I would like to see some sort of hardware-enforced secure context available on commodity computer systems.... I'm working up a p2p MMOG protocol as a hobby project, with the goal of being able to host a world with tens or hundreds of thousands of users on minimal hardware by offloading most of the processing onto the network.
You need more than that, don't you? You need to be sure that anything that looks like such a context, remotely, actually is such a context (that is, it conforms to certain spec's).
It's one thing to make a feature widely available; then you can say, "If you want to play my game, you must have this feature." But it's quite another to ensure, in addtion, that no one can emulate the feature.
May I suggest, therefore, that you do not pursue the idea as stated.
Aren't there other ways to accomplish this? It seems to me that you need to be sure:
that processing gets done
that it is done correctly (according to your own algorithms)
that users cannot learn things from this that they should not know.
(1) and (2) can be accomplished by sending identical tasks to multiple machines, randomly selected. This does effectively cut your processing power by some constant factor, of course.
(3) is harder. You need user's machines to process data without the user being able to interpret the data. Tricky....
Re:Largest Consumption of Electricity?
on
Sunlight in a Tube
·
· Score: 1
... I'm in Las Vegas where in the summer the power bills are 4 times in the summer what they are in the fall.
On the other hand, in the winter the power bills are only 2 times in the summer what they are in the fall.
Back in '84 Apple gave us applications and desk accessories. Then in '90 System 7 came along, and desk accessories were now the same as applications. You could put anything you want into the apple menu.
Now it's 2005, and desk accessories are back.
Only they're called "widgets".
(Prediction: Around 2010 some whiz kid in a back room at Apple will think, "Hey! We could let any old app be a widget....")
... if I gave away some sort of widget I made, and people whined that this free widget should be pink not purple, I would tell them to FO.
What if you told people it would be pink,
but it actually turned out to be purple?
This particular criticism says that the Gnome developers are not following their own stated philosophy. Such criticisms cannot be rejected out of hand, simply because the software is free.
By the way, there are other reasons to reject these particular criticisms of this particular project. Still I think the points in the parent article are not valid.
Why, for the love of all that's holy, should anyone care what computer Linus uses to do his work?
You've hit the nail on the head:
Because Linus is holy, and we love Him.
Since we love Him, we want to be just like Him.
So we drive the same kind of car He does.
We use the same brand of deodorant that He does.
We style our nose hair the same way He does.
We name our daughters after Him
(all 11 of them).
And of course we want to use the same computer he does.
(Not the same kind of computer, mind you; the same computer.)
I wonder what happened in March '04, though. There seems to have been a general convulsion that affected most of the top languages. I have a hard time believing that. I'll bet something changed about the search engines. Did Google or Yahoo make some significant change in March '04?
... have they finally seen the light and realized that strong encryption is good for society?
Depends on what you mean by "they". The U.S. government is not one person. Nor is the NSA.
The NSA works hard to hire smart people. It appears to me that they are very successful. So plenty of folks at the NSA are very clear on the social implications of strong encryption.
But filter their work through layers of security paranoiacs, bureaucratic morons, and politicians of every sort, and who knows what you'll get.
If this really is the case, this would cause them problems eavesdropping.
Another thing the smart folks at the NSA are sure to know is that they have no lack of information; their primary need is to figure out how to filter and process what they have.
This letter by Dr. Edgar David Villenueva Nunez that the linked article links to is absolutely fantastic.
Wow! That guy really put some thought into it.
Some of the more interesting quotes from his letter:
On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.
So two arguments for using proprietary software contradict each other. Cool.
On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.
I want to hear from Slashdot readers who have quit jobs or turned down offered jobs because it was not what they wanted to do. Why did you do it? Was it ethics, ambition, pride, or disgust?
What about it just not being what you wanted to do? I quit a job back in 2000. I'd been there for a couple of years. Then one day I woke up and realized that I wanted to be doing something else. The job I had was a fine job... for someone else.
The big problem was "What is the alternative?" I was dissatisfied with my job, but it was better than, say, no income at all. I didn't quit until I was sure I had another job lined up, but of course that kind of thing doesn't happen for many people, so it's tough to give guidance.
I'll admit this is a silly example. Most examples are, though, in order to distill ideas down to a manageable form.
However, I must disagree with your statement about overkill. Yes, I might change the names and the way things are stated, but this is exactly the level of documentation that I think ought to be provided for such a function:
Its name
What it does
Pre and postconditions, in automatically checkable form.
Since there is no standard way to write automatically checked invariants in C++, I made them comments. The idea was that it would be easy to convert them to such. And I think it is.
As for your more mathematical comments (which are rather off-topic, but still worth discussing IMHO):
First, defining the dot product as the sum of products of corresponding coordinates is fine if you are using a coordinate-based representation. But for a coordinate-free representation, the way I have stated it is more appropriate. Second, replacing "innerProduct" with "usualInnerProduct": well, of course it's "usual". If we had to say "usual" all the time we'd never get anything done. When I say, "What is the product of 20 and 100?" no one asks, "Do you mean the usual product?" because of course I do.
Me too, actually. I've never even looked into online single song purchases. Clearly I'm not typical, though. There is obviously an enormous demand from lots of people who are not like me.
Perhaps it's time to end this thread?
[/endthread]
Wow. You ARE an economist. "That factor does not fit in my oversimplified model, so I will discard it."
Can we have a reasonable discussion here, without ad hominem arguments?
Of course it fits. Supply and demand push the optimum price around. The huge demand for songs tends to push it up. Things like Kazaa and "piracy" belong on the supply side, and so push it down.
Just because there is a large supply does not mean the optimum price is lower than the current one, because we have to consider all the factors.
As you pointed out, models can be oversimplified to the point of being useless. Considering only the effect of Kazaa, etc., on price is clearly oversimplifying, because there is obviously a huge demand.
Once again: apparently some music industry people think they have good reasons to believe that the optimum price is higher. Obviously some people here don't want this to be true. Well, reality is reality, and sometimes the facts aren't what you want to be true.
Deal with it.
Can you imagine what might happen if a child were exposed to a breast again?... Imagine some kid hearing the word "fuck".
Well of course it's silly. But consider the process behind it all.
If there is a general consensus on what is acceptable, then we can be vague and leave the details to judges and juries.
But what we have is a situation in which the consensus has broken down, and yet one end of the obsecenity spectrum is considered unacceptable by nearly all, while the other is acceptable.
This means we must draw a line somewhere: one side is acceptable, and the other is not.
And yes, things right near the line, but on opposite sides, look pretty similar, and people can always make the point that the difference is silly, and so the system is flawed.
Yes, it's flawed, but in the absense of consensus, we must draw a rather arbitrary line somewhere.
A second relevant factor is companies pushing the limits as hard as they can. Sure, one breast showing is no big deal. And I think that everyone, deep down, knows that. But many of us also know that if you don't fight every transgression of the line, no matter how small, then the line ends up moving.
Lastly, I'm curious why you pick on the U.S. Every developed nation in the world has obsenity standards of one sort or another. Many are stricter than the U.S.'s in some ways. But they all draw their lines, and your basic arguments apply to them all.
A copyright exception that allowed you more rights if you are using a copy than if you are using the original is just silly, but that is the only way to make it not be "viral".
Replace "copy" by "derived work". Isn't that what the LGPL does?
Forgive me if I just don't understand what this decency stuff is supposed to be about. Do we really need the government to dictate a program's content?
First of all, there is a crucial distinction here: Do we consider the government to be acting as the agent of the people? If so, then the question becomes, "Do we really need the people to dicate a program's content?"
WARNING: Continue reading before making knee-jerk response.
No, I don't think my restatement automatically means a "yes" answer. After all, in theory at least, we place strong limitations on the power of government, regardless of whose agent it is considered. And more importantly, we do not grant the people the power to restrict freedom of speech, whether acting alone or through their government.
HOWEVER, we do grant people the power to control what they allow in their own homes, and more generally on their own property. You cannot restrict what I say, generally, but you can toss me out of your house for saying things you don't like.
Now, here is the key point: Broadcasting sends "speech" everywhere: through walls, across private property, and into homes. And therefore I do consider that private citizens, acting through their government, have a right to place restrictions on broadcast media.
Actually, that's pretty well settled. The big question these days is what counts as "broadcasting". When it was all about radio waves filling every nook and cranny, the question was easy. Now, with cable, the internet, and the-next-big-thing-whatever-it-may-be, the questions become harder.
You're missing the critical point: The music download sites are not going to make a dent in CD sales, but they may very well make a dent in "piracy"...
Why is that "critical"?
The original point I was responding to was that basic economic theory is being neglected. I say that, on the contrary, basic economic theory says that there is an optimum price for everything. I don't see why the existence of "piracy" and Kazaa necessarily mean that this optimum is lower than the current price, whatever it may be. Maybe it is higher. If music industry exec's think so, then it is quite rational for them to raise the price. Maybe that will increase "piracy" and P2P usage. So what? By "optimum", we usually mean the price that will maximize profit; that is what basic theory generally addresses.
Furthermore, most of the developer documentation of your typical programmer is such that all it describes is the arguments a function takes and what is supposed to be returned, while doing nothing to explain the purpose of the function and why it might be used.
One can draw a different conclusion from this than the one you drew. You are right: documentation is often bad. However, the experience of many people is that documentation is often necessary. So it is worth our time to consider how to document things well.
IMHO, the Design by Contract school of thought has done some good things in this direction.
But your point about neglecting the overall purpose is a good one. One can, for example, combine pre and postconditions with a general statement of purpose.
// innterProd // Returns the inner product of two given vectors // Pre: None. // Post: Return value is len(vec1) * len(vec2) * cos(alpha), // where alpha is the angle between vec1, vec2. Scalar innerProd(Vector vec1, Vector vec2);
Surely there can be little ambiguity about what that function does, and when one would use it. And the doc's are pretty concise, too.
But that doesn't mean DbC is the One True Way.
In any case, the question of how to document code well (and easily!) is one that is worth more effort than is currently being spent on it.
"Viral" is usually taken to mean it "infects" other work". This is not true of the GPL.
Note that you're not really arguing about facts here, but about the definition of the word "viral".
If "viral" is taken to mean that the same licensing conditions apply to derivative works, then the GPL is viral. On the other hand, if "viral" is taken to mean you are somehow forced to apply the same licensing conditions
to whatever else you create, then obviously the
GPL is not viral.
Which is the "usual" sense? Depends on whom you hang out with. I did a quick Google for GPL Viral, tossing out dup's, broken links, and non-English pages. In the first two pages of hits, I found 7 that are making essentially my argument, 4 that are making essentially yours, and 3 that seem to be trying to weigh things impartially.
So I win on that basis.:-) Of course, one can argue that a big chunk of the people using the word in my sense are either journalists who don't know a software license from a dump truck, or else microsoft PR people. That's probably true, so maybe you win.
Perhaps the real problems here are (1) "viral" is a rather pejorative term, often used by people who are fighting the Free Software movement, and (2) Free Software people are notoriously touchy and dogmatic, many of them having zero tolerance for any criticism (even implied criticism) of his holiness RMS, forever blessed, and his perfect revelation, the GPL.
Well, fine, but the property of the GPL that extends identical licensing terms to derivative works is interesting and noteworthy. We need a word to use to talk about that. If not "viral", then what?
Did they miss the whole supply/demand/equilibrium price part of economics class in high school...
It certainly looks like you did. What these people are saying is that the price that is going to produce the highest profit looks to be above the current one. Therefore they want to raise prices. If you can remember that class you supposedly took, this is the natural response to a high demand.
You can disagree with their morals, but let's not make silly comments about how these people don't know their economics.
What's viral is copyright law.... The GPL isn't viral, it just doesn't allow you to ignore the viral nature of copyright.
Nope. I quote from the GPL, v. 2, section 6:
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions.
That's viral.
"Viral" means that licensing terms are applied to derivative or collective works as well as the original.
Thus, a traditional license in which the licensor claims ownership of derivative works,
would be a viral license (yes this would be legal; as licensee, you would not have to agree to these terms, but if you did, then you did). And the GPL is viral. The LGPL is not viral. Neither is the BSD license, the Boost license, etc. And neither are most traditional non-transferable licenses, since they explicitly disallow derivative works.
Copyright law on the other hand, covers all works, including those with viral licenses, like the GPL, and those with non-viral licenses, like the LGPL. Thus, copyright law is neither "viral" nor "non-viral".
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of $DEITY, who is "$DIETY"??? The great god of weight loss?
You need more than that, don't you? You need to be sure that anything that looks like such a context, remotely, actually is such a context (that is, it conforms to certain spec's). It's one thing to make a feature widely available; then you can say, "If you want to play my game, you must have this feature." But it's quite another to ensure, in addtion, that no one can emulate the feature. May I suggest, therefore, that you do not pursue the idea as stated.
Aren't there other ways to accomplish this? It seems to me that you need to be sure:
- that processing gets done
- that it is done correctly (according to your own algorithms)
- that users cannot learn things from this that they should not know.
(1) and (2) can be accomplished by sending identical tasks to multiple machines, randomly selected. This does effectively cut your processing power by some constant factor, of course. (3) is harder. You need user's machines to process data without the user being able to interpret the data. TrickyOn the other hand, in the winter the power bills are only 2 times in the summer what they are in the fall.
Weird place, Las Vegas.
Back in '84 Apple gave us applications and desk accessories. Then in '90 System 7 came along, and desk accessories were now the same as applications. You could put anything you want into the apple menu.
Now it's 2005, and desk accessories are back. Only they're called "widgets".
(Prediction: Around 2010 some whiz kid in a back room at Apple will think, "Hey! We could let any old app be a widget ....")
Well, given Jackson's slavish adherence to every last detail of the books, he wouldn't dare put Aragorn in the Hobbit movie, would he?
What if you told people it would be pink, but it actually turned out to be purple?
This particular criticism says that the Gnome developers are not following their own stated philosophy. Such criticisms cannot be rejected out of hand, simply because the software is free.
By the way, there are other reasons to reject these particular criticisms of this particular project. Still I think the points in the parent article are not valid.
You've hit the nail on the head: Because Linus is holy, and we love Him.
Since we love Him, we want to be just like Him. So we drive the same kind of car He does. We use the same brand of deodorant that He does. We style our nose hair the same way He does. We name our daughters after Him (all 11 of them).
And of course we want to use the same computer he does. (Not the same kind of computer, mind you; the same computer.)
I wonder what happened in March '04, though. There seems to have been a general convulsion that affected most of the top languages. I have a hard time believing that. I'll bet something changed about the search engines. Did Google or Yahoo make some significant change in March '04?
Depends on what you mean by "they". The U.S. government is not one person. Nor is the NSA.
The NSA works hard to hire smart people. It appears to me that they are very successful. So plenty of folks at the NSA are very clear on the social implications of strong encryption.
But filter their work through layers of security paranoiacs, bureaucratic morons, and politicians of every sort, and who knows what you'll get.
If this really is the case, this would cause them problems eavesdropping.
Another thing the smart folks at the NSA are sure to know is that they have no lack of information; their primary need is to figure out how to filter and process what they have.
Wow! That guy really put some thought into it. Some of the more interesting quotes from his letter:
On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately preceding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.
So two arguments for using proprietary software contradict each other. Cool.
On the other hand, it would contribute greatly to our analysis if you could inform us about free software projects *established* in public bodies which have already been abandoned in favor of proprietary software. We know of a good number of cases where the opposite has taken place, but not know of any where what you describe has taken place.
Yep. Make them back up their claims!
What about it just not being what you wanted to do? I quit a job back in 2000. I'd been there for a couple of years. Then one day I woke up and realized that I wanted to be doing something else. The job I had was a fine job ... for someone else.
The big problem was "What is the alternative?" I was dissatisfied with my job, but it was better than, say, no income at all. I didn't quit until I was sure I had another job lined up, but of course that kind of thing doesn't happen for many people, so it's tough to give guidance.
I'll admit this is a silly example. Most examples are, though, in order to distill ideas down to a manageable form.
However, I must disagree with your statement about overkill. Yes, I might change the names and the way things are stated, but this is exactly the level of documentation that I think ought to be provided for such a function:
- Its name
- What it does
- Pre and postconditions, in automatically checkable form.
Since there is no standard way to write automatically checked invariants in C++, I made them comments. The idea was that it would be easy to convert them to such. And I think it is.As for your more mathematical comments (which are rather off-topic, but still worth discussing IMHO): First, defining the dot product as the sum of products of corresponding coordinates is fine if you are using a coordinate-based representation. But for a coordinate-free representation, the way I have stated it is more appropriate. Second, replacing "innerProduct" with "usualInnerProduct": well, of course it's "usual". If we had to say "usual" all the time we'd never get anything done. When I say, "What is the product of 20 and 100?" no one asks, "Do you mean the usual product?" because of course I do.
Aw, come on, you can set your sights higher than that. Go for it! Shoot for the stars! Try for a 3:1 ratio.
Please do. [sob, sniff, sniff]
Me too, actually. I've never even looked into online single song purchases. Clearly I'm not typical, though. There is obviously an enormous demand from lots of people who are not like me.
Perhaps it's time to end this thread? [/endthread]
Can we have a reasonable discussion here, without ad hominem arguments?
Of course it fits. Supply and demand push the optimum price around. The huge demand for songs tends to push it up. Things like Kazaa and "piracy" belong on the supply side, and so push it down.
Just because there is a large supply does not mean the optimum price is lower than the current one, because we have to consider all the factors. As you pointed out, models can be oversimplified to the point of being useless. Considering only the effect of Kazaa, etc., on price is clearly oversimplifying, because there is obviously a huge demand.
Once again: apparently some music industry people think they have good reasons to believe that the optimum price is higher. Obviously some people here don't want this to be true. Well, reality is reality, and sometimes the facts aren't what you want to be true. Deal with it.
Well of course it's silly. But consider the process behind it all.
If there is a general consensus on what is acceptable, then we can be vague and leave the details to judges and juries.
But what we have is a situation in which the consensus has broken down, and yet one end of the obsecenity spectrum is considered unacceptable by nearly all, while the other is acceptable. This means we must draw a line somewhere: one side is acceptable, and the other is not.
And yes, things right near the line, but on opposite sides, look pretty similar, and people can always make the point that the difference is silly, and so the system is flawed. Yes, it's flawed, but in the absense of consensus, we must draw a rather arbitrary line somewhere.
A second relevant factor is companies pushing the limits as hard as they can. Sure, one breast showing is no big deal. And I think that everyone, deep down, knows that. But many of us also know that if you don't fight every transgression of the line, no matter how small, then the line ends up moving.
Lastly, I'm curious why you pick on the U.S. Every developed nation in the world has obsenity standards of one sort or another. Many are stricter than the U.S.'s in some ways. But they all draw their lines, and your basic arguments apply to them all.
No, of course not, and I didn't mean to imply you were.
In any case, Pat Robertson is not funny. But I still think your previous message was.
Replace "copy" by "derived work". Isn't that what the LGPL does?
Autographed D&D items for sale. Click the link under my username.
ROTFL
First of all, there is a crucial distinction here: Do we consider the government to be acting as the agent of the people? If so, then the question becomes, "Do we really need the people to dicate a program's content?"
WARNING: Continue reading before making knee-jerk response.
No, I don't think my restatement automatically means a "yes" answer. After all, in theory at least, we place strong limitations on the power of government, regardless of whose agent it is considered. And more importantly, we do not grant the people the power to restrict freedom of speech, whether acting alone or through their government.
HOWEVER, we do grant people the power to control what they allow in their own homes, and more generally on their own property. You cannot restrict what I say, generally, but you can toss me out of your house for saying things you don't like.
Now, here is the key point: Broadcasting sends "speech" everywhere: through walls, across private property, and into homes. And therefore I do consider that private citizens, acting through their government, have a right to place restrictions on broadcast media.
Actually, that's pretty well settled. The big question these days is what counts as "broadcasting". When it was all about radio waves filling every nook and cranny, the question was easy. Now, with cable, the internet, and the-next-big-thing-whatever-it-may-be, the questions become harder.
Why is that "critical"? The original point I was responding to was that basic economic theory is being neglected. I say that, on the contrary, basic economic theory says that there is an optimum price for everything. I don't see why the existence of "piracy" and Kazaa necessarily mean that this optimum is lower than the current price, whatever it may be. Maybe it is higher. If music industry exec's think so, then it is quite rational for them to raise the price. Maybe that will increase "piracy" and P2P usage. So what? By "optimum", we usually mean the price that will maximize profit; that is what basic theory generally addresses.
One can draw a different conclusion from this than the one you drew. You are right: documentation is often bad. However, the experience of many people is that documentation is often necessary. So it is worth our time to consider how to document things well.
IMHO, the Design by Contract school of thought has done some good things in this direction. But your point about neglecting the overall purpose is a good one. One can, for example, combine pre and postconditions with a general statement of purpose.
Surely there can be little ambiguity about what that function does, and when one would use it. And the doc's are pretty concise, too.But that doesn't mean DbC is the One True Way. In any case, the question of how to document code well (and easily!) is one that is worth more effort than is currently being spent on it.
Note that you're not really arguing about facts here, but about the definition of the word "viral".
If "viral" is taken to mean that the same licensing conditions apply to derivative works, then the GPL is viral. On the other hand, if "viral" is taken to mean you are somehow forced to apply the same licensing conditions to whatever else you create, then obviously the GPL is not viral.
Which is the "usual" sense? Depends on whom you hang out with. I did a quick Google for GPL Viral, tossing out dup's, broken links, and non-English pages. In the first two pages of hits, I found 7 that are making essentially my argument, 4 that are making essentially yours, and 3 that seem to be trying to weigh things impartially.
So I win on that basis. :-) Of course, one can argue that a big chunk of the people using the word in my sense are either journalists who don't know a software license from a dump truck, or else microsoft PR people. That's probably true, so maybe you win.
Perhaps the real problems here are (1) "viral" is a rather pejorative term, often used by people who are fighting the Free Software movement, and (2) Free Software people are notoriously touchy and dogmatic, many of them having zero tolerance for any criticism (even implied criticism) of his holiness RMS, forever blessed, and his perfect revelation, the GPL.
Well, fine, but the property of the GPL that extends identical licensing terms to derivative works is interesting and noteworthy. We need a word to use to talk about that. If not "viral", then what?
It certainly looks like you did. What these people are saying is that the price that is going to produce the highest profit looks to be above the current one. Therefore they want to raise prices. If you can remember that class you supposedly took, this is the natural response to a high demand.
You can disagree with their morals, but let's not make silly comments about how these people don't know their economics.
Nope. I quote from the GPL, v. 2, section 6:
That's viral. "Viral" means that licensing terms are applied to derivative or collective works as well as the original.Thus, a traditional license in which the licensor claims ownership of derivative works, would be a viral license (yes this would be legal; as licensee, you would not have to agree to these terms, but if you did, then you did). And the GPL is viral. The LGPL is not viral. Neither is the BSD license, the Boost license, etc. And neither are most traditional non-transferable licenses, since they explicitly disallow derivative works.
Copyright law on the other hand, covers all works, including those with viral licenses, like the GPL, and those with non-viral licenses, like the LGPL. Thus, copyright law is neither "viral" nor "non-viral".