Open systems need competition from closed systems just as closed systems need competition from open systems.
Open systems ensure competition even in a world with no closed systems. Of course, to keep things completely competitive you actually need open source, and open systems might not be enough, but closed systems don't enter into the equation.
I hate to break the series of misinformed replies you received, but the main objection by the Israeli government (residing, by and large, in Jerusalem, not Tel-Aviv) had to do with privacy. The conditions given to Google had to do with obscuring license plates and faces, and not much else.
Re-reading my previous reply, it may not have been clear. The two Ideos phones are the U8150 sold in Kenya. In addition to them, I have a U8800 (Ideos X5) and a U8510 (Ideos X3).
My company does localization of Android phones for local distributors. Currently on my desk are a Nexus One, Nexus S, two Ideos phones, an Ideos X5 and an Ideos X3. This does not include non-active phones I have at home. Of this set, by far, the lowest speced and weakest phone is the Ideos, of which I have two, because it is an active project. Because it is an active project, my SIM card is in one of the IDEOS phones, and it has been my main phone for several months now.
I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that while the phone IS, in fact, slower than the rest of them, and its screen IS quite inferior, it is definitely a useable (and useful) smart phone. Your criticism is simply without merit.
So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.
Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.
Also, IIRC, it wasn't 65536. It was bigger. Maximal size was ~65506+your MTU (which was never less than 536, and was often 1500) which caused the overflow. 65536 total size is still okay (or is it 65535?)
Just out of curiosity, how is that different than "technological analysts" like Gartner and such?
People who give predictions of the future tend to avoid ever looking at how they fared on past predictions. This is true of respected companies as well as psychics and tarot readers.
I actually tested it pretty close to when the strip was released, and it worked then as well on several random pages.
The moment "person" leads there as well as "science", it's very hard not to reach there.
But I'll bite. Can you (easily) provide me with a page that, as of the date the strip was published (around May 25th, 2011), did no go into this loop, but today does, then I might concur.
On a side note, every rule has an exception. You might find a rule that does not have an exception, but that would just make it the exception of this rule.
Having done some work in the area of aeronautics, I can tell you this logic doesn't always hold true. In particular, if the code you write is meant to run inside a cockpit (and it almost doesn't matter whether this is actually flying the plane or just displaying an airport's map), it goes through such level of scrutiny that is meant to assure that it has no bugs, without bugs happening in the field.
At least that was the mindset of the people around me.
I can't think of any reason why, from a mathematical/statistical point of view, that would be the case.
I'll do my best to help you out, then.
My basic assumption is that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are, given one option that sortof works, to search for better alternatives. A fairly direct consequence is that the more obscure the alternative, the more intelligent, on average, the people who even give it a chance.
The final outcome of all of this is that the less intelligent go with the default option, and even when they switch, they switch to relatively common alternatives. The more intelligent go with the best fit, with their distribution of choices more similar to a uniform distribution. As a result, the default options receive more of the less intelligent population, while the obscure options receive more of the more intelligent population, driving the average down and up respectively.
How does your experience deal with foreign languages? Or are you one of the ~80% of Americans who have never had a passport?
My name is Shachar Shemesh. "Shachar", in Hebrew (which is the generally spoken language around here) means "dawn". "Shemesh" means "sun". Since my given and family names, usually three letters each (Slashdot doesn't allow Hebrew letters, so explicit spelling omitted), turned into seven letters each, unpronounceable and impossible for indigenous Americans to spell, I decided to spare fellow IRC members (this was back in 1991) the bother of trying to, and used an alias. Since "dawn" is a girl's name in English, I went with my family name.
Since then, the Internet has changed, and I've reverted to using my actual name in most places. My Slashdot ID, however, dates back far enough that an alias is used.
After having ruled out making conclusive statements about a fellow slashdotter intelligence based merely on an apparent discrepancy between his signature and his nick name, we now turn to trying to draw conclusions about a slashdotter's intelligence based on the following criteria:
His willingness to stand by their comments by logging in
His awareness of the world outside the southern half of north America
His willingness to spend one second doing basic research (read: STFW, read the profile or even read the comment's meta-data).
The above criteria was phrased in the male form, due to my sincere hope that no woman would be stupid enough to have written the parent comment.
That, or people for whom English is not their first language.
Slashdot USA bias at its best...
Shachar
P.S. That, and the fact I was trying to get an intelligent "first post" under strict marital time constraints (aka "dinner's on the table"). Wasn't sure about that word, but decided (wrongly) to rely on the spell checker.
The smaller the sample group, the more intelligent the average in it, in all recent "technology vs. intelligence" studies. Can we just deduct that the less intelligent flow with the crowd, the more intelligent actually pick what's best for them, and call it quits?
I ask that anyone contacting me about projects do so via the project's mailing. That list does require you to be subscribed in order to post. The reason for the former is that direct communications with me are, often, antithetic to "community". My projects are so popular that a community can be taken for granted. I also want the list's archives to log such activities.
I agree this makes participating slightly more troublesome, but I think it's fair to ask not to treat me as a private free support venue.
And then I, as lead (and often only) developer for several FOSS projects, get an email with a question, suggestion or bug report to my personal email. When I reply with "please use the mailing list", people like you, who, to them, "community" means that the lead developer needs to answer their questions directly, complain, get upset, and sometimes get downright rude.
As a lead developer, I want a community to form. This means that I want to give all people in the community a chance to answer your question, not only myself personally.
Since you're so full of good advices, please help me out with this one, then. What happens when, TWO DAYS before you move in to a new apartment you just bought, you find out that one of the neighbors is precisely such a person?
Happened to a good friend of a good friend, which is to say, it happened to me. We're still fighting off the frivolous lawsuits.
Here's my experience. I did a project for a company that were producing a SoC themselves. We were using the designware SPI peripheral. We wrote the driver ourselves (don't remember right now why - the dw_spi module was not for the right chip or something along these lines. I didn't do the original development).
Turns out this chip doesn't have proper peripherals support. No NAND controller and no integrated MAC, so we use SPI for both persistent storage and for networking. Except the chip isn't fast enough to service the "SPI queue is almost empty" interrupt, despite the designware having a huge queue (256 bytes), and no matter how high we place the watermark, so we do some serious trickery in order to get things working (in essence - directing SPI chips select to a GPIO and manually controlling activation and deactivation). Poor SPI throughput. Worse, the driver is now unsubmittable, as it contains hacks which really only make sense to this particular chip.
So I come along, and suggest to hook the SPI driver to the existing on board DMA controller. Get the whole buffers through without the CPU needing to do anything. A bit of hard work, and the DMA is working (not improving performance, but that's another story). Except neither the DMA infrastructure nor the actual hardware are generic enough to do such a thing so that I don't care which DMA controller is hooked into the SPI controller. So, more hacks. In theory, I could rework the infrastructure so that it is more generic, but that's a project that will cost (man hours) about as much as the original SPI driver rewrite.
The project wound up being canceled, so things never progressed any further, but you can understand that none of that code was ever released. This is not due to the client's desire not to release. Search for Baruch Siach's contributions in the enc286 code for example of vanilla integrated code that were done on that client's dime and with their consent. It's just that there is a limit to how much time a company can authorize merely so that the code is generic enough to go into main.
Yes. He probably meant "Muslim". It's a common mistake.
To be fair, his exact words are not contradictory to knowing all of that:
... because he thought he was well-loved by his Arab brothers.
The statement is that his brothers (in Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia) are Arab (which they are), not that he, himself, is. I'm for giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
(which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels)
I certainly don't see it like that. As the saying goes, "Your dime, your time."
The question is not whether the Palestinian had a practical right to put up that demand, just like the question was never whether proprietary software had the practical right not to release their source code. The question was whether they have the moral right to, and more to the point, whether, given the demand was made, whether RMS should have still accepted those terms, rather than say "no thank you".
Whatever your stance on either the software freedom question or the Palestinian academic boycott questions is, RMS made it abundantly clear what his position on the software terms question is - no one should accept such terms. And yet, when it comes to the academic boycott question, not only is he not opposed to it (and I am perfectly willing to accept that people have to choose their battles), he is giving in to it.
Read the Israeli organizer's account of things. When he thought he was coming, he made sure that no one was mentioning Linux without prefixing GNU to it, and no one was talking about any proprietary software anywhere in the same gathering. He asks, and because he's a popular speaker, also receives, inordinate amount of control over the entire trip, and if any of his conditions are not met, he'd cancel in a heartbeat. And yet, those conditions he accepts. I think the article is right to question his purity of heart.
If your posted email address is correct, I would welcome further dialog.
My posted email is correct. I am looking forward to your correspondence. Please clearly mark the subject with the word "Slashdot" so I can catch it if my spam filter mistreats it.
Hey, way to punt and reply to nothing I said. Well done.
In your reply you confirmed what I accused you of doing (judging Israel by this one criteria, and nothing else), and called it justified because of various claimed atrocities. Since you confirmed my claim, there is nothing to reply to on that front. I did point out that your alleged atrocities are based on misinformation and propaganda, but that I doubted that you were willing to open your presuppositions to discussions, so I will (in retrospect, only try to) step away from the discussion.
Could you cite where I did that? Kthx.
A fair request (and the only reason I did reply). You claim Israel do various atrocities, and yet you claim Israelis should not receive certain type of visitors. When I point out that this is collective punishment, you respond:
I couldn't care less about what else they're doing.
Israel lives and dies by the occupation. It is central to their very way of life.
Hope that is enough references.
This "If you're against Israeli occupation, you're a Jew-hater" schtick is tired as hell.
I never accused you of hating Jews (to use your own words - please cite references). I accused you of being misinformed and of having been fed from propaganda. You, however, hear this accusation, despite it never been made. The most likely explanation, were I to guess, is that it is easier to call me paranoid than to face my accusations on their merit. In other words (again, yours), you are punting. Well done:-).
If you wish to re-check your presuppositions, please feel free to contact me via email. I think this public forum has run its course, and we are so off topic (which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels) that this is really getting redundant. If not, have a good life.
What I see is someone who is so fond of taking the moral high ground, that you do not seem to care whether your views were formed by incomplete cooked information, and yet so sure of them that you are willing to condemn a whole nation. Since nothing I'm going say will even make you reconsider the facts you throw around so easily, I think we can close the discussion here.
Slashdot Mirror
What a silly question.
Open systems need competition from closed systems just as closed systems need competition from open systems.
Open systems ensure competition even in a world with no closed systems. Of course, to keep things completely competitive you actually need open source, and open systems might not be enough, but closed systems don't enter into the equation.
Shachar
Wow, all you wanted was to undo a moderation mistake, and got a +5 insightful instead. Kinda reminds of Saul.
Shachar
I hate to break the series of misinformed replies you received, but the main objection by the Israeli government (residing, by and large, in Jerusalem, not Tel-Aviv) had to do with privacy. The conditions given to Google had to do with obscuring license plates and faces, and not much else.
Shachar
Re-reading my previous reply, it may not have been clear. The two Ideos phones are the U8150 sold in Kenya. In addition to them, I have a U8800 (Ideos X5) and a U8510 (Ideos X3).
Shachar
My company does localization of Android phones for local distributors. Currently on my desk are a Nexus One, Nexus S, two Ideos phones, an Ideos X5 and an Ideos X3. This does not include non-active phones I have at home. Of this set, by far, the lowest speced and weakest phone is the Ideos, of which I have two, because it is an active project. Because it is an active project, my SIM card is in one of the IDEOS phones, and it has been my main phone for several months now.
I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that while the phone IS, in fact, slower than the rest of them, and its screen IS quite inferior, it is definitely a useable (and useful) smart phone. Your criticism is simply without merit.
Shachar
Whoosh
So all it took was one single oversized-sized icmp ping to crash just about any computer on the net. Imagine being able to take down all of google's internet presence with just a few thousand packets. Of course, at the time, there was no google.
Technically, you needn't send the whole thing. You couldn't send the whole thing, anyways, as there are limits on the size of an IP packet. You sent the packet in IP fragments. You needn't even send all of the fragments. Merely sending the last fragment, the one that overflowed the IP packet size.
Also, IIRC, it wasn't 65536. It was bigger. Maximal size was ~65506+your MTU (which was never less than 536, and was often 1500) which caused the overflow. 65536 total size is still okay (or is it 65535?)
Shachar
Just out of curiosity, how is that different than "technological analysts" like Gartner and such?
People who give predictions of the future tend to avoid ever looking at how they fared on past predictions. This is true of respected companies as well as psychics and tarot readers.
Shachar
I actually tested it pretty close to when the strip was released, and it worked then as well on several random pages.
The moment "person" leads there as well as "science", it's very hard not to reach there.
But I'll bite. Can you (easily) provide me with a page that, as of the date the strip was published (around May 25th, 2011), did no go into this loop, but today does, then I might concur.
On a side note, every rule has an exception. You might find a rule that does not have an exception, but that would just make it the exception of this rule.
Shachar
All URLs lead to goatse just as all Wikipedia links lead to "philosophy"
There, fixed it for you.
Having done some work in the area of aeronautics, I can tell you this logic doesn't always hold true. In particular, if the code you write is meant to run inside a cockpit (and it almost doesn't matter whether this is actually flying the plane or just displaying an airport's map), it goes through such level of scrutiny that is meant to assure that it has no bugs, without bugs happening in the field.
At least that was the mindset of the people around me.
Shachar
I fail to see the basis for this -- medical, sociological, educational or even statistical. Care to elaborate?
I did in this comment.
Shachar
I can't think of any reason why, from a mathematical/statistical point of view, that would be the case.
I'll do my best to help you out, then.
My basic assumption is that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are, given one option that sortof works, to search for better alternatives. A fairly direct consequence is that the more obscure the alternative, the more intelligent, on average, the people who even give it a chance.
The final outcome of all of this is that the less intelligent go with the default option, and even when they switch, they switch to relatively common alternatives. The more intelligent go with the best fit, with their distribution of choices more similar to a uniform distribution. As a result, the default options receive more of the less intelligent population, while the obscure options receive more of the more intelligent population, driving the average down and up respectively.
I hope this clears things up for you.
Shachar
How does your experience deal with foreign languages? Or are you one of the ~80% of Americans who have never had a passport?
My name is Shachar Shemesh. "Shachar", in Hebrew (which is the generally spoken language around here) means "dawn". "Shemesh" means "sun". Since my given and family names, usually three letters each (Slashdot doesn't allow Hebrew letters, so explicit spelling omitted), turned into seven letters each, unpronounceable and impossible for indigenous Americans to spell, I decided to spare fellow IRC members (this was back in 1991) the bother of trying to, and used an alias. Since "dawn" is a girl's name in English, I went with my family name.
Since then, the Internet has changed, and I've reverted to using my actual name in most places. My Slashdot ID, however, dates back far enough that an alias is used.
After having ruled out making conclusive statements about a fellow slashdotter intelligence based merely on an apparent discrepancy between his signature and his nick name, we now turn to trying to draw conclusions about a slashdotter's intelligence based on the following criteria:
The above criteria was phrased in the male form, due to my sincere hope that no woman would be stupid enough to have written the parent comment.
Dawn
That, or people for whom English is not their first language.
Slashdot USA bias at its best...
Shachar
P.S.
That, and the fact I was trying to get an intelligent "first post" under strict marital time constraints (aka "dinner's on the table"). Wasn't sure about that word, but decided (wrongly) to rely on the spell checker.
The smaller the sample group, the more intelligent the average in it, in all recent "technology vs. intelligence" studies. Can we just deduct that the less intelligent flow with the crowd, the more intelligent actually pick what's best for them, and call it quits?
Shachar
I ask that anyone contacting me about projects do so via the project's mailing. That list does require you to be subscribed in order to post. The reason for the former is that direct communications with me are, often, antithetic to "community". My projects are so popular that a community can be taken for granted. I also want the list's archives to log such activities.
I agree this makes participating slightly more troublesome, but I think it's fair to ask not to treat me as a private free support venue.
Shachar
And then I, as lead (and often only) developer for several FOSS projects, get an email with a question, suggestion or bug report to my personal email. When I reply with "please use the mailing list", people like you, who, to them, "community" means that the lead developer needs to answer their questions directly, complain, get upset, and sometimes get downright rude.
As a lead developer, I want a community to form. This means that I want to give all people in the community a chance to answer your question, not only myself personally.
Shachar
Since you're so full of good advices, please help me out with this one, then. What happens when, TWO DAYS before you move in to a new apartment you just bought, you find out that one of the neighbors is precisely such a person?
Happened to a good friend of a good friend, which is to say, it happened to me. We're still fighting off the frivolous lawsuits.
Shachar
Rickrolling. Don't waste your time and bandwidth.
Shachar
Here's my experience. I did a project for a company that were producing a SoC themselves. We were using the designware SPI peripheral. We wrote the driver ourselves (don't remember right now why - the dw_spi module was not for the right chip or something along these lines. I didn't do the original development).
Turns out this chip doesn't have proper peripherals support. No NAND controller and no integrated MAC, so we use SPI for both persistent storage and for networking. Except the chip isn't fast enough to service the "SPI queue is almost empty" interrupt, despite the designware having a huge queue (256 bytes), and no matter how high we place the watermark, so we do some serious trickery in order to get things working (in essence - directing SPI chips select to a GPIO and manually controlling activation and deactivation). Poor SPI throughput. Worse, the driver is now unsubmittable, as it contains hacks which really only make sense to this particular chip.
So I come along, and suggest to hook the SPI driver to the existing on board DMA controller. Get the whole buffers through without the CPU needing to do anything. A bit of hard work, and the DMA is working (not improving performance, but that's another story). Except neither the DMA infrastructure nor the actual hardware are generic enough to do such a thing so that I don't care which DMA controller is hooked into the SPI controller. So, more hacks. In theory, I could rework the infrastructure so that it is more generic, but that's a project that will cost (man hours) about as much as the original SPI driver rewrite.
The project wound up being canceled, so things never progressed any further, but you can understand that none of that code was ever released. This is not due to the client's desire not to release. Search for Baruch Siach's contributions in the enc286 code for example of vanilla integrated code that were done on that client's dime and with their consent. It's just that there is a limit to how much time a company can authorize merely so that the code is generic enough to go into main.
Shachar
Yes. He probably meant "Muslim". It's a common mistake.
To be fair, his exact words are not contradictory to knowing all of that:
... because he thought he was well-loved by his Arab brothers.
The statement is that his brothers (in Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia) are Arab (which they are), not that he, himself, is. I'm for giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
Shachar
(which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels)
I certainly don't see it like that. As the saying goes, "Your dime, your time."
The question is not whether the Palestinian had a practical right to put up that demand, just like the question was never whether proprietary software had the practical right not to release their source code. The question was whether they have the moral right to, and more to the point, whether, given the demand was made, whether RMS should have still accepted those terms, rather than say "no thank you".
Whatever your stance on either the software freedom question or the Palestinian academic boycott questions is, RMS made it abundantly clear what his position on the software terms question is - no one should accept such terms. And yet, when it comes to the academic boycott question, not only is he not opposed to it (and I am perfectly willing to accept that people have to choose their battles), he is giving in to it.
Read the Israeli organizer's account of things. When he thought he was coming, he made sure that no one was mentioning Linux without prefixing GNU to it, and no one was talking about any proprietary software anywhere in the same gathering. He asks, and because he's a popular speaker, also receives, inordinate amount of control over the entire trip, and if any of his conditions are not met, he'd cancel in a heartbeat. And yet, those conditions he accepts. I think the article is right to question his purity of heart.
If your posted email address is correct, I would welcome further dialog.
My posted email is correct. I am looking forward to your correspondence. Please clearly mark the subject with the word "Slashdot" so I can catch it if my spam filter mistreats it.
Shachar
Hey, way to punt and reply to nothing I said. Well done.
In your reply you confirmed what I accused you of doing (judging Israel by this one criteria, and nothing else), and called it justified because of various claimed atrocities. Since you confirmed my claim, there is nothing to reply to on that front. I did point out that your alleged atrocities are based on misinformation and propaganda, but that I doubted that you were willing to open your presuppositions to discussions, so I will (in retrospect, only try to) step away from the discussion.
Could you cite where I did that? Kthx.
A fair request (and the only reason I did reply). You claim Israel do various atrocities, and yet you claim Israelis should not receive certain type of visitors. When I point out that this is collective punishment, you respond:
I couldn't care less about what else they're doing.
Israel lives and dies by the occupation. It is central to their very way of life.
Hope that is enough references.
This "If you're against Israeli occupation, you're a Jew-hater" schtick is tired as hell.
I never accused you of hating Jews (to use your own words - please cite references). I accused you of being misinformed and of having been fed from propaganda. You, however, hear this accusation, despite it never been made. The most likely explanation, were I to guess, is that it is easier to call me paranoid than to face my accusations on their merit. In other words (again, yours), you are punting. Well done :-).
If you wish to re-check your presuppositions, please feel free to contact me via email. I think this public forum has run its course, and we are so off topic (which was, may I remind you, that RMS is willing to accept proprietary license type restrictions on his travels) that this is really getting redundant. If not, have a good life.
Shachar
What I see is someone who is so fond of taking the moral high ground, that you do not seem to care whether your views were formed by incomplete cooked information, and yet so sure of them that you are willing to condemn a whole nation. Since nothing I'm going say will even make you reconsider the facts you throw around so easily, I think we can close the discussion here.
Enjoy your moral purity.
Shachar