This is so sad, but it was probably inevitable. Amazon is a big company now, which means it's controlled by the lawyers. Remember, kids: big companies don't innovate!
I'm good friends with the guy who implemented one-click shopping (he refers to it as ``the money vaccuum.'') But I won't let that stop me -- I'm still not shopping there any more.
Here's the letter I sent them. I encourage all of you to send letters of your own. (But don't just cut-and-paste someone else's letter, they can tell...)
When you started spamming me, I was irritated, but didn't much care, since at least you gave me a way to unsubscribe. When you started selling your customers' private information down the river, I was irritated, but didn't much care, because I'm not overly concerned about my privacy. But now you've finally lost me as a customer.
Why? Because you asked for, and were awarded, a 17-year monopoly on the concept of "one-click shopping", because that idea is apparently such an innovation, such a breakthrough, that you never would have gone into business without the incentive of federally-mandated exclusive rights.
As if that wasn't bad enough, now you are sueing Barnes and Noble for adding a similar feature to their web site. So much for the bullshit apology one often hears of "we only have patents for defensive purposes, in case someone bigger and stronger sues us for patent infringement first."
Amazon.com is a great web site, far better than any other online store I've used. But I will not be using it again. I will either use other web sites, or make more trips to physical stores from now on.
Convenience is nice, but I don't feel good giving my money to anticompetitive parasites who succeed because of their lawyers rather than the quality of their products and services.
The real shame of it is that your services are *good*. You don't need to compete this way. It's sad, and sickening.
Software patents are far more of a threat to competition and innovation than anything Microsoft has ever done.
One of my favorites is the movie GUI. Anytime you see people using computers in the movies, the windows ALWAYS zoom, make neato swooshing sounds, the mouse clicks always are audiable (*click!*), etc. etc. Hollywood computers are the most audiable computers, even more than the Game Boy.
Have you gone through the ``special features'' on a DVD lately? The GUIs they use for such things look like computers do in the movies. They've finally managed to put it in people's homes and make it real.
Computers are eventually going to act like they do in the movies because people expect them to! This is the same reason cell phones look like Star Trek communicators.
To think of it another way, do you know of any good movies about writing a book? I don't mean the action described in the book, I mean the actually process of an author writing.
To think of it another way, do you know of any good movies about writing a book? I don't mean the action described in the book, I mean the actually process of an author writing.
Okay, I know that Sneakers was not exactly a spot-on portrayal of hacking, but I found it to be a lot more plausable at least stylistically than that terrible movie "Hackers".
Sneakers might have been more accurate about [whatever], but it was absolutely terrible as a movie! Look, if you want to see a bunch of geeks, just look around. They're not dramatic. They don't lead cinematic lives.
That's why Hackers was such a brilliant movie! They knew which parts to keep and which parts to throw away. It didn't fail to match reality because someone didn't understand what hacking was, it failed to match reality because someone did understand what movies are.
I don't know any hackers who look like Angelina Jolie. But that's not the point. Their portrayal of Joey shows that they did understand what ``real'' hackers are like -- and they had the sense to realize that a movie full of only that kind of character would be boring as hell.
``Chess is the most violent of all sports... There's no sport as competitive -- yes, I'll say as rough -- as chess. The only goal in chess is to prove your superiority to the other guy, and the most important superiority, the most total one, is the superiority of the mind... There is real chess and women's chess. Some people don't like to hear this, but chess does not fit women properly. It's a fight, you know? A big fight...It's the logic of a fighter, a professional fighter. Women are weaker fighters. There is also the aspect of creativity in chess. You have to create new ideas. That's quite difficult, too. Chess is the combination of sport, art, and science. In all these fields, you can see men's superiority. Just compare the sexes in literature, in music or in art. The result is, you know, obvious. Probably the answer is in the genes.''
-- Garry Kasparov, 1989
Then he was beaten by a machine and went down in history for it.
It seems to me that the difference lies in the modification rather than distribution. What originally started RMS on the whole Free Software thing, was not being able to fix a program he needed to use.[...] This argument doesn't really apply other digital media.
I agree with Carmack, RMS's arguments naturally extend themselves to all other media. One can easily imagine RMS having gotten bent over not being allowed to record and distribute his own cover version of some song, instead of a printer driver.
If you believe in the philosophical underpinings of the GPL, then you believe that intellectual property is morally wrong.
I prefer a more pragmatic approach: intellectual property is a construct we invented for the betterment of society as a whole. Does it work? Which parts help more than they hurt? Which hurt more than they help? For example, I think the copyright system works pretty well, and (today's) patent system is a horrible botch.
It would be nice if attachments could run/open on a VMWare virtual machine or something like it created specifically for the purpose, with monitors for suspicious activity. If the virtual machine gets destroyed, no biggee. Delete it and create it again. I doubt this is practical at the consumer level now however.
Even running helper apps and plugins inside of a chroot would help loads, and that's pretty straightforward. Well, except for the fact that only root can chroot()...
I've heard that Pluto is in danger of losing its status as a planet, but what I've never understood is why Pluto was considered a planet but Charon was not. Charon is usually referred to as Pluto's moon, but my understanding is that Charon is actually about 2/3rds the mass of Pluto, so really they orbit around a common epicenter (that is not within either body, but between them.) So that sounds like a double planet to me, not a planet with a moon...
This is not all new, because there has been a theory called the "nemesis theory" which is an extension to the catastrophe theory.
And this theory has also been immortalized in a pop song! Shriekback 's 1985 hit Nemesis, from the fabulous album Oil and Gold: as far as I know, the only song about asteroid-based extinctions.
priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals everybody happy as the dead come home big black nemesis, parthenogenesis no one move a muscle as the dead come home ... how bad it gets, you can't imagine the burning wax, the breath of reptiles god is not mocked, he knows our business karma could take us, at any moment cover him up, I think we're finished you know its never, been so exotic but I don't know, my dreams are vicious we could still end up, with the great big fishes.
Here's the reason SV doesn't have the advanced banking tech: because programmers know better.
Well, but it does, because all these banks are national. There's nothing special about SV.
But anyway, I think it's safe to say that no large company's business decisions are ever influenced by reasons like ``because the programmers know better.'' You must work at a very unusual place if that's how they operate there.
I HATE direct bill pay systems. There's no way in hell I'm letting Vast Conglomerate A ask Vast Bank B for some of my money.
Who says you have to let them ask? Instead of letting the recipient pull, you instruct your bank to periodically push. That way you only have one vast conglomerate capable of screwing you over (and it's one who already had the capability to screw you over anyway, since they already have all of your money.)
One of my pet peeves is that people over here *still* use cheques to pay all their bills instead of direct funds transfer. I'd almost forgotten how to write a cheque before I moved here, but hardly anyone does direct debit so I'm forever writing the things out and stuffing them in envelopes (not post-paid of course).
Get a different bank! Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America let you pay any bills online, and those are the two most common banks in the Bay Area. I'm sure many others do as well.
The way it works behind the scenes is that they'll do an electronic transfer for those payees who can accept it, and they'll print and mail a check for you for those who can't (the first check I had them write was for $1 to myself, just so I could see what the paper copy looked like...)
that's not really what AI is all about - it's more about trying to solve problems using various techniques in order to make programs useful.
That's not the goal of AI, that's the goal of programming.
There was a time when expert sytems were AI. Before that, anything DWIMish was AI. Now it's all just programming.
Why? Because the only definition that consistently fits AI is clever stuff we don't really know how to program yet.
Someone (I forget who, maybe Dave Touretzsky?) said once, ``AI is like a magic trick. The first time you see it, you think wow, that's amazing! That must be magic! Then you want to know how it's done, and someone tells you, and you think, wow, that's really clever! Then later, after you understand it and it's no longer novel, when you see it again you think, well it's just slight-of-hand, duh.''
Once something doesn't feel like magic any more, because it has become common-place, it is no longer AI. At that point, it's just programming.
(And some pointy-headed loser will probably even refer to it as a ``design pattern.'')
I like that Hofstadter dialogue you mentioned, but calling something that passes the Turing test a ruse kind of misses Hofstadter's point entirely. Just because you understand why a program passes the Turing test doesn't mean it didn't pass, and it doesn't mean you are excused from treating the program as a human. Because if you hypothetically understood all the chemical and electrical processes that made us work, it wouldn't excuse you from treating your fellow humans decently. ``Oh, it's just a meat-machine pretending to be clever'' isn't an excuse.
To bastardize the Arthur C. Clarke quote, any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Real is either using glibc-2.0 for their glibc, the glibc-2.1.2 distribution is not correct. I doubt it's glibc. So, the problem is: Why use glibc-2.0 for building the package, when 2.1.2 is the current release?
Gee, maybe because of the large installed base of 2.0 users?
There was a time when people believed that the version numbers of shared libraries meant something: you changed the major number when you had made a binary-incompatible change to the library, and changed the minor number when making backward-compatible changes. That's why ld.so works the way it does.
Apparently the glibc developers don't care about this.
Where did you find 6.0.4.433? The one I just downloaded (the RH RPM) gave me 6.0.4.238.
The download page was confusing too -- when I filled out the form to download "RealPlayer G2", it took me to a page that said "only RealPlayer 5.0 is supported on this platform", and the file it gave me was named "rv50_redhat5xi386_rpm".
But in fact, that file had 6.0.4.238 in it, which includes the "G2" logo at the bottom.
Is there a comparison of the various merits of these methods of audio broadcasting? From what I've seen, it seems to me that streaming-MP3 audio is higher quality than RealAudio. But RealAudio has a feature that I haven't seen in an MP3 broadcast, which is the ability to random-access the stream.
For example, many radio stations (e.g., NPR) are archiving their broadcasts on the web; this is a situation where ``play the file from the beginning'' doesn't quite cut it. The fact that, with RealAudio, you can skip around in the stream, so that the archive file can be six hours long but you can still find the part you're interested in without listening for six hours straight (or downloading the whole thing to your local disk first) is incredibly important.
As far as I've seen so far, you can't do this with MP3 streams: you can only listen from the beginning. Is that true?
Is there any work being done to make random-access of MP3 streams possible?
Netscape always eats 100% CPU when doing gethostbyname from it's external async DNS process. This happens regardless of whether you type the site name on the command line or in the location bar.
It isn't really a bug, since it is implemented exactly the way it was designed. It is still a bad design. Maybe you should send them a note.
The hell it's not. It was not designed that way, it was designed so that both processes would be idle until such time as the DNS server responded. See unix-dns.h. Someone must have botched things so that netlib is looping calling DNS_ServiceProcess() repeatedly, even though the fd returned by DNS_SpawnProcess() has not yet been marked readable.
This isn't too surprising, though, since netlib is such a mess that this "looping" failure mode is one of the most common things to go wrong.
Here's my "All I Ever Wanted From Netscape Or Mozilla" list, for which I've been waiting since Netscape 3.01:
Image autoload on/off from the Options menu with one click, like NS3.01.
Java/Javascript enable/disable from the Options menu with one click, unlike any Netscape version ever released.
GIF animation enable/disable from the Options menu with one click, unlike any Netscape version ever released.
Heh. I implemented these in the 3.02 codebase years ago. Plus S/MIME. Too bad they wouldn't let me release it as 3.1 back before 4.0 shipped. It would have been a "distraction", apparently.
if I understand Macrovision correctly, it is basically a non-chaotic bit o' noise added to the NTSC signal).
Macrovision works by periodically flipping the signal in the vertical blanking region from black to white. It flips it every few seconds (somewhere in the range of 5-30 seconds, it seems) and does it randomly. The reason this works is that almost all VCRs manufactured after 1986 or so do some manner of auto-gain-control, by assuming that the blanking region is the reference black level. So when it goes white, the intensity of the recorded picture goes all wonky.
Most televisions don't do this gain-control trick, which is why this works: it will mess up VCRs but not CRTs. Of course, it also messes up any TV that behaves more like a VCR than a CRT, such as LCD projectors.
You can get a device that defeats Macrovision for about $40 from the back of any video magazine. The way they work is by taking the input video signal and painting a black stripe over the blanking interval. As far as I've seen, this causes no loss of picture quality.
Another thing that would be nice to hear from the horse's mouth is whether Unisys claims that their patent covers decoding of GIFs as well as creation of them. My understanding is that it only covers creation, but I have heard rumors that Unisys believes otherwise. It would be good to have a definitive answer on what Unisys's opinion on that actually is.
Thanks for calling them, Rob! Good job. Slashdot needs more of this sort of thing.
Modern life is hard and stressful in unique ways, but reactionary longings for a golden age gone by are a waste of time.
I agree with this -- I certainly believe that we have it better off today than in any previous era. Douglas Coupland wrote a wonderfully obnoxious essay about this called ``The Past Sucks''. He notes that if you dig deep enough into the minds of some SCA type who longs for the past, you'll hear a laundry-list of exceptions: ``but I'd have to be a member of the royalty; and I'd have to have had my shots; and I'd need espresso.''
So no, I don't want to live in the past, I don't want to go backwards.
My point was, isn't it about time that the progress we've made started paying some dividends?
We're getting more work done faster instead of being able to work less. That hardly seems like a good trade to me.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so sad, but it was probably inevitable. Amazon is a big company now, which means it's controlled by the lawyers. Remember, kids: big companies don't innovate!
I'm good friends with the guy who implemented one-click shopping (he refers to it as ``the money vaccuum.'') But I won't let that stop me -- I'm still not shopping there any more.
Here's the letter I sent them. I encourage all of you to send letters of your own. (But don't just cut-and-paste someone else's letter, they can tell...)
---------------------------------
Subject: patent suit ==> losing customers
You have finally gone too far.
When you started spamming me, I was irritated, but didn't much care, since at least you gave me a way to unsubscribe. When you started selling your customers' private information down the river, I was irritated, but didn't much care, because I'm not overly concerned about my privacy. But now you've finally lost me as a customer.
Why? Because you asked for, and were awarded, a 17-year monopoly on the concept of "one-click shopping", because that idea is apparently such an innovation, such a breakthrough, that you never would have gone into business without the incentive of federally-mandated exclusive rights.
As if that wasn't bad enough, now you are sueing Barnes and Noble for adding a similar feature to their web site. So much for the bullshit apology one often hears of "we only have patents for defensive purposes, in case someone bigger and stronger sues us for patent infringement first."
Amazon.com is a great web site, far better than any other online store I've used. But I will not be using it again. I will either use other web sites, or make more trips to physical stores from now on.
Convenience is nice, but I don't feel good giving my money to anticompetitive parasites who succeed because of their lawyers rather than the quality of their products and services.
The real shame of it is that your services are *good*. You don't need to compete this way. It's sad, and sickening.
Software patents are far more of a threat to competition and innovation than anything Microsoft has ever done.
Goodbye.
Have you gone through the ``special features'' on a DVD lately? The GUIs they use for such things look like computers do in the movies. They've finally managed to put it in people's homes and make it real.
Computers are eventually going to act like they do in the movies because people expect them to! This is the same reason cell phones look like Star Trek communicators.
Sneakers might have been more accurate about [whatever], but it was absolutely terrible as a movie! Look, if you want to see a bunch of geeks, just look around. They're not dramatic. They don't lead cinematic lives.
That's why Hackers was such a brilliant movie! They knew which parts to keep and which parts to throw away. It didn't fail to match reality because someone didn't understand what hacking was, it failed to match reality because someone did understand what movies are.
I don't know any hackers who look like Angelina Jolie. But that's not the point. Their portrayal of Joey shows that they did understand what ``real'' hackers are like -- and they had the sense to realize that a movie full of only that kind of character would be boring as hell.
(The Net just sucked on every level, though.)
Then he was beaten by a machine and went down in history for it.
I agree with Carmack, RMS's arguments naturally extend themselves to all other media. One can easily imagine RMS having gotten bent over not being allowed to record and distribute his own cover version of some song, instead of a printer driver.
If you believe in the philosophical underpinings of the GPL, then you believe that intellectual property is morally wrong.
I prefer a more pragmatic approach: intellectual property is a construct we invented for the betterment of society as a whole. Does it work? Which parts help more than they hurt? Which hurt more than they help? For example, I think the copyright system works pretty well, and (today's) patent system is a horrible botch.
Even running helper apps and plugins inside of a chroot would help loads, and that's pretty straightforward. Well, except for the fact that only root can chroot()...
I've heard that Pluto is in danger of losing its status as a planet, but what I've never understood is why Pluto was considered a planet but Charon was not. Charon is usually referred to as Pluto's moon, but my understanding is that Charon is actually about 2/3rds the mass of Pluto, so really they orbit around a common epicenter (that is not within either body, but between them.) So that sounds like a double planet to me, not a planet with a moon...
And this theory has also been immortalized in a pop song! Shriekback 's 1985 hit Nemesis, from the fabulous album Oil and Gold: as far as I know, the only song about asteroid-based extinctions.
Well, but it does, because all these banks are national. There's nothing special about SV.
But anyway, I think it's safe to say that no large company's business decisions are ever influenced by reasons like ``because the programmers know better.'' You must work at a very unusual place if that's how they operate there.
Who says you have to let them ask? Instead of letting the recipient pull, you instruct your bank to periodically push. That way you only have one vast conglomerate capable of screwing you over (and it's one who already had the capability to screw you over anyway, since they already have all of your money.)
Get a different bank! Both Wells Fargo and Bank of America let you pay any bills online, and those are the two most common banks in the Bay Area. I'm sure many others do as well.
The way it works behind the scenes is that they'll do an electronic transfer for those payees who can accept it, and they'll print and mail a check for you for those who can't (the first check I had them write was for $1 to myself, just so I could see what the paper copy looked like...)
That's not the goal of AI, that's the goal of programming.
There was a time when expert sytems were AI. Before that, anything DWIMish was AI. Now it's all just programming.
Why? Because the only definition that consistently fits AI is clever stuff we don't really know how to program yet.
Someone (I forget who, maybe Dave Touretzsky?) said once, ``AI is like a magic trick. The first time you see it, you think wow, that's amazing! That must be magic! Then you want to know how it's done, and someone tells you, and you think, wow, that's really clever! Then later, after you understand it and it's no longer novel, when you see it again you think, well it's just slight-of-hand, duh.''
Once something doesn't feel like magic any more, because it has become common-place, it is no longer AI. At that point, it's just programming.
(And some pointy-headed loser will probably even refer to it as a ``design pattern.'')
I like that Hofstadter dialogue you mentioned, but calling something that passes the Turing test a ruse kind of misses Hofstadter's point entirely. Just because you understand why a program passes the Turing test doesn't mean it didn't pass, and it doesn't mean you are excused from treating the program as a human. Because if you hypothetically understood all the chemical and electrical processes that made us work, it wouldn't excuse you from treating your fellow humans decently. ``Oh, it's just a meat-machine pretending to be clever'' isn't an excuse.
To bastardize the Arthur C. Clarke quote, any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Gee, maybe because of the large installed base of 2.0 users?
There was a time when people believed that the version numbers of shared libraries meant something: you changed the major number when you had made a binary-incompatible change to the library, and changed the minor number when making backward-compatible changes. That's why ld.so works the way it does.
Apparently the glibc developers don't care about this.
The download page was confusing too -- when I filled out the form to download "RealPlayer G2", it took me to a page that said "only RealPlayer 5.0 is supported on this platform", and the file it gave me was named "rv50_redhat5xi386_rpm".
But in fact, that file had 6.0.4.238 in it, which includes the "G2" logo at the bottom.
For example, many radio stations (e.g., NPR) are archiving their broadcasts on the web; this is a situation where ``play the file from the beginning'' doesn't quite cut it. The fact that, with RealAudio, you can skip around in the stream, so that the archive file can be six hours long but you can still find the part you're interested in without listening for six hours straight (or downloading the whole thing to your local disk first) is incredibly important.
As far as I've seen so far, you can't do this with MP3 streams: you can only listen from the beginning. Is that true?
Is there any work being done to make random-access of MP3 streams possible?
Don't you hate it when people say ``implement'' when they mean ``deploy''?
I sure do.
The hell it's not. It was not designed that way, it was designed so that both processes would be idle until such time as the DNS server responded. See unix-dns.h. Someone must have botched things so that netlib is looping calling DNS_ServiceProcess() repeatedly, even though the fd returned by DNS_SpawnProcess() has not yet been marked readable.
This isn't too surprising, though, since netlib is such a mess that this "looping" failure mode is one of the most common things to go wrong.
Heh. I implemented these in the 3.02 codebase years ago. Plus S/MIME. Too bad they wouldn't let me release it as 3.1 back before 4.0 shipped. It would have been a "distraction", apparently.
I think the relevant difference is that we're the only ones who can buy stuff.
Macrovision works by periodically flipping the signal in the vertical blanking region from black to white. It flips it every few seconds (somewhere in the range of 5-30 seconds, it seems) and does it randomly. The reason this works is that almost all VCRs manufactured after 1986 or so do some manner of auto-gain-control, by assuming that the blanking region is the reference black level. So when it goes white, the intensity of the recorded picture goes all wonky.
Most televisions don't do this gain-control trick, which is why this works: it will mess up VCRs but not CRTs. Of course, it also messes up any TV that behaves more like a VCR than a CRT, such as LCD projectors.
You can get a device that defeats Macrovision for about $40 from the back of any video magazine. The way they work is by taking the input video signal and painting a black stripe over the blanking interval. As far as I've seen, this causes no loss of picture quality.
There is a Macrovision FAQ, including schematics on how to build your own filter.
Thanks for calling them, Rob! Good job. Slashdot needs more of this sort of thing.
I agree with this -- I certainly believe that we have it better off today than in any previous era. Douglas Coupland wrote a wonderfully obnoxious essay about this called `` The Past Sucks ''. He notes that if you dig deep enough into the minds of some SCA type who longs for the past, you'll hear a laundry-list of exceptions: ``but I'd have to be a member of the royalty; and I'd have to have had my shots; and I'd need espresso.''
So no, I don't want to live in the past, I don't want to go backwards.
My point was, isn't it about time that the progress we've made started paying some dividends?
We're getting more work done faster instead of being able to work less. That hardly seems like a good trade to me.
Solow is to "paradox" as Alanis is to "irony"?