything.
Cheers,
Ben
Alphas offer better performance than Intel, plus they are 64-bit. If you are tossing around GB of data the ability to directly address very large amounts of memory is going to matter. Linux on Intel today is able to handle 2-4 GB of RAM (depending on patches) but you can't address all of that. (You can map it - which is what databases want to do with it.) Likewise 2.4 extends that to 64 GB, but you cannot address it all.
Another benefit is security. Look at the LinuxPPC test. Even without their fixing a known hole, nobody could break in for a long time because you have to write assembler for the PowerPC chip which few people know. Alphas are not Intel, and that could well work to their advantage...
So was this even considered?
Cheers,
Ben
I sure hope the anonymous Intel employee that wrote that script is reading this! :-)
:-)
I think that you can arrange that...
I will take your word on both his gender and Perl expertise as well.
Cheers,
Ben
That darned closed-source programming gets people into bad habits..
/bin/perl -w
First of all with current versions of Perl the srand call is not needed.
Secondly I would recommend using qw() because it is more legible for lists.
Thirdly a little information hiding works well. There is no need to have to synchronize the length of the list with the argument to rand.
And -w is always worthwhile
So rewritten we get
#!
@prefix = qw(Pent It Max Ath Cort Trit);
@suffix = qw(ium alon ex anium oricon agon on eres obos ymede itan erion);
@tag = qw(II III IV Pro MMS Deluxe);
printf ("%s%s %s\n", &rand_elt(@prefix), &rand_elt(@suffix), &rand_elt(@tag));
sub rand_elt {
return $_[rand(scalar @_)];
}
Not that it matters in this case, but good habits are good habits...
:-P
Cheers,
Ben
PS To get the code to look like code use the TT tag, and to get indents use . Warning, IE may mess up the indented space on a cut-and-paste...
First of all the software first reverse-engineered was not encrypted.
Secondly the encryption algorithm they were supposed to use was weak. If they don't use a strong encryption algorithm, then how ascertainable is it?
Cheers,
Ben
I mean, many of us actually went so far as to provide real websites, email addresses, and other identifiers. Guess we wanted to be really hard to identify.
/. to identify, for instance, Chris Dibona. Oops, I just posted a link to a link, perhaps I should link the code directly. Ack, perhaps an email would help them. Whoops, that is an anonymous address, ah well, if they ask me at that address I will be willing to give them a more direct contact. (Hint, I live in New York City.)
I somehow don't think that any questions need to be asked of
My point? The USA was founded on the idea that citizens have the right to protest unfair legal actions. Posting code and links here is a form of protest. Protesters usually don't mind being identified, after all if they cannot be identified, what is the point of having protested?
Right.
They can claim the law is on their side. They can claim that the algorithm was secure. They can claim that what I did is unfair to them.
That doesn't make them right.
Another example. Sign a lease for an apartment in New York City. It says that your landlord can enter any time. In fact that is false, no matter what the paper says, that is a right you cannot sign away. But they are allowed to try to convince you that you have signed away that right, even though you have not. And you are free to tell them to get lost.
Well guess what?
I don't think they have a case.
Even if they did, I do not agree with the substance of their position and would not agree with the laws that they could possibly have the case under.
And if forcing the point brings DVDs to Linux sooner, well so much the better.
Regards,
Ben Tilly
Try Activestate for your download. The clipboard module can easily be used to write a convenient utility to demoronize your html.
:-)
Oh right, and take a look at The Perl Power Tools. Put a few of those in your path and it may do something for your sanity.
OTOH you could just install Linux and look innocent...
Cheers,
Ben
The DVD association did not create a Linux client and have no desire to do so. So Linux people set about trying to create a Linux client just like they try to for every other closed-source device out there. Step 1 is to break the encryption so you can read the bloody DVD.
As mentioned by someone else, copying a DVD is not worthwhile at today's storage costs so piracy is hardly an issue (for now).
Regards,
Ben
If need be I will upload as well, so tell them to take my name down as well.
Regards,
Ben
Several months ago I began predicting that someday someone would find a buffer overflow in the various Windows TCP-IP stacks and use it to write a worm that would bring down the Microsoft part of the Internet and cause so much traffic as to effectively shut down everything else. I further predict that until an event of this magnitude happens, the general public will not really learn the basic lessons about security that the *nix world was forced to learn from the first worm.
What are your thoughts on this prediction? (Timeline, reasonableness, etc.)
Regards,
Ben
You gain the right to redistribute my software.
I gain the guarantee that my wishes are respected regarding the distribution of my works.
Read the GPL closely, you don't need to agree to it to use the software, only to distribute it. In other words it isn't the act of downloading that is the point of agreement, it is the point of putting it on your ftp site.
Cheers,
Ben