Check out Project JXTA. Briefly, while it isn't all here yet, JXTA is Sun's approach to making an open standard for P2P applications. Their suggestiong is that JXTA ought to be to ICQ, AIM, Napster, Gnutella et al, as Mosaic was to AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy, in terms of unifying technologically splintered communities. In and of itself, JXTA is fascinating stuff.
In terms of the FCC liking P2P, the fact that one of the Four Pillars (and, frankly, the Good Witch) is willing to back the idea ought to stand as excellent character evidence, in my opinion.
It seems to me that it's easy to attack a "self-policing" network, in terms of it being a dumb machine, can't be smart enough to solve it's own problems, etc.
However, I have to say, I can see several reasons to encourage such a system. Essentially, though, they all come down to the system being the closest entity to itself. No system administrator can know his system as intimately as it could know itself (if it were capable of doing so.) In terms of speed of response, comprehensive scanning, and endurance, an automated protection service could not be besten by a live admin.
Obviously, a human being wins in terms of potential intelligence, user discrimination and imagination, but I think it's foolish to attack a system that could lend the qualities of the machine to it's own protection rather than encourage training. Frankly you should do both.
But as far as tool making people sloppy, I don't see anyone bitching about the Microsoft development packages subconciously training bad coders.
The example I thought of reading the original post was Cosmic Encounters. One of the best games ever written, but the Hasbro version cuts out a lot of the cleaness of the rules, and strips out two players for the benefit of some nicer looking pieces. That's dumbed down, not simplified.
For thsoe of you who prefer not to browse off a topic, the argument seems to be that the plumet in storage prices justifies bloat, which then can be used to pack more features into a quicker release. Oh, and thinking that bloat is an issue is a sign of mental disease.
Short version, this is not a developer's article, or even really a geek's article. The straw man example is an app to sift Windows Registry for extra crud and clean it out. The app requires a full meg of storage, which Joel feels is entirely reasonable for a (in his opinion) useless piece of software.
However, it seems to me that all the arguments against Java apply to bloatware, without the pros. I mean, you can say that the speed of modern processors overcomes the mollases-like speed of a JVM. But, frankly, if speed is at all important, that makes about as much sense as saying "knowing algorithms isn't worth squat, just code the first thing that comes to mind." I mean, do you have the fast proc to overcome human suckage, or to blaze away. Me, I want to blaze away, which means there needs to be less human suckage, if you see what I mean.
Bloatware is pure human suckage, without the whole portability benefit.
On the other hand, why hasn't thought of this before?
Or is this like the time that the NYTimes reported a spun mercury reflector as high-tech?
Actually, I'd imagine the linkage itself is the high-tech part; the sort of deal where astronomers have wanted to do this for ages but actually hooking the thing up was beyond the ken.
Nyarly is going to stop thinking out loud now. Alternatively, consider this a request for more info...
And you should also try to write your software with fewer bugs. And if you're in a boxing match, try to land more punches than the other guy.
The question though is analogous to a boxer wanting to know what gloves to use to win boxing matches. Maybe there's an advantage to lighter (or heavier) gloves, or a specific stitching, or the leather used or whatever, but the fact that the boxer asked the question suggests that maybe they don't know they should be landing more punches.
So, the advice "use good design" is excellent. It's a tactful way of suggesting that the code they're using isn't all that crucial. Moving to a 5 figure user base (and congratulations to the article author) requires a better design, of which a production plan (of which language choice is just a part) is just a part. I think the best part of the advice given is that it doesn't sound as much like chiding a fledgling as it probably should.
I'm going to have to diagree with you on this point. Slashdot covers a whole lot of ground, and there's very often an over-assumption of how informed a reader is. I can't say I'd begrudge a two word paranthetical about what an app does. How bad, really would Gimp (image processing) and linux (free OS) be?
Very often we get a full paragraph on non-software topics (or pages long rants of pablium, thanks JK) that I'd gladly skip. But at the same time, enough data to let people self-select might somewhat reduce the Slashdot effect. I know one of the things that makes Slashdot less useful to me than it could be is there being less information about a topic than I'd like in order to decide if browsing the page is worth the time.
How hard would it be for an industrious youth (or some other hard-working individual) to produce a web application that would unassisted solict funds through a PayPal account into a Swiss bank to pay HavenCo etc. and then run it from a SeaLand server? At some point any business venture that had been established could be pre-programmed to be purchased and dissolved by the application. End result is a self propigating business without personal representation in any country that might be able to prosecute for IP infringement, and without a legal fiction anywhere to hang a lawsuit on.
It seems worthwhile to make a disclaimer here that, like anyone with a stake in IP laws, I have no interest in advocating their removal or circumvention. Not to say that I don't think that they are broken and need fixing - but that's a different thread.
I also wonder how clever such a device would have to be to survive. Consider that the legal device could be erected: the seed money gets to the right accounts to start the thing, and the responsibility there implied is repaid. Perhaps someone loans the money to someone they've never seen and who the agent then claims to be at repayment. Unlikely, but possible. Frankly, the legal hack isn't to much my cocern, only the result.
But now there is implied an interesting AI problem, and one that's not neccesarily insurmountable. The agent has a year to raise 15,000USD or it will be destroyed. And in order to this, it needs to flexible enough to invent or solicit suggestions for (and understand) new business models (or to refine its current one.) It'd also have to be rock solid rather than buckling when RIAA hires hackers to attack it. Maybe it could hire a network security officer to maintain its code. Man, there's a line - "So what do you do." "I maintain my boss' codebase and try to do damage control when corporate hackers attack it."
There are a few problems I can see with bluelinx's device. First, lest they be slashdotted, the general shtick is that if your phone comes within range of their device, it sends a bluetooth message to turn the cell ring volume down, or to vibrate or whatever. When you leave the radius, cell volume returns to normal.
Great notion, in theory. Practically, a number of issues come up.
It requires universal acceptance by cell manufacurers. Universal acceptance is one of the toughest requirements to meet, and this one requires it of a group that has reasons not to do so. The simplest of which is that Q-Zone phones will cost more to make. A couple tenths of a cent maybe, but still more. And that's a margin large enough to kill the idea dead.
It requires acceptance by venue management. Why should I care about Q-Zone if my movie theater is satisfied with their "silence is golden" policy, over installing pricy electronics in their theater.
It'll kill battery life. Now your phone has to poll the Q-Zone station about whether it's okay to wake up again, or register that it's still in the quiet zone, and that's enough juice to suck the battery dry that much faster. Is this a perk?
American phone users are likely to resent the feature, and opt to buy phones where it isn't installed (another notch against universal manufacturer acceptance) or where it can be turned on and off (where venue acceptance takes a hit).
Better still would be any largish region requiring all cellular devices to vibrate. That'd bring the availability of vibrating devices up, and keep interruptions down in the first place.
Very few of the general public had the ability to become Internet consumers. The professionals will always be
the professionals.
Well and good, but the second point of the article was that the Digerati are on their way out, and on that point, the grandparent of this post is spot on: not only will there always be Digerati in the form of professionals, that gap is safe by the unwillingness and inability of everyone to become digital professionals. Mostly, this is due to the necessity of having a day job.
I think the real question is whether digital professionals are going to fall in with legal and medical professionals or automotive professionals. Clientelle would imply the former, but rough education leads me to lean towards the latter.
The game market for the Mac and
Linux is going to dry up, because you can target Win32 and get XBox as well.
Actually, I might be inclined to argue the exact opposite, in that the games that you need to have a desktop system for have up until now been networked shooters and RTS's. I don't know anyone who claims that a shooter works will on a platform, and the XBox isn't shipping with a mouse (amongst other things) AFAIK. Frankly, up until now networking has been an issue, and the lack of a rich control set is the other. Also, the relative nastiness of televisions as monitors is another detractor from certain kinds of games.
But, those games that are good on platforms are usually much better than the port to a PC. The value of a dedicated machine. I think in the end the XBox is going to flop hard.
But there is one. It's called Xtank. Compile it with the -3DGRAPHICS option and it is too sweet.
Man, if only that weren't currently vapor. Is there a cvs project to revive Xtank? The last version I saw was running under Solaris 4.0, and ever since then I've tried a couple of times to do the compile on whatever Unix I had available. Not a trivial task, and I usually get fed up with poorly written code (alas, beautiful game, hideous code) before I get anywhere.
So, why isn't there a SourceForge project to get Xtank rpm-able, and maybe in the major distros. Even build in the elusive 3DGRAPHICS option, so as to keep the look.
Regardless of how you are borking your mice, I'd suggest grabbing a Kensington Mouse.In.A.Box. Their other mice are supported...poorly under Linux, which is a real pity because they are some shnap input devices.
Five year warranty. Excellent feel. Very good input. If they had a Linux driver, I'd have one on my desk now.
I'd also recommend that everyone go trackball. You adjust very quickly, and the results are insanely good. But stay away from those icky 2cm jobs Logitech pawns out. A good 6-10cm is much more comfortable, powerful and accurate.
Ummmm...could you expand on that? I don't see how "logic used to navigate obstacles" is communication.
Sure thing. Simply put, the navigation logic isn't communication.
Okay, less glibly, consider how you and two friends would move a sofa if there were some compelling reason not to communicate. (A sleeping tiger in the room, or whatever. Granted that doesn't rule out gestures, and I want to do that, but you get the idea.) One of you goes to one end of the sofa, the other two might abort a move to that end, one gets the other end, and whoever didn't make it to an end of the sofa opens doors and whatnot. It's really not neccesary to say "I'll get this end" except to be social.
This sort of behavior is an extension of obstacle navigation on this premise: the way Actor #2 gets to far end of the couch is that he sees that Actor #1 is at the near end; even more generally, Actor #2 only sees that the near end is blocked, so he grabs the far end and starts moving the sofa. The fact that the other end is being supported and moved is dandy, but under this sort of behavior scheme, Actor #2 is pretty much ignorant of the fact.
Applying this to micro-bots, a dozen of the little puppies get set to move a brick. None of them alone is capable of moving it, but all 12 go at the brick and try to push directly on it. If there's something not-brick in the way, avoid it. Adjust the angle of push so that the brick goes the right way, but constantly make adjustments, so that as new robots come in contact and start pushing, the brick goes in the right direction.
The long and the short of it is that the robots don't have to know that they'll have help, or supposedly be cooperating. The programmers needs to understand that, and abstract the knowledge out of the algorithm coded into the bots.
Sorry to be long winded, but my grasp here is a little fuzzy, so I'm try to lay out everything I know in the hopes of getting something accross.
Actually, (and only the fact that this is a stale post leads me to reply to what I'm seeing as an unintetional troll), I have.
The word "solvable" has a very specific meaning, and the travelling salesman problem is very solvable. It just happens that it is a member of the set of NP-complete problems, for which the best known algorithms are time-exponential. It is not isomorphic to the Turing Halting Problem which is not solvable. Kindly consider proper usage of technical terms before dismissing an elementary and complete refutation as a hand-wave.
I'll accept the hand-wave on pattern-recognition. The better answer to the question "why is p-r so hard" is "we don't understand the problem very well" for which the reason is that we don't have to think about how we do it. I would be tempted to dissociate creativity, emotion and self-awareness from pattern-recognition as built in human brain features since it's possible that pre-lingual (infant) humans are not self aware, and that there are vast numbers of people who have lost the abilities to create or feel.
As for self-organizing networks being simple: arbitrary organization is quite simple. Discover everyone near you, pick randomly. However, I wouldn't use this network model because it doesn't have any useful qualities apart from simplicity. My comment regarding them was intended with an ironic tone.
When I was in school, one of my profs had done his dissertation on the idea of robotic collaboration without communication. Essentially, the idea was that robots could use much the same logic they use to navigate an arbitrary set of obstacles to co-operate to acheive a task without needing to communicate anything. Prof's name was James Jennings, and he pretty much made my upper level education worthwhile.
It seems that this sort of behavior would be ideal for these little bastards. I mean, they're cute and all, but radio transmission would zap their batteries, and coordinating communication would eat all their memory. But a small growth in memeory size would be enough to manage the sort of navigation algorithms I recall.
Unfortuantely, mass produced these things are supposed to run a couple hundred USD, each. Tough to rationalize many handy applications for that. Even cat entertainment seems to be a little overkilled by that sort of investment (although they do seem ideal, don't they? Maybe not fast enough.)
Why isn't the travelling salesman problem solvable? Why is pattern recognition such a difficult problem when humans do it so easily?
Woah, there, Space Cowboy. First, the travelling salesman problem is solvable even by a Turing-machine analogue (including Von Neuman machines), but it happens to be NP-Complete, so the solution complexity grows so stupidly fast in relationship to the size of the problem (in this case the number of cities to visit.)
Pattern recognition seems to be built into the human brain as much as (and perhaps more than) binary addition is built into modern processors. The mathematical ability of humans is based more on a mapping of pattern recognition and association than on anything else.
So, you questions answered, a self-organizing network becomes a problem when you want it to do something, like minimize network traffic (or at least collisions) or be trustable.
The reaction to eBooks has been for some time been that books will never be replaced by gadgets, for reasons of comfort, sentiment, or cost.
However, I'd say the largest problem with book replacement technology is that it fundamentally fails to enhance the technology of printed media while costing much more. What advantage do you really get out of an ePaper eBook that's as big as a classic book? It costs a couple orders of magnitude more? That's just silly.
In order for a technology to succeed it should at least enhance upon anything it happens to be replacing. Would a 1 horse-power car have been successful? Unlikely.
It's been very frustrating to watch the various digital book technologies being presented without any real answer to the very basic business model question: "How is this better than a book?" Some of the naive answers presented include:
Holds more data
Is this really an advantage? DVDs demonstrate that while we like a little bit extra with our content, the sort of storage difference we're talking about isn't just Shakespear an commentary, but all of Elizabethian literature and exhaustive commentary. It's conceivably the entire O'Reilly library. It is, for practical example, the entirety of Usenet from inception to 1994. And that's on a crappy 640MB CD, not even a 5GB DVD. While this sounds great, it is not in the best interest of publishers, which means they aren't interested, so we get no support for our eBook there.
More compact, more light
Okay, granted, it'd be nice to have Cryptonomicon or the Complete Works of England, or Every Biblical Text in a bitty little reader, but not many people want to pay ten times as much for the priveledge. Sure, convenience is a premium, but that's a bit steep.
Links with the text
Sure. Neat feature for a text to include, as anyone who's read a well formated PDF can tell you. However, its usefulness relies on how well the text formatter understands the apporiate useage of hyperlinks, which is a null set, in my opinion. Or maybe the power set of the null set. Maybe. Other web-by features have come up, but frankly I personally got over needing pictures in my books about the same time I started walking, and I don't really want to deal with animated banner ads while I try to read The Sound and The Fury. Especially not if I get to pay hundreds of bucks for the privledge.
But lets not mention the other disadvantages eBooks bring to the media. Here we go, please answer true or false:
Have you ever lost a book?
Were you out more than 40USD?
Have you ever been frustrated because your book ran out of power as you were about to finish the climactic chapter?
Have you ever dropped a book?
And not been able to read it when you picked it up again?
And been out more than 40USD?
Would it be worth it to pay 1000USD+ to have the Oxford English Dictionary about your person?
Until an eBook can not just replace but improve on traditional books, they won't fly. And improve in some tangible, useful, indispensible way.
One quick notion on that front is a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Perception, where text is presented word by word in a fixed position, saving the reader the need to scan lines. While this sounds like a trivial luxury, research seems to indicate it boosts speed of acquisition and duration of retention of text.
What, finally, is the point of altering a cheap, durable, stable media to make it expensive, delicate and prone to bugs, unless you add some significant value in the process.
"I am sick and tired of being told that good, upright people are sick and tired. And I think all good, upright people are too."
Basically, I'm getting to the point where I'll read an article abstract, feel my gorge rise, and be absolutely sure that JonKatz is the author. What I'm really not sure of is where he get's license to speak for or even of geeks and geek culture. Even with a bunch of high-school rejects piping up me-tooism to his tune.
Speaking as an ex-high school reject, Mr. Katz has yet to demonstrate that he knows anything apart from
How to win the sympathies of fifteen year olds while
Capitalizing on the madness and deaths of teenagers (teenaged geeks included) and
angering and offending adult geeks.
That said, I'd like to make it very plain, I for one do not think that JonKatz is the/. fixture everyone loves, or even loves to hate. His inclusion repluses and disturbs me, especially as/. is read by a wider readership and eventually does become the Internet "voice of geeks." It's a free country where/. lives, and I presume where JK lives as well, and he's welcome to his voice, but the nature of moderation is that by participating in/., you lend your voice to anything that appears in it's pages. It infuriates me to have my voice hijacked to be used for the drivel JonKatz spouts.
This column is no better. And finally, I'm tired of indicated the direct errors I see in a Katz-rant, and would rather, in my own, discuss what I see as errors of philosophy: points that I believe echo mistaken ideas about general/. readership that Katz holds, and ones I think are pretty important.
Geeks believe technology solves everything, and the the future will be better than the present is better than the past. If we though that, why would we read/.? Voltairian notions like that obviate any sort of activism, or even action. Where do I arrive at the conclusion that Katz believes this? Well, in this article, the emphasis on the technology level, with a "Gosh, it sure is good that we don't still ahve that stuff" attitude, as opposed to "Goddamn it's amazing what they did with what they had." Geekdom is humanistic, regardless of its technocratic stereotypes.
Geeks are isolationists The idea that there is geek (good) and not-geek (bad). Notice how everything is observed by Katz from the outside, unless he's suggesting that the subject is a fellow geek, in which case he presupposes motives. "When exactly did Hollywood come to hate generals so much? Can you remember a positive recent portrayal of one?" Well, yes. Generals Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. As American generals go, there's this classic film called Patton...But most annoying about the comment is this "Hollywood is not geek" statement implicit in the Katz. A geek would have addressed Hollywood in general, rather than whispering gossip about it.
Non-geeks are evil and scary What commentary he slips into a movie review (a movie review!) is all about nuke happy politicos, threatening diplomats and (a Katz favorite) the hysterical media. I think each of those stereotypes occurs three times in the review. This is probably the Katzism I hate most; it does nobody any good to suggest to the media and politicians that geeks hate and fear them. What incentive do they then have to justly represent anyone they identify as a geek?
Geekdom is an identityI'm going to pull a Human Torch here and suggest that Geekdom is Not Identity. In fact, the idea is ludicrous. Anyone who might justifiably suggest as much will by definition object to the label, to any label. My use has always been to suggest some shared qualities and interests, and in part to hijack the word out of negative connotation. But the identification "I am a geek" has zero meaning on it's own. And the day I hear about a Geek College Fund I will laugh my ass off.
As a postscript (level 2) (oh, JK, that was geek humor) I'd like to suggest a new poll: Should JonKatz be removed from Slashdot? .
UIs flow uphill. Every single enhancement or tweak made to any User Interface results in casual users drifting away and the hardcore bitching to heaven. OS UI tweaks get this more than anything else. Especially when a feature is removed.
What a good number of/.ers don't realize is that the most rational reason Mac users remain hardcore in the face of a geriatric core OS is that the Mac UI
makes good sense; menus flow in a useful way, every visual effect has a true meaning, and key shortcuts are presented in the context of an app. One could argue that a one button mouse falls into this set of considerations.
is consistent. No other OS even suggests that applications coded for it follow it's UI. Apple has had a Human Interface Guidelines manual since before Sytem 5.0, which doesn't include a lick of code, but is probably their most important publication. (Imagine X with the same document...or even Posix; was -F "force" or "fast?"?
is intuitive. The number of UI trivia one needs to learn to become proficient in Mac OS is simply much lower than any other OS UI I've seen.
The downside to all this (and it is significant), is that the decisions made about the UI are almost set in stone. In any other OS, one simply spends more time fooling around with the UI and thinking about how to get the computer to do what you want rather than making it do what you want, but then any change in the UI hits your workflow much harder.
OS X is a significant departure, and no matter how well crafted, the departure is what will be commented on for some time. Whether it's good or not is best judged by how frustrating it is to be back in OS 9 after adapting to X.
Put it this way -- would you extend the same courtesy to Microsoft if you installed NT and it was riddled with security holes?
Surely you're joking. Isn't that what MS expects you to do, anyway? And at last count NT wasn't nearly so open to having it's mechanics fuddled with to close holes by hand. Nope, gotta wait for a service pack.
Wow! Katz's "the problem with America" today isn't that Americans keep down geeks and outcasts. Today it's that we don't recognize what's really important in technology. Obviously a maniacal mad geneticist who can control who lives or dies is far more important than a maniacal kludge artist with an eye towarrds more billions.
Except, over here on the outside of Comics Land, genome sequencing isn't about who gets born or not. No genetics firm wants to (or will be allowed to, IMO) decide who gets born. They might make certain genetic tests available to parents, but that's happening already. But last I heard, the US government was fairly Xian Fundamentalist when it came to fetal termination. Somehow I don't think they'd be very keen on insurance companies, for instance, refusing to cover and children resulting from a particular zygote. That's just asking for and Abort, Retry then Fail scenario, which the Warren Hatches of this world would probably find more repugnant than I do.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder why Katz doesn't just present questions for discussion. He's pitching to an audience that is too intelligent to be gulled by his fallacious rhetoric. I mean, there's a paragraph there that amounts to "Geneticists compare Hunkapiller to Gates, Gates has just been called a liar and predatory monopolist by a federal judge, therefore Hunkapiller is a liar and a predatory monopolist." That's one hell of a non sequitor, Jon. Try a little harder to make your points next time.
Frankly, the best way to have made the point would have been to interest the audience in Hunkapiller: if we should be interested in him, it shouldn't really take more than a quick explaination of why and a good number of the readers should be, right.
Well, I for one couldn't care less about Hunkapiller. I am interested in how health care, insurance, and government will start using his and his competitor's services. But I don't think I'll be dealing with him directly ever, so I don't see the impact.
What upsets me most about this article is the weird fuzz-thought, apologist take we're seeing from a non-Katz editors. What's basically being said is "there's no conspiracy, it's just greed and myopic self-interest, so it's okay." Which is like saying, "Oh, it's not AIDS, just leukemia, so that's alright." Bzzt, try again.
The point in the way back first place was that a trend of behavior was noted from certain companys. ZDNet was one of them, and Microsoft was another. And when you see anyone doing similar things over a period of time, it's reasonable to attribute that to a concealed agenda or private policy.
Okay, for instance
Microsoft has its OS (term used loosely; hey, yeah, I'm biased) on 95% of the world's PCs. That figure may be fluctuating, but it's one that MS is happy to publish. And by any measure, that's a monopoly. But...
A monopoly is not necessarily an issue except that Microsoft has been using it to maneuver smaller application houses (read: future assets) into position for acquisition, and...
to control the actions of larger business rivals. Or at least, so run so many seperate accounts that it's difficult to discount them. Furthermore,
MS has begun (or by some accounts, has been for nearly a decade) building its OS such that its applications cannot help to run better under it than their competitors and
leveraging their OS into markets which would, on the face of things, not be OS markets. Like Web browsing.
Most of those items are fairly well documented, and usually by dozens of sources. It seems reasonable therefore to decide that Microsoft's policy to do anything to own the whole pie, regardless of how questionable their actions are, ethically or legally.
I think that no one on this forum really believes, though, that Microsoft employees all lust for the blood of their competitors, driven in their craze by Warlord Gates. Or, as the mainstream metaphor goes, are will-less machines acting on the whim of Overmind Bill.
But when you accept a job somewhere, you accept their actions and the philosophy implicit in them. And you become complicit in anything they do and you don't resign over. Usually, that's great. Microsoft employees can proudly claim that their OS is on 95% of the PCs in the world. But they have to accept with that the stigma of the corpses that success was built on.
Not all of those corpses are companies. There's a lot of speculation that could be spent on the computing world if Microsoft hadn't been quite so successful early on; if the Intel OS market had actually been a competitive playing field.
As far as the company being responsible for the actions of their employees, of course they are. They hired them, if nothing else, and presumably have the power to fire them as well. That relationship implies that the company is pleased with every employees actions, and condones them. To say that the company is too large to properly manage is ridiculous; that's a significant fault. In a society of individuals we lock up or put down those who have the power to harm others and lack the restraint to prevent themselves from doing so (e.g. mad men and mad dogs.)
And to hear the argument from/. that incredible biases from certain arms of ZDNet is excusable is reprehensible. ZDNet claims to be an honest-to-god journalistic enterprise, and for them to print pieces written with a bias is rather questionable. When the editors consistantly print to a certain bias it's reasonable to gather that the editors share that bias. Especially when ZDNet regularly prioritizes its bias over facts.
It used to be said that journalism was a sacred trust. It's always seemed to me that the reasoning behind that was that a journalist was presenting information to the populace at large, and that most of their audience was not well enough informed to distinguish fact from falsehood.
Consider the outrage you feel when you read that [MS|Apple|Sun|The Open Source Movement] has done something that you are know they have not done (produced a decent operating system, destroyed a small business, failed to support a specific piece of hardware or market segment). That outrage, I'll posit, has it's roots in the intuition that for every person who can read the article and say "Wait a minute!" there's a hundred times that many who'll say "Really? I'll go tell my friends!" It's an intuition borne out by ZD's addition of the "What do you think?" section.
When editors put their beliefs above what facts present themselves, or especially put financial gain over truthful reporting, they are violating a sacred trust implicit in our reading their publications. If nothing else is, that's a good higher than self interest. And my opinion is that if that's not a judgement you can identify with, there are better ways to fulfill your self-interest.
I mean seriously, saying that the puppet master is just plain old greed doesn't solve anything. There's still puppets doing evil, until we can cut their strings.
Yeah, but you can't avoid that. Threads (and related processes by extention) are by their nature difficult to manage. Mutex everything and hope is your best bet in development and thread isolation is your best tool in debugging. But neither of those is great.
Threads are one of the things that makes coding an art rather than just a craft. You have to get a feel for them, and any system that supports them well is going to make debugging them a pain, as counterintuitive (read: ass-backwards) as that sounds.
Claimer: this is response to replies to the article, not the story itself, but neither is it in response to any one post.
What if you took the philosophy behind the Morris worm: that a virus could benifit from security heuristics, and extended that to the motives of the worm. Couldn't, for instance, a slowly spreading Windows trojan that exhibited some descretion (for instance, only spamming the first dozen email addresses lexigraphically following its current host) and some polymorphism (pretending to reply to Inbox email) and known security glitches in windows (between vbs and that weird Windows scrap file thing) to patch said glitches? To basically rate the host system on some level of newbiedom and then make basic and fairly transparent security changes?
Possibilities include:
Changing default settings of Outlook to disallow autorun of attachments, and especially of VBS stuff.
Installing a faceless MacAffee ripoff (or better still, a Virex port) to do virus checking quietly for the user.
Change some default settings to foil simple scripts; like moving the Start Folder, or Sharing setups.
Is there something wrong with this idea? My gut feeling is that any virus is wrong since it removes control of the machine from its user. But then again, if you targeted Windows, control over system was never a concern of those users.
I guess the biological analogy would be to release a weakened influenza virus to innoculate a populace too ignorant (or "underinformed") to get vaccinated. Sure, some people are going to get very sick, and the weak, the sickly, the very young and the very old will exhibit casualties, but over all lives might be saved. Same deal here: the worst, closest to breaking systems will probably break, but everyone else should be better off, right?
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of the FCC liking P2P, the fact that one of the Four Pillars (and, frankly, the Good Witch) is willing to back the idea ought to stand as excellent character evidence, in my opinion.
However, I have to say, I can see several reasons to encourage such a system. Essentially, though, they all come down to the system being the closest entity to itself. No system administrator can know his system as intimately as it could know itself (if it were capable of doing so.) In terms of speed of response, comprehensive scanning, and endurance, an automated protection service could not be besten by a live admin.
Obviously, a human being wins in terms of potential intelligence, user discrimination and imagination, but I think it's foolish to attack a system that could lend the qualities of the machine to it's own protection rather than encourage training. Frankly you should do both.
But as far as tool making people sloppy, I don't see anyone bitching about the Microsoft development packages subconciously training bad coders.
The example I thought of reading the original post was Cosmic Encounters. One of the best games ever written, but the Hasbro version cuts out a lot of the cleaness of the rules, and strips out two players for the benefit of some nicer looking pieces. That's dumbed down, not simplified.
Short version, this is not a developer's article, or even really a geek's article. The straw man example is an app to sift Windows Registry for extra crud and clean it out. The app requires a full meg of storage, which Joel feels is entirely reasonable for a (in his opinion) useless piece of software.
However, it seems to me that all the arguments against Java apply to bloatware, without the pros. I mean, you can say that the speed of modern processors overcomes the mollases-like speed of a JVM. But, frankly, if speed is at all important, that makes about as much sense as saying "knowing algorithms isn't worth squat, just code the first thing that comes to mind." I mean, do you have the fast proc to overcome human suckage, or to blaze away. Me, I want to blaze away, which means there needs to be less human suckage, if you see what I mean.
Bloatware is pure human suckage, without the whole portability benefit.
Or is this like the time that the NYTimes reported a spun mercury reflector as high-tech?
Actually, I'd imagine the linkage itself is the high-tech part; the sort of deal where astronomers have wanted to do this for ages but actually hooking the thing up was beyond the ken.
Nyarly is going to stop thinking out loud now. Alternatively, consider this a request for more info...
The question though is analogous to a boxer wanting to know what gloves to use to win boxing matches. Maybe there's an advantage to lighter (or heavier) gloves, or a specific stitching, or the leather used or whatever, but the fact that the boxer asked the question suggests that maybe they don't know they should be landing more punches.
So, the advice "use good design" is excellent. It's a tactful way of suggesting that the code they're using isn't all that crucial. Moving to a 5 figure user base (and congratulations to the article author) requires a better design, of which a production plan (of which language choice is just a part) is just a part. I think the best part of the advice given is that it doesn't sound as much like chiding a fledgling as it probably should.
Very often we get a full paragraph on non-software topics (or pages long rants of pablium, thanks JK) that I'd gladly skip. But at the same time, enough data to let people self-select might somewhat reduce the Slashdot effect. I know one of the things that makes Slashdot less useful to me than it could be is there being less information about a topic than I'd like in order to decide if browsing the page is worth the time.
It seems worthwhile to make a disclaimer here that, like anyone with a stake in IP laws, I have no interest in advocating their removal or circumvention. Not to say that I don't think that they are broken and need fixing - but that's a different thread.
I also wonder how clever such a device would have to be to survive. Consider that the legal device could be erected: the seed money gets to the right accounts to start the thing, and the responsibility there implied is repaid. Perhaps someone loans the money to someone they've never seen and who the agent then claims to be at repayment. Unlikely, but possible. Frankly, the legal hack isn't to much my cocern, only the result.
But now there is implied an interesting AI problem, and one that's not neccesarily insurmountable. The agent has a year to raise 15,000USD or it will be destroyed. And in order to this, it needs to flexible enough to invent or solicit suggestions for (and understand) new business models (or to refine its current one.) It'd also have to be rock solid rather than buckling when RIAA hires hackers to attack it. Maybe it could hire a network security officer to maintain its code. Man, there's a line - "So what do you do." "I maintain my boss' codebase and try to do damage control when corporate hackers attack it."
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Great notion, in theory. Practically, a number of issues come up.
Better still would be any largish region requiring all cellular devices to vibrate. That'd bring the availability of vibrating devices up, and keep interruptions down in the first place.
Well and good, but the second point of the article was that the Digerati are on their way out, and on that point, the grandparent of this post is spot on: not only will there always be Digerati in the form of professionals, that gap is safe by the unwillingness and inability of everyone to become digital professionals. Mostly, this is due to the necessity of having a day job.
I think the real question is whether digital professionals are going to fall in with legal and medical professionals or automotive professionals. Clientelle would imply the former, but rough education leads me to lean towards the latter.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Actually, I might be inclined to argue the exact opposite, in that the games that you need to have a desktop system for have up until now been networked shooters and RTS's. I don't know anyone who claims that a shooter works will on a platform, and the XBox isn't shipping with a mouse (amongst other things) AFAIK. Frankly, up until now networking has been an issue, and the lack of a rich control set is the other. Also, the relative nastiness of televisions as monitors is another detractor from certain kinds of games.
But, those games that are good on platforms are usually much better than the port to a PC. The value of a dedicated machine. I think in the end the XBox is going to flop hard.
Man, if only that weren't currently vapor. Is there a cvs project to revive Xtank? The last version I saw was running under Solaris 4.0, and ever since then I've tried a couple of times to do the compile on whatever Unix I had available. Not a trivial task, and I usually get fed up with poorly written code (alas, beautiful game, hideous code) before I get anywhere.
So, why isn't there a SourceForge project to get Xtank rpm-able, and maybe in the major distros. Even build in the elusive 3DGRAPHICS option, so as to keep the look.
xgal's not bad either
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Five year warranty. Excellent feel. Very good input. If they had a Linux driver, I'd have one on my desk now.
I'd also recommend that everyone go trackball. You adjust very quickly, and the results are insanely good. But stay away from those icky 2cm jobs Logitech pawns out. A good 6-10cm is much more comfortable, powerful and accurate.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Sure thing. Simply put, the navigation logic isn't communication.
Okay, less glibly, consider how you and two friends would move a sofa if there were some compelling reason not to communicate. (A sleeping tiger in the room, or whatever. Granted that doesn't rule out gestures, and I want to do that, but you get the idea.) One of you goes to one end of the sofa, the other two might abort a move to that end, one gets the other end, and whoever didn't make it to an end of the sofa opens doors and whatnot. It's really not neccesary to say "I'll get this end" except to be social.
This sort of behavior is an extension of obstacle navigation on this premise: the way Actor #2 gets to far end of the couch is that he sees that Actor #1 is at the near end; even more generally, Actor #2 only sees that the near end is blocked, so he grabs the far end and starts moving the sofa. The fact that the other end is being supported and moved is dandy, but under this sort of behavior scheme, Actor #2 is pretty much ignorant of the fact.
Applying this to micro-bots, a dozen of the little puppies get set to move a brick. None of them alone is capable of moving it, but all 12 go at the brick and try to push directly on it. If there's something not-brick in the way, avoid it. Adjust the angle of push so that the brick goes the right way, but constantly make adjustments, so that as new robots come in contact and start pushing, the brick goes in the right direction.
The long and the short of it is that the robots don't have to know that they'll have help, or supposedly be cooperating. The programmers needs to understand that, and abstract the knowledge out of the algorithm coded into the bots.
Sorry to be long winded, but my grasp here is a little fuzzy, so I'm try to lay out everything I know in the hopes of getting something accross.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Actually, (and only the fact that this is a stale post leads me to reply to what I'm seeing as an unintetional troll), I have.
The word "solvable" has a very specific meaning, and the travelling salesman problem is very solvable. It just happens that it is a member of the set of NP-complete problems, for which the best known algorithms are time-exponential. It is not isomorphic to the Turing Halting Problem which is not solvable. Kindly consider proper usage of technical terms before dismissing an elementary and complete refutation as a hand-wave.
I'll accept the hand-wave on pattern-recognition. The better answer to the question "why is p-r so hard" is "we don't understand the problem very well" for which the reason is that we don't have to think about how we do it. I would be tempted to dissociate creativity, emotion and self-awareness from pattern-recognition as built in human brain features since it's possible that pre-lingual (infant) humans are not self aware, and that there are vast numbers of people who have lost the abilities to create or feel.
As for self-organizing networks being simple: arbitrary organization is quite simple. Discover everyone near you, pick randomly. However, I wouldn't use this network model because it doesn't have any useful qualities apart from simplicity. My comment regarding them was intended with an ironic tone.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
It seems that this sort of behavior would be ideal for these little bastards. I mean, they're cute and all, but radio transmission would zap their batteries, and coordinating communication would eat all their memory. But a small growth in memeory size would be enough to manage the sort of navigation algorithms I recall.
Unfortuantely, mass produced these things are supposed to run a couple hundred USD, each. Tough to rationalize many handy applications for that. Even cat entertainment seems to be a little overkilled by that sort of investment (although they do seem ideal, don't they? Maybe not fast enough.)
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Woah, there, Space Cowboy. First, the travelling salesman problem is solvable even by a Turing-machine analogue (including Von Neuman machines), but it happens to be NP-Complete, so the solution complexity grows so stupidly fast in relationship to the size of the problem (in this case the number of cities to visit.)
Pattern recognition seems to be built into the human brain as much as (and perhaps more than) binary addition is built into modern processors. The mathematical ability of humans is based more on a mapping of pattern recognition and association than on anything else.
So, you questions answered, a self-organizing network becomes a problem when you want it to do something, like minimize network traffic (or at least collisions) or be trustable.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
However, I'd say the largest problem with book replacement technology is that it fundamentally fails to enhance the technology of printed media while costing much more. What advantage do you really get out of an ePaper eBook that's as big as a classic book? It costs a couple orders of magnitude more? That's just silly.
In order for a technology to succeed it should at least enhance upon anything it happens to be replacing. Would a 1 horse-power car have been successful? Unlikely.
It's been very frustrating to watch the various digital book technologies being presented without any real answer to the very basic business model question: "How is this better than a book?" Some of the naive answers presented include:
- Holds more data
-
More compact, more light
-
Links with the text
But lets not mention the other disadvantages eBooks bring to the media. Here we go, please answer true or false:Is this really an advantage? DVDs demonstrate that while we like a little bit extra with our content, the sort of storage difference we're talking about isn't just Shakespear an commentary, but all of Elizabethian literature and exhaustive commentary. It's conceivably the entire O'Reilly library. It is, for practical example, the entirety of Usenet from inception to 1994. And that's on a crappy 640MB CD, not even a 5GB DVD. While this sounds great, it is not in the best interest of publishers, which means they aren't interested, so we get no support for our eBook there.
Okay, granted, it'd be nice to have Cryptonomicon or the Complete Works of England, or Every Biblical Text in a bitty little reader, but not many people want to pay ten times as much for the priveledge. Sure, convenience is a premium, but that's a bit steep.
Sure. Neat feature for a text to include, as anyone who's read a well formated PDF can tell you. However, its usefulness relies on how well the text formatter understands the apporiate useage of hyperlinks, which is a null set, in my opinion. Or maybe the power set of the null set. Maybe. Other web-by features have come up, but frankly I personally got over needing pictures in my books about the same time I started walking, and I don't really want to deal with animated banner ads while I try to read The Sound and The Fury. Especially not if I get to pay hundreds of bucks for the privledge.
Have you ever lost a book?
Were you out more than 40USD?
Have you ever been frustrated because your book ran out of power as you were about to finish the climactic chapter?
Have you ever dropped a book?
And not been able to read it when you picked it up again?
And been out more than 40USD?
Would it be worth it to pay 1000USD+ to have the Oxford English Dictionary about your person? Until an eBook can not just replace but improve on traditional books, they won't fly. And improve in some tangible, useful, indispensible way.
One quick notion on that front is a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Perception, where text is presented word by word in a fixed position, saving the reader the need to scan lines. While this sounds like a trivial luxury, research seems to indicate it boosts speed of acquisition and duration of retention of text.
What, finally, is the point of altering a cheap, durable, stable media to make it expensive, delicate and prone to bugs, unless you add some significant value in the process.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
"I am sick and tired of being told that good, upright people are sick and tired. And I think all good, upright people are too."
Basically, I'm getting to the point where I'll read an article abstract, feel my gorge rise, and be absolutely sure that JonKatz is the author. What I'm really not sure of is where he get's license to speak for or even of geeks and geek culture. Even with a bunch of high-school rejects piping up me-tooism to his tune.
Speaking as an ex-high school reject, Mr. Katz has yet to demonstrate that he knows anything apart from
- How to win the sympathies of fifteen year olds while
- Capitalizing on the madness and deaths of teenagers (teenaged geeks included) and
- angering and offending adult geeks.
That said, I'd like to make it very plain, I for one do not think that JonKatz is theThis column is no better. And finally, I'm tired of indicated the direct errors I see in a Katz-rant, and would rather, in my own, discuss what I see as errors of philosophy: points that I believe echo mistaken ideas about general /. readership that Katz holds, and ones I think are pretty important.
- Geeks believe technology solves everything, and the the future will be better than the present is better than the past. If we though that, why would we read
/.? Voltairian notions like that obviate any sort of activism, or even action. Where do I arrive at the conclusion that Katz believes this? Well, in this article, the emphasis on the technology level, with a "Gosh, it sure is good that we don't still ahve that stuff" attitude, as opposed to "Goddamn it's amazing what they did with what they had." Geekdom is humanistic, regardless of its technocratic stereotypes.
- Geeks are isolationists The idea that there is geek (good) and not-geek (bad). Notice how everything is observed by Katz from the outside, unless he's suggesting that the subject is a fellow geek, in which case he presupposes motives. "When exactly did Hollywood come to hate generals so much? Can you remember a positive recent portrayal of one?" Well, yes. Generals Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. As American generals go, there's this classic film called Patton...But most annoying about the comment is this "Hollywood is not geek" statement implicit in the Katz. A geek would have addressed Hollywood in general, rather than whispering gossip about it.
- Non-geeks are evil and scary What commentary he slips into a movie review (a movie review!) is all about nuke happy politicos, threatening diplomats and (a Katz favorite) the hysterical media. I think each of those stereotypes occurs three times in the review. This is probably the Katzism I hate most; it does nobody any good to suggest to the media and politicians that geeks hate and fear them. What incentive do they then have to justly represent anyone they identify as a geek?
- Geekdom is an identityI'm going to pull a Human Torch here and suggest that Geekdom is Not Identity. In fact, the idea is ludicrous. Anyone who might justifiably suggest as much will by definition object to the label, to any label. My use has always been to suggest some shared qualities and interests, and in part to hijack the word out of negative connotation. But the identification "I am a geek" has zero meaning on it's own. And the day I hear about a Geek College Fund I will laugh my ass off.
As a postscript (level 2) (oh, JK, that was geek humor) I'd like to suggest a new poll: Should JonKatz be removed from Slashdot? .Ushers will eat latecomers.
What a good number of /.ers don't realize is that the most rational reason Mac users remain hardcore in the face of a geriatric core OS is that the Mac UI
- makes good sense; menus flow in a useful way, every visual effect has a true meaning, and key shortcuts are presented in the context of an app. One could argue that a one button mouse falls into this set of considerations.
- is consistent. No other OS even suggests that applications coded for it follow it's UI. Apple has had a Human Interface Guidelines manual since before Sytem 5.0, which doesn't include a lick of code, but is probably their most important publication. (Imagine X with the same document...or even Posix; was -F "force" or "fast?"?
- is intuitive. The number of UI trivia one needs to learn to become proficient in Mac OS is simply much lower than any other OS UI I've seen.
The downside to all this (and it is significant), is that the decisions made about the UI are almost set in stone. In any other OS, one simply spends more time fooling around with the UI and thinking about how to get the computer to do what you want rather than making it do what you want, but then any change in the UI hits your workflow much harder.OS X is a significant departure, and no matter how well crafted, the departure is what will be commented on for some time. Whether it's good or not is best judged by how frustrating it is to be back in OS 9 after adapting to X.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Surely you're joking. Isn't that what MS expects you to do, anyway? And at last count NT wasn't nearly so open to having it's mechanics fuddled with to close holes by hand. Nope, gotta wait for a service pack.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Except, over here on the outside of Comics Land, genome sequencing isn't about who gets born or not. No genetics firm wants to (or will be allowed to, IMO) decide who gets born. They might make certain genetic tests available to parents, but that's happening already. But last I heard, the US government was fairly Xian Fundamentalist when it came to fetal termination. Somehow I don't think they'd be very keen on insurance companies, for instance, refusing to cover and children resulting from a particular zygote. That's just asking for and Abort, Retry then Fail scenario, which the Warren Hatches of this world would probably find more repugnant than I do.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder why Katz doesn't just present questions for discussion. He's pitching to an audience that is too intelligent to be gulled by his fallacious rhetoric. I mean, there's a paragraph there that amounts to "Geneticists compare Hunkapiller to Gates, Gates has just been called a liar and predatory monopolist by a federal judge, therefore Hunkapiller is a liar and a predatory monopolist." That's one hell of a non sequitor, Jon. Try a little harder to make your points next time.
Frankly, the best way to have made the point would have been to interest the audience in Hunkapiller: if we should be interested in him, it shouldn't really take more than a quick explaination of why and a good number of the readers should be, right.
Well, I for one couldn't care less about Hunkapiller. I am interested in how health care, insurance, and government will start using his and his competitor's services. But I don't think I'll be dealing with him directly ever, so I don't see the impact.
Maybe I'm exhibiting Hunkapiller syndrome.
Or maybe that's a crock.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
The point in the way back first place was that a trend of behavior was noted from certain companys. ZDNet was one of them, and Microsoft was another. And when you see anyone doing similar things over a period of time, it's reasonable to attribute that to a concealed agenda or private policy.
Okay, for instance
- Microsoft has its OS (term used loosely; hey, yeah, I'm biased) on 95% of the world's PCs. That figure may be fluctuating, but it's one that MS is happy to publish. And by any measure, that's a monopoly. But...
- A monopoly is not necessarily an issue except that Microsoft has been using it to maneuver smaller application houses (read: future assets) into position for acquisition, and...
- to control the actions of larger business rivals. Or at least, so run so many seperate accounts that it's difficult to discount them. Furthermore,
- MS has begun (or by some accounts, has been for nearly a decade) building its OS such that its applications cannot help to run better under it than their competitors and
- leveraging their OS into markets which would, on the face of things, not be OS markets. Like Web browsing.
Most of those items are fairly well documented, and usually by dozens of sources. It seems reasonable therefore to decide that Microsoft's policy to do anything to own the whole pie, regardless of how questionable their actions are, ethically or legally.I think that no one on this forum really believes, though, that Microsoft employees all lust for the blood of their competitors, driven in their craze by Warlord Gates. Or, as the mainstream metaphor goes, are will-less machines acting on the whim of Overmind Bill.
But when you accept a job somewhere, you accept their actions and the philosophy implicit in them. And you become complicit in anything they do and you don't resign over. Usually, that's great. Microsoft employees can proudly claim that their OS is on 95% of the PCs in the world. But they have to accept with that the stigma of the corpses that success was built on.
Not all of those corpses are companies. There's a lot of speculation that could be spent on the computing world if Microsoft hadn't been quite so successful early on; if the Intel OS market had actually been a competitive playing field.
As far as the company being responsible for the actions of their employees, of course they are. They hired them, if nothing else, and presumably have the power to fire them as well. That relationship implies that the company is pleased with every employees actions, and condones them. To say that the company is too large to properly manage is ridiculous; that's a significant fault. In a society of individuals we lock up or put down those who have the power to harm others and lack the restraint to prevent themselves from doing so (e.g. mad men and mad dogs.)
And to hear the argument from /. that incredible biases from certain arms of ZDNet is excusable is reprehensible. ZDNet claims to be an honest-to-god journalistic enterprise, and for them to print pieces written with a bias is rather questionable. When the editors consistantly print to a certain bias it's reasonable to gather that the editors share that bias. Especially when ZDNet regularly prioritizes its bias over facts.
It used to be said that journalism was a sacred trust. It's always seemed to me that the reasoning behind that was that a journalist was presenting information to the populace at large, and that most of their audience was not well enough informed to distinguish fact from falsehood.
Consider the outrage you feel when you read that [MS|Apple|Sun|The Open Source Movement] has done something that you are know they have not done (produced a decent operating system, destroyed a small business, failed to support a specific piece of hardware or market segment). That outrage, I'll posit, has it's roots in the intuition that for every person who can read the article and say "Wait a minute!" there's a hundred times that many who'll say "Really? I'll go tell my friends!" It's an intuition borne out by ZD's addition of the "What do you think?" section.
When editors put their beliefs above what facts present themselves, or especially put financial gain over truthful reporting, they are violating a sacred trust implicit in our reading their publications. If nothing else is, that's a good higher than self interest. And my opinion is that if that's not a judgement you can identify with, there are better ways to fulfill your self-interest.
I mean seriously, saying that the puppet master is just plain old greed doesn't solve anything. There's still puppets doing evil, until we can cut their strings.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
Threads are one of the things that makes coding an art rather than just a craft. You have to get a feel for them, and any system that supports them well is going to make debugging them a pain, as counterintuitive (read: ass-backwards) as that sounds.
Ushers will eat latecomers.
What if you took the philosophy behind the Morris worm: that a virus could benifit from security heuristics, and extended that to the motives of the worm. Couldn't, for instance, a slowly spreading Windows trojan that exhibited some descretion (for instance, only spamming the first dozen email addresses lexigraphically following its current host) and some polymorphism (pretending to reply to Inbox email) and known security glitches in windows (between vbs and that weird Windows scrap file thing) to patch said glitches? To basically rate the host system on some level of newbiedom and then make basic and fairly transparent security changes?
Possibilities include:
- Changing default settings of Outlook to disallow autorun of attachments, and especially of VBS stuff.
- Installing a faceless MacAffee ripoff (or better still, a Virex port) to do virus checking quietly for the user.
- Change some default settings to foil simple scripts; like moving the Start Folder, or Sharing setups.
Is there something wrong with this idea? My gut feeling is that any virus is wrong since it removes control of the machine from its user. But then again, if you targeted Windows, control over system was never a concern of those users.I guess the biological analogy would be to release a weakened influenza virus to innoculate a populace too ignorant (or "underinformed") to get vaccinated. Sure, some people are going to get very sick, and the weak, the sickly, the very young and the very old will exhibit casualties, but over all lives might be saved. Same deal here: the worst, closest to breaking systems will probably break, but everyone else should be better off, right?
Ushers will eat latecomers.