Who said anything about Microsoft? The name "M$" is clearly a regular expression, so he's running something which ends in "M".
I'm guessing it's tfo$orciM.
Fiduciary duty: includes a healthy business model
on
Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They have a responsibility to their shareholders to do everything they can to protect a) their investment in creating the DRM in the first place, and b) the value of their licensed software and agreements with publishers.
Well, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to deliver a good return on investment.
You can try doing that in multiple ways. One of them is fighting a losing battle tooth and nail, another is coming up with a business model that works well in the environment it'll execute in.
I'm not saying Adobe is at one extreme and should move to the other. But you have to wonder whether fighting the DRM war is ultimately good or bad for business. If it's bad, not fighting it is their shareholder responsibility.
GPL vs. DRM: DRM goes against the copyright spirit
on
Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The thing is, the legal framework, the right of the copyright holder to issue a license, is the same for software with DRM as it is without.
As I understand it, the purpose of copyright is to secure for creators a limited time monopoly on the rights necessary for selling the creation, in return for them eventually enriching the cultural (and, in the case of software, technological) commons.
Some kinds of DRM prevent or obstruct use of the work in such a way that when the work enters the public domain, it doesn't enrich the commons in practice. It's like being given a car wreck that's in really bad shape: sure you can sell it as scrap metal, but it's worth so little that you're better off ignoring it.
For this reason, I think one can argue that DRM (with certain properties) goes against the spirit and purpose of copyright law, and the argument doesn't apply to GPL'ed software.
Show me any computer setup that can have my show on the screen in the time it takes for me to get home tired from work, toss my shoes off, plop on the couch and just press "on" one time to be where I want to be.
Show me any TV setup where I can view all back episodes of all aired shows ever, at the click of a few buttons and a little patience.
In fact, show me a TV that sends me 16:34 news when I want them at 16:34, and also sends 17:08 news when my neighbor wants them at 17:08.
Show me a TV that I can pause. Show me a TV I can carry into my kitchen and watch while I cook. Show me a TV I can have in my airplane hand luggage.
I'm not trying to be rabid pro-computer or anti-TV. Both have their strengths, and I happen prefer those of the computer.
Really? What I hear people say at various security conferences is that you don't go through the crypto, but around it. You scan the guy's disk for things that looks like a password, then you try all of them. Or you do a timing attack. Or you...
None of it breaks the mathematical properties of the encryption function. Why do we need new mathematics?
There's a lot of arguing back and forth about whether the government should use plain language.
The argument for is that then everybody can understand the law better; the argument against is that plain language tends to be ambiguous and the laws are complex in nature.
I conjecture the following: plain language can be used to describe complex systems in unambiguous ways (to the extent the systems are unambiguous, at least).
As a starting analogy, consider lambda calculus: you have three rewriting rules (variable renaming, function evaluation and eta conversion) which turn out to be turing complete: simple language, complex systems.
As another example, consider simple.wikipedia.org: it attempts to describe everything the "normal" wikipedia describes, but in a simpler language.
Regarding legislation: there has got to be some amount of complexity which is not really necessary and can be stripped away.
Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.
Erm... what problem is being solved by this?
If you want to know whether the kids are in class, as opposed to in school, you have to look in every classroom. Except that it doesn't really work; you have to look where the students are supposed to be, which the system may not know (or be able to adapt to).
Is it fire safety and evacuation? So you have one of these machines at every exit, and it can perfectly well identify everyone in a screaming running horde of people?
It doesn't seem to solve any useful problem. Does anyone know what it's intended to accomplish, and whether it actually accomplishes anything?
When I first started building multi-OS compatible webpages, I decided I wanted them to be compatible with everything. That means...
What, no support for elinks or w3m-mode?:(
I'm not even... well, I'm not 100% joking. Sometimes I ssh to my university and use elinks to browse the web from there (for instance, when I need to come from a university computer to download articles from SpringerLink, or when my fucking ISP blocks the pirate bay and I want to read their blog about the trial, or download the audio recordings).
The FreeBSD license is much less restrictive than the GPL and wouldn't be broken by most, if not all, cross licensing.
Well, that depends on the licensing deal.
Let's say Tom Tom only uses BSD-licensed code, and gets a license from MS to redistribute the code as much as they want, royalty-free.
Well, that must mean MS has a patent on something in (say) FreeBSD. They then go around and sue FreeBSD for patent violation, and demand royalty from any distribution of the code.
Now Microsoft "owns" FreeBSD and can decide who it will be "sold" to, and how much Microsoft earns for "selling" it.
I think that's broken. You apparently disagree. Is that appearance real?
Old school: Go undercover/hit the streets to round up prostitutes. New school: Login in to www.craiglisst.com from the comfort of the squad room, set up a date, make arrest. Rinse, repeat.
How about New new school:
Make the damn thing legal, it's just sex and money in one happy exchange voluntarily entered into by both parties.
Why is it illegal? Because some puritan has the power to decide what "[You] the people" is allowed to do? Because it's to protect the women (I'm sure there are no male prostitutes) from the dangers of the trade (yeah, PMITA prison is a step up...)? Undressing for money is fine, but undressing and doing the next logical thing is not?:-?
To say nothing of eliminating the need to configure an ftp server.
You could still have an interface that says "send this file" which runs FTP and automagically configures it.
It's not like the various IM protocols are particularly chatty about what your firewall should and shouldn't do.
In the worst case, you could use HTTP instead over some high port, and send the other party some "download-from-here" message.
There was no need to reinvent the file transfer wheel. Also, the braindeadness of having to go through their servers (for MSN at least) when one party has a public IP address is just astonishing. And I don't have the source, so I can't fix their drain bamage:(
It just sucks ass, that's what it does.
IMHO, IM file transefer ability is a nice feature and not just a new wheel.
What's a nice feature is the "send file" button that works and is easy. What's dumb is that it works like shit compared to what it could have been, and that it works with "Our New Round Thing" instead of a bog standard wheel.
Is it me or is that not exactly a huge innovation?
Haven't you read other news in IT lately?
MSN msgr, Yahoo chat, ICQ, Google talk et al. all reinvented IRC each in their own mutually incompatible way. Then they added file transfer that wasn't FTP.
Web 2.0 is a reinvention of the mainframe with thin clients on dumb terminals. JavaScript is becoming a reinvention of python, except with curlies. JSON is a reinvention of XML, which is a reinvention of s-expressions.
Next up, someone's going to reinvent the business process of reinventing the wheel in slightly different and incompatible ways ("for added value", of course) and patent the method. Hey, that'd be a good use of business method patents.
Executable code should not be embedded in documents
Why not? Seriously, why not?
The real problem, IMNSHO, is not that there's code, but that the code is allowed to do other things than to just compute stuff.
I'm not really sure why you'd want documents to contain code, but I can imagine someone might want to say "the first 20 primes are 2, 3,..." and have the computation done at "run"-time. Or at least, something else interesting that exceeds the capabilities of easily analyzable language classes (regular, context-free).
The badness happens when document-embedded code can read my file system, write to my file system, run other programs that are outside its own sandbox, or talk to others via the network.
(I think the Java security model tried to do approximately this.)
As a way to attack parts of the problem, perhaps document readers should just run the format interpretation code in a process which drops all unnecessary capabilities?
At least in principle, being able to compute doesn't mean being able to violate your security concerns.
In haskell terms, none of the code inside a document should have the type `IO a', and then you'd be safe (assuming of course that unsafePerformIO and the like didn't exist).
as vendors try to find the division of features that maximizes their returns (which is an instance of the NP-Complete "integer programming problem", only approximations are practical)
Deciding four-colorability of planar graphs is O(1)---that's the famous Four Color Theorem---so it's in P so it's in NP so it reduces to SAT, integer linear programming and god knows what else.
Does that mean that only approximations to "bool fourcolorable(graph_t *G) { return true; }" are practical? Return true some of the time? I think it looks perfectly practical. In fact, it scales perfectly to any number of graphs;-)
If you're claiming that integer linear programming reduces to "Vista Segmentation" and thus is NP complete (rather than just being in NP), I'd like to see a proof. No [citation needed], on slashpedia you can submit your own original research:)
Interesting how stories spin out differently depending on the browser in question.
Humans aren't perfectly reasoned or objective, nor do they apply the same standards fairly to everyone and everything. More news at 11;)
What would be interesting to point out is why we treat FF better than IE (the interesting question is always "why?").
I think it's fair of "us" to hate IE, because we are the ones suffering from its bad security. We are the ones who have to clean up after the messes that IE allows others to make. Instead of MS making their browser less flammable, they have us put out unnecessary fires.
With FF, we could (ostensible) take control ourselves and fix the damn thing. With FF, we have the power to solve a hard problem once instead of a dumb one n times.
(and of course, there's nothing you can do to secure users from their own willingness to trust untrustworthy people, but that's true for both browsers.)
When bad IE security causes us pain and good FF security causes us relief, is it any surprise we shame IE for having the bugs while applauding FF for fixing the bugs?
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue and all the memory leaks.
I have the exact opposite experience.
My firefox currently uses 13% of my 2 GB, which is 266 MB. Sometimes it becomes horribly slow.
Even if it crept up to 500 MB, I wouldn't mind much (I'm using almost 1 GB of core and 800 megs of cache ATM). If it was always fast and snappy, I'd be much happier.
I mean, come on---I'm having 50-60 tabs open but I'm only looking at one at any given moment in time...
Also, when it restores the last session, why doesn't it load the tabs in MRU order? Does it think I want to look at the tab that's been stale for two weeks?
Fix the raw speed and be smart about CPU allocation so it does the important things first and appears faster. Then fix the memory.
Slashdot Mirror
~$ python myprogram.py
A sufficiently clever user could use an interpreter to write his own dynamic linker and thereby run binaries too.
And you can compile C to MIPS code with GCC, and then run the MIPS code in Java using NestedVM.
Or you could convert everything to a bash script ;)
Who said anything about Microsoft? The name "M$" is clearly a regular expression, so he's running something which ends in "M".
I'm guessing it's tfo$orciM.
They have a responsibility to their shareholders to do everything they can to protect a) their investment in creating the DRM in the first place, and b) the value of their licensed software and agreements with publishers.
Well, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to deliver a good return on investment.
You can try doing that in multiple ways. One of them is fighting a losing battle tooth and nail, another is coming up with a business model that works well in the environment it'll execute in.
I'm not saying Adobe is at one extreme and should move to the other. But you have to wonder whether fighting the DRM war is ultimately good or bad for business. If it's bad, not fighting it is their shareholder responsibility.
The thing is, the legal framework, the right of the copyright holder to issue a license, is the same for software with DRM as it is without.
As I understand it, the purpose of copyright is to secure for creators a limited time monopoly on the rights necessary for selling the creation, in return for them eventually enriching the cultural (and, in the case of software, technological) commons.
Some kinds of DRM prevent or obstruct use of the work in such a way that when the work enters the public domain, it doesn't enrich the commons in practice. It's like being given a car wreck that's in really bad shape: sure you can sell it as scrap metal, but it's worth so little that you're better off ignoring it.
For this reason, I think one can argue that DRM (with certain properties) goes against the spirit and purpose of copyright law, and the argument doesn't apply to GPL'ed software.
If you go read the article (I-must-be-new-here), you'll note that it says
"By Ãyvind Solstad â March 26, 2008".
(in slashcode still doesn't handle unicode, it's "(Oslash)-yvind" and "solstad (groupoperation) March").
The news are almost a year old. That taken into account, I hope it's a dupe ;)
But in any case, it's good news, so keep on celebrating.
Once they have flattened the country
That's going to take a while, what with all the skiing mountains...
Show me any computer setup that can have my show on the screen in the time it takes for me to get home tired from work, toss my shoes off, plop on the couch and just press "on" one time to be where I want to be.
Show me any TV setup where I can view all back episodes of all aired shows ever, at the click of a few buttons and a little patience.
In fact, show me a TV that sends me 16:34 news when I want them at 16:34, and also sends 17:08 news when my neighbor wants them at 17:08.
Show me a TV that I can pause. Show me a TV I can carry into my kitchen and watch while I cook. Show me a TV I can have in my airplane hand luggage.
I'm not trying to be rabid pro-computer or anti-TV. Both have their strengths, and I happen prefer those of the computer.
This post brought to you by Fair And Balanced.
developing new and improved encryption systems
Really? What I hear people say at various security conferences is that you don't go through the crypto, but around it. You scan the guy's disk for things that looks like a password, then you try all of them. Or you do a timing attack. Or you...
None of it breaks the mathematical properties of the encryption function. Why do we need new mathematics?
Married a chick from Eastern Europe [...] Will we get Viagra or Britney Spears Perfume advertising?
File systems ;-)
There's a lot of arguing back and forth about whether the government should use plain language.
The argument for is that then everybody can understand the law better; the argument against is that plain language tends to be ambiguous and the laws are complex in nature.
I conjecture the following: plain language can be used to describe complex systems in unambiguous ways (to the extent the systems are unambiguous, at least).
As a starting analogy, consider lambda calculus: you have three rewriting rules (variable renaming, function evaluation and eta conversion) which turn out to be turing complete: simple language, complex systems.
As another example, consider simple.wikipedia.org: it attempts to describe everything the "normal" wikipedia describes, but in a simpler language.
Regarding legislation: there has got to be some amount of complexity which is not really necessary and can be stripped away.
Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.
Erm... what problem is being solved by this?
If you want to know whether the kids are in class, as opposed to in school, you have to look in every classroom. Except that it doesn't really work; you have to look where the students are supposed to be, which the system may not know (or be able to adapt to).
Is it fire safety and evacuation? So you have one of these machines at every exit, and it can perfectly well identify everyone in a screaming running horde of people?
It doesn't seem to solve any useful problem. Does anyone know what it's intended to accomplish, and whether it actually accomplishes anything?
When I first started building multi-OS compatible webpages, I decided I wanted them to be compatible with everything. That means...
What, no support for elinks or w3m-mode? :(
I'm not even... well, I'm not 100% joking. Sometimes I ssh to my university and use elinks to browse the web from there (for instance, when I need to come from a university computer to download articles from SpringerLink, or when my fucking ISP blocks the pirate bay and I want to read their blog about the trial, or download the audio recordings).
Maybe the second m was just a typo? ;-)
The FreeBSD license is much less restrictive than the GPL and wouldn't be broken by most, if not all, cross licensing.
Well, that depends on the licensing deal.
Let's say Tom Tom only uses BSD-licensed code, and gets a license from MS to redistribute the code as much as they want, royalty-free.
Well, that must mean MS has a patent on something in (say) FreeBSD. They then go around and sue FreeBSD for patent violation, and demand royalty from any distribution of the code.
Now Microsoft "owns" FreeBSD and can decide who it will be "sold" to, and how much Microsoft earns for "selling" it.
I think that's broken. You apparently disagree. Is that appearance real?
Let me guess. You don't get laid much.
Why the fuck are you saying this on slashdot?
Old school: Go undercover/hit the streets to round up prostitutes.
New school: Login in to www.craiglisst.com from the comfort of the squad room, set up a date, make arrest. Rinse, repeat.
How about New new school:
Make the damn thing legal, it's just sex and money in one happy exchange voluntarily entered into by both parties.
Why is it illegal? Because some puritan has the power to decide what "[You] the people" is allowed to do? Because it's to protect the women (I'm sure there are no male prostitutes) from the dangers of the trade (yeah, PMITA prison is a step up...)? Undressing for money is fine, but undressing and doing the next logical thing is not? :-?
they'll truly know what it means to be excetuted. Bastart.
Broke That For You.
Hahaha fuck no. [...]
Yeah okay, XML sucks more ass and has been overused. But it has been put (among others) to the same use JSON is being put.
Wait, is that JHTML I see coming, with JSON style sheets and JSON-modifying JSON and embedded lambda calculus and... :(
To say nothing of eliminating the need to configure an ftp server.
You could still have an interface that says "send this file" which runs FTP and automagically configures it.
It's not like the various IM protocols are particularly chatty about what your firewall should and shouldn't do.
In the worst case, you could use HTTP instead over some high port, and send the other party some "download-from-here" message.
There was no need to reinvent the file transfer wheel. Also, the braindeadness of having to go through their servers (for MSN at least) when one party has a public IP address is just astonishing. And I don't have the source, so I can't fix their drain bamage :(
It just sucks ass, that's what it does.
IMHO, IM file transefer ability is a nice feature and not just a new wheel.
What's a nice feature is the "send file" button that works and is easy. What's dumb is that it works like shit compared to what it could have been, and that it works with "Our New Round Thing" instead of a bog standard wheel.
Is it me or is that not exactly a huge innovation?
Haven't you read other news in IT lately?
MSN msgr, Yahoo chat, ICQ, Google talk et al. all reinvented IRC each in their own mutually incompatible way. Then they added file transfer that wasn't FTP.
Web 2.0 is a reinvention of the mainframe with thin clients on dumb terminals. JavaScript is becoming a reinvention of python, except with curlies. JSON is a reinvention of XML, which is a reinvention of s-expressions.
Next up, someone's going to reinvent the business process of reinventing the wheel in slightly different and incompatible ways ("for added value", of course) and patent the method. Hey, that'd be a good use of business method patents.
Can you tell I'm bitter? ;)
Executable code should not be embedded in documents
Why not? Seriously, why not?
The real problem, IMNSHO, is not that there's code, but that the code is allowed to do other things than to just compute stuff.
I'm not really sure why you'd want documents to contain code, but I can imagine someone might want to say "the first 20 primes are 2, 3, ..." and have the computation done at "run"-time. Or at least, something else interesting that exceeds the capabilities of easily analyzable language classes (regular, context-free).
The badness happens when document-embedded code can read my file system, write to my file system, run other programs that are outside its own sandbox, or talk to others via the network.
(I think the Java security model tried to do approximately this.)
As a way to attack parts of the problem, perhaps document readers should just run the format interpretation code in a process which drops all unnecessary capabilities?
At least in principle, being able to compute doesn't mean being able to violate your security concerns.
In haskell terms, none of the code inside a document should have the type `IO a', and then you'd be safe (assuming of course that unsafePerformIO and the like didn't exist).
as vendors try to find the division of features that maximizes their returns (which is an instance of the NP-Complete "integer programming problem", only approximations are practical)
Deciding four-colorability of planar graphs is O(1)---that's the famous Four Color Theorem---so it's in P so it's in NP so it reduces to SAT, integer linear programming and god knows what else.
Does that mean that only approximations to "bool fourcolorable(graph_t *G) { return true; }" are practical? Return true some of the time? I think it looks perfectly practical. In fact, it scales perfectly to any number of graphs ;-)
If you're claiming that integer linear programming reduces to "Vista Segmentation" and thus is NP complete (rather than just being in NP), I'd like to see a proof. No [citation needed], on slashpedia you can submit your own original research :)
Interesting how stories spin out differently depending on the browser in question.
Humans aren't perfectly reasoned or objective, nor do they apply the same standards fairly to everyone and everything. More news at 11 ;)
What would be interesting to point out is why we treat FF better than IE (the interesting question is always "why?").
I think it's fair of "us" to hate IE, because we are the ones suffering from its bad security. We are the ones who have to clean up after the messes that IE allows others to make. Instead of MS making their browser less flammable, they have us put out unnecessary fires.
With FF, we could (ostensible) take control ourselves and fix the damn thing. With FF, we have the power to solve a hard problem once instead of a dumb one n times.
(and of course, there's nothing you can do to secure users from their own willingness to trust untrustworthy people, but that's true for both browsers.)
When bad IE security causes us pain and good FF security causes us relief, is it any surprise we shame IE for having the bugs while applauding FF for fixing the bugs?
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue and all the memory leaks.
I have the exact opposite experience.
My firefox currently uses 13% of my 2 GB, which is 266 MB. Sometimes it becomes horribly slow.
Even if it crept up to 500 MB, I wouldn't mind much (I'm using almost 1 GB of core and 800 megs of cache ATM). If it was always fast and snappy, I'd be much happier.
I mean, come on---I'm having 50-60 tabs open but I'm only looking at one at any given moment in time...
Also, when it restores the last session, why doesn't it load the tabs in MRU order? Does it think I want to look at the tab that's been stale for two weeks?
Fix the raw speed and be smart about CPU allocation so it does the important things first and appears faster. Then fix the memory.
Anecdote + (-Anecdote) = 0 data ;-)
The defendant's lawyer did not object.
Can't you disbar them for gross negligence of their client's interests, or something?
Or does it only make them a lousy lawyer?
Or.... The explanation certainly is easy, it's just not very satisfying to me :)