There's a simple way to deal with that, especially if you aren't ready to make the switch yet. Just create a machine with all the latest and greatest bells and whistles for KDE, super-simplify it and then set it up at your library and let the librarians have a go at it. I think that will turn them around rather quickly, unless they do use the hidden obscure features of windoze.
no you should transfer all your domains over to GKG. No I don't work for them but they've been really really good and I've never had a problem with them at all.
I have mod points but since there isn't a "-1 extemely uninformed", here goes.
I want no one and no corp deciding what should be accessed across their backbones/routers/etc.
There's the kicker their backbones/routers/etc.. If this ISP can't block whatever it wants then we need to make firewalls illegal... here let me get you the IP to my DSL line there's a linux box there with no passwords... that's just stupid.
And you didn't read the article, the ISP isn't stopping its customers from access the RIAA if they want to. Its using a honeypot of songs and people who download those songs and start attacking customers on their network get banned. Its simple. Its the same as banning script kiddies for trying to hax0r your website or banning spammers from SMTP servers.
Now all a judge has to ask is "Is it possible to block access to a single website?", and the RIAA will give this ISP up as an example.
There are pleny of examples of how websites can be banned. This doesn't add to it because they are banning individuals who are attacking their network, they aren't banning websites. Even if they were its their network, they can decide who should be on it. The RIAA telling ISPs to block music sites on the other hand has no legal grounds to try to control stuff they don't own.
I guess I shouldn't blame you though read/. long enough and everything becomes 'censorship'.
are you kidding? 3 years of experience??? People straight out of college are getting jobs you should be able to find one. I only have about 4 1/2 years of experience, I was laid off 3 weeks ago and I have contract work to do and people calling me (probably about to accept a job) and my strong points are Perl and PHP.
Seriously if you know C and Java you have it made, you might have to relocate but there are hundreds software jobs out there. I'd suggest going to ComputerJobs.com or to Monster.
I'm not saying you shouldn't start your own company, I don't know anything about the local economy where you live but I'm going to say that with 3 years experience and your skills you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a job.
The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.
Nice troll I'll bite with some simple math. Even if you replace the PC every year for 6 years say with a $2000 PC you've spent $14,000 so you've still saved $8,000 per workstation. Even at $3000 a PC you're going to save $1000 on every workstation, not as much but it still starts to add up.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say they are probably going to get all those PCs from a contractor. I used to work for a University that was on such a contract with Dell. They lease from Dell and get a huge discount on their $3000 workstations (don't remember how much), Dell replaces the machines every 3 years. Even if they are paying full price ($3000), That's 2 sets in 6 years time, $6000 per workstation.
How unpatriotic can you be? Sarcasm at these patriotic Americans! The 80 ounce drinks mean more pants, and more chairs and more coffins! That my friend means more jobs... communist!
Why do so many people insist on separating the Internet by geopolitical boundries? Your idea is just as bad as the Hague treaty. Just like the treaty it puts the burden of proof on content providers that their content is for a specific group of people.
Your idea also does little to promote free use on the net. It would be much easier for governments like China to block out everything from the west. The way it is now someone in China at least has a chance of getting unbiased news.
If I live under an oppresive government, I should be able to choose whether or not to break a law. I don't want DNS set up in such a way that the govt would make it nearly impossible to do that.
Is getting a haircut a massive achievement? Hardly. You're overvaluing the people that actually contribute and undervaluing the VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE who merely drift through life: school, job, kids, middle-age, retirement, death.
No, he is painting them all with the same broad general brush, that annoys me. You are taking it a step further and saying that people who don't make major impacts on humanity are of less value than people who do. My apologies but that offends me, not everyone gets to be the hero or get hyped up by the media or discover a cure for insert-your-favorite-terminal-illness-here. But that doesn't mean they don't have unique ideas, thoughts, feelings or that they can't be creative or that they are only creative a very small amount of time.
And then... even if you take all creativity away humans ultimatly do what makes them happy, or what is best for their loved ones. I say that is even more than responding to stimuli. No robot currently created knows what happiness is, much less love and can only respond with a given set of parameters while humans, who may respond along the same lines when asked the same questions still come up with unique answers.
the obvious answer is that most people perceive robots a certain way... as machines. In fact I'm impressed he got that many responses, most people don't ask their electric can-opener what the meaning of life is, and I venture to guess that most people don't see a robot much differently.
This statement is only valid if the people knew they were talking to a computer.
Fair enough, how many people do you know open up and give more than a few canned answers to perfect strangers?
Also he talks about how the brain is such a horrible computer but completely ignores human interaction, something that our computers can't do and I don't see them doing very well anytime in the near future (ever talked to that crappy robot voice on Sprint PCS customer service?).
That's a problem of NLP and voice recognition. Answering simple questions is not a difficult task given the proper knowledge base.
Exactly, a knowledge base, a database, whatever but I can't tell that thing that i have a problem with my bill, I have to go through dozens of menus and talk to a real person. There is no human interaction, its just telling me what's in a database, it can't try to figure out the problem.
He talks about how the brain is horrible at math but ignores that fact that everytime we move the brain makes complex calcuations to put our legs in the right place and keep us balanced. Just because we aren't conscious of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
You never make any calculations. You've got years upon years of experience with your musclular system. You've developed reflexes and coordination that all happen subconsciously.
Okay I step on something that's an odd shape for this example say it shift my weight in a way it hasn't been shifted before. I don't fall down, why? because my brain controls my reflexes when correct my balence, based on the signals from my inner-ear. Its highly unlikely that I store every experience of falling and my brain just picks the correct response, no it tries to right me with a reflex to catch my weight. The signals in the brain are real, I bet they can be reduced to equations. However since I can't find where I read about this now, I'll conceed the point.
They take input and react on it. How they do so is guided by almost entirely by experience, with "free will" being a tiny fraction of randomness that promotes "independent" action and thought.
I randomly became a programmer, randomly I do some art as a hobby, randomly I write a few things. Wait all of those are creative activities that I choose to do. Ask anyone on the planet and I can almost say for certain they will tell you about a creative thing they've done or currently do. I'm sorry but this is a pathetic attempt to reduce the human experiance to random stimuli.
From your comments I assume that you are still in school. Fortunatly, at least in my experiance it doesn't work that way in real life. Companies don't assign you neat little programs with set parameters, they say "The Customer wants 'X' and you have to figure out how to give the customer 'X' all on your own (well maybe some help from a newsgroup or something)"
Your friend who got into CS because 'her father told her to' probably won't get very far after school, eventually she'll wise up and do something she likes, or she'll like CS and learn it for real. But I've seen it before, people who are great a regurgitating the test material (in any field) don't do well later without the creative thinking.
Disclaimer, I haven't read the whole thing yet since its long I'm going to comment on my observations so far.
That's not to say that some people can't be more enlightened than others. But for the vast herd out there, on average, consciousness is simply not a significant factor. Not even a second- or third-order effect. Consciousness is marginal.
Okay I'm sure this guy is a huge expert and all but this sounds rather elitest, lots of people create lots of wonderful things, to say that most people don't use their consciousness simply ignores all the massive achievements of the last 100 years. He goes on to talk about that people say only about 45000 things to his robots... well it seems to me the obvious answer is that most people perceive robots a certain way... as machines. In fact I'm impressed he got that many responses, most people don't ask their electric can-opener what the meaning of life is, and I venture to guess that most people don't see a robot much differently.
Also he talks about how the brain is such a horrible computer but completely ignores human interaction, something that our computers can't do and I don't see them doing very well anytime in the near future (ever talked to that crappy robot voice on Sprint PCS customer service?). He talks about how the brain is horrible at math but ignores that fact that everytime we move the brain makes complex calcuations to put our legs in the right place and keep us balanced. Just because we aren't conscious of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
So really I think hes comparing humans from the perspective of his robots... I don't think its a very good comparison. In fact switch good visual recognition with good math skills in what he's saying and you would have a better description of a robot than a person...
he general feeling is that we've been pushed aside as Linux has become more of a mainstream USian commodity, and so a few of them (not myself) are heading back to Windows.
And Windows is not a mainstream USian commodity? And M$oft won't push you aside if you get in the way of profit?
The DMCA is different because it doesn't involve physical property, Congress doesn't really understand it so they follow the loudest voices, which in this case are the RIAA and MPAA.
Judges don't have to play politics as much, especially the higher level you get, so while they aren't impossible to buy it is a whole lot harder without it being blatently illegal. So no they aren't all biased toward money and big corporations. I believe that there hasn't been a good challenge to the DMCA yet but when there is I believe it will be thrown out.
We should still be writing our representatives but at the same time I don't really think this bill stands much of a chance. Congress usually understands when they are making something that is on the books illegal into something legal for elite groups. They know that if they pass the bill and it gets some publicity that there will be huge public outcry, probably enough to keep at least some of them from being re-elected.
Even if it passes its obviously unconstitutional and any judge in his right mind will strike it down.
(if it passes the house and goes to the Senate then I'll worry)
I really don't see how you get that interpretation from that quote simply because the quote and what we're talking about have absolutly nothing to do with each other!
Seriously... the quote doesn't say "Perl is designed to make small jobs easy, without making the large jobs impossible." It says 'easy' and 'hard'. I contend that you can have large programs that are fairly easy to write and vice versa small programs that are very complex.
That quote says nothing about not writing large mission-critical apps in Perl.
Who said anything about the Internet? Honestly I didn't read the article but I do have the first version of the book they are talking about and it has nothing to do with the internet rather pattern matching in programming.
That is why research into regexps is doomed to failure. It is a dead end. From a theoretical standpoint, regexps are cute and interesting, but for serious data prowling, you need something with a brain and a heart.
While I agree that for large amounts of data you need something other than a regex, but that certainly doesn't mean that regexs are dead or that we shouldn't try to make them better! I don't need Google's search algorithm to make sure my user's input matchs certain parameters and I would really hate to have to write
I really don't think most law makers are interested in spying on people (call me naive, whatever, no one has given a really good answer why they would want to at least in a Democracy). I think law makers are interested in money and votes, and if the public is crying "Save us from the evil hacker terrorists" the law makers are going to at least try to appear to be giving the public what they want. In this case in many governments its regulation of encryption.
The lawmakers don't understand the technology so if someone gives them a case where restricting encryption actually benefits the "evil hacker terrorists" by being able to spy on us because we all have weak encryption. (and yes regulation or not the terrorist's encryption will be just fine)
Its a case of playing the same game the lawmakers do, it doesn't really have to do with what the terrorists can get their hands on.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't seen too many people argueing the other side of the coin. That is the big argument for restricting crypto is that "the terrorists" (tm) will use it to communicate with each other. Are we arguing that the "the terrorists" (tm) could be hacking into communication networks and gaining vital information from everyday conversation? It seems just as plasable. And governments that are so scared of technology might actually buy it. We could see people in power start to advocate the encryption of all communications!
Probably just wishful thinking but I'd love to see it tried.
Some of those [Switch] TV ads could be interpreted as direct attacks against Windows or Microsoft.
You think? Who would have thought those ads were actually to get people to switch to Apple by directly saying that Macintosh machines are better... oh wait! I know: EVERYONE because that's what the freaking ads say! Begs the question whether this is political correctness gone amok or if the author of the C-net article is just plain stupid.:)
They do sell some PCs in store, at least where I live. Usually they are HPs. I haven't really looked lately to see if they had any of the linux stuff in store or not though. Probably not, they probably want to see if they can make money off the geeks first before trying it with the general public.
I did a hidden staff page for a company that I worked for. Kind of like a 'credits' thing that was really funny. I obsfucated it by changing all the characters to their ascii codes so it wasn't as obvious if someone viewed the source. I did this after a previous employer threatened to sue me for putting in an egg that told about all the problems in the company:)
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, that's funny. The scary thing is it sounds just like my wife who insists on saving all her work to floppies and won't let me junk the drive.
:) ... I love being married.
Me: baby we have DSL if you need a file while you're at school you can transfer it, its faster than loading the 500K word doc off the floppy
her: but what if the harddrive breaks?
me: that floppy will go bad long before the harddrive breaks
her: I don't care, it could still happen and I want it with me!
Women
So then I guess its theogists of the world can debate wheither one's soul stays inside.
... probably a little like looking through an ice cube.
:)
I wonder what the world looks like from inside a diamond?
Okay I'll quit rambling now
"But everyone already knows Windows."
There's a simple way to deal with that, especially if you aren't ready to make the switch yet. Just create a machine with all the latest and greatest bells and whistles for KDE, super-simplify it and then set it up at your library and let the librarians have a go at it. I think that will turn them around rather quickly, unless they do use the hidden obscure features of windoze.
no you should transfer all your domains over to GKG. No I don't work for them but they've been really really good and I've never had a problem with them at all.
I have mod points but since there isn't a "-1 extemely uninformed", here goes.
... here let me get you the IP to my DSL line there's a linux box there with no passwords ... that's just stupid.
/. long enough and everything becomes 'censorship'.
I want no one and no corp deciding what should be accessed across their backbones/routers/etc.
There's the kicker their backbones/routers/etc.. If this ISP can't block whatever it wants then we need to make firewalls illegal
And you didn't read the article, the ISP isn't stopping its customers from access the RIAA if they want to. Its using a honeypot of songs and people who download those songs and start attacking customers on their network get banned. Its simple. Its the same as banning script kiddies for trying to hax0r your website or banning spammers from SMTP servers.
Now all a judge has to ask is "Is it possible to block access to a single website?", and the RIAA will give this ISP up as an example.
There are pleny of examples of how websites can be banned. This doesn't add to it because they are banning individuals who are attacking their network, they aren't banning websites. Even if they were its their network, they can decide who should be on it. The RIAA telling ISPs to block music sites on the other hand has no legal grounds to try to control stuff they don't own.
I guess I shouldn't blame you though read
are you kidding? 3 years of experience??? People straight out of college are getting jobs you should be able to find one. I only have about 4 1/2 years of experience, I was laid off 3 weeks ago and I have contract work to do and people calling me (probably about to accept a job) and my strong points are Perl and PHP.
Seriously if you know C and Java you have it made, you might have to relocate but there are hundreds software jobs out there. I'd suggest going to ComputerJobs.com or to Monster.
I'm not saying you shouldn't start your own company, I don't know anything about the local economy where you live but I'm going to say that with 3 years experience and your skills you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a job.
The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.
Nice troll I'll bite with some simple math. Even if you replace the PC every year for 6 years say with a $2000 PC you've spent $14,000 so you've still saved $8,000 per workstation. Even at $3000 a PC you're going to save $1000 on every workstation, not as much but it still starts to add up.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say they are probably going to get all those PCs from a contractor. I used to work for a University that was on such a contract with Dell. They lease from Dell and get a huge discount on their $3000 workstations (don't remember how much), Dell replaces the machines every 3 years. Even if they are paying full price ($3000), That's 2 sets in 6 years time, $6000 per workstation.
How unpatriotic can you be? Sarcasm at these patriotic Americans! The 80 ounce drinks mean more pants, and more chairs and more coffins! That my friend means more jobs ... communist!
Why do so many people insist on separating the Internet by geopolitical boundries? Your idea is just as bad as the Hague treaty. Just like the treaty it puts the burden of proof on content providers that their content is for a specific group of people.
Your idea also does little to promote free use on the net. It would be much easier for governments like China to block out everything from the west. The way it is now someone in China at least has a chance of getting unbiased news.
If I live under an oppresive government, I should be able to choose whether or not to break a law. I don't want DNS set up in such a way that the govt would make it nearly impossible to do that.
Looks like it would work well. I mean its a great circumvision device. Anyone not using it for educational purposes could be suied under the DMCA!!!
No, he is painting them all with the same broad general brush, that annoys me. You are taking it a step further and saying that people who don't make major impacts on humanity are of less value than people who do. My apologies but that offends me, not everyone gets to be the hero or get hyped up by the media or discover a cure for insert-your-favorite-terminal-illness-here. But that doesn't mean they don't have unique ideas, thoughts, feelings or that they can't be creative or that they are only creative a very small amount of time.
And then... even if you take all creativity away humans ultimatly do what makes them happy, or what is best for their loved ones. I say that is even more than responding to stimuli. No robot currently created knows what happiness is, much less love and can only respond with a given set of parameters while humans, who may respond along the same lines when asked the same questions still come up with unique answers. This statement is only valid if the people knew they were talking to a computer.
Fair enough, how many people do you know open up and give more than a few canned answers to perfect strangers? That's a problem of NLP and voice recognition. Answering simple questions is not a difficult task given the proper knowledge base.
Exactly, a knowledge base, a database, whatever but I can't tell that thing that i have a problem with my bill, I have to go through dozens of menus and talk to a real person. There is no human interaction, its just telling me what's in a database, it can't try to figure out the problem.
I immediatly thought of 'Bender' I can't think of an episode off the top of my head where he wore one though...
:)
And yes, its a very funny image
From your comments I assume that you are still in school. Fortunatly, at least in my experiance it doesn't work that way in real life. Companies don't assign you neat little programs with set parameters, they say "The Customer wants 'X' and you have to figure out how to give the customer 'X' all on your own (well maybe some help from a newsgroup or something)"
Your friend who got into CS because 'her father told her to' probably won't get very far after school, eventually she'll wise up and do something she likes, or she'll like CS and learn it for real. But I've seen it before, people who are great a regurgitating the test material (in any field) don't do well later without the creative thinking.
Disclaimer, I haven't read the whole thing yet since its long I'm going to comment on my observations so far.
... as machines. In fact I'm impressed he got that many responses, most people don't ask their electric can-opener what the meaning of life is, and I venture to guess that most people don't see a robot much differently.
... I don't think its a very good comparison. In fact switch good visual recognition with good math skills in what he's saying and you would have a better description of a robot than a person ...
That's not to say that some people can't be more enlightened than others. But for the vast herd out there, on average, consciousness is simply not a significant factor. Not even a second- or third-order effect. Consciousness is marginal.
Okay I'm sure this guy is a huge expert and all but this sounds rather elitest, lots of people create lots of wonderful things, to say that most people don't use their consciousness simply ignores all the massive achievements of the last 100 years. He goes on to talk about that people say only about 45000 things to his robots... well it seems to me the obvious answer is that most people perceive robots a certain way
Also he talks about how the brain is such a horrible computer but completely ignores human interaction, something that our computers can't do and I don't see them doing very well anytime in the near future (ever talked to that crappy robot voice on Sprint PCS customer service?). He talks about how the brain is horrible at math but ignores that fact that everytime we move the brain makes complex calcuations to put our legs in the right place and keep us balanced. Just because we aren't conscious of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
So really I think hes comparing humans from the perspective of his robots
Just my opinions, not meant as a troll.
he general feeling is that we've been pushed aside as Linux has become more of a mainstream USian commodity, and so a few of them (not myself) are heading back to Windows.
And Windows is not a mainstream USian commodity? And M$oft won't push you aside if you get in the way of profit?
Interesting that they feel that way.
The DMCA is different because it doesn't involve physical property, Congress doesn't really understand it so they follow the loudest voices, which in this case are the RIAA and MPAA.
Judges don't have to play politics as much, especially the higher level you get, so while they aren't impossible to buy it is a whole lot harder without it being blatently illegal. So no they aren't all biased toward money and big corporations. I believe that there hasn't been a good challenge to the DMCA yet but when there is I believe it will be thrown out.
We should still be writing our representatives but at the same time I don't really think this bill stands much of a chance. Congress usually understands when they are making something that is on the books illegal into something legal for elite groups. They know that if they pass the bill and it gets some publicity that there will be huge public outcry, probably enough to keep at least some of them from being re-elected.
Even if it passes its obviously unconstitutional and any judge in his right mind will strike it down.
(if it passes the house and goes to the Senate then I'll worry)
I really don't see how you get that interpretation from that quote simply because the quote and what we're talking about have absolutly nothing to do with each other!
Seriously... the quote doesn't say "Perl is designed to make small jobs easy, without making the large jobs impossible." It says 'easy' and 'hard'. I contend that you can have large programs that are fairly easy to write and vice versa small programs that are very complex.
That quote says nothing about not writing large mission-critical apps in Perl.
I don't think the Japanease were dropping things like this on Hawaii, but hey I could be wrong :)
Who said anything about the Internet? Honestly I didn't read the article but I do have the first version of the book they are talking about and it has nothing to do with the internet rather pattern matching in programming.
That is why research into regexps is doomed to failure. It is a dead end. From a theoretical standpoint, regexps are cute and interesting, but for serious data prowling, you need something with a brain and a heart.
While I agree that for large amounts of data you need something other than a regex, but that certainly doesn't mean that regexs are dead or that we shouldn't try to make them better! I don't need Google's search algorithm to make sure my user's input matchs certain parameters and I would really hate to have to write
if $input contains really_evil_characters() die;
Regex is here to stay
I really don't think most law makers are interested in spying on people (call me naive, whatever, no one has given a really good answer why they would want to at least in a Democracy). I think law makers are interested in money and votes, and if the public is crying "Save us from the evil hacker terrorists" the law makers are going to at least try to appear to be giving the public what they want. In this case in many governments its regulation of encryption.
The lawmakers don't understand the technology so if someone gives them a case where restricting encryption actually benefits the "evil hacker terrorists" by being able to spy on us because we all have weak encryption. (and yes regulation or not the terrorist's encryption will be just fine)
Its a case of playing the same game the lawmakers do, it doesn't really have to do with what the terrorists can get their hands on.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't seen too many people argueing the other side of the coin. That is the big argument for restricting crypto is that "the terrorists" (tm) will use it to communicate with each other. Are we arguing that the "the terrorists" (tm) could be hacking into communication networks and gaining vital information from everyday conversation? It seems just as plasable. And governments that are so scared of technology might actually buy it. We could see people in power start to advocate the encryption of all communications!
Probably just wishful thinking but I'd love to see it tried.
From the article:
... oh wait! I know: EVERYONE because that's what the freaking ads say! Begs the question whether this is political correctness gone amok or if the author of the C-net article is just plain stupid. :)
Some of those [Switch] TV ads could be interpreted as direct attacks against Windows or Microsoft.
You think? Who would have thought those ads were actually to get people to switch to Apple by directly saying that Macintosh machines are better
They do sell some PCs in store, at least where I live. Usually they are HPs. I haven't really looked lately to see if they had any of the linux stuff in store or not though. Probably not, they probably want to see if they can make money off the geeks first before trying it with the general public.
I did a hidden staff page for a company that I worked for. Kind of like a 'credits' thing that was really funny. I obsfucated it by changing all the characters to their ascii codes so it wasn't as obvious if someone viewed the source. I did this after a previous employer threatened to sue me for putting in an egg that told about all the problems in the company :)