We all remember Jim Allchin saying that XP was "the most secure Windows ever." And everyone here knows about the UPnP bugs that were discovered the day XP was released. Their other recent announcements lambasting the process of full disclosure by Scott Culp also show that they have no real commitment to providing decent security in their products. Well, if this word from BillG is supposed to mean anything, we ought to see it in action. Unless "trustworthy computing" is supposed to mean trusted computers (a conceptual fiction) for use with digital rights management...
"Technology is making it easier for people to exercise their creative freedom," executive producer Marc Adler said.
Well, yeah, provided the system of intellectual property law doesn't interfere with it too much. The legal regime that the big studios are making will eventually make it nearly impossible for any form of major creative production to move ahead without a large, skilled, and well paid legal department, which raises the bar quite a bit...
The judge should show concern over the effect of the settlement on Free Software, as it seems that Free Software, too, has become a viable competitor. No more is the software market made up largely of producers such as Microsoft and consumers, who were the users of shrink-wrapped software. The market is now more complicated than that, because much of the software that now runs the Internet and which most of us/. readers use all the time is created and used by prosumers, to borrow a neologism from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, and this software created by and for the users, is rapidly becoming a major part of the software marketplace. GNU/Linux, Apache, and their ilk are testimony to that. To ignore it as the DOJ has, or to not think of it as part of the marketplace, as you have, is to ignore this fact about today's software industry.
Yes, Microsoft is right, the software industry is radically different from the more traditional industries that antitrust law was originally created to address, but not in the way Microsoft presented to the DOJ. In the software industry, anyone and everyone can potentially be a viable part of the marketplace, so the only choice really will be to totally open up the protocols and API's to anyone and everyone who wants to see them, if the DOJ's settlement is to have any real effectivity in fulfilling the spirit of antitrust law.
Well, it didn't immediately click because the Beethoven song he used to test the program is better known by its German name: "Für Elise" (well, that's what the book of piano pieces I used to have calls that tune). Trouble is, everyone's associations to the name 'Eliza' is the 'AI' program by Joseph Weizenbaum...
I believe the Soviet Union once launched a system of satellites called GLONASS that worked like GPS. Are they planning to do an upgrade or repair of this system? The GPS FAQ has more information (see section 5.2).
Heck, it's understandable why they'd want to build an alternative GPS; the US Department of Defense could suddenly decide to turn selective availability back on again if they felt like it someday...
Could fuel further research in better propulsion
on
Mining On The Moon
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· Score: 2
Sorry about the pun above... The real trick if mining companies want to make lunar mining worthwhile is to make the cost of sending stuff to and from space. Chemical rocket propulsion is so horribly inefficient for that purpose as to be impractical.
Now a real place that it would be worthwhile to do commercial mining if transporting stuff could be made easier would be Mercury; that planet's supposed to be full of the dense platinum group metals as it's closest to the center of the solar system (guess that would qualify as a "Rich" world in Master of Orion terms, unfortunately it also qualifies as a "Radiated" world).
Have tried this. My ripes include the fact that is that it is somewhat slow (compared to proprietary computer algebra systems like Maple or Mathematica anyhow), and (gasp) it uses XView. Yes, the old GUI toolkit Sun once created for Open Look and their OpenWindows desktop.
The worst part about it is that it's NOT open source/free software, which means that you're basically betting that the folks at the University of Paderborn who developed it aren't going to stop maintaining it or will suddenly stop making versions of it that are freely usable. Keep this in mind if you decide to use it.
Well, from what I remember, the boys at Id Software saw Ultima Underworld and that was what inspired them to create their ground-breaking game (can't remember where I heard this story though). They did Origin one better with W3D of course, giving pure action as opposed to the somewhat more complex role-playing that was always (well, almost always anyway) the hallmark of the Ultima games, so perhaps it's not quite so right to consider UUTSA as an FPS game, even though it arguably it inspired that genre.
The first real first-person-shooter game (sort of), would rightly be Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. I think it would be the game that started the FPS revolution, except that Wolfenstein 3D and later, DOOM, brought the revolution into full gear.
...just not in the way he thinks he is. The entire Free Software/Open Source movement mainly began as a reaction to propertarian modes of software production, of which Microsoft eventually became the greatest, most extreme, and most infamous example. Even Richard Stallman says the GNU Project began as such a reaction in his history of the GNU Project.
All this shuck about open and extensible architectures was none of Microsoft's doing, and the Free Software movement would likely have existed even without it, though it probably would not have grown as rapidly.
I'm just wondering if perhaps someone has patented the algorithms used to drive these soft modems. A Free Software implementation of a soft modem driver will thus be in violation of the patent then. As far as I can tell the ITU, the standards body that defines these modem standards, allows what the W3C calls RAND licensing, as they state in patent policy (excerpt):
2 If an ITU-T Recommendation is developed and such information as referred to in paragraph 1 [patents and other intellectual property claims], three different situations may arise:
2.1 The patent holder waives his rights; hence, the Recommendation is freely accessible to everybody, subject to no particular conditions, no royalties are due, etc.
2.2 The patent holder is not prepared to waive his rights but would be willing to negotiate licenses with other parties on a non-discriminatory basis on reasonable terms and conditions. Such negotiations are left to the parties concerned and are performed outside the ITU-T. [emphasis mine]
2.3 The patent holder is not willing to comply with the provisions of either paragraph 2.1 or paragraph 2.2; in such case, no Recommendation can be established.
It's paragraph 2.2 that worries me. If any patents exist on the modem standards implemented by soft modems that are thus RAND-licensable, any GPL implementation is impossible. I believe some of the compression algorithms used in some of the modem standards are already known to be patented, such as the infamous LZW compression algorithm held by Unisys that has caused the huge flap over GIF's a couple of years back.
Well, it's not really unfair, as a formal background in digital signal processing is unarguably required to be a serious developer of this type of code.
That's news to me. I always thought Network Solutions or whoever runs the other root name servers had their own proprietary and more robust and scalable DNS software.
You can't do zone transfers using djbdns for one thing. DJB thinks that zone transfers are evil, and has his own method for doing the task (rsync over ssh I believe), but whether they're evil or not is beside the point. Like it or not, zone transfers are a part of the core DNS protocols and any proper successor to BIND must implement them all. Starting a standards war with the IETF is not something I want to have along with a name server I deploy. Let Bernstein write an RFC for publication describing his idiosyncratic methods and get the IETF to ratify it as a core standard if he wants, if he truly thinks his way is the better way. The way he operates reminds me more of the way Microsoft handles standards than anything else.
Besides, djbdns is also deficient in a far more important way (for me and to a lot of people here on Slashdot anyhow, I hope): it's actually proprietary software with a limited license for gratis use. It's not Free Software or even Open Source, not by any reasonable definition of the term. There is no license along with his programs, and absent a license you have NO RIGHT to share, study, or change Bernstein's code!
...today he seems to be off-balance, and doesn't seem to understand all of the issues about which he speaks. Apparently he has failed to note a couple of key facts:
Alan Cox hasn't censored himself. If Jon Lasser would fly to England or cross the border into either Mexico or Canada, he could find an Internet café somewhere where he could study the changelogs at his leisure.
It's his country that's done the censorship.
The DMCA has already made the full disclosure way he and everyone else who has the smallest clue about computer and information security knows to be effective illegal in the United States.
If he wants to bitch about it, let him either write to his congressman to get the law repealed, or emigrate to some other country that doesn't have a DMCA-like law.
I'll just point out a slight inaccuracy in your highly informative answer. CO2 increase in the atmosphere does directly relate to the ozone hole problem. CO2 increase causes global warming. Global warming causes the (presently) weak polar vortex in the North Pole to strengthen. Strengthening of that polar vortex causes the ozone hole in the northern hemisphere to increase in size. Well, many more people live in the land around in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere...
That's the thing with the environment; everything is interconnected.
I believe there's a meteorological phenomenon called the polar vortex that causes the ozone hole to occur at the South Pole and during Antarctic summer. See this link for more details. Short version is, during polar night there's a huge whirlpool of cold air that circulates there all night causing the CFC's we've emitted to more rapidly destroy the ozone in the region. By summer, the vortex stops, so the ozone hole disperses. There's also a vortex in the North Pole, but because there are a lot of irregular land masses there, the vortex up north is a lot weaker, hence the ozone hole up north is far smaller. But global warming is causing the northern vortex to strengthen, and hence increase the size of the hole up north.
This is what I get for watching too much Discovery Channel!
There have been a lot of cuneiform texts found by archaeologists that spoke about some wind of death bringing an abrupt end to the Sumerian civilization at around the late 2000's BC, and this is something that the archaeologists have been hard pressed to explain, giving far-fetched explanations about barbarian tribes raiding and pillaging Sumer. A cometary impact is a far more plausible explanation, it would seem, given the way the texts are written. Perhaps the comet fragmented on entry to the atmosphere and another fragment landed on the plain of the Dead Sea, destroying the settlements of Sodom and Gomorrah there and turning the area around the Dead Sea into the wasteland it now is. I wonder if there has been any geological study of the Dead Sea plain that could perhaps confirm or deny this conjecture.
So now, somebody kick Saddam out of Iraq so the archaeologists and geologists can study it more closely!:)
There's been a five-day long Microsoft-sponsored party that culminated last Wednesday for the Windows XP Launch. Other than the fact that BillG's birthday is on October 28, why does it seem that a lot of significant things seem to happen to them during Halloween?
Other than the fact that working with MS software is a horrendous nightmare worthy of a horror movie in itself...:)
"The site has exceeded maximum traffic for the day." Jeez, these people ought to get an account on SourceForge for their project. At least SourceForge can weather a semi-decent slashdotting!
Is it a device to give the RIAA execs nightmares or wet dreams? We all know that the MPAA and RIAA would both like to uninvent the computer, and this sort of specialized digital entertainment box may be just the thing they need, a special-purpose device that they have near absolute control over.
We all know that digital rights management is impossible to enforce on a general-purpose computer. But on a special-purpose entertainment console like this one, it will be trivial to do so except against the most determined cracker, if it has been designed properly.
Maybe the CD writer it's got is one of those that only writes those junk CD's that you can't play on a computer...
Re:Since when did MS ever set any standards?
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 2
1. Stac Electronics was a patent infringement suit. I thought every good slashdotter was anti patent-abuse? Or are you the odd man out?
MS infringed their patent on compressing data as it is written to the disk/decompressing it as it's read from the disk. Sounds really original and innovative that does.
Well, back in the mid-eighties and early nineties (if you were old enough to have a PC back then), it really was an innovative and original idea which nobody had ever thought about before. Stac Electronics also used to make data compression hardware that sat in the old ST-506 controller bus that transparently compressed and decompressed data travelling to and from the hard drive.
Never mind that it was a case of patent abuse which is something that is against the "slashdot ethos". The point is Microsoft has ever and anon gotten by with stealing ideas rather than innovating. The article talks about Microsoft setting standards. All they do is take someone else's standard and hijack it to lock the rest of the world in. Embrace, extend, annihilate.
By the way, Tim Paterson was the author of QDOS, the codebase that eventually became MS-DOS 1.0, after MS bought it from him. Gary Kildall wrote the original CP/M BIOS code, which MS ripped off in making the PC1 BIOS. Spyglass was the company that wrote the original Internet Explorer.
Since when did MS ever set any standards?
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Everything Microsoft ever did since the very beginning was steal ideas from other people and companies and market them as their own. Ask Tim Paterson, Gary Kildall, Apple, Stac Electronics, or Spyglass. They very nearly got away with this with Java, but Sun was watchful, and now, what they're doing with C# and.NET is basically a reinvention of what Java already is. It makes me wonder if the bigwigs inside Microsoft ever had an original thought in their own heads.
Difference here is, IBM actually did set computing standards in its time. They actually did innovate a lot of things in a big way. And they had the humility to accept that while they could remain powerful and influential, they could not remain the force that drove the computing revolution.
Well, if that's his real name, it sounds to me like the name of the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi, (1810-1875), or Alphonse-Louis Constant, who was well known for his works on occultism, notably on the Tarot, and association with Freemasonry and Rosicrucian thought. "Aleph One" is a particularly apt handle for someone with that name, as Éliphas Lévi used the Hebrew letter "Aleph" to denote the first Tarot card, the Magician, in his Cabalistic studies of the cards. I dunno, perhaps his name was just a coincidence, and he got the Aleph One handle from there.
Slashdot Mirror
We all remember Jim Allchin saying that XP was "the most secure Windows ever." And everyone here knows about the UPnP bugs that were discovered the day XP was released. Their other recent announcements lambasting the process of full disclosure by Scott Culp also show that they have no real commitment to providing decent security in their products. Well, if this word from BillG is supposed to mean anything, we ought to see it in action. Unless "trustworthy computing" is supposed to mean trusted computers (a conceptual fiction) for use with digital rights management...
Well, yeah, provided the system of intellectual property law doesn't interfere with it too much. The legal regime that the big studios are making will eventually make it nearly impossible for any form of major creative production to move ahead without a large, skilled, and well paid legal department, which raises the bar quite a bit...
The judge should show concern over the effect of the settlement on Free Software, as it seems that Free Software, too, has become a viable competitor. No more is the software market made up largely of producers such as Microsoft and consumers, who were the users of shrink-wrapped software. The market is now more complicated than that, because much of the software that now runs the Internet and which most of us /. readers use all the time is created and used by prosumers, to borrow a neologism from Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave , and this software created by and for the users, is rapidly becoming a major part of the software marketplace. GNU/Linux, Apache, and their ilk are testimony to that. To ignore it as the DOJ has, or to not think of it as part of the marketplace, as you have, is to ignore this fact about today's software industry.
Yes, Microsoft is right, the software industry is radically different from the more traditional industries that antitrust law was originally created to address, but not in the way Microsoft presented to the DOJ. In the software industry, anyone and everyone can potentially be a viable part of the marketplace, so the only choice really will be to totally open up the protocols and API's to anyone and everyone who wants to see them, if the DOJ's settlement is to have any real effectivity in fulfilling the spirit of antitrust law.
Tell that to the passengers of the Hindenburg.
Well, it didn't immediately click because the Beethoven song he used to test the program is better known by its German name: "Für Elise" (well, that's what the book of piano pieces I used to have calls that tune). Trouble is, everyone's associations to the name 'Eliza' is the 'AI' program by Joseph Weizenbaum...
I believe the Soviet Union once launched a system of satellites called GLONASS that worked like GPS. Are they planning to do an upgrade or repair of this system? The GPS FAQ has more information (see section 5.2).
Heck, it's understandable why they'd want to build an alternative GPS; the US Department of Defense could suddenly decide to turn selective availability back on again if they felt like it someday...
Sorry about the pun above... The real trick if mining companies want to make lunar mining worthwhile is to make the cost of sending stuff to and from space. Chemical rocket propulsion is so horribly inefficient for that purpose as to be impractical.
Now a real place that it would be worthwhile to do commercial mining if transporting stuff could be made easier would be Mercury; that planet's supposed to be full of the dense platinum group metals as it's closest to the center of the solar system (guess that would qualify as a "Rich" world in Master of Orion terms, unfortunately it also qualifies as a "Radiated" world).
Have tried this. My ripes include the fact that is that it is somewhat slow (compared to proprietary computer algebra systems like Maple or Mathematica anyhow), and (gasp) it uses XView. Yes, the old GUI toolkit Sun once created for Open Look and their OpenWindows desktop.
The worst part about it is that it's NOT open source/free software, which means that you're basically betting that the folks at the University of Paderborn who developed it aren't going to stop maintaining it or will suddenly stop making versions of it that are freely usable. Keep this in mind if you decide to use it.
Well, from what I remember, the boys at Id Software saw Ultima Underworld and that was what inspired them to create their ground-breaking game (can't remember where I heard this story though). They did Origin one better with W3D of course, giving pure action as opposed to the somewhat more complex role-playing that was always (well, almost always anyway) the hallmark of the Ultima games, so perhaps it's not quite so right to consider UUTSA as an FPS game, even though it arguably it inspired that genre.
The first real first-person-shooter game (sort of), would rightly be Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. I think it would be the game that started the FPS revolution, except that Wolfenstein 3D and later, DOOM, brought the revolution into full gear.
...just not in the way he thinks he is. The entire Free Software/Open Source movement mainly began as a reaction to propertarian modes of software production, of which Microsoft eventually became the greatest, most extreme, and most infamous example. Even Richard Stallman says the GNU Project began as such a reaction in his history of the GNU Project.
All this shuck about open and extensible architectures was none of Microsoft's doing, and the Free Software movement would likely have existed even without it, though it probably would not have grown as rapidly.
I'm just wondering if perhaps someone has patented the algorithms used to drive these soft modems. A Free Software implementation of a soft modem driver will thus be in violation of the patent then. As far as I can tell the ITU, the standards body that defines these modem standards, allows what the W3C calls RAND licensing, as they state in patent policy (excerpt):
It's paragraph 2.2 that worries me. If any patents exist on the modem standards implemented by soft modems that are thus RAND-licensable, any GPL implementation is impossible. I believe some of the compression algorithms used in some of the modem standards are already known to be patented, such as the infamous LZW compression algorithm held by Unisys that has caused the huge flap over GIF's a couple of years back.
Well, it's not really unfair, as a formal background in digital signal processing is unarguably required to be a serious developer of this type of code.
That's news to me. I always thought Network Solutions or whoever runs the other root name servers had their own proprietary and more robust and scalable DNS software.
You can't do zone transfers using djbdns for one thing. DJB thinks that zone transfers are evil, and has his own method for doing the task (rsync over ssh I believe), but whether they're evil or not is beside the point. Like it or not, zone transfers are a part of the core DNS protocols and any proper successor to BIND must implement them all. Starting a standards war with the IETF is not something I want to have along with a name server I deploy. Let Bernstein write an RFC for publication describing his idiosyncratic methods and get the IETF to ratify it as a core standard if he wants, if he truly thinks his way is the better way. The way he operates reminds me more of the way Microsoft handles standards than anything else.
Besides, djbdns is also deficient in a far more important way (for me and to a lot of people here on Slashdot anyhow, I hope): it's actually proprietary software with a limited license for gratis use. It's not Free Software or even Open Source, not by any reasonable definition of the term. There is no license along with his programs, and absent a license you have NO RIGHT to share, study, or change Bernstein's code!
...today he seems to be off-balance, and doesn't seem to understand all of the issues about which he speaks. Apparently he has failed to note a couple of key facts:
Alan Cox hasn't censored himself. If Jon Lasser would fly to England or cross the border into either Mexico or Canada, he could find an Internet café somewhere where he could study the changelogs at his leisure.
It's his country that's done the censorship.
The DMCA has already made the full disclosure way he and everyone else who has the smallest clue about computer and information security knows to be effective illegal in the United States.
If he wants to bitch about it, let him either write to his congressman to get the law repealed, or emigrate to some other country that doesn't have a DMCA-like law.
I'll just point out a slight inaccuracy in your highly informative answer. CO2 increase in the atmosphere does directly relate to the ozone hole problem. CO2 increase causes global warming. Global warming causes the (presently) weak polar vortex in the North Pole to strengthen. Strengthening of that polar vortex causes the ozone hole in the northern hemisphere to increase in size. Well, many more people live in the land around in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere...
That's the thing with the environment; everything is interconnected.
I believe there's a meteorological phenomenon called the polar vortex that causes the ozone hole to occur at the South Pole and during Antarctic summer. See this link for more details. Short version is, during polar night there's a huge whirlpool of cold air that circulates there all night causing the CFC's we've emitted to more rapidly destroy the ozone in the region. By summer, the vortex stops, so the ozone hole disperses. There's also a vortex in the North Pole, but because there are a lot of irregular land masses there, the vortex up north is a lot weaker, hence the ozone hole up north is far smaller. But global warming is causing the northern vortex to strengthen, and hence increase the size of the hole up north.
This is what I get for watching too much Discovery Channel!
There have been a lot of cuneiform texts found by archaeologists that spoke about some wind of death bringing an abrupt end to the Sumerian civilization at around the late 2000's BC, and this is something that the archaeologists have been hard pressed to explain, giving far-fetched explanations about barbarian tribes raiding and pillaging Sumer. A cometary impact is a far more plausible explanation, it would seem, given the way the texts are written. Perhaps the comet fragmented on entry to the atmosphere and another fragment landed on the plain of the Dead Sea, destroying the settlements of Sodom and Gomorrah there and turning the area around the Dead Sea into the wasteland it now is. I wonder if there has been any geological study of the Dead Sea plain that could perhaps confirm or deny this conjecture.
So now, somebody kick Saddam out of Iraq so the archaeologists and geologists can study it more closely! :)
There's been a five-day long Microsoft-sponsored party that culminated last Wednesday for the Windows XP Launch. Other than the fact that BillG's birthday is on October 28, why does it seem that a lot of significant things seem to happen to them during Halloween?
Other than the fact that working with MS software is a horrendous nightmare worthy of a horror movie in itself... :)
"The site has exceeded maximum traffic for the day." Jeez, these people ought to get an account on SourceForge for their project. At least SourceForge can weather a semi-decent slashdotting!
Is it a device to give the RIAA execs nightmares or wet dreams? We all know that the MPAA and RIAA would both like to uninvent the computer, and this sort of specialized digital entertainment box may be just the thing they need, a special-purpose device that they have near absolute control over.
We all know that digital rights management is impossible to enforce on a general-purpose computer. But on a special-purpose entertainment console like this one, it will be trivial to do so except against the most determined cracker, if it has been designed properly.
Maybe the CD writer it's got is one of those that only writes those junk CD's that you can't play on a computer...
Well, back in the mid-eighties and early nineties (if you were old enough to have a PC back then), it really was an innovative and original idea which nobody had ever thought about before. Stac Electronics also used to make data compression hardware that sat in the old ST-506 controller bus that transparently compressed and decompressed data travelling to and from the hard drive.
Never mind that it was a case of patent abuse which is something that is against the "slashdot ethos". The point is Microsoft has ever and anon gotten by with stealing ideas rather than innovating. The article talks about Microsoft setting standards. All they do is take someone else's standard and hijack it to lock the rest of the world in. Embrace, extend, annihilate.
By the way, Tim Paterson was the author of QDOS, the codebase that eventually became MS-DOS 1.0, after MS bought it from him. Gary Kildall wrote the original CP/M BIOS code, which MS ripped off in making the PC1 BIOS. Spyglass was the company that wrote the original Internet Explorer.
Everything Microsoft ever did since the very beginning was steal ideas from other people and companies and market them as their own. Ask Tim Paterson, Gary Kildall, Apple, Stac Electronics, or Spyglass. They very nearly got away with this with Java, but Sun was watchful, and now, what they're doing with C# and .NET is basically a reinvention of what Java already is. It makes me wonder if the bigwigs inside Microsoft ever had an original thought in their own heads.
Difference here is, IBM actually did set computing standards in its time. They actually did innovate a lot of things in a big way. And they had the humility to accept that while they could remain powerful and influential, they could not remain the force that drove the computing revolution.
Well, if that's his real name, it sounds to me like the name of the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi, (1810-1875), or Alphonse-Louis Constant, who was well known for his works on occultism, notably on the Tarot, and association with Freemasonry and Rosicrucian thought. "Aleph One" is a particularly apt handle for someone with that name, as Éliphas Lévi used the Hebrew letter "Aleph" to denote the first Tarot card, the Magician, in his Cabalistic studies of the cards. I dunno, perhaps his name was just a coincidence, and he got the Aleph One handle from there.