The difference now is that they have much better emulation. Rosetta isn't a basic emulator at all, it dynamically translates PPC opcodes to x86 while optimizing. The core technology can even be used to "translate" x86 code to x86 code and run it faster than the original, because it can do things like eliminate branches.
We can start by how long it takes to crunch a lot of floating point operations and integer math operations.
That might show the opposite results - misleadingly slow instead of misleadingly fast.
Rosetta dynamically translates machine instructions in such a way that it can eliminate branches that aren't taken. Mispredicted branches wreak havoc on the long pipelines of the Pentium 4, so code that can run straight through runs much faster. You can even "translate" x86 code to x86 code this way and speed it up significantly.
It doesn't make floating point or integer math operations any faster, but most users run applications that are chock full of branches, not math benchmarks.
The author does not discover it. The author creates it.
I have shown otherwise. If you can't point out a flaw in my reasoning, waving your hands and saying "nuh-uh!" isn't much of a counterargument.
Think about what you're writing here. When you wrote your response up there... did you discover it?
Yes, I did. The number that represents my response would still represent the same text whether or not I had written it, and I make no claim to "own" it.
If you had enough people sitting at computers for enough years, generating every possible combination of bits and interpreting them as text, MP3, MPEG, and every other format, they would eventually read every book, watch every movie, and hear every song that has ever been written or ever will be written. Those pieces of information exist whether anyone ever finds them or not.
However, it would take countless billions of years to find them all that way; that brute force approach isn't very good. An author, OTOH, can manipulate the piece of information he's working with until he has one that he believes is a good story, just as a scientist can manipulate his theory until he has one that explains the evidence in front of him. In other words, his intellect and artistic talent helps him know where to look.
Floppy drives go bad just like CD-ROM drives. And if you're replacing a bad drive, $15 for a new CD-ROM isn't much more than $10 for a new floppy (newegg prices).
My point, again, is that no one can own information. It is not property.
If you had read the first few paragraphs of my earlier comment, instead of just quoting the "information theory" bit and making a snide remark, you would've noticed my explanation of the value that information has. It is not worthless, and I have never said it is, contrary to your strawman insinuations.
However, its value is not created by any author, it's inherent in the information itself. The author provides a service by discovering it in the first place, not by making copies.
You are making the typical geek mistake of assuming that anything is alright as long as it is legal and possible. [...] The usual way we stop this kind of behaviour, is to a) ask people politely to stop, b) yell at them for being assholes.
Exactly - not by outlawing it. I'm not saying people who watch TV through a stranger's window, or use a stranger's open wireless network, aren't being rude... I'm just saying they shouldn't be arrested. If social censure isn't enough to get the results you want, then get off the couch and secure your network.
So you agree that it has value? Interesting departure from your stance.
Not a departure at all. Any number has information value; that doesn't mean it has an owner, or that there should be restrictions on who can say that number to someone else.
Certain numbers also have value in a more subjective sense, which I think is what you're getting at - a number that encodes a book, a photo, or a song has value to a person because it can be reconstructed into something they can aesthetically appreciate. However, that value is inherent in the experience itself; two copies of the number are no more valuable than one, because anyone can create them for nothing. And since the experience can be reconstructed from the number, they are equivalent - the subjective value of the experience is inherent in the number that describes it(*).
Consequently we can say that the content of a book is not created by the author, it's discovered. After all, that number could still be reconstructed into the same experience even if the book's author had never been born; it's just that no one would ever think to try that particular number.
Now the role of authors becomes clear: they don't create information, they find it. It's a very important service. If a dowser offers to tell you exactly where to dig for gold on your million-acre estate, he'd be doing much the same thing, and he'd deserve to be rewarded for it (if dowsing weren't a scam). But he doesn't own the gold; it's there whether he brings it to your attention or not.
An encoding of data as symbols or impulses? Sure, that's straight out of Shannon - but only in terms of information theory and entropy. It's not talking about the same thing.
Information theory is exactly what I'm talking about.
(* actually, it's inherent in the combination of the number, the technology to reconstruct it, and the human capacity to perceive and understand the reconstructed version)
Disregarding the racist humor in this post, it does raise a good point: How do we as a nation, any nation balance the rights of competing interests? In this case the interest of free speech versus Rowling and her publisher's right to IP.
If you talk about the publisher's "right to IP", you've already conceded the fight to them. The real competing interests are (1) the public's right to free speech and (2) the public's interest in fueling the creation of new works.
Anyone claiming to have a right to control the content of a book--especially descriptions of the plot and characters that aren't even covered by copyright--is only looking out for their own financial interest.
He's going to sue whoever investigates it under the DMCA. ROT13 is an access control, so as long as some of his own text is encoded (not just the part copyrighted by the publisher), and he says "no employee of Overhyped Children's Book Publishing Inc. is allowed to access the content of this post", they're not legally allowed to decode it.
I can do it easier than that - I can just dump the database from the phone company's exchanges.
Did I say you could use those? Hell, if that's allowed, then I guess I have a simple algorithm for producing a novel that requires nothing more than Stephen King and a typewriter.;)
The point you're ignoring is that information that can be produced by an algorithm is extraneous, and essentially equivalent to the algorithm plus its inputs. It's like saying that, given the equation "2x = 30", you can produce "3x + 5 = 50" algorithmically - fine, go ahead, but it won't tell you anything new.
The content of a book has information value precisely because (and only to the extent that) it can't be generated automatically from something else. If it could, we'd only need to pass that "something else" around instead.
Nearly the whole world disagrees with you. And has for several hundred years.
A couple decades ago, you could've said the same thing about RMS. "Developing software and giving the code away for free? There's no money in that. It'll never take off."
Information, by the way, means "facts or knowledge provided or learned". A novel or other work of literature is not "facts or knowledge provided or learned".
Sometimes a word has multiple definitions and related terms, you know. Try reading past the first one; you'll find it makes your dictionary a lot more useful.
Now, while you can indeed encode a book as numbers, I defy anyone to come up with an algorithmic way of generating the contents of that exact book, given a dictionary of words inside it.
I defy you to come up with an algorithmic way of generating the theory of relativity given a database of mathemetical symbols and physics terms.
In fact, I also defy you to come up with an algorithmic way of generating a correct listing of telephone numbers, given only a list of names and digits and the format of a valid North American phone number.
The fact that a particular piece of information took great effort to produce (or discover) does not mean it isn't information, or that the person who expended the effort should be crowned King Of That Information and allowed to dictate who may use or share it. Information is information, no matter where it came from, and it cannot be owned.
A publisher whose books consistenty arrived at, say, Target, ahead of the small bookstores, would soon find the small bookstores not bothering to carry that publishers books.
Is that a problem? The publisher is still selling the same number of books. The customers are still buying the same number of books, and they're getting them sooner. The other bookstores can concentrate on an aspect of the business where they can outcompete Target.
Also, the publisher wants to keep customers happy. If the books went on sale whenever they arrived at the stores, you'd have people rushing from store to store, following rumors of arrivals, and getting frustrated if they don't get there before they sell out.
This doesn't seem to interfere with the sales of cars or any other hotly anticipated items. "Let your fingers do the walking," as they say.
Books aren't just ideas and information. They're more than that.
You're right.. they're also paper, glue, and ink, which is why I fully support Scholastic's right to protect their books from being stolen.
The content of a book, on the other hand, is information--not in the sense of dry facts like a phone book, but in the philosophical sense, the one we know from the phrase "information technology". A book's content can be described by a sequence of numbers, and sending those numbers to someone is equivalent to giving them a copy of the book. But a sequence of numbers is not property.
But even a one-day head start on something like movies and music can create a gigantic advantage, what some would argue is an unfair one.
I'm sorry, you still haven't pointed out anything unfair about it.
You seem to be saying it's unfair just because it helps some businesses more than others, but as far as I can tell, it's no less fair than if my business happens to have more knowledgeable salesmen than yours. Even if that's purely by chance and not because I'm better at training them, it's still a legitimate advantage.
Personally, I'd hate to watch a foot-race where whoever gets to the track first gets to start first.
Luckily, business competition doesn't have to be entertaining to watch, it just has to give customers what they want.
Nobody is saying everybody has to run at the same speed, they are just saying they all have to start at the same time.
They all had an opportunity to get the book shipped to them, right? If one store can get it shipped sooner and thus be able to sell it sooner, by spending more on shipping or whatever, that's an advantage they have over their competitors, and they deserve whatever extra business it gets them. That's what I mean by running faster.
I know, for instance, that a locally owned video store in town often got their new releases a day or two before the Blockbuster I worked at. How they managed it, I can't imagine...but street date made sure they could never use it to their advantage.
They should've been able to! Why should customers have to wait to watch a DVD just because some store they may never visit doesn't have it yet?
It's still an artificial limit on competition. Why should companies only be able to compete on price? It certainly isn't the only thing their customers care about.
Let's say I'm importing some fragile goods from China and selling them here. My competitors also have to ship them from China, and 10% of their goods are usually broken in shipping. I devise a better way to ship them, so that only 5% are broken, which allows me to sell the other 95% for less.
Is that unfair? Should I have to use the same shipping method as my competitors, or charge more to offset the advantage?
"Well, you drove all the book stores out of business. And all I can get here are the latest bad romance novels."
Not likely. If there's a significant set of books that Target won't sell, then there's nothing to stop Mom & Pop from selling those books, since Target won't even be competing with them.
And if it's just one book, well, you'll still be able to find it online, since the larger audience makes it easy to find enough customers to justify stocking them (which is also why satellite radio has so many genres you can't find on local radio).
"Excuse me, imperious overlord, but in the course of conducting my menial duties I couldn't help but fail to notice that we're not carrying the latest book by [acclaimed author]. Perhaps if we were to carry this book we could sell a few copies of it, thereby enhancing our profits."
"Why you foul little troll, you should consider yourself lucky that we haven't replaced you with a poorly paid monkey! From India! You were NOT hired for you brains! Now get back to licking my boots clean!"
Uh huh... because we all know how much those evil capitalists hate to satisfy consumer demand by stocking products people want to buy!
Companies like Target didn't get where they are by ignoring what customers want.
Retailers who get the books earlier from having an unreasonable advantage over those that don't. This often translates to large retailers versus small retailers...Target already has an advantage on price, now imagine if they also had it on the shelves 2 or 3 days early.
I don't see what's so unreasonable about it. If they're able to get the book first, they deserve any extra business they might get, because they've found a way to give customers what they want.
street dates are established so the item appears on everybody's shelves at the same time, thus promoting fair competition.
The fact is that economies of scale often make it easier for big companies like Target to deliver what customers want. That's not anticompetitive, it is competition. They're winning.
A foot race where no one is allowed to run faster than anyone else isn't a fair competition at all. As long as these companies aren't doing anything abusive, there's no reason to handicap them.
Ideas and information will never be "property", no matter how long people who have something to gain from restricting them keep repeating the mantra intellectual property, intellectual property...
Thomas Jefferson said it best:
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
It's just a letter. Debt collection agencies try to sound tough, but they don't really have any teeth, do they? Don't they have to stop contacting you if you ask, just like telemarketers?
Thank God someone finally implemented this great idea. I'm so sick of having to telnet into servers and type in POST queries by hand to submit forms. Now, at long last, we'll be able to post comments on Slashdot just by typing text in a box and clicking a button!
C is one of the simplest syntaxes among the popular compiled languages. A proper, complete recursive descent parser could be implemented in a day by a person versed in writing parsers. I'm curious as to what you think is so complex or hard about it.
Here are a few examples of the difficulties in parsing C. Obviously it's not impossible to write a parser, but there are a lot of tricky cases that can bite you if you're not careful. One such example (described here) is this:
(b)-(c)
Does that say "subtract c from b", or does it say "negate c and cast it to b"? Depends on whether b is a typedef.
Slashdot Mirror
Is windows easy to use? Really? Is that why so many people get trojans, viruses, backdoors, malware, etc?
Yes, it is. People who aren't experienced or knowledgeable enough to know how to protect themselves from malware use Windows because it's easy.
The difference now is that they have much better emulation. Rosetta isn't a basic emulator at all, it dynamically translates PPC opcodes to x86 while optimizing. The core technology can even be used to "translate" x86 code to x86 code and run it faster than the original, because it can do things like eliminate branches.
We can start by how long it takes to crunch a lot of floating point operations and integer math operations.
That might show the opposite results - misleadingly slow instead of misleadingly fast.
Rosetta dynamically translates machine instructions in such a way that it can eliminate branches that aren't taken. Mispredicted branches wreak havoc on the long pipelines of the Pentium 4, so code that can run straight through runs much faster. You can even "translate" x86 code to x86 code this way and speed it up significantly.
It doesn't make floating point or integer math operations any faster, but most users run applications that are chock full of branches, not math benchmarks.
The author does not discover it. The author creates it.
I have shown otherwise. If you can't point out a flaw in my reasoning, waving your hands and saying "nuh-uh!" isn't much of a counterargument.
Think about what you're writing here. When you wrote your response up there... did you discover it?
Yes, I did. The number that represents my response would still represent the same text whether or not I had written it, and I make no claim to "own" it.
If you had enough people sitting at computers for enough years, generating every possible combination of bits and interpreting them as text, MP3, MPEG, and every other format, they would eventually read every book, watch every movie, and hear every song that has ever been written or ever will be written. Those pieces of information exist whether anyone ever finds them or not.
However, it would take countless billions of years to find them all that way; that brute force approach isn't very good. An author, OTOH, can manipulate the piece of information he's working with until he has one that he believes is a good story, just as a scientist can manipulate his theory until he has one that explains the evidence in front of him. In other words, his intellect and artistic talent helps him know where to look.
Floppy drives go bad just like CD-ROM drives. And if you're replacing a bad drive, $15 for a new CD-ROM isn't much more than $10 for a new floppy (newegg prices).
My point, again, is that no one can own information. It is not property.
If you had read the first few paragraphs of my earlier comment, instead of just quoting the "information theory" bit and making a snide remark, you would've noticed my explanation of the value that information has. It is not worthless, and I have never said it is, contrary to your strawman insinuations.
However, its value is not created by any author, it's inherent in the information itself. The author provides a service by discovering it in the first place, not by making copies.
No, your little trick of ignoring my entire comment and scoffing at something I didn't even write is a lame way to dodge the argument.
You are making the typical geek mistake of assuming that anything is alright as long as it is legal and possible. [...] The usual way we stop this kind of behaviour, is to a) ask people politely to stop, b) yell at them for being assholes.
Exactly - not by outlawing it. I'm not saying people who watch TV through a stranger's window, or use a stranger's open wireless network, aren't being rude... I'm just saying they shouldn't be arrested. If social censure isn't enough to get the results you want, then get off the couch and secure your network.
So you agree that it has value? Interesting departure from your stance.
Not a departure at all. Any number has information value; that doesn't mean it has an owner, or that there should be restrictions on who can say that number to someone else.
Certain numbers also have value in a more subjective sense, which I think is what you're getting at - a number that encodes a book, a photo, or a song has value to a person because it can be reconstructed into something they can aesthetically appreciate. However, that value is inherent in the experience itself; two copies of the number are no more valuable than one, because anyone can create them for nothing. And since the experience can be reconstructed from the number, they are equivalent - the subjective value of the experience is inherent in the number that describes it(*).
Consequently we can say that the content of a book is not created by the author, it's discovered. After all, that number could still be reconstructed into the same experience even if the book's author had never been born; it's just that no one would ever think to try that particular number.
Now the role of authors becomes clear: they don't create information, they find it. It's a very important service. If a dowser offers to tell you exactly where to dig for gold on your million-acre estate, he'd be doing much the same thing, and he'd deserve to be rewarded for it (if dowsing weren't a scam). But he doesn't own the gold; it's there whether he brings it to your attention or not.
An encoding of data as symbols or impulses? Sure, that's straight out of Shannon - but only in terms of information theory and entropy. It's not talking about the same thing.
Information theory is exactly what I'm talking about.
(* actually, it's inherent in the combination of the number, the technology to reconstruct it, and the human capacity to perceive and understand the reconstructed version)
Disregarding the racist humor in this post, it does raise a good point: How do we as a nation, any nation balance the rights of competing interests? In this case the interest of free speech versus Rowling and her publisher's right to IP.
If you talk about the publisher's "right to IP", you've already conceded the fight to them. The real competing interests are (1) the public's right to free speech and (2) the public's interest in fueling the creation of new works.
Anyone claiming to have a right to control the content of a book--especially descriptions of the plot and characters that aren't even covered by copyright--is only looking out for their own financial interest.
He's going to sue whoever investigates it under the DMCA. ROT13 is an access control, so as long as some of his own text is encoded (not just the part copyrighted by the publisher), and he says "no employee of Overhyped Children's Book Publishing Inc. is allowed to access the content of this post", they're not legally allowed to decode it.
I can do it easier than that - I can just dump the database from the phone company's exchanges.
;)
Did I say you could use those? Hell, if that's allowed, then I guess I have a simple algorithm for producing a novel that requires nothing more than Stephen King and a typewriter.
The point you're ignoring is that information that can be produced by an algorithm is extraneous, and essentially equivalent to the algorithm plus its inputs. It's like saying that, given the equation "2x = 30", you can produce "3x + 5 = 50" algorithmically - fine, go ahead, but it won't tell you anything new.
The content of a book has information value precisely because (and only to the extent that) it can't be generated automatically from something else. If it could, we'd only need to pass that "something else" around instead.
Nearly the whole world disagrees with you. And has for several hundred years.
A couple decades ago, you could've said the same thing about RMS. "Developing software and giving the code away for free? There's no money in that. It'll never take off."
Information, by the way, means "facts or knowledge provided or learned". A novel or other work of literature is not "facts or knowledge provided or learned".
Sometimes a word has multiple definitions and related terms, you know. Try reading past the first one; you'll find it makes your dictionary a lot more useful.
Now, while you can indeed encode a book as numbers, I defy anyone to come up with an algorithmic way of generating the contents of that exact book, given a dictionary of words inside it.
I defy you to come up with an algorithmic way of generating the theory of relativity given a database of mathemetical symbols and physics terms.
In fact, I also defy you to come up with an algorithmic way of generating a correct listing of telephone numbers, given only a list of names and digits and the format of a valid North American phone number.
The fact that a particular piece of information took great effort to produce (or discover) does not mean it isn't information, or that the person who expended the effort should be crowned King Of That Information and allowed to dictate who may use or share it. Information is information, no matter where it came from, and it cannot be owned.
A publisher whose books consistenty arrived at, say, Target, ahead of the small bookstores, would soon find the small bookstores not bothering to carry that publishers books.
Is that a problem? The publisher is still selling the same number of books. The customers are still buying the same number of books, and they're getting them sooner. The other bookstores can concentrate on an aspect of the business where they can outcompete Target.
Also, the publisher wants to keep customers happy. If the books went on sale whenever they arrived at the stores, you'd have people rushing from store to store, following rumors of arrivals, and getting frustrated if they don't get there before they sell out.
This doesn't seem to interfere with the sales of cars or any other hotly anticipated items. "Let your fingers do the walking," as they say.
Books aren't just ideas and information. They're more than that.
You're right.. they're also paper, glue, and ink, which is why I fully support Scholastic's right to protect their books from being stolen.
The content of a book, on the other hand, is information--not in the sense of dry facts like a phone book, but in the philosophical sense, the one we know from the phrase "information technology". A book's content can be described by a sequence of numbers, and sending those numbers to someone is equivalent to giving them a copy of the book. But a sequence of numbers is not property.
But even a one-day head start on something like movies and music can create a gigantic advantage, what some would argue is an unfair one.
I'm sorry, you still haven't pointed out anything unfair about it.
You seem to be saying it's unfair just because it helps some businesses more than others, but as far as I can tell, it's no less fair than if my business happens to have more knowledgeable salesmen than yours. Even if that's purely by chance and not because I'm better at training them, it's still a legitimate advantage.
Personally, I'd hate to watch a foot-race where whoever gets to the track first gets to start first.
Luckily, business competition doesn't have to be entertaining to watch, it just has to give customers what they want.
Nobody is saying everybody has to run at the same speed, they are just saying they all have to start at the same time.
They all had an opportunity to get the book shipped to them, right? If one store can get it shipped sooner and thus be able to sell it sooner, by spending more on shipping or whatever, that's an advantage they have over their competitors, and they deserve whatever extra business it gets them. That's what I mean by running faster.
I know, for instance, that a locally owned video store in town often got their new releases a day or two before the Blockbuster I worked at. How they managed it, I can't imagine...but street date made sure they could never use it to their advantage.
They should've been able to! Why should customers have to wait to watch a DVD just because some store they may never visit doesn't have it yet?
It's still an artificial limit on competition. Why should companies only be able to compete on price? It certainly isn't the only thing their customers care about.
Let's say I'm importing some fragile goods from China and selling them here. My competitors also have to ship them from China, and 10% of their goods are usually broken in shipping. I devise a better way to ship them, so that only 5% are broken, which allows me to sell the other 95% for less.
Is that unfair? Should I have to use the same shipping method as my competitors, or charge more to offset the advantage?
"Well, you drove all the book stores out of business. And all I can get here are the latest bad romance novels."
Not likely. If there's a significant set of books that Target won't sell, then there's nothing to stop Mom & Pop from selling those books, since Target won't even be competing with them.
And if it's just one book, well, you'll still be able to find it online, since the larger audience makes it easy to find enough customers to justify stocking them (which is also why satellite radio has so many genres you can't find on local radio).
"Excuse me, imperious overlord, but in the course of conducting my menial duties I couldn't help but fail to notice that we're not carrying the latest book by [acclaimed author]. Perhaps if we were to carry this book we could sell a few copies of it, thereby enhancing our profits."
"Why you foul little troll, you should consider yourself lucky that we haven't replaced you with a poorly paid monkey! From India! You were NOT hired for you brains! Now get back to licking my boots clean!"
Uh huh... because we all know how much those evil capitalists hate to satisfy consumer demand by stocking products people want to buy!
Companies like Target didn't get where they are by ignoring what customers want.
Retailers who get the books earlier from having an unreasonable advantage over those that don't. This often translates to large retailers versus small retailers...Target already has an advantage on price, now imagine if they also had it on the shelves 2 or 3 days early.
I don't see what's so unreasonable about it. If they're able to get the book first, they deserve any extra business they might get, because they've found a way to give customers what they want.
street dates are established so the item appears on everybody's shelves at the same time, thus promoting fair competition.
The fact is that economies of scale often make it easier for big companies like Target to deliver what customers want. That's not anticompetitive, it is competition. They're winning.
A foot race where no one is allowed to run faster than anyone else isn't a fair competition at all. As long as these companies aren't doing anything abusive, there's no reason to handicap them.
Thomas Jefferson said it best:
It's just a letter. Debt collection agencies try to sound tough, but they don't really have any teeth, do they? Don't they have to stop contacting you if you ask, just like telemarketers?
Why bother? We already have the smell-o-scope.
Thank God someone finally implemented this great idea. I'm so sick of having to telnet into servers and type in POST queries by hand to submit forms. Now, at long last, we'll be able to post comments on Slashdot just by typing text in a box and clicking a button!
C is one of the simplest syntaxes among the popular compiled languages. A proper, complete recursive descent parser could be implemented in a day by a person versed in writing parsers. I'm curious as to what you think is so complex or hard about it.
Here are a few examples of the difficulties in parsing C. Obviously it's not impossible to write a parser, but there are a lot of tricky cases that can bite you if you're not careful. One such example (described here) is this:
(b)-(c)
Does that say "subtract c from b", or does it say "negate c and cast it to b"? Depends on whether b is a typedef.