The problem is having such a format be so widespead that it interferes with normal communication, like email. I am a UNIX network engineer that has been bitten *many* times by the 'please send a resume as a Word doc'. That is difficult if you don't run Windows at all.
I have not yet been in that situation - people are always happy to receive PDF or PS from me (I use latex/dvips or pdflatex for these), and I got both of my current jobs on an plain text application and on a silver platter (i.e. without any application). However, many people have told me that Word will gladly (and silently) display HTML documents with the.doc extension, and most suits are unable to tell the difference;-)
How is the corporate culture within SUN? As far as I an tell, it started out as a hacker company, with strong ties into academia. Now it seems to have switched into "serious business" mode and sells most of it's hardware with and to suits.
The odds are very high (as in 99.999% ++) that none of the compressors will manage to shrink the file a single byte. Infact they will probably all cause it to grow very sligthly.
However, many compression programs will hide this very small growth in the file name. Gzip, for example, will never increase a file in size by simply refusing to do the compression if the file does not shrink. However, it adds a 3 byte marker (".gz") to all files it compresses, nicely hidden away in a place you don't look at.
Here is what we did in our research group: We developed our system (without expecting any commercial gain), and released it under the GNU GPL. Recently, a commercial company become interested in our code, and we sold them the license to release proprietary versions. Of course, our version will remain (and be developed under) the GPL, and the company even agreed to release parts of their development back under GPL.
Of course, this only worked because we had no outside contributions to our code base, but it seems to be a reasonable model.
If he's not able to make himself socially presentable for an interview, don't hire him.
Why should I hire a candidate, who doesn't grasp the simple rules by which the hiring-game is played? He
gives the impression about himself, that he's either stupid, or that he doesn't care about the rules a business
operates.
Not quite. I do very well understand "the simple rules by which the hiring game is played". However, I don't think they make sense and hence I do not support them. If an employer does not hire me based on the way I dress, his loss. I want to be able to work in a no-nonsense environment, not in a place where 80% of my time is wasted adjusting bow ties and back-stabbing the management.
That said, I always try to dress reasonably: Clean, no holes, no smell, but rather informal - conference T-Shirt and Denim, if I dress up, I replace the conference shirt by an ordinary one, and the Birkenstocks with sneakers;-)
What makes us think that Open Office and Star Office are immune from similar attacks, or things like buffer
overflows?
I like free software, but I think it's just urban legend that software not written by microsoft is somehow
magically secure. (Witness: BIND, wu_ftpd, sendmail, rpc.*, etc...)
There are two aspects here. First, while you are right that other groups also have written buggy and insecure software, Microsoft's record is particularly abysmal. Most of the big holes in free software were found early on, at the time the internet just started booming and noone had experience with security. We may not yet be perfect, but we have been learning a lot.
The second aspect is even more important. A monoculture is always more suspectible to attack than a diverse ecosystem. If we use more different tools, we will survive viruses and worms a lot better. Consider Code Red: If it hit a host with Apache, it did not use this host for further propagation. Not only did the server stay up, the spread of the virus also slowed down.
So having many different (but preferable interoperable) software systems is inherently beneficial. And yes, this applies to BIND just as well as to Microsoft.
I know you can't put a price on human life, but surely someone must have made the calculation before...
Well, I think we should just give everybody who volunteers for a land war in Afghanistan a gun and send them on. The long term effect on the human gene pool would certainly outweight any temporary inconvenience...
This is a typical bit of retoric, but is it true? Anyone who beleives violence never solves anything needs to have a talk with the city fathers of Carthage. That particular conflict was ended with violence. It took three attempts, but by the third time the Romans figured out their problem -- on their previous attempts, they hadn't applied enough violence.
And as a result we still hail the glorious Roman republic, which brought us peace and prosperity till this day...
The assumption that there is a small group of evil people and that all we need to do is to somehow neutralize them is naive. Every action leads to a like reaction. By turning on the heat, we are creating more victims, more martyrs, and more potential terrorists. Just look at the current example: Have you ever seen so many people shouting for blood? Any retaliation is likely to wake similar feelings on the other side. Any retaliation that is not extremely limited, well targeted, and justified to the world is likely to cause a lot of justified similar feelings all over the world.
Somebody else already posted the famous Gandhi quote: "An eye for an eye, and the world goes blind".
What I like about this quote is that it shows a certain symmetry. You cannot usually solve a conflict by assuming "I'm right, and I'll just keep on hitting the other guy until he sees the light". Most of the time, being right is a matter of perspective. Very few people consciously do deeds they consider evil.
I'm still playing Loki's version of Railroad Tycoon II for Linux. It's an excellent game, and probably can be used to teach things like basic economics, task scheduling, and so on.
Unfortunately, many building games also have a combat component. However, at least the free demo of Caesar III is completely free from violence, it's free, and it should keep most people occupied for a couple of hours.
I don't know if simple games like Tetris or Breakout (now that's an ideal game for juvenile offenders) fit the bill...
Where does it end though? If you can steal IP to save AIDS patients then surely I can steal all your stuff to
pay for my heart transplant, right?
You might possibly benefit from learning a little bit about logical arguments.
If you can lift a can of beer, then surely you can single-handedly raise the Titanic. Doesn't this sound idiotic? It's the same construction you used...
It ends somewhere in the middle, as nearly always. Note that e.g. they are not taking anything from Roche but a small part of the possible future earnings. Note also that on the other hand we have the continued life and productivity of a couple of hundred thousand people.
By the way, I am giving away most of my intellectual property anyways. You can get it from the E theorem prover page. Hope it helps you in getting a transplant.
No, but if somebody starts treating any sort of problem as an emergency giving him right to do whatever
they want,then you have a much greater problem.
Right. But this is not "somebody", it is an elected gouvernment of a large nation. And it is not "any sort of problem", but an epidemic. There are roughly 200000 people with AIDS in Brazil. Assuming an average livespan of 3 years for untreated clinical AIDS (we are not talking about infection here, we are talking about people with symptoms), the death toll is approximately equivalent to one Oklahoma City bombing every day. Add to this the additional burden of caring the sick.
The clear argument is, that it is wrong to steal, even if it saves someone's life. Period.
Uhh....moral absolutism. I'm impressed. So I am not allowed to take ("steal") a rope to throw it to someone drowning? I am a criminal ("tresspassing") if I enter a burning building to save a child? And if I have to batter down the door ("damaging property") I'm on my third strike and go to prison for live?
Real world situations are nearly always to complex to naively apply simple, unconditional rules to evaluate them.
This isn't an example, they are not going to give this medicine away. They are going to charge for it,
probobly the same if slightly less than Roche.
If you had read the original article, you would know that yes, they are giving the drug away. In fact, they are doing it even now (at the cost of 28% of their total medical budget). In most civilized and semi-civilized countries on this planet, the right to adequate medical care is considered one of the most basic human rights.
International law explicitely allows for compulsory licensing of patents in the case of a national emergency. Given the AIDS rates in many third-world countries, emergency is a rather weak word to describe the situation...
Out of curiosity, is there any way to distinguish the Mp3.com-made files from user-ripped ones? Or is the
suit just proceeding on the assumption illegal trading must have happened?
Yes, there is. It is not totally foolproof, and can be faked or hidden easily, but:
> strings vivaldi_two_violins.mp3 | more
TFLT
MPG/3
TENC
mp3.com
...
Vivaldi: Concerto for Two Violins
http://mp3.com/RococoString/
...
mailto:webmaster@mp3.com
They have left a lot of traces in the annotation fields of the music files.
Thirded...this was the first book I thought of when I read the original question. Here is an inclomplete list of books I consider important and somewhat accessible to non-technical readers:
Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie: The C Programming
Language
Donald Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming (pricey,
but well worth it)
Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman: Principles of Compiler
Design
John Hennessy, David A. Patterson: Computer Architecture : A
Quantitative Approach
Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike: The UNIX Programming
Environment
Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman: Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs
Leslie Lamport: LaTeX: A Documentation Preparation
System (not the best, but the classic)
Eric S. Raymond (ed.): The New Hacker's Dictionary
(invaluable, and funny)
A good library should also have some more current books with less shelf life, i.e. the Camel Book, Programming Python, and probably something like Visual Basic 1.237 (pre-alpha) for absolute Dummies
In this case, it seems (at least as far as German law has been
explained in this and other discussions) that the law firm can, at its own discretion, decide who must pay for
what. Further, the 'what' is damage and confusion to the public.
Perhaps things are not entirely clear. The lawyers (on behalf of the clients or on behalf of certain non-profit organizations) send a cease and desist, and includes a bill for this service.
If the addressed person or organization feels that they recieve this without legal justification, they can go to court (or let the laywer go to court), and the normal judical process will lead to a verdict, using the same (hopefully) impartial judges as in the US.
The major difference is who is allowed to initate the action. However, if you look at todays story about Nader complaining to the FTC, the overall scheme is very similar. The major difference seems to be that Nader uses a federal intermediary.
No. Abmahnungen (cease-and-desist letters) can be sent for various reasons, including trademark
infringement.
It is also possible to send such letters on behalf of the public, to enforce consumer protection laws, but this
can be done only by organizations that are registered as consumer protection organizations, and they only get
registered if they're non-profit (I think). Most law firms are however working for profit, and thus cannot sue
on behalf of the public.
I was under the assumption that Adobe did not authorize the actions. In that case, the Abmahnung can only be based on consumer protection laws, fair business practice law, or similar laws in the public interest. Of course, if Adobe is involved, you are right.
It also seems to be a bit of a vigilante type system. Why not let the goverment do this, with an impartial trying
of fact?
Well, why allow private lawsuits at all? Let the government watch all interactions, and settle all disputes with an impartial trying of facts!
I am not claiming that the German system is perfect. It is one way to draw a boundary between public and private affairs, and I consider it to be a reasonable boundary. In the US, the lawyer would probably looked for somebody who downloaded the program, tried to install it under Windows and failed. Then he would sue for all real or imagined problems of that person...is this any better? "Yes, your honour, if the program had worked, I would have stayed at home and the lightning would have struck someone else."
I assume that were the University to refuse to pay (or the Dr.) that the law firm would go to court. I
then assume that it is nearly impossible to get a court to disagree with the law firm. At least, in the US, that's
the way it would work.
This is by no means certain. However, German Universities are publically financed and in my experience usually do not have a large law department, the funding, or the willingness to contest such things. So the law firm might just try to bluff (or, more likely, someone incompetent send off a standard letter without considering the non-standar situation).
There seems to be a pretty widespread misunderstanding even among many Germans. The so called cease and desist letter (or Abmahnung, literally admonishment) typically is not send to protect Adobe's trademark (this is Adobe's job, even in Germany), but to make the offending party
comply with consumer protection laws. These laws forbid someone to e.g. package any lemonade and sell it as Coca Cola, not to protect the value of the trademark, but to protect the consumer from inadvertedly buying a different (inferior) product.
So the lawyer is acting not on behalf of Adobe, but on behalf of the public. This generally is reasonable (it shifts the burden of enforcing laws from the tax payer to special organizations which are not supposed to do this for financial gain). However, as always, the system can be abused (and you can count on a lawyer to find the most efficient way to abuse it).
You mean the overgrown undergraduate's senior project known as GCC (many upper level undergrads
write C compilers as an academic extercize) isn't gonna be able to tackle this one? Abstract asyncronous
volunteers won't be able to port efficiently to the new complex architectures??
For one thing, I know of no undergraduate who writes a full C compiler as an excercise. Some toy compilers for nice subsets of C, perhaps.
And GCC is portable like hell while at the same time still optimizing the code pretty well.
For the second thing (*surprise*), GCC has been ported to the Itanium a long time ago, and has compiled, among other things, the Linux kernel for Itanium. Compaq gave me access to one of their test systems, and while I was not that impressed with the speed of the 667 MHz Itanium, everything seemed to work quite reasonably.
No one believes there is. What he was criticising, rightly I believe, was the expectation that Free Software
will be brought into conformance with the GPL. There are some people out there who adopt the GPL as their
personal licensing ethic, and grade all other licenses on their compatability with it. Some of are simply a little
tired of listening to their complaints when they find something unacceptable.
There is one important point that noone seems to have mentioned yet. While there may be a lot of arguments about the merrits of different licenses, it is very desireable for different free software packages to have compatible licenses.
If we restrict ourselves to the point of view of an end user of software, and only consider the static availability of software at a time, this might seem unimportant. However, from a broader perspective, this becomes very relevant.
As an example, it is now possible to embed Python as a scripting language into any GPL'ed application. And we can pull the regexp code out of Python and use it in gawk (or vice versa).
Indeed. How dare I use a highlighter pen on a book, or scribble in the margins, altering the author's intentions.
Need to enlarge the font to see it? No no no, that's *supposed* to be illegible fine print. And how dare I
override that dayglow orange background, and disable the blink tags and dancing hamsters!
I think all of that is within fair use. But to distribute your changes (in the case of Microsoft to millions of users) is not. You create a derivative work, and both you and the original author have a shared copyright in the result. You cannot distribute it without his consent. BTW, this most probably even holds for your modifications without the original work (unless they are trivial).
The Court
previously took judicial notice that every computer is manufactured
with an on/off switch, that parents may utilize, in the end, to
control the information which comes into their home via the Internet.
I find it very refreshing for a court to recognize this fact and even to put it into its written opinion. It's your responsibility to safeguard your children, not mine or the state's.
Moreover, I strongly believe that most childrens can stand a lot more than their parents believe.
...and in my experience, the most important part is number 2 in your list.
I had serious back pain 8 or 9 years ago. I started doing some simple excercises that made it go away. Now I swim a mile (backstroke or crawl) twice a week, and I never had any trouble again.
Keep in mind that not all sports are equal...jogging is not particularly good for your back or knees, nor is cycling (my second sport). Your physician should be able to suggest good excercises if you want to do something other than swimming.
But there are very few examples of scientists creating consumer goods for the love of discovery. One or two
perhaps - I'm not sure what the intention behind invention of the lightbulb was.
But nobody creates a passenger aircraft, or an automobile, or a new, nicer design of personal computer for
pure creative self-actualising joy.
Well, Thomas Edison was rather a sharp fellow, in particular as far as money was involved. However, he would probably have developed the light bulb nevertheless. Moreover, this is a typical innovation that was in the air at that time - Edison was by no means the only one to work on it, nor even the first one to get a working model. He was just the first to make it to the patent office - ironic, isn't it?
And early PCs have been build witout any patent protection for the machine. Even today, patented components, like IBMs microchannel architecture, do not play a major role in PC design.
Consider e.g. Intel. They have a lot of patents, but their real advantages are name recognition and first-mover status. Without patent protection, they would be forced to move even faster.
And in the field of software, the free software movement is a fine example of people creating "consumer goods for the love of discovery" (or at least without serios financial expectations).
Slashdot Mirror
I have not yet been in that situation - people are always happy to receive PDF or PS from me (I use latex/dvips or pdflatex for these), and I got both of my current jobs on an plain text application and on a silver platter (i.e. without any application). However, many people have told me that Word will gladly (and silently) display HTML documents with the
So fire up emacs in HTML mode or use latex2html.
But how is the internal climate?
However, many compression programs will hide this very small growth in the file name. Gzip, for example, will never increase a file in size by simply refusing to do the compression if the file does not shrink. However, it adds a 3 byte marker (".gz") to all files it compresses, nicely hidden away in a place you don't look at.
Of course, this only worked because we had no outside contributions to our code base, but it seems to be a reasonable model.
Not quite. I do very well understand "the simple rules by which the hiring game is played". However, I don't think they make sense and hence I do not support them. If an employer does not hire me based on the way I dress, his loss. I want to be able to work in a no-nonsense environment, not in a place where 80% of my time is wasted adjusting bow ties and back-stabbing the management.
That said, I always try to dress reasonably: Clean, no holes, no smell, but rather informal - conference T-Shirt and Denim, if I dress up, I replace the conference shirt by an ordinary one, and the Birkenstocks with sneakers ;-)
There are two aspects here. First, while you are right that other groups also have written buggy and insecure software, Microsoft's record is particularly abysmal. Most of the big holes in free software were found early on, at the time the internet just started booming and noone had experience with security. We may not yet be perfect, but we have been learning a lot.
The second aspect is even more important. A monoculture is always more suspectible to attack than a diverse ecosystem. If we use more different tools, we will survive viruses and worms a lot better. Consider Code Red: If it hit a host with Apache, it did not use this host for further propagation. Not only did the server stay up, the spread of the virus also slowed down.
So having many different (but preferable interoperable) software systems is inherently beneficial. And yes, this applies to BIND just as well as to Microsoft.
And as a result we still hail the glorious Roman republic, which brought us peace and prosperity till this day...
The assumption that there is a small group of evil people and that all we need to do is to somehow neutralize them is naive. Every action leads to a like reaction. By turning on the heat, we are creating more victims, more martyrs, and more potential terrorists. Just look at the current example: Have you ever seen so many people shouting for blood? Any retaliation is likely to wake similar feelings on the other side. Any retaliation that is not extremely limited, well targeted, and justified to the world is likely to cause a lot of justified similar feelings all over the world.
Somebody else already posted the famous Gandhi quote: "An eye for an eye, and the world goes blind".
What I like about this quote is that it shows a certain symmetry. You cannot usually solve a conflict by assuming "I'm right, and I'll just keep on hitting the other guy until he sees the light". Most of the time, being right is a matter of perspective. Very few people consciously do deeds they consider evil.
Unfortunately, many building games also have a combat component. However, at least the free demo of Caesar III is completely free from violence, it's free, and it should keep most people occupied for a couple of hours.
I don't know if simple games like Tetris or Breakout (now that's an ideal game for juvenile offenders) fit the bill...
You might possibly benefit from learning a little bit about logical arguments.
If you can lift a can of beer, then surely you can single-handedly raise the Titanic. Doesn't this sound idiotic? It's the same construction you used...
It ends somewhere in the middle, as nearly always. Note that e.g. they are not taking anything from Roche but a small part of the possible future earnings. Note also that on the other hand we have the continued life and productivity of a couple of hundred thousand people.
By the way, I am giving away most of my intellectual property anyways. You can get it from the E theorem prover page. Hope it helps you in getting a transplant.
Right. But this is not "somebody", it is an elected gouvernment of a large nation. And it is not "any sort of problem", but an epidemic. There are roughly 200000 people with AIDS in Brazil. Assuming an average livespan of 3 years for untreated clinical AIDS (we are not talking about infection here, we are talking about people with symptoms), the death toll is approximately equivalent to one Oklahoma City bombing every day. Add to this the additional burden of caring the sick.
I consider this a fairly grave emergency.
Uhh....moral absolutism. I'm impressed. So I am not allowed to take ("steal") a rope to throw it to someone drowning? I am a criminal ("tresspassing") if I enter a burning building to save a child? And if I have to batter down the door ("damaging property") I'm on my third strike and go to prison for live?
Real world situations are nearly always to complex to naively apply simple, unconditional rules to evaluate them.
If you had read the original article, you would know that yes, they are giving the drug away. In fact, they are doing it even now (at the cost of 28% of their total medical budget). In most civilized and semi-civilized countries on this planet, the right to adequate medical care is considered one of the most basic human rights.
International law explicitely allows for compulsory licensing of patents in the case of a national emergency. Given the AIDS rates in many third-world countries, emergency is a rather weak word to describe the situation...
> strings vivaldi_two_violins.mp3 | more
TFLT
MPG/3
TENC
mp3.com
Vivaldi: Concerto for Two Violins
http://mp3.com/RococoString/
mailto:webmaster@mp3.com
They have left a lot of traces in the annotation fields of the music files.
- Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie: The C Programming
Language
- Donald Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming (pricey,
but well worth it)
- Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman: Principles of Compiler
Design
- John Hennessy, David A. Patterson: Computer Architecture : A
Quantitative Approach
- Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike: The UNIX Programming
Environment
- Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman: Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Leslie Lamport: LaTeX: A Documentation Preparation
System (not the best, but the classic)
- Eric S. Raymond (ed.): The New Hacker's Dictionary
(invaluable, and funny)
A good library should also have some more current books with less shelf life, i.e. the Camel Book, Programming Python, and probably something like Visual Basic 1.237 (pre-alpha) for absolute DummiesThe major difference is who is allowed to initate the action. However, if you look at todays story about Nader complaining to the FTC, the overall scheme is very similar. The major difference seems to be that Nader uses a federal intermediary.
I am not claiming that the German system is perfect. It is one way to draw a boundary between public and private affairs, and I consider it to be a reasonable boundary. In the US, the lawyer would probably looked for somebody who downloaded the program, tried to install it under Windows and failed. Then he would sue for all real or imagined problems of that person...is this any better? "Yes, your honour, if the program had worked, I would have stayed at home and the lightning would have struck someone else."
This is by no means certain. However, German Universities are publically financed and in my experience usually do not have a large law department, the funding, or the willingness to contest such things. So the law firm might just try to bluff (or, more likely, someone incompetent send off a standard letter without considering the non-standar situation).So the lawyer is acting not on behalf of Adobe, but on behalf of the public. This generally is reasonable (it shifts the burden of enforcing laws from the tax payer to special organizations which are not supposed to do this for financial gain). However, as always, the system can be abused (and you can count on a lawyer to find the most efficient way to abuse it).
For one thing, I know of no undergraduate who writes a full C compiler as an excercise. Some toy compilers for nice subsets of C, perhaps.
And GCC is portable like hell while at the same time still optimizing the code pretty well.
For the second thing (*surprise*), GCC has been ported to the Itanium a long time ago, and has compiled, among other things, the Linux kernel for Itanium. Compaq gave me access to one of their test systems, and while I was not that impressed with the speed of the 667 MHz Itanium, everything seemed to work quite reasonably.
There is one important point that noone seems to have mentioned yet. While there may be a lot of arguments about the merrits of different licenses, it is very desireable for different free software packages to have compatible licenses.
If we restrict ourselves to the point of view of an end user of software, and only consider the static availability of software at a time, this might seem unimportant. However, from a broader perspective, this becomes very relevant.
As an example, it is now possible to embed Python as a scripting language into any GPL'ed application. And we can pull the regexp code out of Python and use it in gawk (or vice versa).
I think all of that is within fair use. But to distribute your changes (in the case of Microsoft to millions of users) is not. You create a derivative work, and both you and the original author have a shared copyright in the result. You cannot distribute it without his consent. BTW, this most probably even holds for your modifications without the original work (unless they are trivial).
Moreover, I strongly believe that most childrens can stand a lot more than their parents believe.
I had serious back pain 8 or 9 years ago. I started doing some simple excercises that made it go away. Now I swim a mile (backstroke or crawl) twice a week, and I never had any trouble again.
Keep in mind that not all sports are equal...jogging is not particularly good for your back or knees, nor is cycling (my second sport). Your physician should be able to suggest good excercises if you want to do something other than swimming.
Well, Thomas Edison was rather a sharp fellow, in particular as far as money was involved. However, he would probably have developed the light bulb nevertheless. Moreover, this is a typical innovation that was in the air at that time - Edison was by no means the only one to work on it, nor even the first one to get a working model. He was just the first to make it to the patent office - ironic, isn't it?
And early PCs have been build witout any patent protection for the machine. Even today, patented components, like IBMs microchannel architecture, do not play a major role in PC design.
Consider e.g. Intel. They have a lot of patents, but their real advantages are name recognition and first-mover status. Without patent protection, they would be forced to move even faster.
And in the field of software, the free software movement is a fine example of people creating "consumer goods for the love of discovery" (or at least without serios financial expectations).