Especially THESE particular lawyers. "OK, so your product is installed surreptitiously, yet TECHNICALLY legal since you did inform them that you are installing it (even tho I as a lawyer have a hard time understanding the language in which you phrased it). Now you want me to sue somebody that is removing your product after the consumer was clearly told what was being done? Uh.... OK, I'll take the case."
Even a Goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.
Re:You mean DUCKS look sorta like PENGUINS?!
on
Microsoft Using .MS TLD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The best way to look at this argument is to imagine how slashdot would react if Microsft claimed it owned the copyright on all images of birds.
I know what AARD is, I linked to it earlier. What you're doing, characteristically is to completely miss the other, subtler, point I made. AARD is designed to check for genuine MS DOS I agree. But there is some justification for doing this if you know the sort of things Windows requires of Dos. It's not as if Windows is a regular Dos application, issuing int 21 calls and checking the results - it actually rewrites parts of Dos. This sort of thing can only work if the programmers working on Windows have access to the source code and programmers working on Dos. Read "Undocumented MS Dos" - they go to great lengths to reverse engineer parts of Windows that do this.
So checking for genuine Microsoft Dos is not a completely unjustified thing to do. Also, since this code was written before the case which ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, it's not illegal. Incidentally, even after that case it's not illegal for Windows code to make assumptions about Dos like this, and crash if people use DR DOS, anymore than it's illegal to build a petrol car which fails if you fill it with diesel.
My understanding was that they checked a memory reference. While segment + offset gives an address that should work in combination regardless of the values summed, there were different combinations of segment and offset for a OS level call that was tested to flag DR-DOS vs MS-DOS
That's not what it's doing. It calls an undocumented function (which DR DOS had reveree engineered) that gets a pointer to an internal data structure. DR Dos had that data structure but it obviously wasn't identical to MS DOS. It wasn't that it used different alias values for the far pointers, the values were different because it was a different OS. But later on, Windows needed to make massive changes to DOS anyway to get multiple Windows task and Dos boxes to use different instances of Dos for example. It would have been hard to get those to work on anything other than MS DOS.
I heard this sort of thing was quite common in the mainframe days - transaction monitors would load on the OS just like a normal application and then burrow into the OS - rewriting parts of it to make transaction rollbacks work when they included filesystem access for example.
Yeah, but you prop up a doll in the seat in front of you with a big afro wig and then kick it in the head before you sit down to watch the movie. Nothing feels quite like that.
It should read: Hard disk manufacturing company marketing departments define one megabyte of hard drive space as 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Fucking reality calculates one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
Actually, megabyte has always meant 10^6 bytes. The IEC have defined new prefixes for binary, e.g. Mebibyte for 2^20.
Visa are just messing with you. They know that the kind of person who writes "Ask for ID" on cards instead of signing them is probably a paranoid nutcase with a concealed carry license and a chronic drug problem, i.e. the sort of person who you definitely don't want to try to force to "sign the card in your presence".
The government can check credit card purchases already. There are loads of Hollywood movies where FBI agents say of some fugitive "And his Visa card was used recently".
And there's the fact that IE is probably written in incomprehensible, unportable Win32 C whereas Firefox is written on a portable toolkit. Seriously, portable toolkits are the devil when it comes to memory usage, almost as bad as Java.
And IE was designed to work on crappy machines too - the original Windows 95 version was supposed to work in 8MB, and IE hasn't really been developed much since then at least up to the 6.0 version which is most common. Firefox assumed that everyone has essentially unlimited memory, and has been updated a lot since the original Netscape code. As far as I can tell, they rearchitected to support CSS for example.
The comment someone else made about caching the DOM objects for the page in Ram shows this. It's something which you can get away with if you expect people to have oodles of Ram. But originally IE didn't. I know they invented some weird version of Windows controls like buttons and listboxes for example, so that they didn't need to have a window handle for all the elements on a form. And the common control libary that IE needs is actually part of Windows - forked in IE and merged back later, same with MSHTML.dll, the DLL with the Trident renderering engine.
Unfortunately the source code to MSHTML has never been published, but I'd guess it goes to fairly extreme lengths to keep memory usage low. The downside is that CSS support was hard to add of course.
Fashionable Idea appears. Some zealot inside the company forces everyone else to use it. Since no one else really understands it properly and are frankly the sort of people who find regular code without fashionable ideas hard, they end up producing dire code which doesn't work properly. Zealot leaves. Then a new anti zealot takes over and forces everyone to rewrite their code to not use the fashionable idea, or worse to use a different one. There is much refactoring and more bugs introduced. The actual users who just want something to work are much more annoyed by the refactoring than anything else, especially as there are lots of subtle bug fixes that tend to get lost in it.
I guess a blind man wouldn't be self-aware, then ?
Seriously speaking, the test is utterly flawed, because it assumes that The entity in question has and uses reasonably sharp visual perception.
Can use visual perception (as opposed to, say, sound or smell) to tell individuals of its kind apart from each other.
This isn't a flaw, more like a limitation. If the animal can't see or doesn't use vision the way we do, you can't test it. But lots of animals can be tested, and the results are interesting. And I think you can interpolate the missing data points - clearly a blind man is self aware because he's a member of a self aware species.
I think you can work out at which point in a particular group of animals self awareness developed too. E.g. I thought the part about capuchin monkeys get a sort of intermediate score is fascinating - it shows you the amount of complexity a primate brain needs to be self aware. It's also a bit unexpected that elephants pass it.
Knows what itself looks like. Has enough intelligence to understand the concept of a mirror. Sees any reason to care about its reflection (since ignoring it apparently means it fails the test).
These are signs of self awareness.
They mention all your objections in the wiki page. I'm not sure that the fact the test is incomplete matters that much - it's easy to imagine variations that would catch the cases that the tests miss. And in any case, it's the idea behind it that is interesting, and the results they got, which apart from elephants match my expectations of which animals are likely to be self aware.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
What's wrong with "a series of tubes" as a metaphor? Truck vs road would have a been a bit more elegant and the rest of the speech sounds like a Bushism, but I can still see what he's trying to say, which is that ISPs should be allowed to bill people differently for different qualities of service. I think the real problem the blogosphere has with him is that he wants to allow market forces to work and they realise that that is not in their interests. If he'd used the same inelegant language to advocate a more NHS style, socialist internet, free at the point of use and funded by taxes, they would have called him a hero because that fits their politics better.
But seriously if you want to avoid working with a load of bitter geeks in the government/educational/non profit sector for the rest of your life you need to figure out how to explain your ideas to people who understand concepts but are not well versed in technical jargon.
Real hackers didn't hook up modems to ZX Spectrums, they just connected the phone line to tape input and wrote some Z80 assembler to decode the FSK in software.
Metaverses are an important paradigm in the post Web 2.0 era, taking advantage of the wisdom of crowds and allowing open sourcing of ideas. And furries can yiff in them too.
I think free will is somewhat connected to chaos. If you don't know about chaotic systems, determinism implies predictability. Chaos lets you have a rule based system which is unpredictable, which is somewhat like having free will.
But I don't think that the weather is self aware. Neither are fruit flies for that matter, IMO. Self awareness means that you'd be able to pass the mirror test for example.
Slashdot Mirror
DahGhostfacedKiddyFiddlah's almost on to something.
Yeah, but most likely the terrible pain of not knowing will melt his brain before he can figure it out.
Hey baby! Wanna see my solid copper audio cables? Yeah, they feel real heavy don't they? Thousand bucks a piece.
I don't care if it comes with a "summon the slave girls to come orally satisfy me" button -- if it ain't ergo, it ain't worth it
It doesn't, but you could program it to have one.
Slave girls not included. Slavery maybe illegal in your country
Especially THESE particular lawyers. "OK, so your product is installed surreptitiously, yet TECHNICALLY legal since you did inform them that you are installing it (even tho I as a lawyer have a hard time understanding the language in which you phrased it). Now you want me to sue somebody that is removing your product after the consumer was clearly told what was being done? Uh.... OK, I'll take the case."
Even a Goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel.
The best way to look at this argument is to imagine how slashdot would react if Microsft claimed it owned the copyright on all images of birds.
I know what AARD is, I linked to it earlier. What you're doing, characteristically is to completely miss the other, subtler, point I made. AARD is designed to check for genuine MS DOS I agree. But there is some justification for doing this if you know the sort of things Windows requires of Dos. It's not as if Windows is a regular Dos application, issuing int 21 calls and checking the results - it actually rewrites parts of Dos. This sort of thing can only work if the programmers working on Windows have access to the source code and programmers working on Dos. Read "Undocumented MS Dos" - they go to great lengths to reverse engineer parts of Windows that do this.
So checking for genuine Microsoft Dos is not a completely unjustified thing to do. Also, since this code was written before the case which ruled that Microsoft was a monopoly, it's not illegal. Incidentally, even after that case it's not illegal for Windows code to make assumptions about Dos like this, and crash if people use DR DOS, anymore than it's illegal to build a petrol car which fails if you fill it with diesel.
My understanding was that they checked a memory reference. While segment + offset gives an address that should work in combination regardless of the values summed, there were different combinations of segment and offset for a OS level call that was tested to flag DR-DOS vs MS-DOS
That's not what it's doing. It calls an undocumented function (which DR DOS had reveree engineered) that gets a pointer to an internal data structure. DR Dos had that data structure but it obviously wasn't identical to MS DOS. It wasn't that it used different alias values for the far pointers, the values were different because it was a different OS. But later on, Windows needed to make massive changes to DOS anyway to get multiple Windows task and Dos boxes to use different instances of Dos for example. It would have been hard to get those to work on anything other than MS DOS.
I heard this sort of thing was quite common in the mainframe days - transaction monitors would load on the OS just like a normal application and then burrow into the OS - rewriting parts of it to make transaction rollbacks work when they included filesystem access for example.
Yeah, but you prop up a doll in the seat in front of you with a big afro wig and then kick it in the head before you sit down to watch the movie. Nothing feels quite like that.
It should read: Hard disk manufacturing company marketing departments define one megabyte of hard drive space as 1,000,000 bytes: 10^6 bytes. Fucking reality calculates one megabyte as 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.
Actually, megabyte has always meant 10^6 bytes. The IEC have defined new prefixes for binary, e.g. Mebibyte for 2^20.
Visa are just messing with you. They know that the kind of person who writes "Ask for ID" on cards instead of signing them is probably a paranoid nutcase with a concealed carry license and a chronic drug problem, i.e. the sort of person who you definitely don't want to try to force to "sign the card in your presence".
I speak Latin too.
Nemo me impune lacessit = Don't fuck with, motherfucker.
What about if you want to get drunk and burn shit in your backyard? There's nothing like a gasoline fire when life is going badly.
The government can check credit card purchases already. There are loads of Hollywood movies where FBI agents say of some fugitive "And his Visa card was used recently".
And there's the fact that IE is probably written in incomprehensible, unportable Win32 C whereas Firefox is written on a portable toolkit. Seriously, portable toolkits are the devil when it comes to memory usage, almost as bad as Java.
And IE was designed to work on crappy machines too - the original Windows 95 version was supposed to work in 8MB, and IE hasn't really been developed much since then at least up to the 6.0 version which is most common. Firefox assumed that everyone has essentially unlimited memory, and has been updated a lot since the original Netscape code. As far as I can tell, they rearchitected to support CSS for example.
The comment someone else made about caching the DOM objects for the page in Ram shows this. It's something which you can get away with if you expect people to have oodles of Ram. But originally IE didn't. I know they invented some weird version of Windows controls like buttons and listboxes for example, so that they didn't need to have a window handle for all the elements on a form. And the common control libary that IE needs is actually part of Windows - forked in IE and merged back later, same with MSHTML.dll, the DLL with the Trident renderering engine.
Unfortunately the source code to MSHTML has never been published, but I'd guess it goes to fairly extreme lengths to keep memory usage low. The downside is that CSS support was hard to add of course.
What is it with software engineers?
Fashionable Idea appears. Some zealot inside the company forces everyone else to use it. Since no one else really understands it properly and are frankly the sort of people who find regular code without fashionable ideas hard, they end up producing dire code which doesn't work properly. Zealot leaves. Then a new anti zealot takes over and forces everyone to rewrite their code to not use the fashionable idea, or worse to use a different one. There is much refactoring and more bugs introduced. The actual users who just want something to work are much more annoyed by the refactoring than anything else, especially as there are lots of subtle bug fixes that tend to get lost in it.
It's something I see again and again.
I guess a blind man wouldn't be self-aware, then ?
Seriously speaking, the test is utterly flawed, because it assumes that
The entity in question has and uses reasonably sharp visual perception.
Can use visual perception (as opposed to, say, sound or smell) to tell individuals of its kind apart from each other.
This isn't a flaw, more like a limitation. If the animal can't see or doesn't use vision the way we do, you can't test it. But lots of animals can be tested, and the results are interesting. And I think you can interpolate the missing data points - clearly a blind man is self aware because he's a member of a self aware species.
I think you can work out at which point in a particular group of animals self awareness developed too. E.g. I thought the part about capuchin monkeys get a sort of intermediate score is fascinating - it shows you the amount of complexity a primate brain needs to be self aware. It's also a bit unexpected that elephants pass it.
Knows what itself looks like.
Has enough intelligence to understand the concept of a mirror.
Sees any reason to care about its reflection (since ignoring it apparently means it fails the test).
These are signs of self awareness.
They mention all your objections in the wiki page. I'm not sure that the fact the test is incomplete matters that much - it's easy to imagine variations that would catch the cases that the tests miss. And in any case, it's the idea behind it that is interesting, and the results they got, which apart from elephants match my expectations of which animals are likely to be self aware.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_Tubes
What's wrong with "a series of tubes" as a metaphor? Truck vs road would have a been a bit more elegant and the rest of the speech sounds like a Bushism, but I can still see what he's trying to say, which is that ISPs should be allowed to bill people differently for different qualities of service. I think the real problem the blogosphere has with him is that he wants to allow market forces to work and they realise that that is not in their interests. If he'd used the same inelegant language to advocate a more NHS style, socialist internet, free at the point of use and funded by taxes, they would have called him a hero because that fits their politics better.
But seriously if you want to avoid working with a load of bitter geeks in the government/educational/non profit sector for the rest of your life you need to figure out how to explain your ideas to people who understand concepts but are not well versed in technical jargon.
Real hackers didn't hook up modems to ZX Spectrums, they just connected the phone line to tape input and wrote some Z80 assembler to decode the FSK in software.
Metaverses are an important paradigm in the post Web 2.0 era, taking advantage of the wisdom of crowds and allowing open sourcing of ideas. And furries can yiff in them too.
And when it comes to layoff time, they can see who spends the most time online.
I think free will is somewhat connected to chaos. If you don't know about chaotic systems, determinism implies predictability. Chaos lets you have a rule based system which is unpredictable, which is somewhat like having free will.
But I don't think that the weather is self aware. Neither are fruit flies for that matter, IMO. Self awareness means that you'd be able to pass the mirror test for example.
Grim, tearstained masturbation too, as the dream of Vista flop and Linux takeover dies. Like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive, though fatter.
Actually, it's more like Bubble Memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
Because he was just trolling, and the memo never existed?
Which means AARD is indirectly responsible for giving SCO the money they used to attack Linux?
I bet he'd be ecstatic at that!