The funny thing is 'kan' can mean in Japanese a can or tin as well, if it's written using the kanji U+7F36. Oddly enough it's not one of the many wasei-eigo terms Japanese imported from English, as it's really one of the on-yomi (Chinese) readings of that kanji. The technical term for such a thing is a false cognate. It's written '', just in case Slashdot ever stops being one of the last few sites to survive to the 21st century while remaining stubbornly ignorant of Unicode.
Exactly. That's what Paul Graham meant when he said Microsoft is Dead. Sure, they've got huge revenues that dwarf those of some third-world countries, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but they're not dangerous. I'm old enough to remember the kind of fear that Microsoft inspired in the hearts of the rest of the software industry fifteen, twenty years ago. Before beginning a software venture they would ask: "What will Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from attempting to enter it and risk competing against them there. Those days are long past, and today the company that has inherited that terrifying aura is Google. This doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing. It simply means that they've turned into a stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP, no longer relevant to the leading edge of the software business.
Of course, they could make a comeback, sort of like a rock star regaining fame after decades of stagnation, or Apple before and after Steve Jobs' return, but I seriously doubt it would happen with a guy like Steve Ballmer at the head. I doubt that even Bill Gates could pull it off were he to return to the helm.
I wonder what bright soul at Microsoft thought it a good idea to extend autorun to all types of removable media. It was tolerable if annoying for CDs and DVDs, but it became downright dangerous once USB sticks and similar rewritable media were included. I wonder why they haven't decided to push an update that disables or limits the damage that this misbegotten feature can do.
In case you didn't read the summary, the project in question is GNU Go. Just in case the 'GNU' before the project name didn't tip you off, the copyright blurb for that program is: 'Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 by the Free Software Foundation.' Yes, indeed the FSF actually writes code. Who woulda thunk? A snowball will freeze in hell before we see the FSF dual-license any of their own code just to make this sort of accommodation. They have been staunch idealists since 1984.
I seem to remember that the FSF actually tangled with Steve Jobs before (in his NeXT days), and won, and so we have a Free Software Objective-C compiler:
Consider GNU Objective C. NeXT initially wanted to make this front end proprietary; they proposed to release it as.o files, and let users link them with the rest of GCC, thinking this might be a way around the GPL's requirements. But our lawyer said that this would not evade the requirements, that it was not allowed. And so they made the Objective C front end free software.
And so to this day Apple's developer suite includes a modified version of GCC, for which they provide the sources in compliance with the GPL.
The FSF's motive in this action, as in everything they do, is the promotion of the Free Software ideology. They see it as an opportunity to get Apple to ease the draconian restrictions they impose on the App Store. Now, Apple is free to impose whatever restrictions it likes, but if they're not careful, they can step on other people like this. That's the downside to being platform dictator. Apple can possibly weasel around the GPL violation they seem to be guilty of by directing the action to the developer somehow. If they can't do this, and go to court, and lose (which is not outside the realm of possibility since they imposed additional restrictions in violation of section 6 of the GPLv2 which applies to GNU Go 3.6 and below, or section 10 of GPLv3 which applies to GNU Go 3.8), the FSF will have gotten a bunch of cash for their troubles. If Apple settles and eases restrictions, that would be even better for the FSF's mission. No one yet has been motivated enough to actually fight the FSF in court over a GPL violation, but if it comes to that Apple just might, given that what's at stake here is their business model for the App Store. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
If you mean Wintermute, Wintermute has no innate personality, and just steals stuff from Case's brain to place a veneer of personality over himself. He most often appeared to Case as the Finn, and I don't think that'd be a good role for Keanu unless he's grown short, fat, and buck-toothed since I last saw him. And as for Neuromancer, he appears as a Brazilian youth. I doubt that would work. Keanu's so white his eyes look like two piss-holes in a snowbank...
It's not so much that no one wants to do them (although this is true to a degree), but that most people, especially managers, never consider that making quality documentation and obeying procedures takes time and effort, sometimes almost as much as developing the software itself. IT professionals are almost always under unrealistic deadlines to get the project finished and working and so these "non-essentials" are among the first things to fall by the wayside when the project meets a looming deadline. This is the main reason people don't want to do them: they don't directly contribute to the "real" work that is visible to the end users of the project, and as such are considered expendable. Eventually the whole project becomes nothing but kludge piled upon kludge, and the only fix is to start over, again repeating the same mistakes that brought the system to that pass.
How different then, would doing this kind of thing be from installing Linux on a PocketPC/Windows CE device such as an iPaq? Yes, that is possible, but it is far from straightforward. I imagine the device is significantly different from a standard PC and more like a PocketPC-based ARM handheld or smartphone, and one ought to be considering it as such. I assume that such a device will not have some Palladium-like trusted computing system similar to what one sees in some gaming consoles which prevents one from easily changing the OS arbitrarily, but even so, getting everything to work is likely to be a major chore.
Paul Graham also writes that it might actually be possible to buy a Silicon Valley, or something very close to it, by investing a billion dollars or so in a city with the right environment that will be conducive to the growth of startups. Perhaps someone in Russia read Graham's article and decided that they had the kind of political will (which Graham says is so unlikely) to pull it off.
True, however the United States of America, the nation as it was conceived by the Founding Fathers, was also very much based upon the idea of religious tolerance. It was precisely because of this that the United States managed to attract the best and brightest in the past: that people could be assured of their safety regardless of their own personal religious beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, it seems that increasingly growing and vocal groups are all set to overturn this longstanding principle...
I actually submitted a story on this exact same topic back in 2007. The only thing new they seem to have now is a nicer picture, the article seems much lighter than the original article I linked to three years ago. The new article doesn't seem to indicate any new science that has developed since then, not even links or mentions of any new publications updating the findings in 2007, or even mentions of the scientists who are behind this work...
Have you tried reading The Children of Húrin? It's the only one of Tolkien's tales from The Silmarillion that was published in full novel form so far (although I do hope that the tale of Beren and Lúthien eventually gets the same treatment someday), albeit edited by his son Christopher. I think it stands well against Tolkien's other works, even with his son's editorial hand on it. It would make an excellent movie if done right, with all the grandeur of a Wagnerian opera, and it certainly would be a lot easier to turn into a film than The Lord of the Rings ever was. However, the tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor Níniel is probably too tragic for today's Hollywood. They could include Túrin's reappearance at the Dagor Dagorath as its epilogue if the tragedy is too much...
Which is missing the point. Haven't you ever wondered what's really in that 11k of machine code, and what it actually does? We've gotten so insulated from the lower levels of our computers that we no longer really understand how they do something so basic as terminating their own execution. The article felt more to me like an expository attempt to shed light on some of the things that libc has to do for us, rather than practical advice on attempting to make our programs smaller.
The summary could have put in a word about how MagicJack sued for defamation after Boing Boing made a post highly critical of their EULA, before explaining how the judge shot their suit down as a SLAPP...
Well, one could also use the imaginary colors that correspond to those particular combinations of cone cell responses in the human eye which cannot be produced by any physical source of light. The human eye has three types of color-sensitive cone cells, short-wavelength (blue), medium-wavelength (green), and long-wavelength (red). The trouble is, the spectral sensitivity of these three types of cone cells overlap, so any physical source of light would probably excite at least two, most likely all three types of cones at once, to greater or lesser degrees. The upshot of this is that are some combinations of cone cell responses that cannot be produced by any physical source of light. For example, a hypothetical light source that excited only the medium-wavelength cones would correspond to a shade of very deep green, but such a light source would require a spectral power distribution with positive power in the green area of the spectrum and impossible negative power in the red and blue areas.
In short, with artificial color receptors it may be possible to simulate the cone cell responses that would have generated imaginary colors to mean wavelengths outside of the normal human visual spectrum. Or alternatively change color perception entirely with non-overlapping spectral-sensitivity curves that cover a much wider band of the electromagnetic spectrum. You'd perceive color quite differently from normal people in this case though, and that might cause trouble.
We tend to forget that color doesn't really have a physical reality. It's an ongoing philosophical debate whether color is actually a feature of the world we perceive or a feature of our perception of the world. Replacing our sense organs in this fashion is sure to add more fuel to this debate.
I myself had most of my primary and secondary education at Roman Catholic school, and one of the things they taught us in religious classes is that the conflict between science and religion is completely bogus. Science is there to answer the how of the universe, whereas religion is there to answer the why. It is unimportant that the ancient Sumerian cosmology reflected in the Old Testament creation stories is at odds with the findings of modern-day science, that's not the point. The point behind the creation story is not to explain how man and the universe came to be, but rather why they came to be, and their purpose. It seems that this was how the Catholic Church came to resolve its once-turbulent relationship to science since the days of Galileo. As Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI has said:
We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. (emphasis mine)
Further, he says in a book published in 2008:
The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity.
The Catholic Church seems to have come a long way since the 17th Century. Unfortunately, it looks like fundamentalist Christians in the United States are all set to repeat many of the mistakes made by the Catholic Church back then, but with far greater matters at stake than the life and reputation of an old scientist.
Very true. The hardest problem on the Internet is not finding reliable information, but determining whether any given bit of information you managed to dredge up is reliable or not. No search engine can know whether any page it turns up is worth the electrons used to transmit it to you, so having the skill to discriminate between useful information and balderdash (i.e. having a well-tuned bullshit meter), is very valuable in this day and age.
If Apple were in allegiance with Microsoft, we'd have Apple becoming subservient to Microsoft. I think the word here should be alliance, as allies are partners working together, and generally should treat each other as equals. However, given Microsoft's history of treating its "allies", the word 'allegiance' may well become more apt as well.
Turning sand into uranium or turning lead into gold is a trifle harder than shifting a few electrons around, as the alchemists found out early on. To do that you'd have to shift a not electrons, but protons and neutrons around, and that is a LOT harder. At that point, you're dealing with the force that keeps a lot of positively-charged protons together in a very small space, overcoming their electromagnetic repulsion. They don't call it the Strong Nuclear Force for nothing. No, even with that level of nanotech energy would still be a problem. It always is. TANSTAAFL.
Lots of third-world ISPs, and many ISPs that provide mobile Internet do this. I remember a presentation on the evils of NAT in APRICOT 2004 where the presenter mentioned that the entire IP allocation for an African country (I forget which), was a single/24, and so they had no choice but to NAT all of their subscribers. I use an EMobile wireless dongle when I'm in Japan and that didn't give me a public IP address either. The same is true of all the other UMTS/3G/HSDPA-based Internet providers I've used (Smart and Globe in the Philippines). RFC 1918 space all the way. Some consumer DSL providers here in the Philippines do NAT as well (Globe consumer DSL and some plans provided by PLDT), although many still provide dynamically assigned public IP addresses. I imagine the number of ISPs that do NAT can only increase in the years ahead.
Re:And this is a nearly unsolveable problem.
on
GSM Decryption Published
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But doing that would expose them to some level of accountability for their actions, at least for those governments that still pretend at the game of democracy. Weak crypto gives them the ability to surreptitiously snoop on anyone's communications without any accountability. Unfortunately, it also gives everyone with technical know-how the same ability as well, so they are engaged in the Sisyphean task of restricting the flow of technical information in the age of the Internet. Lots of luck to them there. Making it illegal isn't going to stop criminals who are already engaged in serious criminal behavior to begin with.
But then again perhaps I'm attributing to malice that which can be explained more easily by stupidity...
Then why does this related graph show a steady decline in all versions of Internet Explorer? If IE8 is really just cannibalizing IE7 and IE6, hence their decline and IE8's growth, then shouldn't the IE plot be flat or increasing? However, the graph shows IE's market share in steady decline since at least the fourth quarter of 2008, while Firefox has shown a slow increase throughout that same time period. It is obvious that the high uptake of Firefox 3.5 in this period is largely due to people updating from 3.0, but from the other graph it is just clear that IE as a whole is steadily losing users, probably to either Firefox or Chrome.
Slashdot Mirror
The funny thing is 'kan' can mean in Japanese a can or tin as well, if it's written using the kanji U+7F36. Oddly enough it's not one of the many wasei-eigo terms Japanese imported from English, as it's really one of the on-yomi (Chinese) readings of that kanji. The technical term for such a thing is a false cognate. It's written '', just in case Slashdot ever stops being one of the last few sites to survive to the 21st century while remaining stubbornly ignorant of Unicode.
Exactly. That's what Paul Graham meant when he said Microsoft is Dead. Sure, they've got huge revenues that dwarf those of some third-world countries, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but they're not dangerous. I'm old enough to remember the kind of fear that Microsoft inspired in the hearts of the rest of the software industry fifteen, twenty years ago. Before beginning a software venture they would ask: "What will Microsoft do in response to this?" and even the vaguest hint that Microsoft was getting into some field would be sufficient to dissuade the faint of heart from attempting to enter it and risk competing against them there. Those days are long past, and today the company that has inherited that terrifying aura is Google. This doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft will cease being profitable or even that they'll stop growing. It simply means that they've turned into a stable, stolid, boring company like IBM or SAP, no longer relevant to the leading edge of the software business.
Of course, they could make a comeback, sort of like a rock star regaining fame after decades of stagnation, or Apple before and after Steve Jobs' return, but I seriously doubt it would happen with a guy like Steve Ballmer at the head. I doubt that even Bill Gates could pull it off were he to return to the helm.
I wonder what bright soul at Microsoft thought it a good idea to extend autorun to all types of removable media. It was tolerable if annoying for CDs and DVDs, but it became downright dangerous once USB sticks and similar rewritable media were included. I wonder why they haven't decided to push an update that disables or limits the damage that this misbegotten feature can do.
In case you didn't read the summary, the project in question is GNU Go. Just in case the 'GNU' before the project name didn't tip you off, the copyright blurb for that program is: 'Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 by the Free Software Foundation.' Yes, indeed the FSF actually writes code. Who woulda thunk? A snowball will freeze in hell before we see the FSF dual-license any of their own code just to make this sort of accommodation. They have been staunch idealists since 1984.
I seem to remember that the FSF actually tangled with Steve Jobs before (in his NeXT days), and won, and so we have a Free Software Objective-C compiler:
And so to this day Apple's developer suite includes a modified version of GCC, for which they provide the sources in compliance with the GPL.
The FSF's motive in this action, as in everything they do, is the promotion of the Free Software ideology. They see it as an opportunity to get Apple to ease the draconian restrictions they impose on the App Store. Now, Apple is free to impose whatever restrictions it likes, but if they're not careful, they can step on other people like this. That's the downside to being platform dictator. Apple can possibly weasel around the GPL violation they seem to be guilty of by directing the action to the developer somehow. If they can't do this, and go to court, and lose (which is not outside the realm of possibility since they imposed additional restrictions in violation of section 6 of the GPLv2 which applies to GNU Go 3.6 and below, or section 10 of GPLv3 which applies to GNU Go 3.8), the FSF will have gotten a bunch of cash for their troubles. If Apple settles and eases restrictions, that would be even better for the FSF's mission. No one yet has been motivated enough to actually fight the FSF in court over a GPL violation, but if it comes to that Apple just might, given that what's at stake here is their business model for the App Store. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
If you mean Wintermute, Wintermute has no innate personality, and just steals stuff from Case's brain to place a veneer of personality over himself. He most often appeared to Case as the Finn, and I don't think that'd be a good role for Keanu unless he's grown short, fat, and buck-toothed since I last saw him. And as for Neuromancer, he appears as a Brazilian youth. I doubt that would work. Keanu's so white his eyes look like two piss-holes in a snowbank...
It's not so much that no one wants to do them (although this is true to a degree), but that most people, especially managers, never consider that making quality documentation and obeying procedures takes time and effort, sometimes almost as much as developing the software itself. IT professionals are almost always under unrealistic deadlines to get the project finished and working and so these "non-essentials" are among the first things to fall by the wayside when the project meets a looming deadline. This is the main reason people don't want to do them: they don't directly contribute to the "real" work that is visible to the end users of the project, and as such are considered expendable. Eventually the whole project becomes nothing but kludge piled upon kludge, and the only fix is to start over, again repeating the same mistakes that brought the system to that pass.
How different then, would doing this kind of thing be from installing Linux on a PocketPC/Windows CE device such as an iPaq? Yes, that is possible, but it is far from straightforward. I imagine the device is significantly different from a standard PC and more like a PocketPC-based ARM handheld or smartphone, and one ought to be considering it as such. I assume that such a device will not have some Palladium-like trusted computing system similar to what one sees in some gaming consoles which prevents one from easily changing the OS arbitrarily, but even so, getting everything to work is likely to be a major chore.
Paul Graham also writes that it might actually be possible to buy a Silicon Valley, or something very close to it, by investing a billion dollars or so in a city with the right environment that will be conducive to the growth of startups. Perhaps someone in Russia read Graham's article and decided that they had the kind of political will (which Graham says is so unlikely) to pull it off.
True, however the United States of America, the nation as it was conceived by the Founding Fathers, was also very much based upon the idea of religious tolerance. It was precisely because of this that the United States managed to attract the best and brightest in the past: that people could be assured of their safety regardless of their own personal religious beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, it seems that increasingly growing and vocal groups are all set to overturn this longstanding principle...
Trammel or Felluca?
I actually submitted a story on this exact same topic back in 2007. The only thing new they seem to have now is a nicer picture, the article seems much lighter than the original article I linked to three years ago. The new article doesn't seem to indicate any new science that has developed since then, not even links or mentions of any new publications updating the findings in 2007, or even mentions of the scientists who are behind this work...
Have you tried reading The Children of Húrin ? It's the only one of Tolkien's tales from The Silmarillion that was published in full novel form so far (although I do hope that the tale of Beren and Lúthien eventually gets the same treatment someday), albeit edited by his son Christopher. I think it stands well against Tolkien's other works, even with his son's editorial hand on it. It would make an excellent movie if done right, with all the grandeur of a Wagnerian opera, and it certainly would be a lot easier to turn into a film than The Lord of the Rings ever was. However, the tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor Níniel is probably too tragic for today's Hollywood. They could include Túrin's reappearance at the Dagor Dagorath as its epilogue if the tragedy is too much...
Which is missing the point. Haven't you ever wondered what's really in that 11k of machine code, and what it actually does? We've gotten so insulated from the lower levels of our computers that we no longer really understand how they do something so basic as terminating their own execution. The article felt more to me like an expository attempt to shed light on some of the things that libc has to do for us, rather than practical advice on attempting to make our programs smaller.
Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, Op. 49. I'd like to hear them play that on the 5th of November at the Houses of Parliament...
The summary could have put in a word about how MagicJack sued for defamation after Boing Boing made a post highly critical of their EULA, before explaining how the judge shot their suit down as a SLAPP...
Well, one could also use the imaginary colors that correspond to those particular combinations of cone cell responses in the human eye which cannot be produced by any physical source of light. The human eye has three types of color-sensitive cone cells, short-wavelength (blue), medium-wavelength (green), and long-wavelength (red). The trouble is, the spectral sensitivity of these three types of cone cells overlap, so any physical source of light would probably excite at least two, most likely all three types of cones at once, to greater or lesser degrees. The upshot of this is that are some combinations of cone cell responses that cannot be produced by any physical source of light. For example, a hypothetical light source that excited only the medium-wavelength cones would correspond to a shade of very deep green, but such a light source would require a spectral power distribution with positive power in the green area of the spectrum and impossible negative power in the red and blue areas.
In short, with artificial color receptors it may be possible to simulate the cone cell responses that would have generated imaginary colors to mean wavelengths outside of the normal human visual spectrum. Or alternatively change color perception entirely with non-overlapping spectral-sensitivity curves that cover a much wider band of the electromagnetic spectrum. You'd perceive color quite differently from normal people in this case though, and that might cause trouble.
We tend to forget that color doesn't really have a physical reality. It's an ongoing philosophical debate whether color is actually a feature of the world we perceive or a feature of our perception of the world. Replacing our sense organs in this fashion is sure to add more fuel to this debate.
I myself had most of my primary and secondary education at Roman Catholic school, and one of the things they taught us in religious classes is that the conflict between science and religion is completely bogus. Science is there to answer the how of the universe, whereas religion is there to answer the why. It is unimportant that the ancient Sumerian cosmology reflected in the Old Testament creation stories is at odds with the findings of modern-day science, that's not the point. The point behind the creation story is not to explain how man and the universe came to be, but rather why they came to be, and their purpose. It seems that this was how the Catholic Church came to resolve its once-turbulent relationship to science since the days of Galileo. As Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI has said:
Further, he says in a book published in 2008:
The Catholic Church seems to have come a long way since the 17th Century. Unfortunately, it looks like fundamentalist Christians in the United States are all set to repeat many of the mistakes made by the Catholic Church back then, but with far greater matters at stake than the life and reputation of an old scientist.
Very true. The hardest problem on the Internet is not finding reliable information, but determining whether any given bit of information you managed to dredge up is reliable or not. No search engine can know whether any page it turns up is worth the electrons used to transmit it to you, so having the skill to discriminate between useful information and balderdash (i.e. having a well-tuned bullshit meter), is very valuable in this day and age.
If Apple were in allegiance with Microsoft, we'd have Apple becoming subservient to Microsoft. I think the word here should be alliance, as allies are partners working together, and generally should treat each other as equals. However, given Microsoft's history of treating its "allies", the word 'allegiance' may well become more apt as well.
Turning sand into uranium or turning lead into gold is a trifle harder than shifting a few electrons around, as the alchemists found out early on. To do that you'd have to shift a not electrons, but protons and neutrons around, and that is a LOT harder. At that point, you're dealing with the force that keeps a lot of positively-charged protons together in a very small space, overcoming their electromagnetic repulsion. They don't call it the Strong Nuclear Force for nothing. No, even with that level of nanotech energy would still be a problem. It always is. TANSTAAFL.
Also, the fact that the author's name is Jonathan Thomas is just too good to pass up.
For more information on these I suggest reading this article. The metric expansion of space is much more complicated.
Lots of third-world ISPs, and many ISPs that provide mobile Internet do this. I remember a presentation on the evils of NAT in APRICOT 2004 where the presenter mentioned that the entire IP allocation for an African country (I forget which), was a single /24, and so they had no choice but to NAT all of their subscribers. I use an EMobile wireless dongle when I'm in Japan and that didn't give me a public IP address either. The same is true of all the other UMTS/3G/HSDPA-based Internet providers I've used (Smart and Globe in the Philippines). RFC 1918 space all the way. Some consumer DSL providers here in the Philippines do NAT as well (Globe consumer DSL and some plans provided by PLDT), although many still provide dynamically assigned public IP addresses. I imagine the number of ISPs that do NAT can only increase in the years ahead.
But doing that would expose them to some level of accountability for their actions, at least for those governments that still pretend at the game of democracy. Weak crypto gives them the ability to surreptitiously snoop on anyone's communications without any accountability. Unfortunately, it also gives everyone with technical know-how the same ability as well, so they are engaged in the Sisyphean task of restricting the flow of technical information in the age of the Internet. Lots of luck to them there. Making it illegal isn't going to stop criminals who are already engaged in serious criminal behavior to begin with.
But then again perhaps I'm attributing to malice that which can be explained more easily by stupidity...
Then why does this related graph show a steady decline in all versions of Internet Explorer? If IE8 is really just cannibalizing IE7 and IE6, hence their decline and IE8's growth, then shouldn't the IE plot be flat or increasing? However, the graph shows IE's market share in steady decline since at least the fourth quarter of 2008, while Firefox has shown a slow increase throughout that same time period. It is obvious that the high uptake of Firefox 3.5 in this period is largely due to people updating from 3.0, but from the other graph it is just clear that IE as a whole is steadily losing users, probably to either Firefox or Chrome.