I'm a Univ of Delaware Mech Engineering grad student and we had a talk on this from a related researcher earlier this year. It has some cool potential in a lot of areas, but also some strong disadvantages.
Basically a modular robot is cool in that it can adapt to situtations, have redundacy in case a module fails, etc. Makes for a great exploration units.
The main problem with them is that they're a bitch to control. The processing demands rise with the square of the number of modules, so they get sluggish pretty darn fast. They also are more inefficient than a committed robot and can have problems with local weaknesses. Basically a bad configuration can easily overload one module and cause failure of the whole robot. Preventing that takes even more processor time to test possible configurations, creating a wicked cycle.
I think I need to remind people that while open source is incredible at some things, like networking software, it is awful at others. Open source works well where software engineering is more service driven because this scratches itches. It is in the best interest of everyone to improve their tools, even between competitors. OS is abysmally bad at other things, like games, because they don't have the same itch-scratching effect (plus games today are more about art than code). It is also almost impossible to create a totally trusted client using purely OS technology, this is very important for some applications like games.
Bob Young annouced Redhat software's newest investment plan. Called "extend and embrace" Redhat plans to fund starting open source projects, then gobble them up and redistribute them under the Redhat label once they become profitable. Redhat is believed to be doing this to improve their stock prices, which plummeted when everyone realized that you shouldn't pay for milk when a cow is free.
Said one RH investor, "Yeah, turns out this linux thing is free and you can download it for almost nothing off the internet. Guess you don't have to pay $80 for it from Redhat after all. Oops."
In an unrelated comment Mr. Young was quoted as saying "640k should be enough for anyone" and has begun spending way too much money on a house in washington.
I feel like I need to point out a few things here:
Marketing is all about getting consumers to buy what they don't need and previously didn't know they wanted. Most people don't need high-end processors, most people don't need anything more than the functionality in Word 2.0 (or equivalent) for word processing, but we keep upgrading because its "better". Its the lastest and best thing and marketing tells us we need/want it so we buy it. And we end up with that damn paper clip.
Most drivers are not mechanics. Likewise the average desktop user is incapable of coding on a competent enough level to actually fix any software problems they have. This freedom to fix what is wrong themselves is meaningless to most desktop users. The problem for the average user is that in order to fix CS software you have to take it to the dealer, no one else can conduct repairs. This isn't really a problem if you have a good dealer. Open Source will not remove dealers, it will most likely only make them better and more responsive because of competition. It will create better CS dealers. People like dealing with other people they know so they may deal with a distribution but they won't deal with raw Open Source at the lowest level.
Open Source is not the panacea that many advocates tout it as. It has real problems if you are trying to build something unpopular or obscure. OSing software does not guarantee it will always be maintained. OS can also get bogged down and very easily turn into a committee-run situation. Let us remember that camels are horses designed by committee.
Lastly for the average Windows desktop user OS has not brought them anything they directly use. They read the web off apache servers and get their email through sendmail, but none of the applications actually installed on their computers are Open Source. The only one that they might look forward to is Mozilla and its currently still on the list of OS failures in many/most peoples books.
What we need is some way to license protocols so that they can remain legally enforcable open standards. An Open Standards License. Under such a license, any extensions to the standard would have to be documented and open as well. Seems to me this would be a good thing, but I don't know if there is any way to do it in current law.
I believe the good reason is that win32, though crappy, is the standard. It has 90% of the market and almost everyone who wants to play games on their PC at least dual boots to windows. Even die hard linux users.
Its much more cost effective to develop for windows and then pay someone else to port it. Writing for multiple platforms is harder and takes time, time which is really costly in the fast moving PC game market.
He is not being forbidden from talking/programming in perpetuity. He is being prevented from doing so for the next 3 years as a condition of his parole. These are very different things. He could become one of the good guys, but only once his parole is over.
The basic idea is that you pick up eavesdroppers when the "noise pattern" created by the quantum encrypt changes. What happens if the guys is eavesdropping from the start? If your original baseline for transmission was with eavesdropping, then you wouldn't notice anything would you? Or am I missing something from somewhere?
I realize that this is a verboten topic on slashdot - home of free software - but have you considered trying to sell/license your voice technology and design to any major manufacturers? You might be able to cut costs by having some electronics firm build what you design and then make your money through volume and licensing from them.
Yes, you to can buy a BURAN and bankrupt yourself just like it bankrupted the Soviet Space Program! Russians say it beats the US Shuttle in every way (except safety) and they should know because they stole the US shuttle plans themselves to build it in the first place.
Notice the heat sheilding values on Buran aren't as good as the shuttle. Notice also that the higher lift/drag coeff isn't necessarily good because it means the ship won't slow down during re-entry as fast.
I would expect the Buran to be better in most ways, which it is. Buran benefitted from almost 8 more years of work/technological improvement. It may also be a second generation orbiter (since the CIA and NASA thinks espionage may have been involved in its design) with the US shuttle being the first generation.
I don't know about that. When newton first introduced his gravitational theory one of the big detractions was that it didn't predict the orbit of mercury properly. Mercury is too close to the sun so it has relativistic effects caused by the sun's mass. If you take the solar system as a whole, mercury orbit is very different from earth orbit and a pure newtonian model would not take those changes into account.
Is this still going to be up tonight since the station had a power outage saturday and part one won't be broadcast until the 29th? I didn't see it in the archive.
I wish I could find out some specifics about the engine. Some current things I'm wondering are.... Is it full rigid body dynamics in 3D or are the ships simply particles with some extras to determine rotation, etc.? Do they mind that newtonian physics doesn't work in some parts of the solar system, i.e. near mercury's orbit? Do they include gravity effects of planetary bodies and the sun? If the whole solar system is a battle ground, do they mind that such flight speeds would render Newtonian physics invalid as well?
Also, does the moment of inertia, etc. of the ship change when parts are shot off? Are we to assume that the ships use some sort of acceleration compensator to make them survivable? Otherwise we would see autonomous combat craft that would simply kick the crap out of the human piloted ships.
Lastly and m ost importantly, can I build a Starfury or a Gunstar with the fighter creator?
Don't worry they'll change their minds once entire squads of JEDI soldiers start crashing. Remember NT on the Aegis cruiser? That one worked really well.
I notice that this site is actually missing a large number of current air force future goals and projects like the global range transport to replace the C-5 and the Air Theater Transport to replace the C-130. Also most of the current concepts have new names like the autonomous air combat vehicle.
Does the Army After Next project have a website with its goals?
NO! NO NO NO! WRONG!!!! Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
It think your model for the security of a system is way too simplistic especially looking at data of security bugs which are found in the two system types. Windows has many less reported bugs for the numbers of bugs it has. Look at the data. Obscurity means you have to find the bugs by experimentation, OS means you can do it much easier by inspection of the code itself.
Lets use the fortress analogy of security. You have the OS fort and the CS fort. The OS fort is built of know parts and pieces. Its cheap which is good. The plans for all the parts are on file. If you know where to look you can find a list of exactly how to break into the CS fort, but good castiglianos read said lists and fix the intrusion routes.
The CS fort is more expensive. But its plans aren't on file. It has many places where you could break in if you can find them. Unfortunately the fort is heavily camoflaged, you have no idea where to start a break in. You don't know what is weak and what isn't. You just have to try different methods of attack until you succeed. Note methods to break into this fort are known as well, but there are less of them, they are more obscurely worded and the fort keeper keeps his fort up to date as well.
Now your a siege engineer in charge of breaking into the fort. If there is an uncorrected security flaw in the fort, then you job is done. Either fort is equally easy to breach. If not then you have two different methods of attack. The CS fort just has to be attacked by experimentation. Try different assaults and hope you find a weak spot. The OS fort is potentially much more open. You can look at its plans and try to find a new spot without attacking the actual fort. When you think you've found something, you can build your own identical OS fort for pennies and try it out in a mock attack.
Get my point yet? Its not a such a simple proportional model. You need to take into account the difficulty of finding a hole. Your model assumes you can have a completely secure system. This is fundamentally false. There is always a way in, possibly just do to the design of the system. The question is (a) how many ways in are there (b) how easy is it to find each way in (c) how soon are known ways in closed. OS excels in (a) and (c) but is very bad at (b). CS is very good at (b) and ok at (c), but probably much worse at (a).
NO! NO NO NO! WRONG!!!! Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
Re:Laptops are only a tool to aid learning...
on
Laptops In Education
·
· Score: 1
I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't get to use a calculator until I was in 6th grade so I would learn arithmatic. No computers until high school for similar reasons. People need to have basic skills and understand what they are doing before a computer can help with anything.
I've been using maple for 5 years, so I can barely do integrals any more. Calculator for a lot more than than so I can't do arithmatic to save my life. I write everything with a word processor on my comp and can barely write a complete sentence without one. These are not good things. To paraphrase the Matrix "After then we we're really doing all your thinking for you."
Will Open Source triumph? Maybe, but don't get cocky.
Open source is more bug free because of extensive peer review. It runs faster and more stably mostly because of this. It however can take much more time in terms of development. Linux has been around for a long time and even some older parts of the kernel are still kinda rough (IANA kernel coder, but I believe SCSI still needs work etc.). Also "unpopular" jobs in OS tend to go undone, like writing good user documentation. OS groups tend to develop for other programmers rather than the much more important user community as a whole.
However at some point the Open Source marketplace will become oversaturated with projects. It will become more difficult to attract large amounts of attention to less popular projects. OS development will get sloooow in many areas because there aren'y enough OS coders. But, due to its nature it will probably still turn out good products, just not in good time.
So closed source development may be able to be more efficient in terms of development time. Also think about how much "good" closed-source development goes into gaming. Game engines are almost by definition fast and stable and closed-source.
Also, CS can have better security due to obscurity. More security holes were found in Linux than NT in the same period. I'm willing to bet than NT has more holes total though. That means obscurity drastically reduced the numbers of holes that were found in NT. Obscurity is not the end all of security but it is a very useful extra layer that solves many simply problems.
The big issue is whether OS will force CS to become better. Hopefully it will make the public less fault-tolerant and require better CS bug-detection, etc. In short, OS will never wholly defeat CS, but it may force CS to improve. It will hopefully destroy the messy MS-style bigger-is-better coding that occurs so often in the CS world and force CS to be more elegant even if no one sees it.
Ok, I'm a relative newbie at Slashdot. I haven't even been actively posting here for a year yet. I can't talk about the golden age of slashdot or any of that crap. I moderate when I'm chosen. I try to do a good job and sometimes I screw up. Sorry.
As for the "sold-out" comments, thats pretty much crap. I don't see any instances of/. censoring the articles it posts. I haven't seen any articles on how great Andover and VA are. I haven't seen any on how they suck. For the most part its a non-issue./. is owned by a big corporation to pay overhead. Deal with it. If anything Taco is probably so sensitive about the whole thing that he's avoiding all related issues for fear that he isn't objective.
As for you comments about the signal to noise ratio and moderation, they seem to contradict.
You don't seem to share the group opinion on what constitutes noise. Grits posts aren't noise but Portman posts are? Who's to say? You mister "censorship is wrong"?
I like moderation in many ways, if I don't have enough time to read a lot of posts I can read at 3 and get the "good" ones. The noise drops out almost entirely. If I read at -1, then I get a whole hell of a lot of noise. What's your solution? Stop moderation but let every post? That won't take care of the noise problem. Only let certain people post? Well thats the same as the censorship you were criticizing isn't it?
Now on to my slashdot rant:
At the core of a website that supposedly champions the rights of the individual, we have the moderation system. The moderation system has one great flaw. It systematically allows for oppression of the minority. Have you ever posted a reply which went against the/. group ethic? Were you surprised when it languished at 1 while all the party-liners got 2s or more from replying to it? Were you even more surprised when you realized that their posts weren't even well written when you took an hour to compose yours?
Moderators are only able to be checked and balanced by other moderators. For all intents and purposes there is no community conscience or objective party to reign them it. Moderators for the majority party-line will moderate up posts they like and moderate down posts they don't. It happens even though it shouldn't. Minority moderators don't have enough points to moderate party-line posts down and they lack the numbers to moderate their own good posts up against the wishes of the majority.
In short, there is a glass ceiling that all but the best minority opinion posts can't break. Sure moderators should be objective, but they aren't. It shouldn't be a conflict like this, but it is.
I unfortunately do not share the average/. readers views on many social issues. And my karma suffers for it. This combined with what seems to be an increasing percentage of YRO stories is killing me. Oh well, I'll suck it up and deal. I honestly can't come up with anything better than the moderation system, except possibly making it easier to refer abuses to Taco, etc. for summary judgement.
...as electronic commerce has become an important aspect of the American economy...
And what part of the economy would that be? Is that the all-too-crucial overblown speculative-bubble part? I haven't heard of any e-companies that are in the black yet. How many points did Nasdaq drop when Microsofts stock crashed? Have I made my point yet?
The US likes other countries to take risky action first. That way we can see if it works and then implement it ourselves. We avoided socialized medicine and related fiascoes that way. If we have an interesting idea ourselves we try it out on the state level. Again, there's less risk of a major fiasco.
The US is always more worried about national security because it still believes its the bastion of democracy. Also, most of Europe didn't have to worry about national security too much because they had large numbers of American troops on military bases on their soil. It shocked me to find out that many European countries (like Germany) don't have professional standing armies, but its true.
Also most European countries are the size of American STATES. France is the size of Texas. Shouldn't they be capable of moving faster on things than the US?
Slashdot Mirror
It was one of the visiting professors for the spring seminar series, Mark Yim from Xerox PARC.
I'm a Univ of Delaware Mech Engineering grad student and we had a talk on this from a related researcher earlier this year. It has some cool potential in a lot of areas, but also some strong disadvantages.
Basically a modular robot is cool in that it can adapt to situtations, have redundacy in case a module fails, etc. Makes for a great exploration units.
The main problem with them is that they're a bitch to control. The processing demands rise with the square of the number of modules, so they get sluggish pretty darn fast. They also are more inefficient than a committed robot and can have problems with local weaknesses. Basically a bad configuration can easily overload one module and cause failure of the whole robot. Preventing that takes even more processor time to test possible configurations, creating a wicked cycle.
I think I need to remind people that while open source is incredible at some things, like networking software, it is awful at others. Open source works well where software engineering is more service driven because this scratches itches. It is in the best interest of everyone to improve their tools, even between competitors. OS is abysmally bad at other things, like games, because they don't have the same itch-scratching effect (plus games today are more about art than code). It is also almost impossible to create a totally trusted client using purely OS technology, this is very important for some applications like games.
Bob Young annouced Redhat software's newest investment plan. Called "extend and embrace" Redhat plans to fund starting open source projects, then gobble them up and redistribute them under the Redhat label once they become profitable. Redhat is believed to be doing this to improve their stock prices, which plummeted when everyone realized that you shouldn't pay for milk when a cow is free.
Said one RH investor, "Yeah, turns out this linux thing is free and you can download it for almost nothing off the internet. Guess you don't have to pay $80 for it from Redhat after all. Oops."
In an unrelated comment Mr. Young was quoted as saying "640k should be enough for anyone" and has begun spending way too much money on a house in washington.
I feel like I need to point out a few things here:
Marketing is all about getting consumers to buy what they don't need and previously didn't know they wanted. Most people don't need high-end processors, most people don't need anything more than the functionality in Word 2.0 (or equivalent) for word processing, but we keep upgrading because its "better". Its the lastest and best thing and marketing tells us we need/want it so we buy it. And we end up with that damn paper clip.
Most drivers are not mechanics. Likewise the average desktop user is incapable of coding on a competent enough level to actually fix any software problems they have. This freedom to fix what is wrong themselves is meaningless to most desktop users. The problem for the average user is that in order to fix CS software you have to take it to the dealer, no one else can conduct repairs. This isn't really a problem if you have a good dealer. Open Source will not remove dealers, it will most likely only make them better and more responsive because of competition. It will create better CS dealers. People like dealing with other people they know so they may deal with a distribution but they won't deal with raw Open Source at the lowest level.
Open Source is not the panacea that many advocates tout it as. It has real problems if you are trying to build something unpopular or obscure. OSing software does not guarantee it will always be maintained. OS can also get bogged down and very easily turn into a committee-run situation. Let us remember that camels are horses designed by committee.
Lastly for the average Windows desktop user OS has not brought them anything they directly use. They read the web off apache servers and get their email through sendmail, but none of the applications actually installed on their computers are Open Source. The only one that they might look forward to is Mozilla and its currently still on the list of OS failures in many/most peoples books.
What we need is some way to license protocols so that they can remain legally enforcable open standards. An Open Standards License. Under such a license, any extensions to the standard would have to be documented and open as well. Seems to me this would be a good thing, but I don't know if there is any way to do it in current law.
I believe the good reason is that win32, though crappy, is the standard. It has 90% of the market and almost everyone who wants to play games on their PC at least dual boots to windows. Even die hard linux users.
Its much more cost effective to develop for windows and then pay someone else to port it. Writing for multiple platforms is harder and takes time, time which is really costly in the fast moving PC game market.
He is not being forbidden from talking/programming in perpetuity. He is being prevented from doing so for the next 3 years as a condition of his parole. These are very different things. He could become one of the good guys, but only once his parole is over.
The basic idea is that you pick up eavesdroppers when the "noise pattern" created by the quantum encrypt changes. What happens if the guys is eavesdropping from the start? If your original baseline for transmission was with eavesdropping, then you wouldn't notice anything would you? Or am I missing something from somewhere?
I realize that this is a verboten topic on slashdot - home of free software - but have you considered trying to sell/license your voice technology and design to any major manufacturers? You might be able to cut costs by having some electronics firm build what you design and then make your money through volume and licensing from them.
Yes, you to can buy a BURAN and bankrupt yourself just like it bankrupted the Soviet Space Program! Russians say it beats the US Shuttle in every way (except safety) and they should know because they stole the US shuttle plans themselves to build it in the first place.
Notice the heat sheilding values on Buran aren't as good as the shuttle. Notice also that the higher lift/drag coeff isn't necessarily good because it means the ship won't slow down during re-entry as fast.
I would expect the Buran to be better in most ways, which it is. Buran benefitted from almost 8 more years of work/technological improvement. It may also be a second generation orbiter (since the CIA and NASA thinks espionage may have been involved in its design) with the US shuttle being the first generation.
I don't know about that. When newton first introduced his gravitational theory one of the big detractions was that it didn't predict the orbit of mercury properly. Mercury is too close to the sun so it has relativistic effects caused by the sun's mass. If you take the solar system as a whole, mercury orbit is very different from earth orbit and a pure newtonian model would not take those changes into account.
Is this still going to be up tonight since the station had a power outage saturday and part one won't be broadcast until the 29th? I didn't see it in the archive.
I wish I could find out some specifics about the engine. Some current things I'm wondering are.... Is it full rigid body dynamics in 3D or are the ships simply particles with some extras to determine rotation, etc.? Do they mind that newtonian physics doesn't work in some parts of the solar system, i.e. near mercury's orbit? Do they include gravity effects of planetary bodies and the sun? If the whole solar system is a battle ground, do they mind that such flight speeds would render Newtonian physics invalid as well?
Also, does the moment of inertia, etc. of the ship change when parts are shot off? Are we to assume that the ships use some sort of acceleration compensator to make them survivable? Otherwise we would see autonomous combat craft that would simply kick the crap out of the human piloted ships.
Lastly and m ost importantly, can I build a Starfury or a Gunstar with the fighter creator?
I finally can fulfill my dream linux distro :)
Don't worry they'll change their minds once entire squads of JEDI soldiers start crashing. Remember NT on the Aegis cruiser? That one worked really well.
I notice that this site is actually missing a large number of current air force future goals and projects like the global range transport to replace the C-5 and the Air Theater Transport to replace the C-130. Also most of the current concepts have new names like the autonomous air combat vehicle.
Does the Army After Next project have a website with its goals?
NOOOO! Must keep away from the burning light of the day star!
NO! NO NO NO! WRONG!!!!
Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
It think your model for the security of a system is way too simplistic especially looking at data of security bugs which are found in the two system types. Windows has many less reported bugs for the numbers of bugs it has. Look at the data. Obscurity means you have to find the bugs by experimentation, OS means you can do it much easier by inspection of the code itself.
Lets use the fortress analogy of security. You have the OS fort and the CS fort. The OS fort is built of know parts and pieces. Its cheap which is good. The plans for all the parts are on file. If you know where to look you can find a list of exactly how to break into the CS fort, but good castiglianos read said lists and fix the intrusion routes.
The CS fort is more expensive. But its plans aren't on file. It has many places where you could break in if you can find them. Unfortunately the fort is heavily camoflaged, you have no idea where to start a break in. You don't know what is weak and what isn't. You just have to try different methods of attack until you succeed. Note methods to break into this fort are known as well, but there are less of them, they are more obscurely worded and the fort keeper keeps his fort up to date as well.
Now your a siege engineer in charge of breaking into the fort. If there is an uncorrected security flaw in the fort, then you job is done. Either fort is equally easy to breach. If not then you have two different methods of attack. The CS fort just has to be attacked by experimentation. Try different assaults and hope you find a weak spot. The OS fort is potentially much more open. You can look at its plans and try to find a new spot without attacking the actual fort. When you think you've found something, you can build your own identical OS fort for pennies and try it out in a mock attack.
Get my point yet? Its not a such a simple proportional model. You need to take into account the difficulty of finding a hole. Your model assumes you can have a completely secure system. This is fundamentally false. There is always a way in, possibly just do to the design of the system. The question is (a) how many ways in are there (b) how easy is it to find each way in (c) how soon are known ways in closed. OS excels in (a) and (c) but is very bad at (b). CS is very good at (b) and ok at (c), but probably much worse at (a).
P.S. Friggin buttons...
NO! NO NO NO! WRONG!!!!
Ok, here's a simple analysis. The vulnerability of your computer system to outside intrusion is roughly proportional to the number of (unfound) bugs, since all the intruder generally needs to do is find a single explotable bug, and presumably, once an explotable bug is found (by the "white hat" community), you downloaded and installed the patch (here we will assume, to the benefit of the security through obscurity argument, that the patches arrive equally quickly in both).
So every unfound bug is a potential avenue of entry for the intruders Or as an alternative way of looking at it, if we divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, obscurity helps the good guys only if they are outnumbered by the bad guys. Which, really, they aren't.
I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't get to use a calculator until I was in 6th grade so I would learn arithmatic. No computers until high school for similar reasons. People need to have basic skills and understand what they are doing before a computer can help with anything.
I've been using maple for 5 years, so I can barely do integrals any more. Calculator for a lot more than than so I can't do arithmatic to save my life. I write everything with a word processor on my comp and can barely write a complete sentence without one. These are not good things. To paraphrase the Matrix "After then we we're really doing all your thinking for you."
Will Open Source triumph? Maybe, but don't get cocky.
Open source is more bug free because of extensive peer review. It runs faster and more stably mostly because of this. It however can take much more time in terms of development. Linux has been around for a long time and even some older parts of the kernel are still kinda rough (IANA kernel coder, but I believe SCSI still needs work etc.). Also "unpopular" jobs in OS tend to go undone, like writing good user documentation. OS groups tend to develop for other programmers rather than the much more important user community as a whole.
However at some point the Open Source marketplace will become oversaturated with projects. It will become more difficult to attract large amounts of attention to less popular projects. OS development will get sloooow in many areas because there aren'y enough OS coders. But, due to its nature it will probably still turn out good products, just not in good time.
So closed source development may be able to be more efficient in terms of development time. Also think about how much "good" closed-source development goes into gaming. Game engines are almost by definition fast and stable and closed-source.
Also, CS can have better security due to obscurity. More security holes were found in Linux than NT in the same period. I'm willing to bet than NT has more holes total though. That means obscurity drastically reduced the numbers of holes that were found in NT. Obscurity is not the end all of security but it is a very useful extra layer that solves many simply problems.
The big issue is whether OS will force CS to become better. Hopefully it will make the public less fault-tolerant and require better CS bug-detection, etc. In short, OS will never wholly defeat CS, but it may force CS to improve. It will hopefully destroy the messy MS-style bigger-is-better coding that occurs so often in the CS world and force CS to be more elegant even if no one sees it.
Yes :)
Ok, I'm a relative newbie at Slashdot. I haven't even been actively posting here for a year yet. I can't talk about the golden age of slashdot or any of that crap. I moderate when I'm chosen. I try to do a good job and sometimes I screw up. Sorry.
As for the "sold-out" comments, thats pretty much crap. I don't see any instances of /. censoring the articles it posts. I haven't seen any articles on how great Andover and VA are. I haven't seen any on how they suck. For the most part its a non-issue. /. is owned by a big corporation to pay overhead. Deal with it. If anything Taco is probably so sensitive about the whole thing that he's avoiding all related issues for fear that he isn't objective.
As for you comments about the signal to noise ratio and moderation, they seem to contradict.
You don't seem to share the group opinion on what constitutes noise. Grits posts aren't noise but Portman posts are? Who's to say? You mister "censorship is wrong"?
I like moderation in many ways, if I don't have enough time to read a lot of posts I can read at 3 and get the "good" ones. The noise drops out almost entirely. If I read at -1, then I get a whole hell of a lot of noise. What's your solution? Stop moderation but let every post? That won't take care of the noise problem. Only let certain people post? Well thats the same as the censorship you were criticizing isn't it?
Now on to my slashdot rant:
At the core of a website that supposedly champions the rights of the individual, we have the moderation system. The moderation system has one great flaw. It systematically allows for oppression of the minority. Have you ever posted a reply which went against the /. group ethic? Were you surprised when it languished at 1 while all the party-liners got 2s or more from replying to it? Were you even more surprised when you realized that their posts weren't even well written when you took an hour to compose yours?
Moderators are only able to be checked and balanced by other moderators. For all intents and purposes there is no community conscience or objective party to reign them it. Moderators for the majority party-line will moderate up posts they like and moderate down posts they don't. It happens even though it shouldn't. Minority moderators don't have enough points to moderate party-line posts down and they lack the numbers to moderate their own good posts up against the wishes of the majority.
In short, there is a glass ceiling that all but the best minority opinion posts can't break. Sure moderators should be objective, but they aren't. It shouldn't be a conflict like this, but it is.
I unfortunately do not share the average /. readers views on many social issues. And my karma suffers for it. This combined with what seems to be an increasing percentage of YRO stories is killing me. Oh well, I'll suck it up and deal. I honestly can't come up with anything better than the moderation system, except possibly making it easier to refer abuses to Taco, etc. for summary judgement.
And what part of the economy would that be? Is that the all-too-crucial overblown speculative-bubble part? I haven't heard of any e-companies that are in the black yet. How many points did Nasdaq drop when Microsofts stock crashed? Have I made my point yet?
The US likes other countries to take risky action first. That way we can see if it works and then implement it ourselves. We avoided socialized medicine and related fiascoes that way. If we have an interesting idea ourselves we try it out on the state level. Again, there's less risk of a major fiasco.
The US is always more worried about national security because it still believes its the bastion of democracy. Also, most of Europe didn't have to worry about national security too much because they had large numbers of American troops on military bases on their soil. It shocked me to find out that many European countries (like Germany) don't have professional standing armies, but its true.
Also most European countries are the size of American STATES. France is the size of Texas. Shouldn't they be capable of moving faster on things than the US?