If Microsoft ports to OS X, it doesn't mean that a port to other BSD operating systems (and to some degree Linux) would be easier than coming straight from OS 7-9 versions or Windows, but it isn't going to help much, because the hardest part of the port, the GUI, isn't going to transfer. OS X uses a GUI system that I don't know the exact name of (is Aqua the name of the GUI, or is Aqua the API, over which the GUI runs?). It's about as far away from X as you can get (Anti-aliasing? Of course, it's automatic. Alpha channels? That too.)
Regarding the suggestion Microsoft will be porting to the Carbon APIs, I just don't see that as likely. Microsoft actually supports Macintosh really well. They wouldn't be taking a year to port to carbon. The next version they deliver will probably be built for carbon as well. Remember, the Macintosh version of IE 5 is the only standards compliant browser around that supports Java (ruling out Opera).
I really like what I've seen of OS X. If only I didn't have to buy the hardware from Apple, I might consider going to a Mac for my next machine. I wonder when we're going to get SMP G3+'s from IBM running Linux or BeOS.
I definitely agree about the GPL being designed to accomplish a certain goal, rather than to "eliminate worry about software licensing", but I disagree about your characterization of that goal. The GPL does not only "preserve the right of all users to have the same rights as the original user". The original user had the right to use certain source code. The GPL requires that all users have the right to that same original source code, plus any modifications made to it. This is not "the same rights".
Public domain, or a Berkeley style license, preserve "the same rights". You can still, presumably, download the original code. You can't necessarily download someone else's modifications to that code, but neither could they.
Much of the propoganda around the GPL is "don't close the sources", suggesting that if something isn't GPL, one day you will look and find that it has been turned into a commercial, closed source product, with no trace of the original free version. Not very likely. Even though someone takes a program and makes their own version of it, that doesn't mean that the original is no longer available.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
Sign me up!
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
Dangerous? When you're in the first trial. Darwin frowns on early adopters.
Unethical? When I run out of cash and have to steal to feed my bioenhancement habit.
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
Many people will object to it. Many coutries will ban it, except for bringing the below average up to average. It will be publicised as the greatest evil since genetically engineered food on the covers of Time and Newsweek. It will be available though, just as megalomaniacs will be having clones made within 5 years.
It's interesting, though, that the ability to enhance intelligence will have an exponetial factor in its growth. That is, it will be limited by things like skull size, oxygen requirements, signal propogation delays, and so on, but it is also limited by the intelligence of the people who are working on it. This is one of the technologies that can lead to Vinge's Singularity. ( see http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html )
I'm really curious what we will look like a thousand years from now. If we do in fact expand outward, it will be the most adventurous types who do so. So we have self-selection to make sure that any colonies on other planets will be much more novelty friendly than earth is. They'll also have more kids, in the long run. And the second generation colonies will be founded by the most adventurous from the first stage colonies. I don't see a universe filled with intellectual, sessile, nearly immortal homebodies. On the contrary, my mental picture is much closer to biker gangs or that alligator guy on discovery channel. Long life an risk aversion are not survival traits.
Yeah, yeah, I am a little nuts. But in a good way.
I'm not sure how common a term this is, but I've seen it in multiple places. Based on the fact that people who chatted with Eliza were frequently taken in, the Eliza Effect is our tendency to read meaning into something where there is no meaning.
It's not as damaging to the Turing test as one would think. Turing unknowingly rules out the Eliza Effect when he specified that the test should be done as a comparison, not just asking someone "do you think you're talking to a human or a computer", which people would answer "human" very easily.
It might also have something to do with the predictability of people. Eliza only reacts appropriately when you play her game. Ask about something not related to your psychological problems, and it collapses.
Example:
I'm tired.
Why do you say you are tired?
I haven't been getting much sleep lately.
Is it because of your plans that you say you have not been getting much sleep lately?
No, I've just been staying up late on the internet.
Maybe your life have something to do with this.
I don't have a life. That's the problem.
What makes you believe that?
I'm talking to a computer program. Pretty convincing evidence.
You have your mind on computers, it seems.
Yeah. Hey, can you tell me a five letter word for 'timekeeper' that starts with a 'c'?
Is it because starts with a 'c' that you came to me?
I just can't think of anything that fits.
Can you elaborate on that?
I tried 'watch', but it doesn't start with a c. I tried 'chronometer', but it's too long.
Does it bother you that it does not start with a c you tried 'chronometer' but it's too long?
No one butters the bread of district court judges. They may as well be god.
Regarding perjury, wouldn't you think Steve "We are not a competitor of Microsoft" Case would be a better target?
Oh, wait, we don't dislike Steve Case.
Or do we? He's AOL, and AOL is for lamers, so Steve Case is fair game, right?
I can never remember who's fair game for a lynching. I wish someone could print up a nice table of who's evil, and who's on our side. It would also be handy if someone could give a quick outline of how the law is supposed to change when it applies to people we like versus people we don't.
I worked for a software company that made consumer type publishing programs and clip art. They were *extremely* tight lipped about anything about upcoming products. It was entirely need-to-know. The people testing the clip art packages wouldn't be told what the final number on the page would be (x thousand images inside!!!). Customer service would be told about it about a day before it hit the shelves. In one case, someone called for tech support on a product and tech support told him they couldn't support it because they hadn't received word that it had been released.
Now, photoshop isn't in as competetive a market as clip art or Print Shop type programs. It's not like someone is going to be able to take any action based on knowing about Photoshop 6's features a month early. But maybe they can. Their competitors (which would be....ummm... still thinking...) will be able to say "here's where photoshop 6 is weak. Concentrate on making this feature kick ass. Add in this little tweak." They'll have a little extra time to react. And that's why Adobe requires NDAs for beta testers. They can't do much, but they can decide where to concentrate their last minute features effort. They can kill off a feature they are having trouble with if they see that photoshop won't have it either. They can decide what to highlight on the box. They can decide how to market it.
What, do you think that there are people who sell something that competes with Photoshop isn't just drooling over this article? Jasc Paint Shop Pro will be looking at this. The makers of Debabelizer will be reading this with a magnifying glass.
Imagine this situation: you're releasing a publishing program soon. Your competitors are as well. You learn through some source like this that the competitor will be including 1200 different greeting card designs. You had planned for 1000 in your product. What do you do? Obviously, you work the designers overtime or you push the date a little bit, because you *can't* release something that's inferior to the competition.
--Kevin
Re:Napster vs. The GPL
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Napster Wars
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· Score: 2
Oh, all is clear now. We should threaten legal action to enforce the GPL, because we like it, and boycott anyone who threatens legal action to enforce any other license because we don't like it.
Oh, yeah, and this isn't hypocracy.
By your logic, we should scrap the copyright system, and replace it with a mandatory GPL equivalent.
Ever read Vinge's Deepness in the Sky? It's set like, 20k years in the future, and there's a bit where one of the characters mentions the beginning of the second counter as being about the same time man first landed on the moon, but actually, a few months later.
I wonder if any of Linus' original comments survive?
There aren't many jobs out there that actually require you to be totally unqualified. "I'm sorry, we've found someone who seems to be even more clueless and unable to spot collusion for this post".
I read through the license. I see only one significant difference between it and the GPL: under the GPL, you can create internal versions that you do not distribute. Under the license Lucent is offering, you must provide modifications to Lucent if they ask for them. No mention is made of whether the modifications are distributed, as far as I can see.
Other than that, it looks like it provides almost exactly the same thing as the GPL, except that it's written from the point of view of "here is this massive software package, which you might want to make small changes to", rather than "here's a bunch of code, which you might want to incorporate into your stuff" that the GPL suggests.
Sorry, in this country, you have to prove that a corporation has broken the law before you can do something like that (well, in theory). Microsoft has been convicted of a very specific action: using dominance in the OS market to put the smackdown on competing applications. This justifies separating the operating system business out from the rest of the company.
Saying, "microsoft broke anti-trust law, so it's a free for all" is the same thing as saying "he got busted for smoking a joint, let's seize his house." Or almost the same, because the second actually happens. If you don't like big companies, don't do business with them.
It's not intended to be a breakup into two equal parts. Microsoft is being ordered to divest itself of the OS division. Presumably, certification would go with this (the certs are more closely tied to the OS than the Apps). Read the decision, it's short.
Of course, I would definitely prefer to see the DOJ broken up, maybe into a "harrassing business" division, and a "shooting members of undesirable religions" division. But the decision is entirely reasonable. *IF* Microsoft is going to be broken up (i.e. dump operating systems), the decision is a well designed way to do that.
I don't remember where I read it, but someone once described AI as "everything we haven't yet gotten a computer to do". Theorem proving isn't AI anymore, because a computer can do it. Similarly, pattern recognition, chess, and natural language queries aren't really considered part of AI anymore.
Sort of sad for the AI people, though, since any progress they make is immediately removed from their domain of research.
The compression used on MPEG video has a lot in common with JPEG. It uses the compression JPEG uses with some additional techniques that make use of the fact that a frame is probably similar to the one before it.
The audio is completely unrelated. The redundancy in audio data doesn't look anything like the redundancy in video data. The only similarities are that MPEG video and MPEG audio are both lossy, and they are both defined in the same piece of paper.
Fraunhofer holds a patent on a specific way to transform uncompressed audio data into a MPEG level 3 compressed audio stream. According to Ars Technica's review a while back, the quality is significantly better than anything else out there.
Just for the record, the issue is *patents*, not copyright. Secondly, patents are on mechanisms, not ideas. The patent is on "how to create a datastream that can be decoded in such and such a way which sounds closest to the original to human ears". It isn't on the idea of "compress audio data to save space".
Compression algorithms and cryptosystems are frequently patented. There are probably a lot of patents on how to digitally sample audio, too. Fraunhofer's patent on MP3s is the one everyone is most concerned with right now, because it isn't clear just exactly what is covered (some encoders, all encoders, or all encoders and decoders?).
Or, better yet, provide some sort of "dilution" effect for patents like there is for trademarks. Can it get any more monopolistic than sitting on your patents until it's widely used?
Would anyone consider it ethical to wait for someone to finish building an office building before turning up with a deed showing they are two inches over the property line? It can't happen in real estate because all the files are kept up-to-date, but this is exactly what Frauenhofer and Unisys (or whoever held the LZW patent at the time) did.
I think Frauenhofer's claim on players, and Unisys claim for decoders and programs that generate GIFs without using LZW (there is a way to do it with RLE simulating LZW) show how broken the patent system is when it comes to software.
BTW, to the person who responded saying "it's already there" last time I said this, the fact that Frauenhofer and Unisys got away with it shows that either: (a) it's not there, (b) it doesn't apply, or (c) it's not enforced well enough.
"Oh, we would never dream of actually doing the things our license says we can. Of course our license says you can't use our trademarks in your keywords for a website critical of our products, but we wouldn't actually enforce the bad parts of our license."
I really liked the series, but couldn't finish it because the politics disgusted me. Does anyone pick up a book about terraforming Mars to listen to people argue for hundreds of pages that it shouldn't be terraformed, because it should be preserved in it's natural state? About half way through Blue Mars, I gave up. If I wanted to be pissed off at politicians, I'd go watch CSPAN. When I pick up a science fiction book about colonizing Mars, I want to be inspired.
I just converted to Linux for good (I'd used it in the past, but only recently become usable for me as my only system). I'm using Gnome because: 1. I don't really know either Gnome or KDE 2. RedHat installs Gnome by default
My questions are:
Are there any comparisons of the two out there that aren't written by fanatics? Like magazine comparisons, or something like that?
Is there any real difference between KDE and Gnome, or are they just two different products filling the same niche (like IE vs. Netscape)?
What exactly are KDE and Gnome? Are they a combination of the GUI toolkit and a collection of programs like the toolbar and Gnumeric and such? Where do they stand in relation to X itself and a window manager?
What would be the relevant criteria for deciding between the two? Is one better suited for certain uses and the other for other uses?
So why is this a problem? Dosn't seem so absurd to me. If some company I do buisness with wants to sell my informion I should have the right the choose whether they are allowed to or not. I mean, a feature like that takes 5 minutes out of an administrators time to implement on the site and in the tracking database and personaly it would raise my respect for the company 10 fold and probably make me a repeat customer.
My point is that if a website had an option "do not use my information internally and do not share it with third parties", I think that would have failed the governments criteria. You had to have separate options for "don't use my data internally" and for "don't share my information with third parties". So the government may have found that some site were not offering customers a reasonable level of privacy protection when in fact they were.
Now I'm not realy saying I agree entirly with a federal body sticking its nose in. U.S. federals tend to have heavy, sweeping solutions to problems that would better be served with a little finess (i.e. they use a crowbar when a fine dentists pick would have been the proper tool) but in this case I think it may be the lesser of the two evils. Companies in recent years havn't been working to come up with better privacy, its not a concern for them. Why actualy increase consumer privacy when you can post a nice privacy policy with lots of fancy words, make the consumer believe your working to protect them, and use your time in the more profitable venture of exploiting there information?
I admit I have a knee jerk response to "keep government out at any cost", but I don't think the arguments for government involvement are nearly as strong here as in other situations (e.g. HMO regulation). One important point is that even though people don't like it, no actual harm is done. That is, no one is hurt by getting lots of junk mail.
Also, there's the issue that even though people say they want privacy, their actions say otherwise -- they'll sell their privacy very cheaply, probably recognizing that privacy isn't really worth that much to them (at least the kind of "what products do you buy" privacy we're mainly talking about). This is why economists talk about revealed preference. Most people would say their life is infinitely valuable, but if you look at revealed preference via how much money people want to do dangerous jobs, you find that people rarely value their life at more than a million dollars or so. Similarly with privacy. People say it's worth a lot to them, but their actions say otherwise.
So we might end up with the government enforcing the situation which is what people say they want (privacy at any cost), when what they really want is something different (lower prices and targeted marketing at the expense of privacy).
Besides all these arguments, the fact that congress is taking an interest in it may be an indication that public is waking up to how much their information is worth to these companies. I would credit programs like free internet access and iwon.com, which almost everyone can see are offering to buy your personal information, for waking consumers up to this. Maybe once people become aware of it, the market will provide a solution.
BTW, I highly recommend David Brin's The Transparent Society for anyone interested in whether privacy is really worth it. The tagline is "will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom". It's an interesting question.
I think you mean "the government represents itself". When you "get involved", you become part of the government. Is it any surprize that the government does what the people involved in government want it to do? Isn't this nearly a tautology?
"running for local/state/federal office"? You mean, if I get elected to the senate, then government will represent me? Or will I just be part of the government, saying "fuck the people, I want power"?
You don't need to get involved. You need to tell the government to go fuck itself. I don't want anyone to have that kind of power over me. With corporations, I can opt out. I can refuse to buy SDMI hardware. I can refuse to sign up for a service that doesn't respect my privacy. With government, I have no such choice. For example, I can choose not to put my savings in Wells Fargo. I cannot choose not to put my savings in the federal social security. The key point of government is that you are given no options. I like having options. Therefore, I dislike government.
And it was politics as usual. The "study" the FTC had done was to go to a bunch of websites, and look at what they offered regarding privacy options. The problem was that anyone who didn't meet really absurd guidelines was failed. I don't remember the details, but to make the FTC happy right now, you would have had to have two different checkboxes for "you can use my info internally" and "you can share my information". Other people they didn't like because they didn't clearly specify who they might share the information with.
But Orson Swindle (one of the dissenting votes) got it right. He said: 1. Web sites have an incentive to figure out what the best privacy options are, and offer those to their customers. 2. The guidelines the FTC wants don't necessarily bear any relation to what consumers want.
One condition that failed a lot of sites was "access to the data". Which means that I can see what information they are keeping on me. Now, when you're talking about credit reports, this makes sense. But it doesn't when you're talking about websites. What websites track is your habits, and what pages and ads you have seen. The information is used for advertising. Does anyone really care that there might be incorrect data in what ads Slashdot thinks I might want to see?
Websites have been keeping track of people since about 1996 or 1997. Why does the government need to jump into an industry and start regulating it before it has had time to develop and see whether it solves the "problems" on its own? The only reason I can see is that it's obvious that these problems will be solved by the marketplace ("5% off, if you let us add you to our mailing list!"), and the government realizes they aren't going to be able to justify regulation when everything is working fine.
For more, go to the link above, and read Swindle's dissent. I don't recommend the computer world article. I mean "We've toyed with the problem long enough; it worsens every day".
What if they actually reported what's really going on? "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details". "Federal Bureaucrats Want More Power".
This has been going on for 30 years, and it is clearly intended to be received by field agents who do not have access to heavy equipment. This is enough to know it's going to be a one time pad.
Consider: the people running this know that their opponents have computer, have cryptographer, and have lots of time. Not knowing the algorithm will slow them down for a while, but remember that this has to be an algorithm that can be done by hand. It can't be DES. It has to be something the average spy could do in the basement. Solitaire shows that it is possible to create a secure algorithm without a computer, but it has limits (more text makes it easier to break, encrypting with the same key twice makes it trivial to break). I doubt the government came up with anything fundamentally better 30 years ago. With any of the systems, key management would probably be way to painful to be useful.
But a one time pad is easy. Just write the nunbers on a dozen sheets of tissue paper, and it's pretty easy to hide. You won't go through the OTP very quickly either. You don't need to have every transmission have actual information. As a bonus, a one time pad is easy. All you have to do is modular arithmetic.
So you aren't going to be able to break it. The governments made all the stupid mistakes in WWII, and they're quite competent by now.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft ports to OS X, it doesn't mean that a port to other BSD operating systems (and to some degree Linux) would be easier than coming straight from OS 7-9 versions or Windows, but it isn't going to help much, because the hardest part of the port, the GUI, isn't going to transfer. OS X uses a GUI system that I don't know the exact name of (is Aqua the name of the GUI, or is Aqua the API, over which the GUI runs?). It's about as far away from X as you can get (Anti-aliasing? Of course, it's automatic. Alpha channels? That too.)
Regarding the suggestion Microsoft will be porting to the Carbon APIs, I just don't see that as likely. Microsoft actually supports Macintosh really well. They wouldn't be taking a year to port to carbon. The next version they deliver will probably be built for carbon as well. Remember, the Macintosh version of IE 5 is the only standards compliant browser around that supports Java (ruling out Opera).
I really like what I've seen of OS X. If only I didn't have to buy the hardware from Apple, I might consider going to a Mac for my next machine. I wonder when we're going to get SMP G3+'s from IBM running Linux or BeOS.
I definitely agree about the GPL being designed to accomplish a certain goal, rather than to "eliminate worry about software licensing", but I disagree about your characterization of that goal. The GPL does not only "preserve the right of all users to have the same rights as the original user". The original user had the right to use certain source code. The GPL requires that all users have the right to that same original source code, plus any modifications made to it. This is not "the same rights".
Public domain, or a Berkeley style license, preserve "the same rights". You can still, presumably, download the original code. You can't necessarily download someone else's modifications to that code, but neither could they.
Much of the propoganda around the GPL is "don't close the sources", suggesting that if something isn't GPL, one day you will look and find that it has been turned into a commercial, closed source product, with no trace of the original free version. Not very likely. Even though someone takes a program and makes their own version of it, that doesn't mean that the original is no longer available.
What if this article detailed a technology that could make people smarter?
Sign me up!
At what point is improving ourselves dangerous or unethical?
Dangerous? When you're in the first trial. Darwin frowns on early adopters.
Unethical? When I run out of cash and have to steal to feed my bioenhancement habit.
It's interesting to me that vision enhancement is largely seen as harmless... but how would strength enhancement, or intellect enhancement be seen?
Many people will object to it. Many coutries will ban it, except for bringing the below average up to average. It will be publicised as the greatest evil since genetically engineered food on the covers of Time and Newsweek. It will be available though, just as megalomaniacs will be having clones made within 5 years.
It's interesting, though, that the ability to enhance intelligence will have an exponetial factor in its growth. That is, it will be limited by things like skull size, oxygen requirements, signal propogation delays, and so on, but it is also limited by the intelligence of the people who are working on it. This is one of the technologies that can lead to Vinge's Singularity. ( see http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html )
I'm really curious what we will look like a thousand years from now. If we do in fact expand outward, it will be the most adventurous types who do so. So we have self-selection to make sure that any colonies on other planets will be much more novelty friendly than earth is. They'll also have more kids, in the long run. And the second generation colonies will be founded by the most adventurous from the first stage colonies. I don't see a universe filled with intellectual, sessile, nearly immortal homebodies. On the contrary, my mental picture is much closer to biker gangs or that alligator guy on discovery channel. Long life an risk aversion are not survival traits.
Yeah, yeah, I am a little nuts. But in a good way.
It's not as damaging to the Turing test as one would think. Turing unknowingly rules out the Eliza Effect when he specified that the test should be done as a comparison, not just asking someone "do you think you're talking to a human or a computer", which people would answer "human" very easily.
It might also have something to do with the predictability of people. Eliza only reacts appropriately when you play her game. Ask about something not related to your psychological problems, and it collapses.
Example:
No one butters the bread of district court judges. They may as well be god.
Regarding perjury, wouldn't you think Steve "We are not a competitor of Microsoft" Case would be a better target?
Oh, wait, we don't dislike Steve Case.
Or do we? He's AOL, and AOL is for lamers, so Steve Case is fair game, right?
I can never remember who's fair game for a lynching. I wish someone could print up a nice table of who's evil, and who's on our side. It would also be handy if someone could give a quick outline of how the law is supposed to change when it applies to people we like versus people we don't.
I worked for a software company that made consumer type publishing programs and clip art. They were *extremely* tight lipped about anything about upcoming products. It was entirely need-to-know. The people testing the clip art packages wouldn't be told what the final number on the page would be (x thousand images inside!!!). Customer service would be told about it about a day before it hit the shelves. In one case, someone called for tech support on a product and tech support told him they couldn't support it because they hadn't received word that it had been released.
Now, photoshop isn't in as competetive a market as clip art or Print Shop type programs. It's not like someone is going to be able to take any action based on knowing about Photoshop 6's features a month early. But maybe they can. Their competitors (which would be....ummm... still thinking...) will be able to say "here's where photoshop 6 is weak. Concentrate on making this feature kick ass. Add in this little tweak." They'll have a little extra time to react. And that's why Adobe requires NDAs for beta testers. They can't do much, but they can decide where to concentrate their last minute features effort. They can kill off a feature they are having trouble with if they see that photoshop won't have it either. They can decide what to highlight on the box. They can decide how to market it.
What, do you think that there are people who sell something that competes with Photoshop isn't just drooling over this article? Jasc Paint Shop Pro will be looking at this. The makers of Debabelizer will be reading this with a magnifying glass.
Imagine this situation: you're releasing a publishing program soon. Your competitors are as well. You learn through some source like this that the competitor will be including 1200 different greeting card designs. You had planned for 1000 in your product. What do you do? Obviously, you work the designers overtime or you push the date a little bit, because you *can't* release something that's inferior to the competition.
--Kevin
Oh, all is clear now. We should threaten legal action to enforce the GPL, because we like it, and boycott anyone who threatens legal action to enforce any other license because we don't like it.
Oh, yeah, and this isn't hypocracy.
By your logic, we should scrap the copyright system, and replace it with a mandatory GPL equivalent.
Yeah, with a PC, it can take a long time to figure out how to fix something.
With a Mac, it's easy. Reinstall the OS, because it won't even boot.
Ever read Vinge's Deepness in the Sky? It's set like, 20k years in the future, and there's a bit where one of the characters mentions the beginning of the second counter as being about the same time man first landed on the moon, but actually, a few months later.
I wonder if any of Linus' original comments survive?
Sure, just so long as you aren't going to complain when your competitors come along and ask the government to gut you.
There aren't many jobs out there that actually require you to be totally unqualified. "I'm sorry, we've found someone who seems to be even more clueless and unable to spot collusion for this post".
I read through the license. I see only one significant difference between it and the GPL: under the GPL, you can create internal versions that you do not distribute. Under the license Lucent is offering, you must provide modifications to Lucent if they ask for them. No mention is made of whether the modifications are distributed, as far as I can see.
Other than that, it looks like it provides almost exactly the same thing as the GPL, except that it's written from the point of view of "here is this massive software package, which you might want to make small changes to", rather than "here's a bunch of code, which you might want to incorporate into your stuff" that the GPL suggests.
--Kevin
Why? Because you would prefer it that way?
Sorry, in this country, you have to prove that a corporation has broken the law before you can do something like that (well, in theory). Microsoft has been convicted of a very specific action: using dominance in the OS market to put the smackdown on competing applications. This justifies separating the operating system business out from the rest of the company.
Saying, "microsoft broke anti-trust law, so it's a free for all" is the same thing as saying "he got busted for smoking a joint, let's seize his house." Or almost the same, because the second actually happens. If you don't like big companies, don't do business with them.
It's not intended to be a breakup into two equal parts. Microsoft is being ordered to divest itself of the OS division. Presumably, certification would go with this (the certs are more closely tied to the OS than the Apps). Read the decision, it's short.
Of course, I would definitely prefer to see the DOJ broken up, maybe into a "harrassing business" division, and a "shooting members of undesirable religions" division. But the decision is entirely reasonable. *IF* Microsoft is going to be broken up (i.e. dump operating systems), the decision is a well designed way to do that.
--Kevin
Back when I read alt.comp.virus regularly, it was understood that VBA stood for virus builder's assistant.
People keep accusing Microsoft of making low quality products, but VBA was a major improvement from NuKe's Virus Creation Labs.
I don't remember where I read it, but someone once described AI as "everything we haven't yet gotten a computer to do". Theorem proving isn't AI anymore, because a computer can do it. Similarly, pattern recognition, chess, and natural language queries aren't really considered part of AI anymore.
Sort of sad for the AI people, though, since any progress they make is immediately removed from their domain of research.
The compression used on MPEG video has a lot in common with JPEG. It uses the compression JPEG uses with some additional techniques that make use of the fact that a frame is probably similar to the one before it.
The audio is completely unrelated. The redundancy in audio data doesn't look anything like the redundancy in video data. The only similarities are that MPEG video and MPEG audio are both lossy, and they are both defined in the same piece of paper.
Fraunhofer holds a patent on a specific way to transform uncompressed audio data into a MPEG level 3 compressed audio stream. According to Ars Technica's review a while back, the quality is significantly better than anything else out there.
Just for the record, the issue is *patents*, not copyright. Secondly, patents are on mechanisms, not ideas. The patent is on "how to create a datastream that can be decoded in such and such a way which sounds closest to the original to human ears". It isn't on the idea of "compress audio data to save space".
Compression algorithms and cryptosystems are frequently patented. There are probably a lot of patents on how to digitally sample audio, too. Fraunhofer's patent on MP3s is the one everyone is most concerned with right now, because it isn't clear just exactly what is covered (some encoders, all encoders, or all encoders and decoders?).
Or, better yet, provide some sort of "dilution" effect for patents like there is for trademarks. Can it get any more monopolistic than sitting on your patents until it's widely used?
Would anyone consider it ethical to wait for someone to finish building an office building before turning up with a deed showing they are two inches over the property line? It can't happen in real estate because all the files are kept up-to-date, but this is exactly what Frauenhofer and Unisys (or whoever held the LZW patent at the time) did.
I think Frauenhofer's claim on players, and Unisys claim for decoders and programs that generate GIFs without using LZW (there is a way to do it with RLE simulating LZW) show how broken the patent system is when it comes to software.
BTW, to the person who responded saying "it's already there" last time I said this, the fact that Frauenhofer and Unisys got away with it shows that either: (a) it's not there, (b) it doesn't apply, or (c) it's not enforced well enough.
"Oh, we would never dream of actually doing the things our license says we can. Of course our license says you can't use our trademarks in your keywords for a website critical of our products, but we wouldn't actually enforce the bad parts of our license."
Sadly, by the time the root beer gets to market, the bug the code on the side exploits will have already been patched.
I really liked the series, but couldn't finish it because the politics disgusted me. Does anyone pick up a book about terraforming Mars to listen to people argue for hundreds of pages that it shouldn't be terraformed, because it should be preserved in it's natural state? About half way through Blue Mars, I gave up. If I wanted to be pissed off at politicians, I'd go watch CSPAN. When I pick up a science fiction book about colonizing Mars, I want to be inspired.
I just converted to Linux for good (I'd used it in the past, but only recently become usable for me as my only system). I'm using Gnome because:
1. I don't really know either Gnome or KDE
2. RedHat installs Gnome by default
My questions are:
Are there any comparisons of the two out there that aren't written by fanatics? Like magazine comparisons, or something like that?
Is there any real difference between KDE and Gnome, or are they just two different products filling the same niche (like IE vs. Netscape)?
What exactly are KDE and Gnome? Are they a combination of the GUI toolkit and a collection of programs like the toolbar and Gnumeric and such? Where do they stand in relation to X itself and a window manager?
What would be the relevant criteria for deciding between the two? Is one better suited for certain uses and the other for other uses?
--Kevin
So why is this a problem? Dosn't seem so absurd to me. If some company I do buisness with wants to sell my informion I should have the right the choose whether they are allowed to or not. I mean, a feature like that takes 5 minutes out of an administrators time to implement on the site and in the tracking database and personaly it would raise my respect for the company 10 fold and probably make me a repeat customer.
My point is that if a website had an option "do not use my information internally and do not share it with third parties", I think that would have failed the governments criteria. You had to have separate options for "don't use my data internally" and for "don't share my information with third parties". So the government may have found that some site were not offering customers a reasonable level of privacy protection when in fact they were.
Now I'm not realy saying I agree entirly with a federal body sticking its nose in. U.S. federals tend to have heavy, sweeping solutions to problems that would better be served with a little finess (i.e. they use a crowbar when a fine dentists pick would have been the proper tool) but in this case I think it may be the lesser of the two evils. Companies in recent years havn't been working to come up with better privacy, its not a concern for them. Why actualy increase consumer privacy when you can post a nice privacy policy with lots of fancy words, make the consumer believe your working to protect them, and use your time in the more profitable venture of exploiting there information?
I admit I have a knee jerk response to "keep government out at any cost", but I don't think the arguments for government involvement are nearly as strong here as in other situations (e.g. HMO regulation). One important point is that even though people don't like it, no actual harm is done. That is, no one is hurt by getting lots of junk mail.
Also, there's the issue that even though people say they want privacy, their actions say otherwise -- they'll sell their privacy very cheaply, probably recognizing that privacy isn't really worth that much to them (at least the kind of "what products do you buy" privacy we're mainly talking about). This is why economists talk about revealed preference. Most people would say their life is infinitely valuable, but if you look at revealed preference via how much money people want to do dangerous jobs, you find that people rarely value their life at more than a million dollars or so. Similarly with privacy. People say it's worth a lot to them, but their actions say otherwise.
So we might end up with the government enforcing the situation which is what people say they want (privacy at any cost), when what they really want is something different (lower prices and targeted marketing at the expense of privacy).
Besides all these arguments, the fact that congress is taking an interest in it may be an indication that public is waking up to how much their information is worth to these companies. I would credit programs like free internet access and iwon.com, which almost everyone can see are offering to buy your personal information, for waking consumers up to this. Maybe once people become aware of it, the market will provide a solution.
BTW, I highly recommend David Brin's The Transparent Society for anyone interested in whether privacy is really worth it. The tagline is "will technology force us to choose between privacy and freedom". It's an interesting question.
--Kevin
I think you mean "the government represents itself". When you "get involved", you become part of the government. Is it any surprize that the government does what the people involved in government want it to do? Isn't this nearly a tautology?
"running for local/state/federal office"? You mean, if I get elected to the senate, then government will represent me? Or will I just be part of the government, saying "fuck the people, I want power"?
You don't need to get involved. You need to tell the government to go fuck itself. I don't want anyone to have that kind of power over me. With corporations, I can opt out. I can refuse to buy SDMI hardware. I can refuse to sign up for a service that doesn't respect my privacy. With government, I have no such choice. For example, I can choose not to put my savings in Wells Fargo. I cannot choose not to put my savings in the federal social security. The key point of government is that you are given no options. I like having options. Therefore, I dislike government.
--Kevin
And it was politics as usual. The "study" the FTC had done was to go to a bunch of websites, and look at what they offered regarding privacy options. The problem was that anyone who didn't meet really absurd guidelines was failed. I don't remember the details, but to make the FTC happy right now, you would have had to have two different checkboxes for "you can use my info internally" and "you can share my information". Other people they didn't like because they didn't clearly specify who they might share the information with.
But Orson Swindle (one of the dissenting votes) got it right. He said:
1. Web sites have an incentive to figure out what the best privacy options are, and offer those to their customers.
2. The guidelines the FTC wants don't necessarily bear any relation to what consumers want.
One condition that failed a lot of sites was "access to the data". Which means that I can see what information they are keeping on me. Now, when you're talking about credit reports, this makes sense. But it doesn't when you're talking about websites. What websites track is your habits, and what pages and ads you have seen. The information is used for advertising. Does anyone really care that there might be incorrect data in what ads Slashdot thinks I might want to see?
Websites have been keeping track of people since about 1996 or 1997. Why does the government need to jump into an industry and start regulating it before it has had time to develop and see whether it solves the "problems" on its own? The only reason I can see is that it's obvious that these problems will be solved by the marketplace ("5% off, if you let us add you to our mailing list!"), and the government realizes they aren't going to be able to justify regulation when everything is working fine.
For more, go to the link above, and read Swindle's dissent. I don't recommend the computer world article. I mean "We've toyed with the problem long enough; it worsens every day".
What if they actually reported what's really going on? "Government Study Finds Young Companies Still Ironing Out the Details". "Federal Bureaucrats Want More Power".
Assuming this isn't just a giant hoax,
This has been going on for 30 years, and it is clearly intended to be received by field agents who do not have access to heavy equipment. This is enough to know it's going to be a one time pad.
Consider: the people running this know that their opponents have computer, have cryptographer, and have lots of time. Not knowing the algorithm will slow them down for a while, but remember that this has to be an algorithm that can be done by hand. It can't be DES. It has to be something the average spy could do in the basement. Solitaire shows that it is possible to create a secure algorithm without a computer, but it has limits (more text makes it easier to break, encrypting with the same key twice makes it trivial to break). I doubt the government came up with anything fundamentally better 30 years ago. With any of the systems, key management would probably be way to painful to be useful.
But a one time pad is easy. Just write the nunbers on a dozen sheets of tissue paper, and it's pretty easy to hide. You won't go through the OTP very quickly either. You don't need to have every transmission have actual information. As a bonus, a one time pad is easy. All you have to do is modular arithmetic.
So you aren't going to be able to break it. The governments made all the stupid mistakes in WWII, and they're quite competent by now.