There's almost universal agreement that I didn't compress anything, but I don't think this is a requirement of the challenge
anyway. I still think I compressed the data in the original file. It's not my fault that a file system uses up more space storing the
same amount of data in two files rather than a single file.
And in fact, in some filesystems he might have used less space. From what I remember of Acorn's ADFS, small files could be stored in the same allocation block as the directory catalog. So you could potentially 'show space savings' (Steve Tate's quote at the bottom of the page) simply by splitting the file up.
-- Andrem
I feel the same... after three years of computer science, where almost every course ended up proving Goedel's Theorem, so I guess I've been numbed to the shock value of things like this. But a lot of the claims seemed hard to put into perspective - like the fact that knowing some of the digits doesn't help you find the others... surely this is true of a lot of irrational numbers? If I know that PI is 3.14?59? - is that going to make it any easier for me to find that the third decimal place is '1'?
(Ok, I'm sure someone will find some mathematical trick whereby you can extrapolate some digits from PI if you know some other digits. My point is that it wouldn't be too shocking to find that for some numbers knowing a few of the digits doesn't help you find any others.)
-- Andrem
May be you can help explain one thing I didn't quite get. His claims seem to be that this number isn't computable - that there is no simpler way of expressing the number formally than by listing its digits. He then says (according to the New Scientist article) that you can find any digit of the number by plugging figures into a diophantine equation, and makes out that this is comparatively easy to solve... what's wrong here? -- Andrem
I remember someone coming up with similar claims about ten years ago. They reckoned they could achieve a 64:1 compression on any data - including the output of their own compressor (in which case, why does the compressor not run itself twice on the data?).
Of course, anyone who knows any information theory will instantly recognise this as utter drivel, but it's a good way of grabbing people's attention.
-- Andrem
I think it's something that can take getting used to.
Acorn made anti-aliasing part of their RISC OS operating system ten years ago... and I've still not seen anything that competes with it. It was usable on a 640x256 display. Not everyone liked it: I guess some people just see it as out-of-focus and strain their eyes. But it did allow you to get use very small pixel-size fonts, giving you a lot of desktop space for such a small resolution.
I've put some screenshots up at: http://www.backroom.uklinux.net/pictures/riscos/
'aa.png' and 'al.png' show a 480x352 desktop, with and without anti-aliasing. (If you are using Netscape 4, you might want to save these pictures out and view them in something else).
Acorn's system uses vector fonts, with hinting for small point sizes. Unlike most other systems, it doesn't just stick grey dots around diagonal lines: it renders the font at twice the resolution then resamples it at screen resolution.
It also uses a quarter-pixel coordinate system, so the spacing between characters it much more even. -- Andrem
Java is a fully functional language. There are no design decisions that preclude the use of XML with Java. In fact, a language that is designed to be tightly coupled to a certain technology is probably not going to be flexible enough to cope with next year's technology.
There are limits to how much foresight you can expect someone to show. For example, no-one would expect Microsoft to have the foresight to notice anything that might have happened more recently than five years ago.
-- Andrem
There seems to be a strong belief that 'capitalism' implies that it is illegal to do anything that might threaten someone's income. So if someone is making a living out of selling books, the law should come down swiftly against anything that might make books redundant.
But is it such a bad thing. Take an extreme example: imagine if copyright laws didn't exist at all... would the world be too horrible a place for people to live in? Is copyright law the only thing that stops civilisation from descending into chaos? Would all artists stop producing works?
Sure, things would be different: some people might not be able to earn 'slightly less than Jack Valenti' salary by keeping their current jobs. Lots of things might change. But I don't the world would end. I definitely think people would continue to write songs, books, software and make films. There will always be ways to make money from them...
A few years ago, it was looking like the Internet might threaten newspapers. Nowadays, you can get copies of most newspapers online for free. They are voluntarily giving their stuff away, and yet people still go out and pay for the printed versions. Sure, it's not $10,000 for a year's subscription; but the point is, rather than crying about it and demanding news laws, why not try to go with the flow and see where it takes you.
Computers have always brought the threat of redundancies and unemployment, but they've also tended to create new jobs and new opportunities. I strongly believe that the threats to society created by the Internet will prove just as non-existent, if we give it a chance. The more worrying threat in the current climate is that those crying for new laws will get their way, and the people will suffer. -- Andrem
The comment we were following up to was that 'achieving 8 characters a second' is 'practically impossible'.
If you're having a hard time believing that the 'average coder' types 170wpm, I suggest you stop trying because it's clearly not true.
I agree that there's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison between piano music and typing. I don't think sight-reading should be compared with copy-typing though: it's much easier to process words as chunks than groups of notes in fast runs. -- Andrem
I agree entirely - not to mention that feats like that are possible with one hand - often leaping all over the piano keyboard too... Try and find a recording of Liszt's 'La Campanella' - if you want to see the score, someone's got a Powerpoint file of it here. There are some nice 2 octave jumps for the right hand: imagine alternating between pressing '4' on the keypad, then 'A', at a rate of 10 key-presses per second.
There's also the constraint of pressing each note in strict timing: your computer doesn't care if each key-press exactly follows a quarter note rhythm at 200bpm - it allows you a considerable degree of rubato. So if a typist with good co-ordination between their hands you should easily be able to out-do a pianist.
-- Andrem
I agree - voice recognition opens lots of new possibilities when you start thinking beyond simple dictation. If the OSS community does get to play with this stuff, I think we can look forward to some really funky toys cropping up.
Being able to use your computer without sitting in front of it would be great fun (especially if you do manage to rig the house for sound). You could do a whole bunch of stuff before you even get out of bed - call work (using your computer's voice-modem) to say you can't be bothered to go in today, get today's news headlines, play a few rounds of Internet VQuake (a new FPS based entirely on voice commands)...
It would also be handy while you're at the computer, if you're using the keyboard and mouse for other things. Voice commands could be used to trigger a range of macro commands, and would be much easier to learn than cryptic keyboard shortcuts. Sure, it wouldn't replace common easy-to-learn shortcuts like Ctrl-C - but it could give the keyboard a run for its money with things like 'Font: Helvetica 14pt'.
I bet it could work really well with the Gimp too - it always takes me ages to find which menu the script-fu effect I'm after is on, and being able to change brush tools without moving the mouse (or knowing the keyboard shortcut) would be handy.
I haven't seen any evidence (other than the comments here on/.) to indicate the XP is intended for top notch programmers. Buddy programming seems like the ideal way of making sure that novice programmers don't run amok, while also giving them an opportunity to turn into professional programmers.
Also, XP doesn't claim to be a strict process: it's a bunch of ideas about how you can implement a process. Most of the ideas are ones that seem like common sense when they are explained, but which are ignored by most engineering projects. Draw your own conclusions about whether or not it's a good idea to bundle them together and recommend people try them. -- Andrem
Not everyone complains about cruft... one of the problems with programming, which XP seems to address, is the assumption that changing existing code will always break things. I'm sure we've all been bitten by it: find someone else's crufty code, spend hours tracing through what it does, attempt to refactor to tidy it up a bit, and much later find that you've broken something because the original code relied on some undocumented side-effect of one of the broken-looking bits of code.
It's not always that bad though - often you can find out what code does, fit a test framework around it to confirm that it does what you think, remove the cruft and check that the tests still run. If the tests are there in the first place (which I reckon is the most important thing in XP), it'll be much easier to refactor the code when needed.
The problem with crufty code is that cruft just accumulates, and gets harder and harder to change. There's an interesting comment on http://extremeprogramming.org/stories/testdb.html: 'When something is very difficult try doing it more often not less'. That's a mantra everyone ought to chant... -- Andrem
> People do not realise what is possible. The
> increase in processing power grows daily. As
> are storage costs coming down. This will be the
> same as having somebody watching everything
> you do.
Comments like this are missing an important point: the big, bad, ugly government is simply not competent enough to do this. Personally, I'd be happy if I didn't have to fill in a tax return to give the government information that they could just as easily collect automatically.
Yeah, I think encryption is a good idea, because it allows me to enforce ownership over data. I don't care about spooks watching me, because I really don't think I'm that interesting.
Finally, I agree that RIP is bad, because it is WRONG. That doesn't mean that I think that our govenment is going to turn Evil overnight. -- Andrem
Any attempt to add just a few more TLDs to the system is going to result in redundancy: why bother with restricted TLDs at all? At the moment, it only means that if you want to look at a site (say 'slashdot' or 'freshmeat') you have to remember which arbitrary suffix to put on the end: there is no sensible distinction between.com,.net or.org - they might as well just be.1,.2 and.3.
Completely opening the system up for people to register their own top-level names will make the world a much simpler place. Isn't 'http://slashdot/' much simpler?
People can still create hierarchical names, so if someone wanted to create a '.church' TLD and give away second level domains to worthy causes, they are welcome to. ICANN could sell TLDs for much more than.COM domains. (Of course people can still opt to go to ORSC instead of ICANN for a TLDs). -- Andrem
Have you considered buying yourself an Empeg - http://www.empeg.com - and possibly linking it to a Palm - http://geek.empeg.com/developer/projects.html -- Andrem
This is a significant issue. It's quite common for people running Linux at work to need root access to their own machines (because the sort of people running Linux at work tend to want to do the sort of things you can only do as root). But as the HOWTO points out, it's a short hop from being root on your machine to masquerading as anyone else.
Are there no (released) tools for solving this problem? Projects like Coda seem to be aiming for sensible solutions based on decent authentication mechanisms - but Coda is solving several other problems and (last time I checked) was still under development. Are there any file-servers which don't attempt to be as ambitious, but do provide the necessary secure authentication? -- Andrem
And when everyone realises they can get/. discussions broken up that easily, people will stop using it as a discussion forum. But out of the ashes will come Slashdot II, using Gnutella, Freenet and some yet-to-be-invented distributed anonymising version-controlled message propagation protocol, which will make it impossible for any messages to be deleted (unless they mention hot grits).
The more they try to squash free speech, the more we'll fight back. And doesn't anyone find it funny that we can look at Internet censorship in China as a sign of a ruthless power-crazed governm ent, but in the West it's a sign of the success of capitalism... -- Andrem
That was my first thought - based on what M$ have given us in the name of AI user-interfaces (the paperclip and friends).
But it occurs to me that it needn't be that nasty, if you put a bit more work into it. For example, I get really annoyed when Word changes 'teh ' to 'the ', and I just notice after going left,backspace,left,'h',end. A more intelligent 'agent' would have remembered why it did what it did, noticed what I was trying to do, and sorted everything out.
So, bringing back the Internet theme, how about this for a project: a browser which can learn about sites that the user visits regularly, and provide various access shortcuts. For instance, if I regularly refresh the Slashdot index until a new article appears, the browser could notice this behaviour and offer to take care of it and notify me when the page is updated.
Or it could notice that you often click on a link labelled 'download software', and this takes you to a page with a high legalese quotient, which you always skip straight to the bottom of and click the 'I accept' button... the Intelligent Browser could bypass this page for you (this sort of thing could really piss off any DMCA lawyers). -- Andrem
Anyone who uses Gnutella and thinks that it's a _private_ distributed network is seriously mistaken. Just as we don't want the Powers That Be to interfere with our attempts to descramble DVDs and record MP3s, we shouldn't get fussed about other people grabbing IP addresses over what is essentially a broadcast medium.
There are two alternatives, for people who are concerned about privacy: don't use Gnutella for your Pr0n downloads, or invent an encrypted version of the Gnutella protocol. -- Andrem
Ok, so frame rates on modern graphics cards are a little ludicrous. What games seem to need now is more polygons. I can't wait to see whether Evolva lives up to the expectations: because the landscape and creatures are computer generated, the amount of detail can be increased to match what your system can handle - rather than the upper limit being dependent on how much effort the 3D designers put in. -- Andrem
Before I'd heard about Asynchrony and SourceXchange, I started thinking how nice it would be for programmers - or anyone with a job which doesn't require their physical presence at an office - to be able to make a living out of bidding for work from this sort of service. Your only requirements would be somewhere to plug a computer in and someone to pay you for the work. Meanwhile, you could be yachting round the world, or sunning yourself on a Caribbean beach. Depending on your life-style, needs and beliefs, (and share option portfolio) you will be able to split your time between well-paid commercial work and voluntary open source hacking.
I think sites like Asynchrony will become much more common. A lot of people seem to get upset because they see Open Source as some kind of religion, which must be untainted by commercial beliefs. Making money out of OSS, or mixing open- and closed-source software, is seen as evil. As far as I'm concerned, it is the end result which counts: if Asynchrony encourages OSS development, great. If it gives existing OSS developers an opportunity to make a bit of unexpected cash, great. As long as it doesn't cause projects to be held up by debates over how shares should be allocated, I can't see any problems at all.
I've not looked at the tools involved in playing DVDs on Linux, but it sounds like you're arguing for making things more complex. Linux tools are normally based on one tool for each job: in this case, I guess, one tool to decode and one to play. -- Andrem
Is there some law I don't know about which states that you shall not use or cause to be used any technology which makes illegal copying easier to do than some objectively defined standard level of difficulty.
DeCSS may make the process easier, but the point is that it isn't the only thing that makes it possible. There are any number of other ways of copying the video.
No matter how I read the intro, I can't agree with your interpretation. Duder quite clearly stated that there is an article which claims that Macromedia are open sourcing Flash.
It is the article's claims that are incorrect: the letter they quote is a confirmation that the SDK will be available. The authors of the article have spiced this up as 'Flash going Open Source'. -- Andrem
Slashdot Mirror
-- Andrem
I feel the same... after three years of computer science, where almost every course ended up proving Goedel's Theorem, so I guess I've been numbed to the shock value of things like this. But a lot of the claims seemed hard to put into perspective - like the fact that knowing some of the digits doesn't help you find the others... surely this is true of a lot of irrational numbers? If I know that PI is 3.14?59? - is that going to make it any easier for me to find that the third decimal place is '1'? (Ok, I'm sure someone will find some mathematical trick whereby you can extrapolate some digits from PI if you know some other digits. My point is that it wouldn't be too shocking to find that for some numbers knowing a few of the digits doesn't help you find any others.)
-- Andrem
May be you can help explain one thing I didn't quite get. His claims seem to be that this number isn't computable - that there is no simpler way of expressing the number formally than by listing its digits. He then says (according to the New Scientist article) that you can find any digit of the number by plugging figures into a diophantine equation, and makes out that this is comparatively easy to solve... what's wrong here?
-- Andrem
Of course, anyone who knows any information theory will instantly recognise this as utter drivel, but it's a good way of grabbing people's attention.
-- Andrem
I think it's something that can take getting used to.
Acorn made anti-aliasing part of their RISC OS operating system ten years ago... and I've still not seen anything that competes with it. It was usable on a 640x256 display. Not everyone liked it: I guess some people just see it as out-of-focus and strain their eyes. But it did allow you to get use very small pixel-size fonts, giving you a lot of desktop space for such a small resolution.
I've put some screenshots up at: http://www.backroom.uklinux.net/pictures/riscos/
'aa.png' and 'al.png' show a 480x352 desktop, with and without anti-aliasing. (If you are using Netscape 4, you might want to save these pictures out and view them in something else).
Acorn's system uses vector fonts, with hinting for small point sizes. Unlike most other systems, it doesn't just stick grey dots around diagonal lines: it renders the font at twice the resolution then resamples it at screen resolution.
It also uses a quarter-pixel coordinate system, so the spacing between characters it much more even.
-- Andrem
There are limits to how much foresight you can expect someone to show. For example, no-one would expect Microsoft to have the foresight to notice anything that might have happened more recently than five years ago.
-- Andrem
But is it such a bad thing. Take an extreme example: imagine if copyright laws didn't exist at all... would the world be too horrible a place for people to live in? Is copyright law the only thing that stops civilisation from descending into chaos? Would all artists stop producing works?
Sure, things would be different: some people might not be able to earn 'slightly less than Jack Valenti' salary by keeping their current jobs. Lots of things might change. But I don't the world would end. I definitely think people would continue to write songs, books, software and make films. There will always be ways to make money from them...
A few years ago, it was looking like the Internet might threaten newspapers. Nowadays, you can get copies of most newspapers online for free. They are voluntarily giving their stuff away, and yet people still go out and pay for the printed versions. Sure, it's not $10,000 for a year's subscription; but the point is, rather than crying about it and demanding news laws, why not try to go with the flow and see where it takes you.
Computers have always brought the threat of redundancies and unemployment, but they've also tended to create new jobs and new opportunities. I strongly believe that the threats to society created by the Internet will prove just as non-existent, if we give it a chance. The more worrying threat in the current climate is that those crying for new laws will get their way, and the people will suffer.
-- Andrem
If you're having a hard time believing that the 'average coder' types 170wpm, I suggest you stop trying because it's clearly not true.
I agree that there's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison between piano music and typing. I don't think sight-reading should be compared with copy-typing though: it's much easier to process words as chunks than groups of notes in fast runs.
-- Andrem
There's also the constraint of pressing each note in strict timing: your computer doesn't care if each key-press exactly follows a quarter note rhythm at 200bpm - it allows you a considerable degree of rubato. So if a typist with good co-ordination between their hands you should easily be able to out-do a pianist.
-- Andrem
I agree - voice recognition opens lots of new possibilities when you start thinking beyond simple dictation. If the OSS community does get to play with this stuff, I think we can look forward to some really funky toys cropping up.
Being able to use your computer without sitting in front of it would be great fun (especially if you do manage to rig the house for sound). You could do a whole bunch of stuff before you even get out of bed - call work (using your computer's voice-modem) to say you can't be bothered to go in today, get today's news headlines, play a few rounds of Internet VQuake (a new FPS based entirely on voice commands)...
It would also be handy while you're at the computer, if you're using the keyboard and mouse for other things. Voice commands could be used to trigger a range of macro commands, and would be much easier to learn than cryptic keyboard shortcuts. Sure, it wouldn't replace common easy-to-learn shortcuts like Ctrl-C - but it could give the keyboard a run for its money with things like 'Font: Helvetica 14pt'.
I bet it could work really well with the Gimp too - it always takes me ages to find which menu the script-fu effect I'm after is on, and being able to change brush tools without moving the mouse (or knowing the keyboard shortcut) would be handy.
-- Andrem
I also thud horse precognition is overrated because her technology wombat cover lart fizz handle sprocket tea cake del *.* yes banana.
I am using bryce echo mission to tripe this article sew I should no.
-- Andrem
Also, XP doesn't claim to be a strict process: it's a bunch of ideas about how you can implement a process. Most of the ideas are ones that seem like common sense when they are explained, but which are ignored by most engineering projects. Draw your own conclusions about whether or not it's a good idea to bundle them together and recommend people try them.
-- Andrem
Not everyone complains about cruft... one of the problems with programming, which XP seems to address, is the assumption that changing existing code will always break things. I'm sure we've all been bitten by it: find someone else's crufty code, spend hours tracing through what it does, attempt to refactor to tidy it up a bit, and much later find that you've broken something because the original code relied on some undocumented side-effect of one of the broken-looking bits of code.
: 'When something is very difficult try doing it more often not less'. That's a mantra everyone ought to chant...
It's not always that bad though - often you can find out what code does, fit a test framework around it to confirm that it does what you think, remove the cruft and check that the tests still run. If the tests are there in the first place (which I reckon is the most important thing in XP), it'll be much easier to refactor the code when needed.
The problem with crufty code is that cruft just accumulates, and gets harder and harder to change. There's an interesting comment on http://extremeprogramming.org/stories/testdb.html
-- Andrem
> People do not realise what is possible. The
> increase in processing power grows daily. As
> are storage costs coming down. This will be the
> same as having somebody watching everything
> you do.
Comments like this are missing an important point: the big, bad, ugly government is simply not competent enough to do this. Personally, I'd be happy if I didn't have to fill in a tax return to give the government information that they could just as easily collect automatically.
Yeah, I think encryption is a good idea, because it allows me to enforce ownership over data. I don't care about spooks watching me, because I really don't think I'm that interesting.
Finally, I agree that RIP is bad, because it is WRONG. That doesn't mean that I think that our govenment is going to turn Evil overnight.
-- Andrem
Any attempt to add just a few more TLDs to the system is going to result in redundancy: why bother with restricted TLDs at all? At the moment, it only means that if you want to look at a site (say 'slashdot' or 'freshmeat') you have to remember which arbitrary suffix to put on the end: there is no sensible distinction between .com, .net or .org - they might as well just be .1, .2 and .3.
.COM domains. (Of course people can still opt to go to ORSC instead of ICANN for a TLDs).
Completely opening the system up for people to register their own top-level names will make the world a much simpler place. Isn't 'http://slashdot/' much simpler?
People can still create hierarchical names, so if someone wanted to create a '.church' TLD and give away second level domains to worthy causes, they are welcome to. ICANN could sell TLDs for much more than
-- Andrem
Have you considered buying yourself an Empeg - http://www.empeg.com - and possibly linking it to a Palm - http://geek.empeg.com/developer/projects.html
-- Andrem
This is a significant issue. It's quite common for people running Linux at work to need root access to their own machines (because the sort of people running Linux at work tend to want to do the sort of things you can only do as root). But as the HOWTO points out, it's a short hop from being root on your machine to masquerading as anyone else.
Are there no (released) tools for solving this problem? Projects like Coda seem to be aiming for sensible solutions based on decent authentication mechanisms - but Coda is solving several other problems and (last time I checked) was still under development. Are there any file-servers which don't attempt to be as ambitious, but do provide the necessary secure authentication?
-- Andrem
And when everyone realises they can get /. discussions broken up that easily, people will stop using it as a discussion forum. But out of the ashes will come Slashdot II, using Gnutella, Freenet and some yet-to-be-invented distributed anonymising version-controlled message propagation protocol, which will make it impossible for any messages to be deleted (unless they mention hot grits).
The more they try to squash free speech, the more we'll fight back. And doesn't anyone find it funny that we can look at Internet censorship in China as a sign of a ruthless power-crazed governm ent, but in the West it's a sign of the success of capitalism...
-- Andrem
Aaaaarrrrgh!
That was my first thought - based on what M$ have given us in the name of AI user-interfaces (the paperclip and friends).
But it occurs to me that it needn't be that nasty, if you put a bit more work into it. For example, I get really annoyed when Word changes 'teh ' to 'the ', and I just notice after going left,backspace,left,'h',end. A more intelligent 'agent' would have remembered why it did what it did, noticed what I was trying to do, and sorted everything out.
So, bringing back the Internet theme, how about this for a project: a browser which can learn about sites that the user visits regularly, and provide various access shortcuts. For instance, if I regularly refresh the Slashdot index until a new article appears, the browser could notice this behaviour and offer to take care of it and notify me when the page is updated.
Or it could notice that you often click on a link labelled 'download software', and this takes you to a page with a high legalese quotient, which you always skip straight to the bottom of and click the 'I accept' button... the Intelligent Browser could bypass this page for you (this sort of thing could really piss off any DMCA lawyers).
-- Andrem
Anyone who uses Gnutella and thinks that it's a _private_ distributed network is seriously mistaken. Just as we don't want the Powers That Be to interfere with our attempts to descramble DVDs and record MP3s, we shouldn't get fussed about other people grabbing IP addresses over what is essentially a broadcast medium.
There are two alternatives, for people who are concerned about privacy: don't use Gnutella for your Pr0n downloads, or invent an encrypted version of the Gnutella protocol.
-- Andrem
Ok, so frame rates on modern graphics cards are a little ludicrous. What games seem to need now is more polygons. I can't wait to see whether Evolva lives up to the expectations: because the landscape and creatures are computer generated, the amount of detail can be increased to match what your system can handle - rather than the upper limit being dependent on how much effort the 3D designers put in.
-- Andrem
Before I'd heard about Asynchrony and SourceXchange, I started thinking how nice it would be for programmers - or anyone with a job which doesn't require their physical presence at an office - to be able to make a living out of bidding for work from this sort of service. Your only requirements would be somewhere to plug a computer in and someone to pay you for the work. Meanwhile, you could be yachting round the world, or sunning yourself on a Caribbean beach. Depending on your life-style, needs and beliefs, (and share option portfolio) you will be able to split your time between well-paid commercial work and voluntary open source hacking.
I think sites like Asynchrony will become much more common. A lot of people seem to get upset because they see Open Source as some kind of religion, which must be untainted by commercial beliefs. Making money out of OSS, or mixing open- and closed-source software, is seen as evil. As far as I'm concerned, it is the end result which counts: if Asynchrony encourages OSS development, great. If it gives existing OSS developers an opportunity to make a bit of unexpected cash, great. As long as it doesn't cause projects to be held up by debates over how shares should be allocated, I can't see any problems at all.
-- Andrem
I've not looked at the tools involved in playing DVDs on Linux, but it sounds like you're arguing for making things more complex. Linux tools are normally based on one tool for each job: in this case, I guess, one tool to decode and one to play.
-- Andrem
I don't see what relevance that has to anything.
Is there some law I don't know about which states that you shall not use or cause to be used any technology which makes illegal copying easier to do than some objectively defined standard level of difficulty.
DeCSS may make the process easier, but the point is that it isn't the only thing that makes it possible. There are any number of other ways of copying the video.
-- Andrem
No matter how I read the intro, I can't agree with your interpretation. Duder quite clearly stated that there is an article which claims that Macromedia are open sourcing Flash.
It is the article's claims that are incorrect: the letter they quote is a confirmation that the SDK will be available. The authors of the article have spiced this up as 'Flash going Open Source'.
-- Andrem