Slashdot Mirror

Actually, it's easy to make a case that both had bugs. GCC made the assumption that the Kernel does not mess with user registers. Since the assumption was wrong (and not required to be true under the kernel spec), it is a bug in the compiler. Since the assumption was reasonable (although not required), it is a bug (or at least a wart) in the kernel. Hopefully, the GCC will eventually get patched, too.

Actually, it's easy to make a case that both had bugs. GCC made the assumption that the Kernel does not mess with user registers. Since the assumption was wrong (and not required to be true under the kernel spec), it is a bug in the compiler. Since the assumption was reasonable (although not required), it is a bug (or at least a wart) in the kernel. Hopefully, the GCC will eventually get patched, too.

A patch to make sure a virus runs gives a whole new meaning to the term "bug compatible".

Plus, the marketdriods won't be able to expand the expression, so using it confers a bit of geek cred. As a plus, it doesn't match berklix.

BSD is a problem though. Maybe we need {*n?x|*BSD}. Though to be that inclusive for that we can just say Posix, unless we want to leave out QNX and BeOS.

*nix does seem to capture all the commercial unices, while leaving out the open source (& QNX/Be). But I don't think that is how the term is typically used.

One is a statement of faith, the other is a statement of fact. Facts should be taught in the public schools. Faith should be taught in the home. The very idea that students should be confounded by faith-based ideas while trying to understand the complexities of the universe is a stunning concept. Parents desiring that their children be taught faith-based ideas along-side facts should put their children in private faith-based schools. I see this as just another cop-out by those folks who want the government to raise their children for them.

for those who have no idea what parent means, trans: no such thing as a free lunch.

(i didn't know either. so i looked it up.

Godwin's Law is a Usenet term that states that the longer an online discussion/debate goes, the greater the probability that someone will make a comparison to Nazis, Hitler, etc. Once someone does make that comparison the thread usually breaks down into name calling and no further intelligent debate occurs. So, once Hitler/Nazis are mentioned, the thread is effectively over. Since this particular article starts with a Nazi reference, is the discussion over before it begins? More info here.

Actually, it's "Ain't" if you're on the Moon (a Harsh Mistress, as we all know), or if you're a computer geek:

TANSTAAFL:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/TANSTAAFL.html
http://jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TANSTAAFL.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanstaafl

Sounds like the defence used in the Nurenburg trials.

Wow, Godwin's Law in the FP. You lose!

Think of open source and free software - in a sense it spreads the same ways.

PHP is usually poorly written.

Since 90% of everything is crap, this probably can be said of most other languages, too.

Actually Hanlon's Razor:
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/HanlonsRazor.ht ml

Nothing was uglier than your average X Windows app when Windows was at version 2.


Too true. MS did a good thing when they got some people with artistic sense to help with Windows 3. The problem is that the industry's given more and more influence to artists of less and less talent, sense and taste for the last 10 years and now so many Windows apps' UI looks like angry fruit salad.

I'm going to put some noses out of joint here, but education in the USA sucks, and it doesn't really get better until you've got all the way through a PhD programme.

Maybe they should use an SED.

Or perhaps an LER.

Maybe they should use an SED.

Or perhaps an LER.

I'm sure they'll be worrying about it as soon as they find where that darn magic is coming from.

It comes from the Magic Smoke of course!

I think you mean: mu :)

That Apple, they think of everything. Now I'm going to go back to waiting for my Dalmation iPod nano tube.

It's called a Dogcow. Moof.

No, really!

Same with VMS. Tons of excellent documentation, for a hefty price.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that DEC included free shelves for every set of documentation purchased.

Read Big Gray Wall in the jargon file to get a better feeling of what such a documentation looks like.

I view that as just another manifestation of Sturleon's Law. I've met utterly brilliant people with degrees in all sorts of things. I know some bright, adaptable people with no college education at all. And I know of examples of credentials that aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Obligatory Real Programmer story.

Isn't it odd that it's the opposite of your definition? Maybe that's part of the change in students' attitudes...

You seem to have spelled crufted wrong.

I guess I was thinking of Hanlon's Razor, as seen at http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/HanlonsRazor.ht ml.

as all they see is schlock put together on the cheap

Know your sci-fi: Sturgeon's Law - Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.

Blogosphere

Tex would lead the tour to the window and happily point to the elderly IBM network controller(box was actually blue on the sides, model forgotten) with all its blinking status leds and tell em "there is the computer".

This post, and its similarly offensive reply, prove the problem with Slashdot "TrollMods". They see a post they don't like, and moderate it "Troll", even if it's not actually a troll. These posts or "Offtopic", or perhaps "Flamebait". The others, with meaningful, relevant content, TrollMods moderate "Troll" just because they disagree, trying to suppress them anonymously rather than even debating as AC.

TANSTAAFL /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see A Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B).

-- jargon files

It's not possible to ever be absolutely sure what the computer is doing.

Bondage and Discipline

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/bondage-and-dis ciplinelanguage.html

Not quite. If you are a dissident make sure that you enter the public keys you trust yourself. This also means that you need programs that you have audited (or that you had someone you trust audit), and they are running on a computer your trust.

Remember Ken Thompson's login/compiler hack? You can write a OS that recognizes when some open source program is running. Which means that you can't trust the machine you are running programs on if you are in China at least.

hmmm... I think I have just given myself one more reason to refuse to buy anything made in China if I have any choice in the matter.

From TFA:

"It was more smoke than fire but it did leave a burn mark on the cover."

Well there's the problem! He Let the Magic Smoke Out.

-- :- D.

I had a look at this a week or so back, since there was a link to it on Terra Nova.
I really wasn't particularly impressed, to be honest, although I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it is still very much early days as far as the project is concerned.

There would also be a couple of major obstacles to this in the real world, sadly.

a) With regards to content in particular, Sturgeon's Law would probably apply with a brutal vengeance.

b) With client-side character files and (worse yet) individual control of bandwidth from peers, you'd see 14 year old Neo wannabes swarming out of the woodwork everywhere, with things like the recent Blizzard speed hack, item duping, and so forth.

c) Although most people might, not everybody has broadband yet, sadly...and for this, everyone would need to. (I'm still on a 56k modem myself)

At least in terms of its level of progress, Croquet is far more interesting. I downloaded it and had a mess around with it...and although there are some issues which could be majorly improved, (texture size needs to be made uniform, for one thing) it's coming along well. It will be a while I think before a sufficient portion of the online population will have the processing capacity or bandwidth for a networked version of Croquet to be large-scale viable...but when we get to that point it could be very interesting. It essentially looks like an ancestor of the sort of completely 3D, networked virtual environment that Gibson and others wrote about.

But Slashdotters so rarely read the stories!

Well apparently Mel retired some time ago (see: http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheStoryofMel.h tml )
But maybe they still use Hex editor in some episodes of "charmed" :-)
-----------
Now I'm sure this post will really contribute to the fast adoption of Open Source Software in the Public Sector world wide, and generaly better the world ;-)

So the point is, I could be wrong, the gun-jumpers could be wrong, but one thing is right; there are ALWAYS other possible alternatives to something obvious, especially when it's military or political. A forum like this is not to say "ahh bad bad bad" and see 500 messages of bitching on bad bad bad, but rather to promote a certain level of dicussion and intelligible arguments.

You're thinking of Duff's device.

http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/d/Duffsdevice.htm l

It's filthy job security code. Ingenious maybe. Inappropriate certainly.

The assumption of anti-spam activists seems to be that spam wouldn't be possible without the knowing collusion of evil ISPs. Obviously, evil, greedy people will only respond to threats to their income. So never mind negotiations -- blacklist 'em until they repent.

Which ignores the difficultly of enforcing a spam policy. You can't just terminate somebody's account the first time somebody accuses them of spamming -- it's not fair, and will probably get you sued. Having worked at an ISP, I can tell you they get lot of bogus spam complaints, mostly from people who don't know how to figure out who owns an IP block, or who misread mail logs. And in some cases, the owner of the IP block just rents rack space to the SMTP provider. Which may well do a poor job of policing spammers -- but you have to make some attempt to get them to improve before you ditch a customer who's paying you tens of thousands of dollars a month.

MAPS and their ilk also seem totally ignorant of Hanlon's Razor. Very often ISPs assign their abuse issues to unsocial geeks whose communication skills and capacity for objective thought is quite limited. So of course they return MAPS's arrogant ignorant anger with more of the same. The resulting interaction is not conducive to solving the problem.

So yeah, ISPs are not blameless. But they're not the greedy bastards the stupid bastards at MAPS like to get mad at.

Read and be enlightened

"Some of the terms being bandied around are more suitable for a computer programmers' convention than for people who want to go online at home, " said Will Smith, AOL's net security expert.

There's nothing secret about it. Dark-emitting Diodes were specced out by Texas Instruments decades ago; it was obviously not much of a stretch to include that feature in their DLPs.

I don't find it appropriate that a moderator (apparently) would respond in this manner, complete with profanity and signs of a Messiah complex. I appreciate the complexity and balance of the Slashdot moderation mechanism, but I believe that too much potential exists for Mods with an axe to grind to use their moderation AS flamebait (okay so not technically, since its not in posting form) to lower others' karma. I think certain slashdotters really get a kick out of goading others on. If this were not the case, I suspect there would be fewer cases where people had good or excellent karma but periodic strings of -1 Flamebait (or Troll or Offtopic) ratings.

I wonder if the system would be better if it timed the duration the moderator spent on the Moderator guidelines page (which they'd be required to read before moderating, of course doing this server-side could be costly, and JavaScript is easily disabled, though it *could* be required to Moderate), or if MetaModerating were given more weight.

1. Someone wrote an elegant and complex solution, and documentation was sparse or nonexistant, leaving the elegant solution utterly wasted whenever maintenance is due: "What the hell was Mel thinking? I've gotta fix all this crap!" Thus, the elegant solution loses its elegance because it's been "fixed to death."
2. Someone did a quick, lazy fix because they didn't understand the code (often, because of #1): "Ehh... good enough." Of course, this makes the next cycle of maintenance senselessly complex, because it's source code gibberish - the original code plus the code written by someone that didn't know what they were doing. Then consider the next 5 maintenance cycles, all convoluting the code further from the original intent. How can this resultant code be faster?

The server operates using Block Transfer Computations on a positronic core.

I am agnostic - I do not believe that in the absense of any evidence in either direction that we can make statements about a deity or deities. Of course, many people try to spin scientific discovery (or lack thereof) to suit their own interpretation of the facts but the bottom line is that no one has ever proven or disproven the validity of any religion. To do so would really cheapen the whole thing, because it's not about fact but about faith.

You're absolutely right that no one has ever proven or disproven the validity of any religion. However, facts and faith are not mutually exclusive. I have faith in many things because of past experience or facts that have been taught to me. For instance, I have faith that things in the physical universe (such as gravity and mass) will continue to work the way I've experienced before or how others have observed them (and expressed in laws of physics). When I observe something that doesn't fit in my mental model, I don't throw out the laws, but try to find where my observation or interpretation was flawed.

Some people seem to need something to cling to, and there is always a religion around waiting to take advantage of and profit from that particular element of the human condition. In return the religion offers the sheeple a support network and a sense of well-being. Basically every organization exists to fulfill this purpose. The thing I find amusing about religion is that it asks you to accept something unprovable. In other words it operates on the irrational side of existence which makes it particularly attractive to those who are experiencing a life crisis.

However, every time someone engineers some system like this, there are people who are taken advantage of. And, of course, there is stratification. If the goal of Catholicism were as stated, to save souls and help people, then there wouldn't need to be a pope dressed up in gold and silk. You might still have a pope but he could be in an office building for all that matters. The most important realization to come to about religion is that it is not about spirituality when it is wrapped up in complex trappings. It's about control, and the people on top getting what they want. You don't need all that shit to make a statement about spirituality. I'm not sure what's so special about gold and jewels that they should adorn religious icons anyway; they're pretty but most precious metals have only specialty uses. Using them for corrosion protection seems a bit excessive and, well, arrogant.

I agree with that analysis for most religious organizations. However, please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crud", which applies to religions just like anything else.

Are you saying that it could never be valid for an organization to ask people to accept something unprovable? Do you think no one should accept anything as true unless it is an absolutely hard, provable fact? I don't think it's humanly possible to operate that way. Consider how much progress in science and technology has taken place based on Newtonian mechanics, which we now know to be false (or at least incomplete). Though F=MA was once thought to be an absolutely proven fact, it has since been disproven.

Even religions which do not amass wealth like the Catholic church are still about controlling people and making them behave in the way the founder(s) desire(d). Do you really need someone else to tell you how to connect with your spiritual self?

Though most religions are indeed about control (as are most large human organizations), a valid religion, IMHO, is one that has as its goal to connect people to God, and therefore with their spiritual selves. Christ

OK, making a more English-like syntax to describe something is not doing it in a 'new and novel way'. It's more English-like.

Anything that has been "common for a long time", with no effective corrective action, is deliberate.

You're forgetting Hanlon's Razor. Stupidity, false pride, arrogance, wilful ignorance, petty jealousy, and folly have been common for a long time too.

It is called the Eliza effect