Slashdot Mirror

Just when I was about ready to give up on Slashdot, you go and post something in such impeccably good taste. Pinkwater has been one of my all-time faves for a long time. Hey, can we use the Slashdot Effect to get them to re-issue the Bertrand Brinley Mad Scientists' Club books? See the web page about them if you aren't lucky enough to have the memories from your childhood.

On the telnet chat server I work on (NUTS is the highest form of communication imho) we have two married couples who moved 500+ miles to be together. I also met my best IRL friend there, along with a girl who was my girlfriend for 17 months. I don't see any harm in it at all.

So, COMDEX is willing to let these particular teenagers into the show. Maybe they'll even be magnanimous and let ALL the major corporate executives in. As Dogbert sez, "Big Furry Deal".

The point isn't the corporate executives. The point isn't whether young people can lie about their age and sneak in. The point isn't even COMDEX! The point is this: the industry is treating young people as second class citizens, and I am sick of it.

I'm 23 years old. People pay me to tell them what to buy. When I'm deciding what I'm going to tell them to buy, what do I pay attention to? Well, you know, I draw upon my extensive professional experience, because that's what my clients pay me for. In particular, I draw on my experience of being 10 years old...

Do you know what it's like to be 10 years old and to know more about technology, oh so much more, than the average adult? You certainly should know what it's like, if you have any business reading Slashdot at all. It disgusts me how many posters on this and the previous item are willing to go, "Oh, well, we don't want loads of KIDS running around looking at the strippers, hur hur." You losers! Where do you think geeks come from? We don't appear fully formed and 21 years old, under a cabbage leaf in the Penguin Patch!

When I was young, my fellow geeks were the only people I could depend upon for decent treatment. That was the only group where I knew I'd be a human being - not "cute", not "precocious", not an interesting novelty. Geeks as a group (with the exception of certain recent posters to Slashdot) are among the most accepting, admirable people in the world. That's why I'm involved in the free software movement; I want that tradition to continue.

I noticed that there were two kinds of adults: the ones who treated me as a real person regardless of my age, and the ones who didn't. I made a decision about which kind I wanted to be. Now there seem to be a lot of the other kind hanging around, and it makes me want to pick up a gun.

I don't contest that COMDEX has a right to keep out whoever they want... I just think that if they choose to keep people out based on age, then it ought to be commercial suicide. They're certainly losing my goodwill. They ought to be losing the goodwill of everyone here.

The "sin city" comment was stupid: COMDEX PacRim, in Vancouver, has a 21-year age limit, here in British Columbia where the legal age for everything is 19 years. The "legally binding contracts" rationalization, and the "insurace" rationalization, may have some weight, but not enough weight. Those are exactly the kinds of stupidity we should be against! Telling me I have to be a certain age to be taken seriously, is as insulting as telling me I have to use a certain maximum key length in my crypto.

If COMDEX treats young people as second-class citizens then COMDEX is scum, and if you defend them, you don't deserve to be here.

Further ranting (including a page about COMDEX, posted long before this discussion started) is on my site. You might like to drop by.

I deeply love the Dead Media Page, http://www.islandnet.com/~ianc/dm/dm.html However, I've never received any mail after signing up for the Dead Media Mailing List. Is this a problem with my mailer, or is the list currently dormant?

There's an excellent article describing how a group of programmers reverse-engineere d NetNanny, the "censorware" package, to find its hidden list of blocking keywords. They also found a backdoor the makers had left in place, allowing anyone to subvert the program with a master password. I recommend the article both for people interested in reverse engineering and censorware.

- Mskala

There's no need to have a deep philosophical debate about whether it is Morally Wrong to use Kermit to Frog to promote the V-chip. It doesn't matter whether it's morally wrong or not. What matters, to me and to the puppet masters, is simply that right or wrong, I don't like it.

I like Kermit the Frog. That fact is worth money to the people who own his trademarks. I don't like the V-chip. If they use Kermit to promote the V-chip, they lose some of my goodwill, which is worth money to them. On the other hand, they gain some name recognition, goodwill, and possibly licensing fees, from other people who may disagree with me. Considering the number of people who feel as I do, I think that this is a bad business decision for them: they lose more than they gain. They would not make such a bad decision voluntarily; I think the reason they appear to have done so, is simply that they don't understand how much money it's going to cost them. They think, incorrectly, that they've made a profitable decision.

So I'm going to write to them and tell them I don't like it. If lots of people wrote polite snailmail letters to the people who control Kermit, saying "I like Kermit, but I don't like this use of him", maybe they'd change their assessment of the profitability of this decision, and ultimately change the decision. I'd like that. It's not necessary to have a coherant philosophical reason for not liking this use of the character. My emotional response is quite sufficient for me.

- Mskala

As far as I can tell, the common pattern among successful software developers is to:

• A. not use formal Software Engineering techniques, and
• B. feel guilty about not using formal Software Engineering techniques.

This pattern seems to be borne out by the train of this discussion. What I'd really like to see is some discussion of what good hackers do do, not what the {academics|managers|etc.} say good hackers ought to do.

We've all had to deal with projects that were badly designed, badly documented, or badly QA'ed. We've also dealt with projects that were good in those respects. It makes perfect sense that there ought to be procedures we can follow to see that the software we produce is Good. But the existing procedures that the scientists have discovered through research on the subject, appear to be mostly useless.

Look at the development teams that use the latest and greatest techniques of formal documentation and analysis - there's a large nexus of that sort of thing in Redmond. Look at the development teams that don't appear to use state-of-the-art Software Engineering. One of those was started in Finland a few years ago. Compare the quality of the resulting products. Formal methods don't seem to have a very good track record... outside of the many authoritative studies that show conclusively how wonderful and necessary they are. What gives??

I don't know exactly what the answer is, what the Right Way of doing software design is. I'd really like to hear people's ideas on that - not what we should do, but what we actually do. How was Linux designed? How was GNU EMACS designed? How was Perl designed? In the average Software Engineering class, all those would be taken as negative examples of how not to build software. They're messy, they don't seem to have been designed or inspected in any coherant way, they all existed mostly in someone's head for a long time before ever being documented... and yet they blow competing products which were designed Correctly, right out of the water, on the very criteria that the Correct procedures were designed for.

The funniest part of all is that the people who design good software spend so much time berating themselves for not doing it the way that the unsuccessful designers do.

"What's the chronology of Altairs, Z-80s, Apples, Macs, XTs, ATs?"

And don't forget the Vintage Computer Festival.

Featuring: The Performance Database Server. Start with the bottom of the Dhrystone results. Then find the older Whetstone database.

STREAM graph of Memory speed vs MFLOPS. (The STREAM standard results has speed numbers. The CPU Info Center has assorted historical CPU info. Here is Intel's Moore's Law graph. Here is a computer timeline. Here are the top 500 supercomputers since 1983.

The first production PET was shown in June and the first TRS-80s were delivered in August. Both come after the launch of the Apple ][.

Thus, Apple ][ is the first.

Source: http://web.islandnet.com/~kpols son/comphist/comp1977.htm