It seems like what he is saying is more that it is too complicated, rather than too complex. Complexity - in terms of many interacting agents, the difficulty of predicting emergent behaviors, and the ability to spontaneously form new structures - seems to be the key feature that made the web successful.
That only holds true if "shallow bugs" meant "All bugs are found"...which implies bug-free software, and I sincerely hope that nobody has been zealous enough to make that claim to you.
Generally speaking, nobody can actually produce bug-free software. The goal in dealing with bugs is to asymptotically reduce both their number and severity.
Now the claim I've heard generally associated with the saying "shallow bugs" is that open source will on average approach zero bugs and lowest average severity faster than other methods, due to greater exposure/more people working on fixing them.
I'm not going to weigh in on that claim one way or another--there are plenty of people here who I'm sure can argue the point better than I can. I just wanted to say that if you've heard this claim expressed in terms of averages, be careful with regard to your reasoning when you're trying to refute it. A single exception doesn't negate an average, and I've always heard "shallow bugs" to be a statement about a statistical behavior, not a claim that open source software is universally bug-free past a certain age.
Think about it this way: all software has bugs. A corollary of this is that old software will have old bugs. That's really all we're seeing here.
The problem with that approach occurs when your neighbor decides not to take them up on the service, allowing a fire to grow unchecked and threaten your building. There are (at least in theory) many ways to address this issue, but we can't treat this as a purely isolated individual choice.
What you're talking about here is "it just works until I screw around with it before R-ing TFM"; this is a wetware issue that no OS can fix.
I apologize, I apparently misinterpreted your original statement as applying to the entire user experience (including application installation/use), rather than just the out-of-box OS X install. I agree entirely that what I was talking about applies across all OS's, which is why I raised the point that it'd make a poor criteria for delineating them.:) Using the definitions you just gave, however, I think we're in agreement.
This does leave me curious though - if a third party were to get so good at packaging hardware which installs/runs OS X out of the box with no problems that the install experience was no more difficult than on Apple-approved hardware (for instance, what Psystar is attempting to do), would the lack of inconvenience then be enough for you to call that system a Mac? Or would genuine Apple hardware be required even if the experience was effectively equivalent?
When it's completely painless and everything "just works" I might agree with you.
I'd be careful about defining a system's Mac/not-Mac status in terms of things "just working". OSX on Apple's approved hardware configs will work without problems for most day to day tasks - but I've seen plenty of tasks where naive assumptions can and will stop things from working.
Unless a Mac intended to run Supercollider and Quarks or MySQL (for instance) ceases to be a Mac in your definition, I think you'd be on safer ground simply arguing that "Macness" requires both OSX and Apple-approved hardware.
I would suggest checking out some of the indie game sites. They've actually been drawing me away from consoles and back to PC recently.
The games are cheap or free
It's all legal
They're usually easy to pick up and play, with a focus on fun game mechanics over action-movie style production
You find new, creative ideas all over the place
I find a lot of good games at the experimental gameplay project - which came up with world of goo and crayon physics, among others.
http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/
If you're like most people your visual field extends about 90-100 degrees out from your nose on either side, allowing you to watch the road but keep the passenger in your peripheral vision. You don't have to be paying active attention to them to be receiving and processing some visual information, such as arm motion and shifts in posture.
A friend of mine is studying to become a laparoscopic surgeon, and she tells me that she often catches herself humming the super mario brothers theme song as she controls the instruments...even switching to the world 1-2 theme if something goes wrong.
There are actually a number of ways around that - for instance in html-based emails, javascript can alter the URL displayed when hovering over the link. Literacy in HTML and consistent checking of the source can help with that, but even then you're not protected against pharming, or against character-set based homograph attacks.
That's one of the best analogies I've heard in these discussions.
It's also probably a good example of why I so enjoyed switching to linux - I really want to get my hands on the OS you just described so I could see how all that actually works...and so I can start playing with the application of image filters to config files:)
Renesys (who really know what it's doing in this space) has posted a refutation to this exact story, explaining that while Iran did suffer from the cut cables the same as the rest of the middle east, it did not go offline, and looking at why TFA may have thought it did. It goes quite in-depth.
The person in the passenger seat is in the same environment as you, and is far less likely to just keep chattering in your ear if something important starts happening. Instead, they'll probably be yelling "Look out!" or "Red light!"
And I'd imagine that to the extent that they can retrieve it from your computer themselves, they could seize the computer after the fact and retrieve it. Unfortunately, this is really hard if you were using even a half-decent encryption system.
A better option for them would be that if they know what they want in advance of the seizure/your arrest, then they could get a warrant allowing them to place a keylogger on your system. If they catch you voluntarily using the key (making the statement) yourself, then there's not much you can do. This is the sort of warrant that was used to get an encryption key from Nicodemo Scarfo - see http://www.news.com/U.S.-keeps-PC-surveillance-under-wraps/2100-1023_3-272131.html. In the case I mentioned in my last post, however, they didn't realize they needed the encryption key until after they had accused him of having child pornography and seized the laptop, and at that point the chance of catching him voluntarily using it with a keylogger was pretty slim.
It may seem nit-picky, but my non-lawyerly understanding of the key legal difference between your two examples is that one of them is a statement from you, and the other is physical access.
The government can get physical access to your papers or even the contents of a locked safe, but they cannot constitutionally force a self-incriminating statement of information from you. So if you write your key down they could get a warrant for that piece of paper, but if you memorize it they can't force you to tell them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher for more info.
The DRM for music was not killed by paying for it, it was killed by not paying for it.
In part. More than that, however, it was killed by people paying for mp3s.
I don't pay for DRM either, instead I buy my mp3s from emusic and Amazon. Now it seems I'll be buying mp3s released by SonyBMG. If, as you claim, you pirate for moral reasons as part of an economic fight to end DRM, I would advocate switching to purchases of DRM-free alternatives, because it is a far more effective demonstration that companies can make money by dropping DRM.
The key thing to think of with regards to production of a video game console is that it's different from making more copies of a game. If a game is selling out, you call your manufacturer and they just turn some of the other DVD-writers to producing one DVD instead of another DVD. To lease a factory and retool/staff it in order to churn out new consoles is a huge investment, not to mention taking time. At every step of the way Nintendo has had to weigh the costs of underproducing against the possibility of this huge wave of demand dying off during the ramp-up time for their (actually their manufacturer's, but they'd be footing the bill) new factories. This is much easier for us looking back than it is for a businessman trying to predict what will be happening 3 or 5 months from now. I don't know how much it costs them to prepare a new manufacturing facility, so there's no way I can say where that balance between these two factors actually lies, but it's not as though a conspiracy theory is needed to explain their being cautious about something like this.
parasitic wasps are going to wipe out their hosts?
Well no, current species of parasitic wasps aren't generally going to; however that's just because the ones that survived up until now are the ones that stumbled upon a method that leaves a host population in tact. This doesn't mean that previous parasites didn't get overzealous and bring about their own extinction by killing all their hosts.
There's nothing about evolution which inherently prevents a species from ending itself...you just don't encounter self-eliminating species often because of survivor bias.
Now I'm not a lawyer and all that, but my bet would be that while calling a fair-use copy "unauthorized" doesn't change the legality, a copy's being explicitly authorized would certainly impact the validity of their argument, or at the very least require further examination of the specific terms under which authorization was granted. If that's so, then clearly specifying whether or not a copy was made with authorization suddenly becomes quite relevant.
(And as a postscript, even if the word were truly meaningless from a legal perspective, it seems to me that there is a substantial difference between a frivolous adjective used in an argument which has merit and an argument which is fundamentally frivolous)
Actually, the fingers are surprisingly spare when it comes to muscle. What's actually keeping them curved around the jungle gym are muscles in your arms which pull on the fingers via tendons, in a vaguely marionette-like fashion. As I understand the issue with regards to crucifiction, the more important issue with nailing through the palms of the hand is that the bones at that point are all more or less radial. They go out to become your fingers, but they lack any cross-pieces to trap a nail. (see http://www.emedicine.com/plastic/topic296.htm) Therefore, it seems to me that the question of whether or not the metacarpals or phalanges (bones in your palm/fingers) could support the weight is immaterial; the nail doesn't need to break the bones, it just needs to tear the flesh between the fingers and slip out that way. This would take far less force, especially when the nail has already been driven through the hand between two of the metacarpals.
Bringing language back into things, the division of the body into parts has historically been a bit arbitrary, and the modern English distinction between "hand", "wrist", and "forearm" is hardly universal. (I couldn't find a quick overarching study, but as an example info on body parts in indo-european languages is at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-ling/ie-sem/pie-body.html) If the hand and wrist were labeled as a combined unit in Aramaic or ancient Greek, the original word would not have contained enough information for later translators to know which of the two terms would be most accurate.
And finally, to bring this back within a hundred miles of the purported topic, looking it up I can't find many references to crucifiction in video games. Looking at Thompson's statements in the past, I do at least have to give him credit for being consistent in opposing both religious and secular violence in video games. Although I can't find any examples of religious crucifiction in video games, he did come out strongly against "Left Behind." (See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6669946
That was actually sort of my point. Whatever percentage of the region's power consumption I account for, at least that percentage is generated by wind. Furthermore, because I'm on a grid and each customer doesn't have their own isolated generators, it all happens reliably and in a redundant manner. The power company takes many generators and puts them all into the grid from which I pull...including the wind turbines which (via the grid) do eventually connect to my house. Sure, if the wind turbines are contributing x% on average of the total grid's energy, sometimes that might fluctuate and drop, but it means that the fluctuations on the other side of x have to even things out so that on average, x% of their customers (assuming even power use for simplicity) could be supported purely on wind power. Part of the niftiness of having large power distribution grids in the first place is that they provide redundancy during these fluctuations -- whether it's redundancy from a coal plant or redundancy from another wind farm elsewhere in the region -- and offer a stable way to support that x% as x increases towards 100.
I actually am...I purchase 100% wind energy from the local power company, and so far this year I've had the power flicker twice, both during storms. Really not an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like what he is saying is more that it is too complicated, rather than too complex. Complexity - in terms of many interacting agents, the difficulty of predicting emergent behaviors, and the ability to spontaneously form new structures - seems to be the key feature that made the web successful.
Anyone else getting a 404 "feed not found" page back from feeds.wired.com?
That only holds true if "shallow bugs" meant "All bugs are found"...which implies bug-free software, and I sincerely hope that nobody has been zealous enough to make that claim to you.
Generally speaking, nobody can actually produce bug-free software. The goal in dealing with bugs is to asymptotically reduce both their number and severity.
Now the claim I've heard generally associated with the saying "shallow bugs" is that open source will on average approach zero bugs and lowest average severity faster than other methods, due to greater exposure/more people working on fixing them.
I'm not going to weigh in on that claim one way or another--there are plenty of people here who I'm sure can argue the point better than I can. I just wanted to say that if you've heard this claim expressed in terms of averages, be careful with regard to your reasoning when you're trying to refute it. A single exception doesn't negate an average, and I've always heard "shallow bugs" to be a statement about a statistical behavior, not a claim that open source software is universally bug-free past a certain age.
Think about it this way: all software has bugs. A corollary of this is that old software will have old bugs. That's really all we're seeing here.
The problem with that approach occurs when your neighbor decides not to take them up on the service, allowing a fire to grow unchecked and threaten your building. There are (at least in theory) many ways to address this issue, but we can't treat this as a purely isolated individual choice.
I apologize, I apparently misinterpreted your original statement as applying to the entire user experience (including application installation/use), rather than just the out-of-box OS X install. I agree entirely that what I was talking about applies across all OS's, which is why I raised the point that it'd make a poor criteria for delineating them. :) Using the definitions you just gave, however, I think we're in agreement.
This does leave me curious though - if a third party were to get so good at packaging hardware which installs/runs OS X out of the box with no problems that the install experience was no more difficult than on Apple-approved hardware (for instance, what Psystar is attempting to do), would the lack of inconvenience then be enough for you to call that system a Mac? Or would genuine Apple hardware be required even if the experience was effectively equivalent?
Unless a Mac intended to run Supercollider and Quarks or MySQL (for instance) ceases to be a Mac in your definition, I think you'd be on safer ground simply arguing that "Macness" requires both OSX and Apple-approved hardware.
- The games are cheap or free
- It's all legal
- They're usually easy to pick up and play, with a focus on fun game mechanics over action-movie style production
- You find new, creative ideas all over the place
I find a lot of good games at the experimental gameplay project - which came up with world of goo and crayon physics, among others. http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/You can also check out the indie games festival's guide to games: http://www.indiegames.com/play.htm
In addition, Wired offered a list of the best indie games of 2007 at http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/02/72796
If you're like most people your visual field extends about 90-100 degrees out from your nose on either side, allowing you to watch the road but keep the passenger in your peripheral vision. You don't have to be paying active attention to them to be receiving and processing some visual information, such as arm motion and shifts in posture.
They didn't need me to care in order for it to be an effective strike/protest...they just needed me to not be watching when the commercials came on.
A friend of mine is studying to become a laparoscopic surgeon, and she tells me that she often catches herself humming the super mario brothers theme song as she controls the instruments...even switching to the world 1-2 theme if something goes wrong.
There are actually a number of ways around that - for instance in html-based emails, javascript can alter the URL displayed when hovering over the link. Literacy in HTML and consistent checking of the source can help with that, but even then you're not protected against pharming, or against character-set based homograph attacks.
That's one of the best analogies I've heard in these discussions.
:)
It's also probably a good example of why I so enjoyed switching to linux - I really want to get my hands on the OS you just described so I could see how all that actually works...and so I can start playing with the application of image filters to config files
Renesys (who really know what it's doing in this space) has posted a refutation to this exact story, explaining that while Iran did suffer from the cut cables the same as the rest of the middle east, it did not go offline, and looking at why TFA may have thought it did. It goes quite in-depth.
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/attention_iran_is_not_disconne_1.shtml
Yeah, but not the company running the toll road that the getaway car used.
The person in the passenger seat is in the same environment as you, and is far less likely to just keep chattering in your ear if something important starts happening. Instead, they'll probably be yelling "Look out!" or "Red light!"
And I'd imagine that to the extent that they can retrieve it from your computer themselves, they could seize the computer after the fact and retrieve it. Unfortunately, this is really hard if you were using even a half-decent encryption system.
A better option for them would be that if they know what they want in advance of the seizure/your arrest, then they could get a warrant allowing them to place a keylogger on your system. If they catch you voluntarily using the key (making the statement) yourself, then there's not much you can do. This is the sort of warrant that was used to get an encryption key from Nicodemo Scarfo - see http://www.news.com/U.S.-keeps-PC-surveillance-under-wraps/2100-1023_3-272131.html. In the case I mentioned in my last post, however, they didn't realize they needed the encryption key until after they had accused him of having child pornography and seized the laptop, and at that point the chance of catching him voluntarily using it with a keylogger was pretty slim.
It may seem nit-picky, but my non-lawyerly understanding of the key legal difference between your two examples is that one of them is a statement from you, and the other is physical access.
The government can get physical access to your papers or even the contents of a locked safe, but they cannot constitutionally force a self-incriminating statement of information from you. So if you write your key down they could get a warrant for that piece of paper, but if you memorize it they can't force you to tell them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher for more info.
Replying to undo a mis-clicked moderation...
I don't pay for DRM either, instead I buy my mp3s from emusic and Amazon. Now it seems I'll be buying mp3s released by SonyBMG. If, as you claim, you pirate for moral reasons as part of an economic fight to end DRM, I would advocate switching to purchases of DRM-free alternatives, because it is a far more effective demonstration that companies can make money by dropping DRM.
The key thing to think of with regards to production of a video game console is that it's different from making more copies of a game. If a game is selling out, you call your manufacturer and they just turn some of the other DVD-writers to producing one DVD instead of another DVD. To lease a factory and retool/staff it in order to churn out new consoles is a huge investment, not to mention taking time. At every step of the way Nintendo has had to weigh the costs of underproducing against the possibility of this huge wave of demand dying off during the ramp-up time for their (actually their manufacturer's, but they'd be footing the bill) new factories. This is much easier for us looking back than it is for a businessman trying to predict what will be happening 3 or 5 months from now. I don't know how much it costs them to prepare a new manufacturing facility, so there's no way I can say where that balance between these two factors actually lies, but it's not as though a conspiracy theory is needed to explain their being cautious about something like this.
There's nothing about evolution which inherently prevents a species from ending itself...you just don't encounter self-eliminating species often because of survivor bias.
Now I'm not a lawyer and all that, but my bet would be that while calling a fair-use copy "unauthorized" doesn't change the legality, a copy's being explicitly authorized would certainly impact the validity of their argument, or at the very least require further examination of the specific terms under which authorization was granted. If that's so, then clearly specifying whether or not a copy was made with authorization suddenly becomes quite relevant.
(And as a postscript, even if the word were truly meaningless from a legal perspective, it seems to me that there is a substantial difference between a frivolous adjective used in an argument which has merit and an argument which is fundamentally frivolous)
Actually, the fingers are surprisingly spare when it comes to muscle. What's actually keeping them curved around the jungle gym are muscles in your arms which pull on the fingers via tendons, in a vaguely marionette-like fashion. As I understand the issue with regards to crucifiction, the more important issue with nailing through the palms of the hand is that the bones at that point are all more or less radial. They go out to become your fingers, but they lack any cross-pieces to trap a nail. (see http://www.emedicine.com/plastic/topic296.htm) Therefore, it seems to me that the question of whether or not the metacarpals or phalanges (bones in your palm/fingers) could support the weight is immaterial; the nail doesn't need to break the bones, it just needs to tear the flesh between the fingers and slip out that way. This would take far less force, especially when the nail has already been driven through the hand between two of the metacarpals.
Bringing language back into things, the division of the body into parts has historically been a bit arbitrary, and the modern English distinction between "hand", "wrist", and "forearm" is hardly universal. (I couldn't find a quick overarching study, but as an example info on body parts in indo-european languages is at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-ling/ie-sem/pie-body.html) If the hand and wrist were labeled as a combined unit in Aramaic or ancient Greek, the original word would not have contained enough information for later translators to know which of the two terms would be most accurate.
And finally, to bring this back within a hundred miles of the purported topic, looking it up I can't find many references to crucifiction in video games. Looking at Thompson's statements in the past, I do at least have to give him credit for being consistent in opposing both religious and secular violence in video games. Although I can't find any examples of religious crucifiction in video games, he did come out strongly against "Left Behind." (See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6669946
That was actually sort of my point. Whatever percentage of the region's power consumption I account for, at least that percentage is generated by wind. Furthermore, because I'm on a grid and each customer doesn't have their own isolated generators, it all happens reliably and in a redundant manner. The power company takes many generators and puts them all into the grid from which I pull...including the wind turbines which (via the grid) do eventually connect to my house. Sure, if the wind turbines are contributing x% on average of the total grid's energy, sometimes that might fluctuate and drop, but it means that the fluctuations on the other side of x have to even things out so that on average, x% of their customers (assuming even power use for simplicity) could be supported purely on wind power. Part of the niftiness of having large power distribution grids in the first place is that they provide redundancy during these fluctuations -- whether it's redundancy from a coal plant or redundancy from another wind farm elsewhere in the region -- and offer a stable way to support that x% as x increases towards 100.
I actually am...I purchase 100% wind energy from the local power company, and so far this year I've had the power flicker twice, both during storms. Really not an issue.