It is my beleif that people are going about this the wrong way.
Humans adapt better than machines. Much Better. Instead of humans labouring to create machines that adapt to the way Humans interact NOW is less efficient than teaching humans to adapt to a scheme which machines can easily work with. One of the main problems the computer industry has faced in the past is that the vast majority of people had never used a computer before, and didnt understand the logic behind how they worked, how to interact with them, and what they could do for you. Pretty soon, this is going to change. More and more young people today grow up with computers.
Technology that is currently aimed at making it easy for neophytes to get ramped up into using computers is going to HOLD PEOPLE BACK in the future.
As humanity has progressed, society has always adapted to the important inventions and developments that have happened. A simple example is cars. Cars initiall had a very complex interface, and they still do. You dont tell your car to "go forward" "turn right" or "turn left".. you talk in a language that the machine can understand (a steering wheel, pedals, stickshifts, etc..). Pundits today would label this as "unintuitive". Sure it is unintuitive.. but do you know how SLOW and PAINFUL it would be to drive using an "intuitive" "human based" interface?
We may or may not be able to come up with computers that grok natural language commands. But I beleive that this will make computers less efficient. Computers today have much more potential than the current "allowing you to do the things you already do in a different way". Just like the automobile revolutionized the way society interacted, computers have the potential to revolutionalize the way we currently interact. But to be able to do that, society is going to HAVE to learn new things, knowledge that is relavent to this particular invention. To use a tool effectively, YOU have to adapt to it. To use a tool as powerful as a computer, people are going to have to LEARN, and I think that the vast majority of people have the capability to understand the concepts behind computers, and put them to good use.
The current conception that programming is "hard", and something to be left to the geeks and hackers, is (I beleive) superstition. Modern languages are based on a few concepts that are easily understandable.
The direction that we should be pursuing is not trying to dumb down computers to the level that people currently interact at, but raise people to a level of knowledge where they have the power to use computers effectively.
This is why instead of supporting initiatives like these, I prefer things like Guido's "Computer programming for everybody" project. In the long run, this will benefit society much more than any "natural language command line".
You are correct on a lot of points. It is true that no-one can point the finger at RH and say, "you did that bad thing." However, the fears about RH are well founded.
As you noted in the beginning of your post, RH _is_ a public company now. Which means that regardless of what Bob Young beleives, or any employee of RH beleives, the stockholders have the final say. Now, you can say that RH will continue doing the good stuff it has been doing, and probably it will, but it does not change the fact that RH is owned by its shareholders.
Now, I can imagine a situation in the future where the interests of Linux will conflict with the interests of RH. This is where it possibly gets bad. The employees of RH might want their darndest to do the "right thing".. but that wont matter. On what side will the coin land? Who knows.
Take that, and compare it to something like Slack, or Debian. Now, with these two distros.. there is very little question what will happen in such a situation.
Those are the fears that some people have. Those fears should not be ignored. RH has been a good company, and it probably will stay a good company. But there are forseable situations where it's obligations (shareholders v. linux) will definitely be ambiguous.
Note that I recommend Redhat and RH-derivative Mandrake to a lot of people as very good distros (and they are). But people should be aware of possible future problems. Anti-RH fanaticism is shortsighted.. but so is blindness to the possibilities.
OK. Lots have people have posted messages to the effect of "In a good ORB, the overhead of a method call to an interface is almost the same as the library." First of, there _is_ an overhead, but we can ignore that.
The big problem with CORBA is _bloat_. If you implement all your internal embedded interfaces with CORBA, it leads to really unweildy sizes.
The server for a simple CORBA demonstration (one structure and 1 interface defining 1 method), compiles to ~70K.
The same functionality, if implemented with sockets or shared libraries, will probably take up less than 10K compiled.
This is the kind of overhead you see with CORBA. Putting CORBA into every nook and cranny of your GUI implementation does not make it 3r33t.
There is a time and place for CORBA. It's not for IPC, and it's not for embedded controls. It's best suited for large distributed applications.
The K people have made a very practical decision by choosing shared libraries.
As far as I can see, there is _nothing_ to analyze about open source coding. It can be explained in a simple demonstration:
A: Hey, check out this (algorithm/program/driver) I wrote. B: That's pretty cool, can I take a look at it? A: Sure [mails foo.tar.gz] B: oh man, that's a lot of global variables you're using there A: I know, gotta get around to fixing that B: here have this patch, I've managed to kill about half of the globals [mails foo.patch] A: that rocks, thanks!
Wow. Finally, Slashdot cites an actual reliable journal reference. THE WWN is one of the best journals this side of the atlantic. You wont find news more relavent to our lifestyle anywhere else. For example, in the October 12 issue:
*We find that this winter will be the worst winter ever, because the Bible predicts it. *Cuba's communist leader Fidel Castro shocks the world by mooning his dinner guests *Info on wether you are being spied on by a peeping tom *A kickass page 5 girl (All pg.5s in WWN issues have a bikini clad girl) *Prevent cancer by urinating every hour *Exercising when you are angry can kill you, says new Yale study *Heartworms found in humans *Narrow faced folks more likely to be shy *Biblical tree of life found in Iraq (?) *Boy hangs himself so kid sister can have his liver *112-year-old's secret: A quart of whicky and 3 packs of cigarettes - EVERY DAY! *Early americans were all drunks - even the kids! *Washington think tanks are riddled with space aliens *Special: the Craziest royals who ever lived! *Dad's a lion, mom's a tiger.. so baby is 1000-lb 12-ft LIGER! *Getting caught in the rain makes you stupid *Girl,9,wins national beer drinking contest *New ultrasound device makes people's heads explode (OVER THE PHONE!) And of course.. the requisite *End of the WORLD is near(?) (says secrent govt. report)
With all this completely relavent factual material, is there _ANY_ question the WWN has so many faithful readers all over the world? I didnt even mention Dotti their advice columnist, or Sarena Sabak, their truly gifted pshychic.
Have you discovered the WWN yet?
-Laxative I hear talking, but I see no dancing! -Pokey
Um... what is the purpose of this? Does an ID card really matter when some psycho (not wearing an id card) walks into the school and starts blowing people away?
Perhaps they should also equip their id cards with radiowave emitters and equip the school with motion or infrared detectors, so that they could tell wether a person not wearing ID cards was approaching the school and call the SWAT team immediately.
It seems like these people are just burying their heads in the sand pretending that this "precautionary measure" will actually do something to stop crazy whackos with guns and no id card.
A much more effective strategy to educate students (wow.. schools educating students! what a concept!) about how to act in case of an emergency situation, and how to not impose a strict social pecking order which causes the downtrodden to have "issues". That would help out a lot. I know when I was in high school that deragotary shit by the "Ruling class" of students was very ugly. People would make fun of immigrants who couldnt speak well, and when I saw that, I'd just want to smash their face in (I couldnt because I"d get my ass kicked if I tried).
Getting back to the point.... These shooting incidents have gotten everyone riled up. I dont mind the gun action, since I do actually support a certain limited gun control, but the paranoia about media, and schools, and shootings, is out of control. Thank god I got out of school last year (I am told by my former schoolmate that my HS implemented some "security" measures of their own after I graduated).
The secret came out yesterday, as Representatives from transmeta unveiled the culmination of the past two years off effort: a pickle that glows green, yet is not radioactive nor toxic. The project was kept shrouded in secrecy because of the threat of Transmeta's space age glowing pickle technology becoming revealed to the public and other companies. "We wanted to corner the market on glowing pickles, and because of the kind of cutthroat competition in this field, Transmeta had to do everything it could to keep it's intellectual property safe," said CEO of Transmeta David Ditzel. Reached for comment at his home, Transmeta employee Linus Torvalds had this to say: "I didnt want to work on something that was directly related to Linux." The pickle technology developed at Transmeta is clean and amenable to mass production. With the release of this product, Transmeta establishes itself as one of the leading high tech pickle vendors. "From now on, when you say -glowing pickle-, the one thing that will come to mind is -transmeta-. They will corner the market with their extremely solid product," says market analyst Reddy Terwal. The glowing pickle product, incidentally, will be named "This product is not named yet". --
Seriously though folks, does _ANYONE_ know what the hell is going on in there? Do you think that just maybe, perchance, this great secrecy is a nice little PR move to get people excited?
Remember the simpsons episode where "gabbo" came to springfield? The only ads they ran for him either went "Gabbo is COMING!!" or "gabbo.. Gabbo.. GABBO!!", about 3 second soundbytes. Somehow, it smells the same way for this whole Transmeta thing.
I think the thing to worry about is not wether the web servers at university will be replaced with NT machines. The _real_ concern would be if(when) Microsoft decides to push the use of NT machines into actual CS development courses at universities. RIght now, the courses break down generally so that the first 2 years you program on win32 environment with a language like pascal or java, and then move on to the more powerful UNIX environments. This is fine with me. The beginning courses just teach you the basics of programming languages, and a little bit about software development in general.
If the higher lever courses switch to win32 environments, however, I would be _Extremely_ worried. Win32 has no place in serious development. As long as you're building dialog boxes from a wizard, or learning basic language constructs, windows machines are fine. Beyond that, UNIX just offers _more_. UNIX is gloriously heterogeneous, while windows is monotonous as hell.
Does this make the world look more and more like the world of Fahrenheight 451? I posted this once before when sony announced it's robotic dog, and there were stories of robotic fish that were indistinguishable from real ones (except for the eyes). I state it once again. If (and when) this comes to the mass market, what next? Western populations are apathetic as it is. People dont read as much as they used to, relying more and more on the boob tube to provide sensory deprivational entertainment. Even the books that people DO read are hopelessly bland, PC, and uncontroversial ones like "Chicken soup for the soul). What is happening to this world????? Just some thoughts from a pseudo paranoid. -Laxative
I think Mr. Guinness has every right to be scared by the fact that a fan has seen his movie 100 times. That scares me. What is there in star wars that is so fundamentally true that it needs to be watched 100 times? There was something wrong with that kid. THe movie I have watched the most was Trainspotting, and I saw it 4 times, and most of the time I was renting it again to show my friends because I thought they would realy like it. But 100 times? I wouldnt even watch that movie more than 8 or 9 times in my whole life. I have had friends that know every single little fact and detail about who is who in star wars, why he is like that, or why something happens. The only explanation I can think of for this is that they are substituting for something else they are missing in their life. I'm sure this is exactly how Guinness feels, except it must be worse on him becaues HE was an actor in the film. Whenever someone bashes star wars, people defend it by saying that "it's just a story". I agree, it's just a story, and obsessively watching it and decoding it, and finding out everything about it, is a sign that something is wrong. Now dont get me wrong, I like star wars. They're fun movies. I liked all 3 originals, and the phatntom menace, but that is where it stops. Were I ever forced to watch a movie 100 times, I would choose something that is at least worth it, maybe Apocalypse Now - where there ARE subtelties that you can discover. Anyway I'm off to have a 100 bowls of ice cream. -Laxative
Would just like to make a comment on the Staroffice Web application.. it's a move in the right direction. Thin clients/fat server model is the ideal one for most home applications. The whole idea of spending $2000 or even $1000, to get a piece of equipment that is going to be used for a little bit of publishing and small-time number crunching, and which is going to be obsolete in a matter of years.. is ludicrous. Computers arent worth that much to many people. The javastation idea would have been really great if it was implemented correctly. A native java chip running remote apps? Expensive servers.. but far cheaper client machines? This sounds like the PERFECT model for a lot of businesses deploying computers to employees. It takes care of a lot of issues like consistency (everyone would run the same versions of apps, and everyone could have their customized preferences stored on the server), upgrading (upgrade 1ce), the path to obsolecence (the clients will not grow obsolete as fast. Perhaps the server.. but then, 1 server purchase v. 20/30/100/1000 client purchases is still a good deal). -Laxative
You missed the point.. I think if anybody went to see this movie hoping to see a documentary on natural numbers, they decidedly ended up dissapointed. The movie simply used the character's obsession with mathematics as a tool to explore the psychological issues of having an essentially one-dimensional, shallow life. The character's mentor(sorry, cant bring the name to mind, I have a very very bad problem with names)spent his whole life trying to find patterns in Pi and came to the conclusion that it was essentially not worth it. The movie's point is NOT wether there are patterns in Pi, or wether the stockmarket can be predicted, but what happens to an individual when they become blind to everything but one goal. In the end, Max (I think that's the character's name), starts seeing patterns everywhere, in coffee, in the guts of a squished bug, in the stock market, in the Torah - and you can pick apart his brain at that moment and really understand the kind of psychosis he is affected by. The movie is not about math, it's about life, the point of life, and about balance.
Can you point me to a place where I can get good info on the good movies coming out? I love independent films, and I've loved most of the independents I've seen, but I've only seen a scarce few.. is there a place on the net which is reliable as a good source of what's good and what's bad?
I thought Pi was a BEAUTIFUL film, Rushmore was great, Trainspotting kicked butt (though i dont know if it's 'independent' or not). That's about all the independent movies that I can list off the top of my head right now. I've been searching for a place where I can get info on films like these, and the only thing I've found so far is the onion's AV-club movie review section.. do you know any other place?
I see a recent trend with companies "coming out of the closet" and announcing Linux support, but failing to fully embrace the whole philosophy. From this article, what I can gather is that now people will be able to program fast graphics for 3dfx cards. unless this DRI is also implemented by other companies with competing video cards.. this announcement is useless. Is the DRI even an open standard? Will 3dfx sue anyone else that tries to implement the same interface in Linux, like the whole smelly affair with glide? Is 3dfx going to release the source, or keep it binary only? All these questions lead to muddles.
If you really want to get excited about graphics on Linux.. take a look at GGI and Mesa.. both seem to be progressing extremely well, and try to provide full cross platform support for all types of cards. For some reason, this doesnt excite me that much.... (maybe it's because I just got my G400.. and it rocks my world)..
Pi? bad? Oh my god! I thought that Pi was one of the best movies I have seen in my entire life.. it was SO beautifully done, the grainy film, the absolutely lovely music, the message it conveys so clearly. Everything about that movie pointed to the fact that someone put SO much thought into exactly what went into the film.. rather than most hollywood flicks, which rather point to the laborious amount of time making it glitzy and perfect product placement.
Nice.. I love the design. There is already a comment here about the OSCAR being ugly.. I think it's beautiful. Simple, rectangular. It is the essence of practicality. Hardware does not have to be stylized to look beautiful. A lot of new hardware (imac-copiers) tries to go the organic route.. really twisting the design. While those are nice, my favour resides with the austere, artificial, industrial look. Forget beige boxes.. give me the raw metal. Forget little grooves to put stylized power-on and reset buttons in. Just stick a big old switch on the rectangular box, and a couple-of off the shelf leds for HDD activity and power.
This article is for the most part true, but who cares? The problem with eleets is that in a very short time, it degrades into snobbery and putrid stagnance. The jet-set were lame yuppies, and if (when) there is going to be a net-set, they will be lame yuppies too. You can see the signs of it already, aol-user-bashing, stigma for people who use services like hotmail and geocities, bashing people who use microsoft software, etcetera.
But I disagree with the article when it says that the general public will look up to a general type of lifestyle which the net-setters live. I dont think the general public will care. Individuals will always strive to be better at using new technological mediums, but they will not strive to achieve the particular lifestyle set by the net-setters. Rather, than 1 elite dominating the scene, there will be a fragmentation into multitudes of different groups with their own focus and agendas, and people will find refuge in these countless groups rather than in the mainstream. The ultraconservatives, the fundamentalists, the libertarians, the pedophiles, the socialists, the hackers, the crackers, the neo-nazis, will all have their representation, for better or worse. So again, who cares about the net-setters? They'll do their thing, just like everyone else.
I think this all has to do with the history of the whole computer science field. When computers really started taking off, it was the young geeks, the stereotypical teenage-hacker(not cracker, hacker), twentysomething coder, who really provided the solutions that business could use. In the past, at least, it was always the young coder, the young computer entrepeneur, who really got things moving. This is pretty much predictable, with any new technology, there needs to be time for it it "phase in" to society. I think computers and programming, now is at a point where even the older generations have a good understanding of the technologies, but the stereotypes still linger, the whole computer programming field cant escape it's history. It's really sad, because I personally beleive that older individuals plainly have a lot more experience, in life and in coding, for businesses to ignore them. Businesses DO need the liveliness and the vigor of young, fresh-out-of-bachelors, coders, but they could also really use the calm, enlightened view of the elders.
I also beleive that this is a symptom of American culture's general lack of respect for old people. They see old people as some sort of blemish on their personal image.. they're wrinkly, not physically attractive, fit only to be relegated to old-folks-homes, but fail to see the lifetime's worth of knowledge just waiting to be gleaned from the old-timers.
Anyway, I love coding, and I'd do it if I was paid a lot, or if I was paid nothing (the latter is the case for me right now), but I'm really disturbed by this rejection of elder individuals by the high-tech industry. I'm 18 right now, just finished my first year, and starting on my second.. and my dad keeps repeating to me with an extreme urgency: As SOON as you get a job, start putting away money for your PENSION. Think 30 years ahead, 'cause when you're an old man, and have no reserve, you're FUCKED. I think that's really the only option for young individuals going into this field, SAVE. It's amazing how you can accumulate money if you keep to a set savings plan.. with just 2000 dollars a year, deposited into a savings account, every year, non-failing, you'll be able to support yourself in your later years, no retirement problems whatsoever.
There is a very good reason why there is a 'double standard'. First, let me address some of the bugs in your argument. One: The change in legality does not occur between 'small' and 'large' companies. Just being a 'large' company does NOT change the legal system for you. But being a monopoly DOES. See the difference? Now, there are good reasons why monopolies need to have special rules applied to them. Libertarians would judge all companies alike, in the sense that they ARE companies, and they should be held to the same set of standards. The problem is, any ideology, taken to an extreme, is folly. When a company becomes a monopoly, it becomes more than a 'normal' company because it suddenly is the supplier, and therefore controller of a WHOLE SEGMENT of the economy. It is a known fact that monopolies have a much easier time keeping competitors out of their market (undercutting prices, etc.) Thus, when a company is a monopoly, it has special responsibilities, more so than a normal, non-monopoly company. These responsibilities is what antitrust law reflects. Antitrust law is needed because without it, the system can easily go awry, and lead to a select group of monopolies running the ENTIRE economy, completely killing competition. Without competition, the capitalist system is USELESS and inefficient. Antitrust law is needed to protect the market. YES, it IS government intervention in the economy, and it IS needed. Without it, there is no hope for the capitalist system. Libertarians who naively beleive in the free laizzes faire market myth dont realize that without antitrust, their wonderful capitalist economy will become a pseudo-communist-oligarchist system. With the economy (and therefore country) controlled by a set of megacorporations, who are themselves controlled by rich investors. It is a complete corruption of the capitalist system.
I dont feel good about the IPO announcement by Be. There are pros and cons in going public, but in my perspective, the cons outweight the pros. My main problem with public companies is that it tends to degrade the character of a company. Whenever you give up a part of your control (as the head of a company) to a guy with money, you lose a lot When big money starts to get involved, the main focus of the company is going to shift from making the best possible OS, to the most profit. This is a general statement. Of course, private companies seek to make profit too, and yes, sometimes profit and making a better products are not mutually exclusive. When it comes down to the line, and there is a tough decesion to make between short term profitability, and the general health of the product, the publically controlled companies will generally choose the former, while the private company has more of a probability of taking the hard road (depending of course, on the head) I have nothing concrete to lay down, these are just my feelings about the issue.
Well, this seems to reflect recent changes in the graphics card industry pretty well. 3DFX's cards suck (especially compared to the TNT2 and G400), and it's clear now where that lack of quality is coming from. 3DFX is more concerned about protecting their turf by any means possible rather than making good products. I got annoyed a while back when it messed with another college (or HS) kid for doing the same thing, but back then 3dFX had a strong foothold. Now, this is just suicide. Nobody has to stick to Glide anymore, OpenGL is a better solution anyway. And Voodoo3 is a shitty card also. So compared with the TNT2 and G400, both who are coming out with nice OpenGL support, this just leaves 3dfx in the pits.
I might draw flame for saying this, but it needs to be said.
This is what happens when a person lets glitz and gloss get in the way of useful coding, and immaturity takes over.
Ok, the usual disclaimer before I get started. I dont use Gnome, I dont use KDE, I dont use E, and I rarely use X. I am not a CLI purist, just find that the CLI gives me most of what I want from a computer. Moreover, I'll say that I've tried E, and Gnome.
Raster's main objective in E is not to actually provide a useful window manager, but to provide inconsequential configurability for the sake of configurability. I'll admit that when I first saw E I was enamored, and said "wow, cool". But take a second look people. As a windowmanager, it provides a shithole of an experience. It's quite obvious that Raster, while putting a lot of work into the configurability and theme-ability, did not pay one bit of attention to the actual usability of E. In his previous statement, Raster accuses the Gnome developers of trying to create a windows clone. But I think that Raster copies microsoft philosophy much more than the Gnome crew. E emphasizes glitz and gimmicks rather than real usability. Gnome on the other hand is about usability. Even though they might lose track of that from time to time, that's the main purpose behind Gnome.
With all this E-bashing, one my ask what point I'm getting to. My point is that E and this occurence, is a reflection of Raster's personality. Maybe it was a mistake for the gnome crew to hire him in the first place, but It's pretty obvious that he does not jive with the goal behind Gnome.
Interesting topic. I think the great advance in real computer intelligence is going to come from evolutionary programming - ie building a system that evolves code based on prerequisite "bias" conditions to a certain goal. Systems like this already exist, and have been put to use to solve simple problems. One day, we might have an evolved program a few terabytes (or more) long, and we wont know what the hell it does, but it will be intelligent. And I think the correct term to use here is artificial CONCIOUSNESS - as in self-conciousness. Intelligence can be faked.. self conciousness is harder.
The problem is, these systems and their success will cause real questions about the nature of OUR humanity. What is humanity after all but an evolved response to a competitive environment based on a small number of fixed rules (i.e. the physical rules of the universe). Now, if and when this "intelligent program" occurs.. what will happen?
a) The postulations that a program might 'discover' it's 'enslavement' are ridiculous. The fact is, the artificial environment provided by you would be the 'organism''s universe - and expecting the organism to think "outside" the universe would be essentially futile. It's like asking humans to picture the 4th dimension - it just doesnt work.
b) Having a program that did this, you could NOT easily "control" it.. i-e you cant make it behave one way or the other. Because the program would be too complicated for you to sort out.. many years of research would be needed to figure out what exactly is going on. You could however, control the environment, the program's universe, much like a kid with an aquarium. YOu could go in, rearrange the resources and change rules.
c) What would this mean to the people who really have a need to believe in humanity as something 'special' - people who believe in souls or some other explanation for our conciousness or self-awareness? It would really shatter the confort zone we live in today.
It will be grand when it happens.. whenever that is.
-Laxative
Bravo Katz, but Why did not you complete this
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
I cant believe you didnt see the trap here..
jezus, if playing violent games such as "doom/quacke/etc" alleviates violent tendencies, then by the same token wouldnt kiddie porn alleviate abusive tendencies?
Slashdot Mirror
/* being rant */
It is my beleif that people are going about this the wrong way.
Humans adapt better than machines. Much Better. Instead of humans labouring to create machines that adapt to the way Humans interact NOW is less efficient than teaching humans to adapt to a scheme which machines can easily work with. One of the main problems the computer industry has faced in the past is that the vast majority of people had never used a computer before, and didnt understand the logic behind how they worked, how to interact with them, and what they could do for you. Pretty soon, this is going to change. More and more young people today grow up with computers.
Technology that is currently aimed at making it easy for neophytes to get ramped up into using computers is going to HOLD PEOPLE BACK in the future.
As humanity has progressed, society has always adapted to the important inventions and developments that have happened. A simple example is cars. Cars initiall had a very complex interface, and they still do. You dont tell your car to "go forward" "turn right" or "turn left".. you talk in a language that the machine can understand (a steering wheel, pedals, stickshifts, etc..). Pundits today would label this as "unintuitive". Sure it is unintuitive.. but do you know how SLOW and PAINFUL it would be to drive using an "intuitive" "human based" interface?
We may or may not be able to come up with computers that grok natural language commands. But I beleive that this will make computers less efficient. Computers today have much more potential than the current "allowing you to do the things you already do in a different way". Just like the automobile revolutionized the way society interacted, computers have the potential to revolutionalize the way we currently interact. But to be able to do that, society is going to HAVE to learn new things, knowledge that is relavent to this particular invention. To use a tool effectively, YOU have to adapt to it. To use a tool as powerful as a computer, people are going to have to LEARN, and I think that the vast majority of people have the capability to understand the concepts behind computers, and put them to good use.
The current conception that programming is "hard", and something to be left to the geeks and hackers, is (I beleive) superstition. Modern languages are based on a few concepts that are easily understandable.
The direction that we should be pursuing is not trying to dumb down computers to the level that people currently interact at, but raise people to a level of knowledge where they have the power to use computers effectively.
This is why instead of supporting initiatives like these, I prefer things like Guido's "Computer programming for everybody" project. In the long run, this will benefit society much more than any "natural language command line".
/* end rant */
-Laxitive
You are correct on a lot of points. It is true that no-one can point the finger at RH and say, "you did that bad thing." However, the fears about RH are well founded.
As you noted in the beginning of your post, RH _is_ a public company now. Which means that regardless of what Bob Young beleives, or any employee of RH beleives, the stockholders have the final say. Now, you can say that RH will continue doing the good stuff it has been doing, and probably it will, but it does not change the fact that RH is owned by its shareholders.
Now, I can imagine a situation in the future where the interests of Linux will conflict with the interests of RH. This is where it possibly gets bad. The employees of RH might want their darndest to do the "right thing".. but that wont matter. On what side will the coin land? Who knows.
Take that, and compare it to something like Slack, or Debian. Now, with these two distros.. there is very little question what will happen in such a situation.
Those are the fears that some people have. Those fears should not be ignored. RH has been a good company, and it probably will stay a good company. But there are forseable situations where it's obligations (shareholders v. linux) will definitely be ambiguous.
Note that I recommend Redhat and RH-derivative Mandrake to a lot of people as very good distros (and they are). But people should be aware of possible future problems. Anti-RH fanaticism is shortsighted.. but so is blindness to the possibilities.
-Laxative
OK. Lots have people have posted messages to the effect of "In a good ORB, the overhead of a method call to an interface is almost the same as the library." First of, there _is_ an overhead, but we can ignore that.
The big problem with CORBA is _bloat_. If you implement all your internal embedded interfaces with CORBA, it leads to really unweildy sizes.
The server for a simple CORBA demonstration (one structure and 1 interface defining 1 method), compiles to ~70K.
The same functionality, if implemented with sockets or shared libraries, will probably take up less than 10K compiled.
This is the kind of overhead you see with CORBA. Putting CORBA into every nook and cranny of your GUI implementation does not make it 3r33t.
There is a time and place for CORBA. It's not for IPC, and it's not for embedded controls. It's best suited for large distributed applications.
The K people have made a very practical decision by choosing shared libraries.
-Laxative
As far as I can see, there is _nothing_ to analyze about open source coding. It can be explained in a simple demonstration:
A: Hey, check out this (algorithm/program/driver) I wrote.
B: That's pretty cool, can I take a look at it?
A: Sure [mails foo.tar.gz]
B: oh man, that's a lot of global variables you're using there
A: I know, gotta get around to fixing that
B: here have this patch, I've managed to kill about half of the globals [mails foo.patch]
A: that rocks, thanks!
scale, repeat
-Laxative
Wow. Finally, Slashdot cites an actual reliable journal reference. THE WWN is one of the best journals this side of the atlantic. You wont find news more relavent to our lifestyle anywhere else. For example, in the October 12 issue:
*We find that this winter will be the worst winter ever, because the Bible predicts it.
*Cuba's communist leader Fidel Castro shocks the world by mooning his dinner guests
*Info on wether you are being spied on by a peeping tom
*A kickass page 5 girl (All pg.5s in WWN issues have a bikini clad girl)
*Prevent cancer by urinating every hour
*Exercising when you are angry can kill you, says new Yale study
*Heartworms found in humans
*Narrow faced folks more likely to be shy
*Biblical tree of life found in Iraq (?)
*Boy hangs himself so kid sister can have his liver
*112-year-old's secret: A quart of whicky and 3 packs of cigarettes - EVERY DAY!
*Early americans were all drunks - even the kids!
*Washington think tanks are riddled with space aliens
*Special: the Craziest royals who ever lived!
*Dad's a lion, mom's a tiger.. so baby is 1000-lb 12-ft LIGER!
*Getting caught in the rain makes you stupid
*Girl,9,wins national beer drinking contest
*New ultrasound device makes people's heads explode (OVER THE PHONE!)
And of course.. the requisite
*End of the WORLD is near(?) (says secrent govt. report)
With all this completely relavent factual material, is there _ANY_ question the WWN has so many faithful readers all over the world? I didnt even mention Dotti their advice columnist, or Sarena Sabak, their truly gifted pshychic.
Have you discovered the WWN yet?
-Laxative
I hear talking, but I see no dancing! -Pokey
Doesnt mathematica use a Lisp-esque language? -Laxative
Um... what is the purpose of this? Does an ID card really matter when some psycho (not wearing an id card) walks into the school and starts blowing people away?
Perhaps they should also equip their id cards with radiowave emitters and equip the school with motion or infrared detectors, so that they could tell wether a person not wearing ID cards was approaching the school and call the SWAT team immediately.
It seems like these people are just burying their heads in the sand pretending that this "precautionary measure" will actually do something to stop crazy whackos with guns and no id card.
A much more effective strategy to educate students (wow.. schools educating students! what a concept!) about how to act in case of an emergency situation, and how to not impose a strict social pecking order which causes the downtrodden to have "issues". That would help out a lot. I know when I was in high school that deragotary shit by the "Ruling class" of students was very ugly. People would make fun of immigrants who couldnt speak well, and when I saw that, I'd just want to smash their face in (I couldnt because I"d get my ass kicked if I tried).
Getting back to the point....
These shooting incidents have gotten everyone riled up. I dont mind the gun action, since I do actually support a certain limited gun control, but the paranoia about media, and schools, and shootings, is out of control. Thank god I got out of school last year (I am told by my former schoolmate that my HS implemented some "security" measures of their own after I graduated).
-Laxative
The secret came out yesterday, as Representatives from transmeta unveiled the culmination of the past two years off effort: a pickle that glows green, yet is not radioactive nor toxic. The project was kept shrouded in secrecy because of the threat of Transmeta's space age glowing pickle technology becoming revealed to the public and other companies.
"We wanted to corner the market on glowing pickles, and because of the kind of cutthroat competition in this field, Transmeta had to do everything it could to keep it's intellectual property safe," said CEO of Transmeta David Ditzel.
Reached for comment at his home, Transmeta employee Linus Torvalds had this to say:
"I didnt want to work on something that was directly related to Linux."
The pickle technology developed at Transmeta is clean and amenable to mass production. With the release of this product, Transmeta establishes itself as one of the leading high tech pickle vendors.
"From now on, when you say -glowing pickle-, the one thing that will come to mind is -transmeta-. They will corner the market with their extremely solid product," says market analyst Reddy Terwal.
The glowing pickle product, incidentally, will be named "This product is not named yet".
--
Seriously though folks, does _ANYONE_ know what the hell is going on in there? Do you think that just maybe, perchance, this great secrecy is a nice little PR move to get people excited?
Remember the simpsons episode where "gabbo" came to springfield? The only ads they ran for him either went "Gabbo is COMING!!" or "gabbo.. Gabbo.. GABBO!!", about 3 second soundbytes. Somehow, it smells the same way for this whole Transmeta thing.
-Laxative
I think the thing to worry about is not wether the web servers at university will be replaced with NT machines. The _real_ concern would be if(when) Microsoft decides to push the use of NT machines into actual CS development courses at universities. RIght now, the courses break down generally so that the first 2 years you program on win32 environment with a language like pascal or java, and then move on to the more powerful UNIX environments. This is fine with me. The beginning courses just teach you the basics of programming languages, and a little bit about software development in general.
If the higher lever courses switch to win32 environments, however, I would be _Extremely_ worried. Win32 has no place in serious development. As long as you're building dialog boxes from a wizard, or learning basic language constructs, windows machines are fine. Beyond that, UNIX just offers _more_. UNIX is gloriously heterogeneous, while windows is monotonous as hell.
-Laxative
Does this make the world look more and more like the world of Fahrenheight 451? I posted this once before when sony announced it's robotic dog, and there were stories of robotic fish that were indistinguishable from real ones (except for the eyes). I state it once again. If (and when) this comes to the mass market, what next? Western populations are apathetic as it is. People dont read as much as they used to, relying more and more on the boob tube to provide sensory deprivational entertainment. Even the books that people DO read are hopelessly bland, PC, and uncontroversial ones like "Chicken soup for the soul). What is happening to this world????? Just some thoughts from a pseudo paranoid. -Laxative
I think Mr. Guinness has every right to be scared by the fact that a fan has seen his movie 100 times. That scares me. What is there in star wars that is so fundamentally true that it needs to be watched 100 times? There was something wrong with that kid. THe movie I have watched the most was Trainspotting, and I saw it 4 times, and most of the time I was renting it again to show my friends because I thought they would realy like it. But 100 times? I wouldnt even watch that movie more than 8 or 9 times in my whole life. I have had friends that know every single little fact and detail about who is who in star wars, why he is like that, or why something happens. The only explanation I can think of for this is that they are substituting for something else they are missing in their life. I'm sure this is exactly how Guinness feels, except it must be worse on him becaues HE was an actor in the film. Whenever someone bashes star wars, people defend it by saying that "it's just a story". I agree, it's just a story, and obsessively watching it and decoding it, and finding out everything about it, is a sign that something is wrong. Now dont get me wrong, I like star wars. They're fun movies. I liked all 3 originals, and the phatntom menace, but that is where it stops. Were I ever forced to watch a movie 100 times, I would choose something that is at least worth it, maybe Apocalypse Now - where there ARE subtelties that you can discover. Anyway I'm off to have a 100 bowls of ice cream. -Laxative
Would just like to make a comment on the Staroffice Web application.. it's a move in the right direction. Thin clients/fat server model is the ideal one for most home applications. The whole idea of spending $2000 or even $1000, to get a piece of equipment that is going to be used for a little bit of publishing and small-time number crunching, and which is going to be obsolete in a matter of years.. is ludicrous. Computers arent worth that much to many people. The javastation idea would have been really great if it was implemented correctly. A native java chip running remote apps? Expensive servers.. but far cheaper client machines? This sounds like the PERFECT model for a lot of businesses deploying computers to employees. It takes care of a lot of issues like consistency (everyone would run the same versions of apps, and everyone could have their customized preferences stored on the server), upgrading (upgrade 1ce), the path to obsolecence (the clients will not grow obsolete as fast. Perhaps the server.. but then, 1 server purchase v. 20/30/100/1000 client purchases is still a good deal). -Laxative
You missed the point.. I think if anybody went to see this movie hoping to see a documentary on natural numbers, they decidedly ended up dissapointed. The movie simply used the character's obsession with mathematics as a tool to explore the psychological issues of having an essentially one-dimensional, shallow life. The character's mentor(sorry, cant bring the name to mind, I have a very very bad problem with names)spent his whole life trying to find patterns in Pi and came to the conclusion that it was essentially not worth it.
The movie's point is NOT wether there are patterns in Pi, or wether the stockmarket can be predicted, but what happens to an individual when they become blind to everything but one goal. In the end, Max (I think that's the character's name), starts seeing patterns everywhere, in coffee, in the guts of a squished bug, in the stock market, in the Torah - and you can pick apart his brain at that moment and really understand the kind of psychosis he is affected by.
The movie is not about math, it's about life, the point of life, and about balance.
-Laxative
Can you point me to a place where I can get good info on the good movies coming out? I love independent films, and I've loved most of the independents I've seen, but I've only seen a scarce few.. is there a place on the net which is reliable as a good source of what's good and what's bad?
I thought Pi was a BEAUTIFUL film, Rushmore was great, Trainspotting kicked butt (though i dont know if it's 'independent' or not). That's about all the independent movies that I can list off the top of my head right now. I've been searching for a place where I can get info on films like these, and the only thing I've found so far is the onion's AV-club movie review section.. do you know any other place?
-Laxative
I see a recent trend with companies "coming out of the closet" and announcing Linux support, but failing to fully embrace the whole philosophy. From this article, what I can gather is that now people will be able to program fast graphics for 3dfx cards. unless this DRI is also implemented by other companies with competing video cards.. this announcement is useless. Is the DRI even an open standard? Will 3dfx sue anyone else that tries to implement the same interface in Linux, like the whole smelly affair with glide? Is 3dfx going to release the source, or keep it binary only? All these questions lead to muddles.
If you really want to get excited about graphics on Linux.. take a look at GGI and Mesa.. both seem to be progressing extremely well, and try to provide full cross platform support for all types of cards. For some reason, this doesnt excite me that much.... (maybe it's because I just got my G400.. and it rocks my world)..
-Laxative
Pi? bad? Oh my god! I thought that Pi was one of the best movies I have seen in my entire life.. it was SO beautifully done, the grainy film, the absolutely lovely music, the message it conveys so clearly. Everything about that movie pointed to the fact that someone put SO much thought into exactly what went into the film.. rather than most hollywood flicks, which rather point to the laborious amount of time making it glitzy and perfect product placement.
You have no taste.
-Laxative
Nice.. I love the design. There is already a comment here about the OSCAR being ugly.. I think it's beautiful. Simple, rectangular. It is the essence of practicality. Hardware does not have to be stylized to look beautiful. A lot of new hardware (imac-copiers) tries to go the organic route.. really twisting the design. While those are nice, my favour resides with the austere, artificial, industrial look. Forget beige boxes.. give me the raw metal. Forget little grooves to put stylized power-on and reset buttons in. Just stick a big old switch on the rectangular box, and a couple-of off the shelf leds for HDD activity and power.
-Laxative
This article is for the most part true, but who cares? The problem with eleets is that in a very short time, it degrades into snobbery and putrid stagnance. The jet-set were lame yuppies, and if (when) there is going to be a net-set, they will be lame yuppies too. You can see the signs of it already, aol-user-bashing, stigma for people who use services like hotmail and geocities, bashing people who use microsoft software, etcetera.
But I disagree with the article when it says that the general public will look up to a general type of lifestyle which the net-setters live. I dont think the general public will care. Individuals will always strive to be better at using new technological mediums, but they will not strive to achieve the particular lifestyle set by the net-setters. Rather, than 1 elite dominating the scene, there will be a fragmentation into multitudes of different groups with their own focus and agendas, and people will find refuge in these countless groups rather than in the mainstream. The ultraconservatives, the fundamentalists, the libertarians, the pedophiles, the socialists, the hackers, the crackers, the neo-nazis, will all have their representation, for better or worse. So again, who cares about the net-setters? They'll do their thing, just like everyone else.
-Laxative
I think this all has to do with the history of the whole computer science field. When computers really started taking off, it was the young geeks, the stereotypical teenage-hacker(not cracker, hacker), twentysomething coder, who really provided the solutions that business could use. In the past, at least, it was always the young coder, the young computer entrepeneur, who really got things moving. This is pretty much predictable, with any new technology, there needs to be time for it it "phase in" to society. I think computers and programming, now is at a point where even the older generations have a good understanding of the technologies, but the stereotypes still linger, the whole computer programming field cant escape it's history. It's really sad, because I personally beleive that older individuals plainly have a lot more experience, in life and in coding, for businesses to ignore them. Businesses DO need the liveliness and the vigor of young, fresh-out-of-bachelors, coders, but they could also really use the calm, enlightened view of the elders.
I also beleive that this is a symptom of American culture's general lack of respect for old people. They see old people as some sort of blemish on their personal image.. they're wrinkly, not physically attractive, fit only to be relegated to old-folks-homes, but fail to see the lifetime's worth of knowledge just waiting to be gleaned from the old-timers.
Anyway, I love coding, and I'd do it if I was paid a lot, or if I was paid nothing (the latter is the case for me right now), but I'm really disturbed by this rejection of elder individuals by the high-tech industry. I'm 18 right now, just finished my first year, and starting on my second.. and my dad keeps repeating to me with an extreme urgency:
As SOON as you get a job, start putting away money for your PENSION. Think 30 years ahead, 'cause when you're an old man, and have no reserve, you're FUCKED. I think that's really the only option for young individuals going into this field, SAVE. It's amazing how you can accumulate money if you keep to a set savings plan.. with just 2000 dollars a year, deposited into a savings account, every year, non-failing, you'll be able to support yourself in your later years, no retirement problems whatsoever.
-Laxative
There is a very good reason why there is a 'double standard'. First, let me address some of the bugs in your argument. One: The change in legality does not occur between 'small' and 'large' companies. Just being a 'large' company does NOT change the legal system for you. But being a monopoly DOES. See the difference?
Now, there are good reasons why monopolies need to have special rules applied to them. Libertarians would judge all companies alike, in the sense that they ARE companies, and they should be held to the same set of standards. The problem is, any ideology, taken to an extreme, is folly. When a company becomes a monopoly, it becomes more than a 'normal' company because it suddenly is the supplier, and therefore controller of a WHOLE SEGMENT of the economy. It is a known fact that monopolies have a much easier time keeping competitors out of their market (undercutting prices, etc.)
Thus, when a company is a monopoly, it has special responsibilities, more so than a normal, non-monopoly company. These responsibilities is what antitrust law reflects. Antitrust law is needed because without it, the system can easily go awry, and lead to a select group of monopolies running the ENTIRE economy, completely killing competition. Without competition, the capitalist system is USELESS and inefficient. Antitrust law is needed to protect the market. YES, it IS government intervention in the economy, and it IS needed. Without it, there is no hope for the capitalist system.
Libertarians who naively beleive in the free laizzes faire market myth dont realize that without antitrust, their wonderful capitalist economy will become a pseudo-communist-oligarchist system. With the economy (and therefore country) controlled by a set of megacorporations, who are themselves controlled by rich investors. It is a complete corruption of the capitalist system.
Laxative
I dont feel good about the IPO announcement by Be. There are pros and cons in going public, but in my perspective, the cons outweight the pros.
My main problem with public companies is that it tends to degrade the character of a company. Whenever you give up a part of your control (as the head of a company) to a guy with money, you lose a lot
When big money starts to get involved, the main focus of the company is going to shift from making the best possible OS, to the most profit. This is a general statement. Of course, private companies seek to make profit too, and yes, sometimes profit and making a better products are not mutually exclusive.
When it comes down to the line, and there is a tough decesion to make between short term profitability, and the general health of the product, the publically controlled companies will generally choose the former, while the private company has more of a probability of taking the hard road (depending of course, on the head)
I have nothing concrete to lay down, these are just my feelings about the issue.
Laxative
Well, this seems to reflect recent changes in the graphics card industry pretty well. 3DFX's cards suck (especially compared to the TNT2 and G400), and it's clear now where that lack of quality is coming from. 3DFX is more concerned about protecting their turf by any means possible rather than making good products. I got annoyed a while back when it messed with another college (or HS) kid for doing the same thing, but back then 3dFX had a strong foothold. Now, this is just suicide. Nobody has to stick to Glide anymore, OpenGL is a better solution anyway. And Voodoo3 is a shitty card also. So compared with the TNT2 and G400, both who are coming out with nice OpenGL support, this just leaves 3dfx in the pits.
-Laxative
I might draw flame for saying this, but it needs to be said.
This is what happens when a person lets glitz and gloss get in the way of useful coding, and immaturity takes over.
Ok, the usual disclaimer before I get started. I dont use Gnome, I dont use KDE, I dont use E, and I rarely use X. I am not a CLI purist, just find that the CLI gives me most of what I want from a computer. Moreover, I'll say that I've tried E, and Gnome.
Raster's main objective in E is not to actually provide a useful window manager, but to provide inconsequential configurability for the sake of configurability. I'll admit that when I first saw E I was enamored, and said "wow, cool". But take a second look people. As a windowmanager, it provides a shithole of an experience. It's quite obvious that Raster, while putting a lot of work into the configurability and theme-ability, did not pay one bit of attention to the actual usability of E. In his previous statement, Raster accuses the Gnome developers of trying to create a windows clone. But I think that Raster copies microsoft philosophy much more than the Gnome crew. E emphasizes glitz and gimmicks rather than real usability. Gnome on the other hand is about usability. Even though they might lose track of that from time to time, that's the main purpose behind Gnome.
With all this E-bashing, one my ask what point I'm getting to. My point is that E and this occurence, is a reflection of Raster's personality. Maybe it was a mistake for the gnome crew to hire him in the first place, but It's pretty obvious that he does not jive with the goal behind Gnome.
But this is all just my take on the matter.
-Laxative
Interesting topic. I think the great advance in real computer intelligence is going to come from evolutionary programming - ie building a system that evolves code based on prerequisite "bias" conditions to a certain goal. Systems like this already exist, and have been put to use to solve simple problems. One day, we might have an evolved program a few terabytes (or more) long, and we wont know what the hell it does, but it will be intelligent. And I think the correct term to use here is artificial CONCIOUSNESS - as in self-conciousness. Intelligence can be faked.. self conciousness is harder.
The problem is, these systems and their success will cause real questions about the nature of OUR humanity. What is humanity after all but an evolved response to a competitive environment based on a small number of fixed rules (i.e. the physical rules of the universe). Now, if and when this "intelligent program" occurs.. what will happen?
a) The postulations that a program might 'discover' it's 'enslavement' are ridiculous. The fact is, the artificial environment provided by you would be the 'organism''s universe - and expecting the organism to think "outside" the universe would be essentially futile. It's like asking humans to picture the 4th dimension - it just doesnt work.
b) Having a program that did this, you could NOT easily "control" it.. i-e you cant make it behave one way or the other. Because the program would be too complicated for you to sort out.. many years of research would be needed to figure out what exactly is going on. You could however, control the environment, the program's universe, much like a kid with an aquarium. YOu could go in, rearrange the resources and change rules.
c) What would this mean to the people who really have a need to believe in humanity as something 'special' - people who believe in souls or some other explanation for our conciousness or self-awareness? It would really shatter the confort zone we live in today.
It will be grand when it happens.. whenever that is.
-Laxative
I cant believe you didnt see the trap here..
jezus, if playing violent games such as "doom/quacke/etc" alleviates violent tendencies, then by the same token wouldnt kiddie porn alleviate abusive tendencies?
-Laxative