Hmmm, well, yes I generally agree, but with my Slashdot-Nazi hat on I can never admit I was wrong of course:) so I will suggest that although product and vendor lock-in is certainly one result of certs, the result of THAT is to make more money for the vendor and (if they're separate orgs) that by promoting the particular software or suite of tools the certifier benefits again - more popular software will be more widely used and generate greater demand for training. So, the point of training is still to make money, but that money from moer sources than direct income from training, books, exam fees and so on.
The 'point' of any for-profit certification is to make money for those administering or awarding it. There are other effects, too, but that's the 'point'.
The Manic Street Preachers wrote a song inspired by Valerie "I Shot Andy Warhol (the male chauvinist bastard)" Solanos comment about men being emotional cripples and 'walking abortions' because our XY chromosomes are a corrupted & incomplete version of women's XX set. Er, approximately - feel free to get your own meaning but be warned, it's a fucking heavy duty lyric by an incredibly powerful writer.
Back in 1990 I was an undergrad at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in Northern Ireland (a fantastic place BTW, highly recommended esp. if you're an over -intelligent under achieving self-motivated hacker type:) A couple of mates and I got ourselves elected to some student union position giving us complete control(!!!! bwahhahaha) of the SU newsletter / zine thing. Previous it was a few hand-typed photostatted sheets with a staple through the corner; we 'got ourselves' access to a super-l337 Mac II machine and some desktop publishing software. Anyway we were making up the second edition for the printers late one Sunday evening when I flipped open a copy of that day's Independent on Sunday and found a large article on Page 2 about how Lynn and a couple of other dodgy types had been funded by a US-based Neo-Nazi front organisation. I also remember his "interesting" psychology 201 lecture on Eugenics and how it had been unfairly tarnished by association with the Nazis.
Anyway, he's popped up in the mainstream media once or twice since then and always in association with highly controversial but media-friendly topics... often with a rather suspect right-wing (or far-right) 'conclusions'. Strangely enough, ISTR many of these stories broke in August...
Most of the major AV programs have incorporated some sort of heuristics capability for years now. The problem with these (and the reason they're not usually turned on by default) is that they tend to false positive all over the place. So the corrolary to these test results is: how many false positives did these product generate using the same config?
Disclaimer: I worked for a household-name antivirus sw firm in the past and now work for one that does filters network-based viruses as a network service.
I was a little disappointed to find no mention in TFA about what they meant by "recently". 1 year? 5? 10? 100? 1000? 10K?
I hate to disabuse you, but you're out by a couple of orders of magnitude. 10 million years is considered "recent" in the context of Martian geology and landscape morphology. Nothing much is thought to have happened (except in the sense of very slow processes, such as air-borne dust particle erosion, the occasional impact and periodic outbursts of sub-surface ice as water which immediately freezes or boils. Michael Malin announced the discovery of flowing water on the surface literally years ago, based on analysis of imagery from his cameras on Mars Odyssey ; you can see these small channels bursting out along the rims of craters and steep cliffs in various places, and it was pretty obvious that this was evidence for ice beneath the surface in some areas, at least.
You forget the metatrolls (me, f'rinstance:) who merely point out that water on Mars is News to No-One, although a new statement that this was the case seems to have been making the Slashdot front page once a month for the past seven years. In fact, such stories were one of the things that got me hooked on/. in the first place.
Ahhh/.... it feels so good (though I know it's wrong.)
Why develop an engine from scratch when you're not an engine developer and there are dozens of proven engines you can just buy?
Rutan "doing it" for NASA-scale sums would, as others have pointed out, be no biggy. The reason it'd be a big deal if he managed it on a commercial basis will be that it's 'commercial' not a sense other than 'launching LEO communication satellites for a few hundred million dollars a pop'.
Clue: Have you any idea *why* Delta or Arianne launches cost 8, 9 or 10 figure sums?
Agreed - the Falcon people are much further along the road towards engines (in particular) of the type needed to actually make orbit. When Rutan has a Falcon-1 equiv engine (covered on Slashdot a while back), *then* I'll pay attention to the press releases.
This is just bullshit for the PR-hungry media machine. There's absolutely no way that White Knight / Spaceship One will scale up to an orbital vehicle. If Rutan thinks he can build a vehicle capable of travelling ten times faster than SS1 with high enough SI and all the rest of that engineering detail, great, let him try - but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Look, I'm too knackered to get into a long explanation of what you're mistaken about. It seems like really what you're taking issue with what you perceive as Firefox zealots claiming that Firefox is taking over the web, and basing that claim on the download figures. Well, those zealots don't exist (and I should know, I've been using the danm thing since the first naked gecko.exe control was released (we're talking 1998 or 99 I think:)
We're also probably arging semantics about the meaning of 'significant' in your first sentence. I agree you can't claim a 1:1 ratio of downloads to users, but whether that ratio is greater or lesser than one is up for debate, let alone what the numbers are. But the download numbers do give some sense of relative moment of Firefox - relative to *itself* anyway - and if, say, 10 million downloads were achieved when the Firefox market share as measured on teh server side (and aggregated across mass market sites) was, say, 3%, [I've no idea what the actual figures are] then I think you can draw *some* tenuous conclusions about end user market share.
BTW human intuition about statistics and probability is a good guide to reality. Whatever seems obvious or common sense is usually wrong,usually for a very subtle yet dramatic reason. (For a given value of 'usually';)
(I'm not saying we should waste astronauts, but that doesn't mean we should quit going into orbit for 2+ years just because a few die either.)
I know it's the deaths that the media will obsess over, but isn't the cost of the lost launch, cargo, and vehicle something to do with it? There's a reason there wasn't a production line cranking out orbiters ("Shuttles") in the late 70s and early 80s. (Compare and contrast this, the USAF's stealth aircraft, and the Anglo-French Concord.)
As Orbiters cannot be replaced when lost, they are - literally - priceless.
Surely that should be the *cube* of the distance? Electromagnetic radiation propogates in three dimensions after all... accepting your figures for Mars' orbit, 1/(1.5^3) is 0.29 - something under a third. Anyway, that's not the same as a cloudy day on earth. Apart from anything else, the Martian atmosphere, tenuous as it is, does absorb and reflect some percentage of incident light due to dust particles and thin traces of various gases. Hmmm, the Mars rovers' site would probably have some definitive info on that.
...lamenting the space program's failure to realize the sort of intergalactic exploration they once imagined as kids...
Er, pardon my tedious and boring insistence on grounding discussions in reality, but doesn't that clause just say it all? I mean, _I_ had lots of wild imaginings as a kid, but guess what? I knew fuck-all about astrophysics at the age of 7! Could someone explain how this is news?
Side note to the nutters who will be posting about FTL, Martian terraforming, mining asteroids or whatever: for heaven's sake, either grow up, or piss off back to watching your Star Trek DVDs. It's almost as depressing to see you wasting your resources thinking about such nonsense as it is to meet an apparently intelligent person who turns out to believe in god.
I had a bad day dealing with morons at work... does it show?
I have to admit, it's an amusing bit of misrepresentation the community uses when citing download figures for Firefox as if they really truly mean something.
What a silly thing to say. Has it occured to you that although the relationship is very unlikely to be 1:1 (downloads to users), that if you could actually calculate that factor with a sample size of, say, 100,000 samples, that the rate be stay stable over the larger number?
The fact that it's not practical to actually research the value of that factor certainly doesn't change the fact of it's existence.
Should we start counting every copy of windows sold or bundled with a PC as a "new IE user"?
No, of course not, because as you point out some of the people who buy a machine with Windows and IE will nuke it. But as with Firefox, it will no doubt amaze you to learn that this number, too, can be reliably scaled with a large enough sample size. The ratio of IE/Windows "purchases" to actual end-users is also proportional to the sales figures. Firefox downloads are initiated by a user; Windows and IE are a default. If you know different, not only will many accountants and sales directors beat a path to your door, there's a Nobel Prize for Economics with your name on it.
I shall refrain from drawing attention to the fact that this schoolboy misunderstanding of basic statistics was modded +5... Ah, dang!
Pardon my scepticism, but how the fsck are these nutters planning to compensate for the incoming solar radiation which is - what, 25%? 20% - as bright as it is here on Earth? "Why, genetic engineering!" Yeah, right. An unpopular opinion amongst the SF film nuts around here, I know, but it's never going to happen outside of 'speculative fiction'.
Nope, it was definitely circulating before then. (Perhaps it wasn't a slashdot story that pointed me at it in 2000/01.) But it was definitely out then.
I had a vivid and specific memory of Slashdot last posting this, and I can date it 'cos I remember showing it to the goddam beret-wearing Mac freaks (us Linux/Slowaris/mod_perl folks had a friendly rivalry going with the shapemakers.) At the time I was working at a dotcom that went tits-up in July 2001. I only started there in October 2000, so that makes the Flash four to five years old.
See how much has changed since then, as the Linux revolution in ease of use and consistency has swept the world's desktops.
Yes Veronica, that was intended as sarcasm, not irony.
In the UK the police drew guns and started shouting at a Brazilian electrician because he was dark skinned and wearing a heavy coat in summer. He paniced which is not a surprise when people start yelling at you and drawing guns. They tackled him pumped him full of lead, though he had no weapon, purely on the vague suspcion he might have a bomb. The Brits responded with, oops, sorry.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think you're over-simplifying here. In an ideal world the armed police wouldn't have found themselves chasing an innocent man as he sprinted into Stockwell tube, down the stairs & onto a train. Having started this chase, presumably with a sincere belief that the chasee *was* a suicide bomber, I doubt they had much option but to shoot him in the head. Undoubtedly lessons will need to be (and hopefully have been) learned from this mistake - but the mistake was (probably , we have to wait for the inquest for more details) persumably made by the surveillance team OC - whether on the ground or remotely - who made the call "treat him as a suicide bomber". Although I'm a pretty anti-authoritarian type & generally hold no candle for the police, I am (a) glad people like this are prepared to risk their lives _and their long-term psychological health_ in order to protect Londoners, and (b) sure that those involved will be carrying this for the rest of their lives (c) not willing to be a back-seat Commissioner or Commander. It's easy to sit here and say "they shot him because he was dark-skinned", but you and I know very very little about the circumstances of the killing.
The terrorists aren't necessarily winning either because our inept foreign policy hasn't changed at all.
Hmmm. Well, that depends what their objectives really are. Short term, Al Qaeda has always harped back to the two big grievances they (and most Muslims around the world, and me - an athieist) perceive they have against the West in general, and the USA in particular. Those are support for the state of Israel, and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (home of two of Islam's most sacred sites.) Clearly they're not much closer to that objective. Or rather, if we ARE closer to a resolution of those issues, it has nothing whatever to do with the activities of AQ, either through their 911, London and Madrid (and Bali and Turkey and other) anti-Western attacks, OR through their internal campaigns in Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent, other ME states such as Syria and Jordan.)
On the other hand, if those are strategic, long-term goals, their short term tactics - disrupting society in the West, increasing FUD in the general population, trying to inspire a world-wide Muslim jihadist movement (what a UK paper called 'a home grown insurgency') and to polarise one side against the other - they are having some success. The Dubya approach is *exactly* what they want; talknig of a 'new crusade', taking aggressive retaliatory action in Afghanistan and Iraq (and believe me, the other 'western influences' in Muslim countries are well-known to these people. Witness the rapid rise of radical Islamists opposition to the US backed violent dictatorship in Uhzbekistan) - these play straight into the hands of those people who tell impressionable, angry young Muslim men that it is their sacred duty to kill infidels.
And of course, the greater the Islamist/Muslim antipathy to the USA, the more power Dubya's junta can claw back from your Constitution.
Follow the money. Who benefits from the changes we've seen over the last five years?
I think the article's not good, it's both exaggerating and missing the real threat in these reg changes.
Firstly I don't believe there will ever be a requirement to backdoor CPE like Linksys desktop switches, DSL routers etc. LEO taps are usually made at the service provider level. There are protocols and technologies in bog-standard Cisco, Juniper,.. vendor(n) products, in their backbone and border (peering, transit) routers. These tend to be a tad bigger than yuor Linksys and won't fit on your desktop unless you've got a fully loaded 42U rack on it. These beasties come with, eg, dozens of line cards, each with 48 OC3 ports. Google for 'Cisco BFR' for the real high end. Ahhh, packet geek porn;)
Incidentally I am an EFF member, and they do have good stuff on the supression of free speech, corporate land grabs etc etc not just now but over the past fifteen years. Go read about it.
genetic testing without properly obtained consent (or a lawfully obtained court order), should, and must, be considered an invasion of privacy.
Despite what us Euroweenies would like to believe, in many respects Europe isn't much better than the USA. I am very happy to say that the behaviour described in the article is explicitly illegal in the UK, at least, and probably the rest of the EU. No, IANAL but I listen to 'Today in Parliament' every night it's on:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, well, yes I generally agree, but with my Slashdot-Nazi hat on I can never admit I was wrong of course :) so I will suggest that although product and vendor lock-in is certainly one result of certs, the result of THAT is to make more money for the vendor and (if they're separate orgs) that by promoting the particular software or suite of tools the certifier benefits again - more popular software will be more widely used and generate greater demand for training. So, the point of training is still to make money, but that money from moer sources than direct income from training, books, exam fees and so on.
Next!
The Manic Street Preachers wrote a song inspired by Valerie "I Shot Andy Warhol (the male chauvinist bastard)" Solanos comment about men being emotional cripples and 'walking abortions' because our XY chromosomes are a corrupted & incomplete version of women's XX set. Er, approximately - feel free to get your own meaning but be warned, it's a fucking heavy duty lyric by an incredibly powerful writer.
How can transparent flamebait like this get modded +5 ?!
Anyway, he's popped up in the mainstream media once or twice since then and always in association with highly controversial but media-friendly topics... often with a rather suspect right-wing (or far-right) 'conclusions'. Strangely enough, ISTR many of these stories broke in August...
Disclaimer: I worked for a household-name antivirus sw firm in the past and now work for one that does filters network-based viruses as a network service.
I hate to disabuse you, but you're out by a couple of orders of magnitude. 10 million years is considered "recent" in the context of Martian geology and landscape morphology. Nothing much is thought to have happened (except in the sense of very slow processes, such as air-borne dust particle erosion, the occasional impact and periodic outbursts of sub-surface ice as water which immediately freezes or boils. Michael Malin announced the discovery of flowing water on the surface literally years ago, based on analysis of imagery from his cameras on Mars Odyssey ; you can see these small channels bursting out along the rims of craters and steep cliffs in various places, and it was pretty obvious that this was evidence for ice beneath the surface in some areas, at least.
Ahhh /. ... it feels so good (though I know it's wrong.)
Rutan "doing it" for NASA-scale sums would, as others have pointed out, be no biggy. The reason it'd be a big deal if he managed it on a commercial basis will be that it's 'commercial' not a sense other than 'launching LEO communication satellites for a few hundred million dollars a pop'.
Clue: Have you any idea *why* Delta or Arianne launches cost 8, 9 or 10 figure sums?
Agreed - the Falcon people are much further along the road towards engines (in particular) of the type needed to actually make orbit. When Rutan has a Falcon-1 equiv engine (covered on Slashdot a while back), *then* I'll pay attention to the press releases.
This is just bullshit for the PR-hungry media machine. There's absolutely no way that White Knight / Spaceship One will scale up to an orbital vehicle. If Rutan thinks he can build a vehicle capable of travelling ten times faster than SS1 with high enough SI and all the rest of that engineering detail, great, let him try - but I wouldn't hold my breath.
...publicity like that.
Anyway, I still maintain that Mars terraforming just ain't going to happen.
We're also probably arging semantics about the meaning of 'significant' in your first sentence. I agree you can't claim a 1:1 ratio of downloads to users, but whether that ratio is greater or lesser than one is up for debate, let alone what the numbers are. But the download numbers do give some sense of relative moment of Firefox - relative to *itself* anyway - and if, say, 10 million downloads were achieved when the Firefox market share as measured on teh server side (and aggregated across mass market sites) was, say, 3%, [I've no idea what the actual figures are] then I think you can draw *some* tenuous conclusions about end user market share.
BTW human intuition about statistics and probability is a good guide to reality. Whatever seems obvious or common sense is usually wrong,usually for a very subtle yet dramatic reason. (For a given value of 'usually' ;)
I know it's the deaths that the media will obsess over, but isn't the cost of the lost launch, cargo, and vehicle something to do with it? There's a reason there wasn't a production line cranking out orbiters ("Shuttles") in the late 70s and early 80s. (Compare and contrast this, the USAF's stealth aircraft, and the Anglo-French Concord.)
As Orbiters cannot be replaced when lost, they are - literally - priceless.
Surely that should be the *cube* of the distance? Electromagnetic radiation propogates in three dimensions after all... accepting your figures for Mars' orbit, 1/(1.5^3) is 0.29 - something under a third. Anyway, that's not the same as a cloudy day on earth. Apart from anything else, the Martian atmosphere, tenuous as it is, does absorb and reflect some percentage of incident light due to dust particles and thin traces of various gases. Hmmm, the Mars rovers' site would probably have some definitive info on that.
Er, pardon my tedious and boring insistence on grounding discussions in reality, but doesn't that clause just say it all? I mean, _I_ had lots of wild imaginings as a kid, but guess what? I knew fuck-all about astrophysics at the age of 7! Could someone explain how this is news?
Side note to the nutters who will be posting about FTL, Martian terraforming, mining asteroids or whatever: for heaven's sake, either grow up , or piss off back to watching your Star Trek DVDs. It's almost as depressing to see you wasting your resources thinking about such nonsense as it is to meet an apparently intelligent person who turns out to believe in god.
I had a bad day dealing with morons at work... does it show?
No, of course not, because as you point out some of the people who buy a machine with Windows and IE will nuke it. But as with Firefox, it will no doubt amaze you to learn that this number, too, can be reliably scaled with a large enough sample size. The ratio of IE/Windows "purchases" to actual end-users is also proportional to the sales figures. Firefox downloads are initiated by a user; Windows and IE are a default. If you know different, not only will many accountants and sales directors beat a path to your door, there's a Nobel Prize for Economics with your name on it.
I shall refrain from drawing attention to the fact that this schoolboy misunderstanding of basic statistics was modded +5... Ah, dang!
Pardon my scepticism, but how the fsck are these nutters planning to compensate for the incoming solar radiation which is - what, 25%? 20% - as bright as it is here on Earth? "Why, genetic engineering!" Yeah, right. An unpopular opinion amongst the SF film nuts around here, I know, but it's never going to happen outside of 'speculative fiction'.
Nope, it was definitely circulating before then. (Perhaps it wasn't a slashdot story that pointed me at it in 2000/01.) But it was definitely out then.
See how much has changed since then, as the Linux revolution in ease of use and consistency has swept the world's desktops.
Yes Veronica, that was intended as sarcasm, not irony.
I agree with most of what you say, but I think you're over-simplifying here. In an ideal world the armed police wouldn't have found themselves chasing an innocent man as he sprinted into Stockwell tube, down the stairs & onto a train. Having started this chase, presumably with a sincere belief that the chasee *was* a suicide bomber, I doubt they had much option but to shoot him in the head. Undoubtedly lessons will need to be (and hopefully have been) learned from this mistake - but the mistake was (probably , we have to wait for the inquest for more details) persumably made by the surveillance team OC - whether on the ground or remotely - who made the call "treat him as a suicide bomber". Although I'm a pretty anti-authoritarian type & generally hold no candle for the police, I am (a) glad people like this are prepared to risk their lives _and their long-term psychological health_ in order to protect Londoners, and (b) sure that those involved will be carrying this for the rest of their lives (c) not willing to be a back-seat Commissioner or Commander. It's easy to sit here and say "they shot him because he was dark-skinned", but you and I know very very little about the circumstances of the killing.
Hmmm. Well, that depends what their objectives really are. Short term, Al Qaeda has always harped back to the two big grievances they (and most Muslims around the world, and me - an athieist) perceive they have against the West in general, and the USA in particular. Those are support for the state of Israel, and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (home of two of Islam's most sacred sites.) Clearly they're not much closer to that objective. Or rather, if we ARE closer to a resolution of those issues, it has nothing whatever to do with the activities of AQ, either through their 911, London and Madrid (and Bali and Turkey and other) anti-Western attacks, OR through their internal campaigns in Saudi Arabia (and to a lesser extent, other ME states such as Syria and Jordan.)
On the other hand, if those are strategic, long-term goals, their short term tactics - disrupting society in the West, increasing FUD in the general population, trying to inspire a world-wide Muslim jihadist movement (what a UK paper called 'a home grown insurgency') and to polarise one side against the other - they are having some success. The Dubya approach is *exactly* what they want; talknig of a 'new crusade', taking aggressive retaliatory action in Afghanistan and Iraq (and believe me, the other 'western influences' in Muslim countries are well-known to these people. Witness the rapid rise of radical Islamists opposition to the US backed violent dictatorship in Uhzbekistan) - these play straight into the hands of those people who tell impressionable, angry young Muslim men that it is their sacred duty to kill infidels.
And of course, the greater the Islamist/Muslim antipathy to the USA, the more power Dubya's junta can claw back from your Constitution.
Follow the money. Who benefits from the changes we've seen over the last five years?
Firstly I don't believe there will ever be a requirement to backdoor CPE like Linksys desktop switches, DSL routers etc. LEO taps are usually made at the service provider level. There are protocols and technologies in bog-standard Cisco, Juniper,.. vendor(n) products, in their backbone and border (peering, transit) routers. These tend to be a tad bigger than yuor Linksys and won't fit on your desktop unless you've got a fully loaded 42U rack on it. These beasties come with, eg, dozens of line cards, each with 48 OC3 ports. Google for 'Cisco BFR' for the real high end. Ahhh, packet geek porn ;)
Incidentally I am an EFF member, and they do have good stuff on the supression of free speech, corporate land grabs etc etc not just now but over the past fifteen years. Go read about it.
Despite what us Euroweenies would like to believe, in many respects Europe isn't much better than the USA. I am very happy to say that the behaviour described in the article is explicitly illegal in the UK, at least, and probably the rest of the EU. No, IANAL but I listen to 'Today in Parliament' every night it's on :)
Now if only we could throw out the EUCD... *sigh*