I attended this year's CFP, and I think that the author of the Salon article severly understated the level of conviction that regulation is going to happen. Putting the computer people aside (who aren't always entirely realistic, sorry), the lawyers, politicians, and every other group represented seemed quite convinced that regulation is coming, whether they liked it or not.
Most of them seemed to like it, however. Even the "geeks" realize that they no longer control the Internet--self-regulation is great when _you_ are doing the regulating, but once you have to rely on a corporation to do it, self-regulation takes on a whole new aura.
Not to say that the "traditional" opinion wasn't espoused. It wasn't nearly as prevalent as I had expected, though.
~=Keelor
The definition of slashdotted...
on
Quickielanche
·
· Score: 5
The definition of slashdotted is what's happening to that poor, poor Atari 800 server right this moment. From the web page:
With an HTML page of only 250 bytes, this process can support several hits per second on the 9600 baud link!
Personally, I've always been curious what would have happened if Jesus had been born in the age of paternity testing. If/when the second coming happens, I have a feeling he's going to have a bit more explaining to do;)
(The above post is meant as a _joke_, not meant to offend anyone)
I agree completely. I was trying to make the point that it's entirely unreasonable to expect someone to verify _every_ change made by a program or read _every_ line of code to make sure it's safe. That's why GoHip is going against every decent "code of honor" for programmers--you don't make unauthorized changes to a system, except those necessary to get the basic functionality of your program installed/running. Last I checked, "basic functionality" of a video player didn't include a.sig advertisement.
Just because a person doesn't use ActiveX does most definitely not mean that they are invulnerable to this kind of situation. Any time you install a piece of software on your computer, unless you:
1) Read through all of the source of the installer, or
2) Have software that warns you about every change to your system,
there is a chance that the software is editing some part of your computer that it shouldn't. In short, this isn't just a company abusing ActiveX--this is a company abusing basic software practices.
Personally, I call software that changes my outgoing e-mail without my consent a virus...
Robinson's Mars series is a great example of how greedy corporations can get overthrown--by corporations that a less so. When a company presents a viable alternative to the apathetic huge corporation, people will probably flock to it. This is exactly what the "libertarians" (that Katz despises so much) expect will happen.
On a side note, for a book that effectively throws every argument Katz has ever made into the dirt, read The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. It's the book that gave my views a name;)
Pretend for a second that this was true--wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to get backdoors into an OS that the government would probably have almost complete control over? I mean, sure you could view it as that Linux is a better operating system... but if it did happen, I'd think it be a lot more driven by the fact that China would view it as a better operating system to spy on... (assuming that they blew through the GPL, which wouldn't be that unlikely) ~=Keelor
You know, I'm sure the US government would just love to allow Netscape to export strong encryption with a nice backdoor built in to it... Unless Microsoft receives a similar agreement, I'd be very suspicious of that crypto.
No single new technology will allow Moore's Law to continue for the next n years. However, a new direction in processor development will. For a while now, one of the primary areas that has allowed Moore's Law to continue has been the shrinking of transitors. As we already know, this can't continue forever.
By fundamentally changing the architecture of the chip (though it could be argued whether these advances are truly fundamental), IBM is giving a new area for improvement. Just as it's hard to double the speed of the chip by improving transitor technology when transitors have not yet been invented, it's also hard to improve the SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology unless it has been invented. Moore's Law is only partially about new technologies; it also helps to refine old ones.
Here's what I'm wondering about--being as the US music industry has repeatedly denied the legitimacy of MP3s because of their lack of copy-protection, doesn't it kind of cut down their case to have a relatively major organization condone them?
Here's the real question, though--what do you do you do when a Windows using DJ gets a BSOD in the middle of a party?
I'm actually seriously concerned by the amount of Microsoft news coming out of MSNBC. Even more worrying is the number of sites (including/., though not nearly as much) that seem to believe that a link to MSNBC as a non-biased source. Sure, they've been pretty tough on Microsoft during this phase of the trials--but no more so than any other mass media has been.
For the most part, the content of hard news is of little concern--most people are intelligent enough to notice if there were discrepancies between an MSNBC article and a similar article on the New York Times. The problem is the articles that they do print. Look at the MSNBC Slashdot response article. As was pointed out in an earlier news post on here, they took a few relatively meaningless quotes off of Slashdot and represented them as the ideas of an average Slashdot user. The result? Someone that reads the article thinks that the Slashdot community is a pretty inarticulate bunch--the average 'net user won't take the time to hunt through/. to find the article in question.
This, of course, can be applied to any subject. A version of Netscape has a security flaw? You can bet they'll slap an article up. The fact that MSNBC posts a relatively harsh article on MS when every other site on the net is doing the same? Not surprising.
The following are not what I'm afraid will come with Y2K. I'm not afraid that...
the power grid will come down. This has been rather thoroughly tested. What may (probably will) happen is that there will be local blackouts. Some could be serious, but I doubt that many people will be killed as a direct result of lack of heat.
the banks will lose everyone's money. Banks have had to look past December 31st, 1999 for a while. My credit card doesn't expire until September 2000, for instance. Again, there _will_ be localized problems, but I doubt that anyone will permanently lose a significant portion of their income.
nukes will accidently go off. This is actually the one I'm least sure about, as I think there is a tiny possiblity that Russian (possibly other country's) nukes will be launched due to some bad data. This is pretty small, though, and (on a rather foreboding note) I think that the US should be able to shoot down any stray nukes before they cause significant damage.
What am I afraid of? People. There are people right now that have enough guns, ammo, and other so-called "survival" equipment to outfit a third-world country. Many of these are not the most stable people to begin with. I'm afraid that when Y2K occurs and nothing significant happens, a few of them will decide to use their guns and ammo in what will already be a rather tense situation. The possiblity of riots due to the lack of Y2K problems should not be ignored. If you have friends that fit in this group, invite them to a party and make sure they pass out or something;).
Ah... the good old days. Apple ][e for me, though. I remember blowing through walls with grenades (and they say that blowing up walls is a major accomplishment in an engine;) ), getting a uniform so that I could just walk right past every guard, and the dreaded SS that could see through your uniform and practically took a grenade to kill. Like I said, the good old days.
The decision needs to be made now (now being within the next year or two, no more) as to what the punishment for Microsoft should be. The judge has found that Microsoft has shown monopolistic behavior--I think just about any judge will agree with that. However, the Supreme Court must decide what to do with that. Four or five years from now, which is when the case could finally get to the Supreme Court under normal circumstances, there is a good chance that Microsoft will no longer be a true monopoly. Even if it is, it will not be a monopoly of the same form, as Gates & company are surely being more careful about who they shoot down right now and will continue to do so for a while.
The important thing to realize here is that, unbelievably, this case is somehow bigger than Microsoft. If 4 years from now, this case is appealed to the Supreme Court, there is a chance they could turn down the case as no longer being worthwhile if MS has lost it's position of power. That would completely lose the point of this case--it's not whether or not MS is a monopoly (it is) or whether it abuses that position (it does) but whether or not the US government has the right to tell any software company that it can't use any means necessary to gain market dominance. This is where the true importance of this case lies, and the Anti-Trust Expediating Act may be the only way for the Supreme Court to really make that decision. There could be another MS in a related market years from now, and it would be nice to be able to stop them before it was too late.
It's only a matter of time before I'm going to disconnect my ethernet card so that I can be _sure_ that nobody is transmitting every key press.
What everyone seems to be overlooking is that it's obvious that Real is just a front. Truthfully, Real=Echelon. It's a conspiracy--MP3s, streaming music, everything was made by the world-wide government to
A. Hand out free software that allows them to track all usage.
B. Encourage illegal activity so that anyone can be arrested for pirating whenever it's needed.
Well, I couldn't find the article I was thinking of, but The-Gadgeteer seems to have a whole gamut of links to reviews and useful sites. Hope it helps.
I don't have all the applicable information on hand, nor the article that I remember reading this in (though I think it might be at the Equip magazine site) but there are two types of programmable remotes. One type is the type that most people hear about that have a few hundred "presets" that try to emulate every proprietary remote on the market. The disadvantage, like was mentioned, is that these don't always have _every_ feature. Also, as soon as a new feature comes along, the remote becomes obsolete.
That is why no true techie should ever buy that type of remote. The _real_ universal remote is programmable. The average lay-person is completely confused by these, as they require you to sit with all of your remotes and send the IR signal to the remote so that it can learn the appropriate signal. Hence, these remotes are generally classified as learning remotes. The down-side? Well, the learning remote has no error-checking, so "Volume up" could get programmed as "Turn on the toaster", given the right equipment. That's not a problem for most semi-knowledgable techies, though. The other downside is that, unlike preset remotes, you need a working original remote to begin. This could be a problem if you're looking for a new remote because the last one was crushed by your 2-ton Lego Mindstorms robot.
It sounds like the remote you're looking at is a learning remote. I don't know anything about that one in particular off-hand, but you should be able to comparison shop the multiple learning remotes. I know there are decent articles about this--I'll try to find one and post a reply in this message about it.
If I remember correctly, this book coined the term "avatar" as used in a virtual world. Yet another example of why we should all bow down and worship Neal Stephanson...;)
On another note, it's interest that Stephanson chose cable as the medium for the metaverse. At the time of this writing--long before the average person knew about the 'net, and LONG before the cable companies were interested in it--he took the leap of faith the the cable infrastructure would be an appropriate medium for a virtual world. This is especially interesting considering the recent possibility that cable will come to dominate the net. Just a thought.
Here's a thought--does the program take the impact of itself running into account? I thought not!
It's like a grand unified theory--sure, we might figure out the rules that control the universe, but we'd need another universe just to calculate their effects...
In one respect, I agree with you whole-heartedly. It doesn't matter if nearly every word in the meta-language is English--though it would help to have multiple forms of words like "read."
What it comes down to is that there will really have to be two "engines"--one for words (which anyone can do, frankly), and one for grammar. I think that most translators up to this point have failed to translate well primarily because grammar is so language specific. As such, if you base your meta-language grammar on English, all other languages become bastardized because of the inconsistencies in English grammar.
I don't expect any translator to pick up on every nuance of speech (such as puns) but it would at least be nice to be able to read the translations without having to reorginze the sentence due to grammar translation failures.
As a side note, does anyone know of any computer-automated translators that actually do translate grammar well?
It seems to me that the strength of the meta-language will be the entire strength of this system. The question is, will the meta-language be skewed towards one language (*cough* English *cough*) or will they manage to create a language that does not impose biases toward one language.
Overall, I agree strongly with the idea. From a testing standpoint, with the development of an effective meta-language, all one would need to do test the translation for the most part is go from language x->meta language->language x. If that works, than presumably the meta language did not slaughter language x.
One question I have is how the language engine will handle words it does not know--or, more likely, abbreviations, misspellings, and slang. From what I've gathered, this is where other translators fail. If the translator doesn't understand half the sentence, than it generally has too much trouble finding context for the rest for anything to make sense. Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of them seemed to like it, however. Even the "geeks" realize that they no longer control the Internet--self-regulation is great when _you_ are doing the regulating, but once you have to rely on a corporation to do it, self-regulation takes on a whole new aura.
Not to say that the "traditional" opinion wasn't espoused. It wasn't nearly as prevalent as I had expected, though.
~=Keelor
With an HTML page of only 250 bytes, this process can support several hits per second on the 9600 baud link!
*wince*
~=Keelor
(The above post is meant as a _joke_, not meant to offend anyone)
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
1) Read through all of the source of the installer, or
2) Have software that warns you about every change to your system,
there is a chance that the software is editing some part of your computer that it shouldn't. In short, this isn't just a company abusing ActiveX--this is a company abusing basic software practices.
Personally, I call software that changes my outgoing e-mail without my consent a virus...
~=Keelor
On a side note, for a book that effectively throws every argument Katz has ever made into the dirt, read The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. It's the book that gave my views a name ;)
~=Keelor
Pretend for a second that this was true--wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier to get backdoors into an OS that the government would probably have almost complete control over? I mean, sure you could view it as that Linux is a better operating system... but if it did happen, I'd think it be a lot more driven by the fact that China would view it as a better operating system to spy on... (assuming that they blew through the GPL, which wouldn't be that unlikely) ~=Keelor
article_45.shtml 03-Dec-99 10:08 13k
*shrug*
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
By fundamentally changing the architecture of the chip (though it could be argued whether these advances are truly fundamental), IBM is giving a new area for improvement. Just as it's hard to double the speed of the chip by improving transitor technology when transitors have not yet been invented, it's also hard to improve the SOI (silicon-on-insulator) technology unless it has been invented. Moore's Law is only partially about new technologies; it also helps to refine old ones.
~=Keelor
Here's the real question, though--what do you do you do when a Windows using DJ gets a BSOD in the middle of a party?
~=Keelor
For the most part, the content of hard news is of little concern--most people are intelligent enough to notice if there were discrepancies between an MSNBC article and a similar article on the New York Times. The problem is the articles that they do print. Look at the MSNBC Slashdot response article. As was pointed out in an earlier news post on here, they took a few relatively meaningless quotes off of Slashdot and represented them as the ideas of an average Slashdot user. The result? Someone that reads the article thinks that the Slashdot community is a pretty inarticulate bunch--the average 'net user won't take the time to hunt through /. to find the article in question.
This, of course, can be applied to any subject. A version of Netscape has a security flaw? You can bet they'll slap an article up. The fact that MSNBC posts a relatively harsh article on MS when every other site on the net is doing the same? Not surprising.
~=Keelor
the power grid will come down. This has been rather thoroughly tested. What may (probably will) happen is that there will be local blackouts. Some could be serious, but I doubt that many people will be killed as a direct result of lack of heat.
the banks will lose everyone's money. Banks have had to look past December 31st, 1999 for a while. My credit card doesn't expire until September 2000, for instance. Again, there _will_ be localized problems, but I doubt that anyone will permanently lose a significant portion of their income.
nukes will accidently go off. This is actually the one I'm least sure about, as I think there is a tiny possiblity that Russian (possibly other country's) nukes will be launched due to some bad data. This is pretty small, though, and (on a rather foreboding note) I think that the US should be able to shoot down any stray nukes before they cause significant damage.
What am I afraid of? People. There are people right now that have enough guns, ammo, and other so-called "survival" equipment to outfit a third-world country. Many of these are not the most stable people to begin with. I'm afraid that when Y2K occurs and nothing significant happens, a few of them will decide to use their guns and ammo in what will already be a rather tense situation. The possiblity of riots due to the lack of Y2K problems should not be ignored. If you have friends that fit in this group, invite them to a party and make sure they pass out or something ;).
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
~=Keelor
The important thing to realize here is that, unbelievably, this case is somehow bigger than Microsoft. If 4 years from now, this case is appealed to the Supreme Court, there is a chance they could turn down the case as no longer being worthwhile if MS has lost it's position of power. That would completely lose the point of this case--it's not whether or not MS is a monopoly (it is) or whether it abuses that position (it does) but whether or not the US government has the right to tell any software company that it can't use any means necessary to gain market dominance. This is where the true importance of this case lies, and the Anti-Trust Expediating Act may be the only way for the Supreme Court to really make that decision. There could be another MS in a related market years from now, and it would be nice to be able to stop them before it was too late.
~=Keelor
What everyone seems to be overlooking is that it's obvious that Real is just a front. Truthfully, Real=Echelon. It's a conspiracy--MP3s, streaming music, everything was made by the world-wide government to
A. Hand out free software that allows them to track all usage.
B. Encourage illegal activity so that anyone can be arrested for pirating whenever it's needed.
~=Keelor
I'm not insane... the voices told me so.
~=Keelor
That is why no true techie should ever buy that type of remote. The _real_ universal remote is programmable. The average lay-person is completely confused by these, as they require you to sit with all of your remotes and send the IR signal to the remote so that it can learn the appropriate signal. Hence, these remotes are generally classified as learning remotes. The down-side? Well, the learning remote has no error-checking, so "Volume up" could get programmed as "Turn on the toaster", given the right equipment. That's not a problem for most semi-knowledgable techies, though. The other downside is that, unlike preset remotes, you need a working original remote to begin. This could be a problem if you're looking for a new remote because the last one was crushed by your 2-ton Lego Mindstorms robot.
It sounds like the remote you're looking at is a learning remote. I don't know anything about that one in particular off-hand, but you should be able to comparison shop the multiple learning remotes. I know there are decent articles about this--I'll try to find one and post a reply in this message about it.
~=Keelor
On another note, it's interest that Stephanson chose cable as the medium for the metaverse. At the time of this writing--long before the average person knew about the 'net, and LONG before the cable companies were interested in it--he took the leap of faith the the cable infrastructure would be an appropriate medium for a virtual world. This is especially interesting considering the recent possibility that cable will come to dominate the net. Just a thought.
~=Keelor
It's like a grand unified theory--sure, we might figure out the rules that control the universe, but we'd need another universe just to calculate their effects...
~=Keelor
What it comes down to is that there will really have to be two "engines"--one for words (which anyone can do, frankly), and one for grammar. I think that most translators up to this point have failed to translate well primarily because grammar is so language specific. As such, if you base your meta-language grammar on English, all other languages become bastardized because of the inconsistencies in English grammar.
I don't expect any translator to pick up on every nuance of speech (such as puns) but it would at least be nice to be able to read the translations without having to reorginze the sentence due to grammar translation failures.
As a side note, does anyone know of any computer-automated translators that actually do translate grammar well?
-Keelor
Overall, I agree strongly with the idea. From a testing standpoint, with the development of an effective meta-language, all one would need to do test the translation for the most part is go from language x->meta language->language x. If that works, than presumably the meta language did not slaughter language x.
One question I have is how the language engine will handle words it does not know--or, more likely, abbreviations, misspellings, and slang. From what I've gathered, this is where other translators fail. If the translator doesn't understand half the sentence, than it generally has too much trouble finding context for the rest for anything to make sense. Just a thought.
-Keelor