I'm simply not a fan of that sort of humor. Reno 911 strikes me as stupid and juvenile, not funny. I certainly have no problem if you enjoy it, though. I'm not writing CC to take it off the air, and I'm not telling you that you're wrong for having a different opinion. I have no doubt that you'd find some of the things I enjoy to be quite lame. (How many/.ers listen to John Prine and James McMurtry?) It's a big world with lots and lots of room for different tastes and opinions. It'd be a big, boring world if everyone liked the same thing.
Anyone who suggests 'abandoning the use of the registry' has obviously never written Windows software. What do you suggest we replace it with, INI files?
An XML equivalent but essentially, yeah.
What do you suppose we do about the thousands of existing applications that use the registry?
Provide wrappers that access XML files. Alternatively, keep the registry in place but depricate it.
How do you suggest we support access controls for individual settings and keys - make a single INI file for each one?
Or a single XML file that's stored in the users profile.
At a minimum, the registry should be split into several distinct pieces. Put hardware settings in one file. Put user interface settings in another. Software configs in a third (if you absolutely cannot give each program it's own.) File extension associations in its own. Etc.
Changes like 'get rid of the registry' are changes you make when you release a new OS, not when you release a service pack. OS X, for example, uses flatfiles to store most (if not all) preferences, but that's something they designed in from the start.
So you're saying MS should have done it when they introduced '98. Or 2000. Or XP. Or when Vista comes out...
It's pretty annoying how people always suggest blatantly stupid 'solutions' to problems instead of focusing on real fixes like better design and better testing...
It's pretty annoying how people always reflexivly defend stupid 'solutions' once they've been put into place instead of realizing that they're dead ends which don't work and just getting on with a new, better design...
Define injury. If you're talking about people receiving physical injury, then no, no one was injured. But if you were one of the ones who's data got corrupted, you'd probably not be so quick to shrug it off.
Microsoft should have made that fix available free of charge. Any bug-fix should be free of charge. Since they didn't, what option was there but to sue? I certainly don't think everyone who purchased DOS 6 deserved a big payout. Had I been the judge with carte blanche to decide the case, I'd have forced MS to release the fix for free, pay for the plaintiff's legal fees, and left the door open for anyone who actually lost data due to MS' product to bring suit for specific damages.
So, when considering a candidate for the Supreme Court, one should not concern one's self with the nature of their philosophy or how they might rule on cases where the most fundamental aspects of liberty and human rights might come in to play. Instead, one should only concentrate on whether or not the candidate was succesful in persuading a jury or a judge.
Interesting philosophy of how one should judge a SCOTUS candidate, but I think I'll try to dig just a tad deeper, thanks.
So we should dismiss the nature of the cases she took and the nature of the arguments she made when considering her as a potential justice. What remains? Exactly how should we judge her?
Why is it that everyone thinks they are due some kind of money any time something doesn't work exactly right.
Because it's fraud and/or breach of promise. I bought a product because the manufacturer told me that it would perform a certain task. If it doesn't perform that task, I'm at least entitled to my money back. Depending on the situation, I may be entitled to more. If the product is the Super Wham-O-Dyne tomato slicer which won't slice tomotaos and I have to use a manual knife to make my BLT, well, getting my money back or getting a replacement unit that does work is about the extent of it. If the product is, say, an automobile who's brakes don't work and the result is that I have an accident and my wife is killed, I'm entitled to a whole hell of a lot more than just my money back.
Of course, this is dependent on your using the product as the manufacturer intended. If you use a screw driver as a chisel and it shatter and a pice flies in your eye, the fault is yours, not the manufacturers. They never promised you that the screwdriver would work as a chisel.
In this case, the question is simple: did the software do what Microsoft said it would do? If not, then MS should have replaced or updated the software to work correctly without cost to the consumer.
(Note that what I've said here is my opinon. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't intended to be legal advice or a necesarily valid description of how things actually work in our court system. It's how they should work.)
I neither stated nor implied that she shouldn't be nominated because she has never been a judge. I merely pointed out that she doesn't have a history of judgements to use in evaluating her as a potential SCOTUS judge. Since she does not have a history of judgements, her performance as a lawyer is the only record we have.
She's being nominated to the Supreme Court, where she will influence the direction of court cases in the US for likely the next few decades. She has never been a judge, so we have no history of judgements on which to evaluate her. If we don't use her previous work as a lawyer as a basis of judgement, exactly how should we judge her? Or should we simply confirm her as a Supremen Court Justice and hope for the best?
I haven't redefined anything. You might want to try reading the Jargon File.
The entry for hacker says, in part:
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
And for hack it includes:
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack foo" is roughly equivalent to "foo is my major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics."
As I said, you might want to learn what the word means before you chime in.
Re:To hack or not to hack, that is the question!
on
Hacking - Art or Science?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wow. You might want to find out what the word means before you weigh in. What you're talking about is a form of hacking, but it's only one aspect of a much wider and more complex field. For example, I've heard Einstein's Theory of Relativity described as a beautiful hack, and I'd tend to agree.
Most certainly, people like Edison and George Washington Carver and Eli Whitney were hackers. I'm rather glad they and others didn't leave their hacking behind when they left college (assuming, of course, that they actually went to college, which many great hackers did not.)
To address the question raised in the article, the answer is neither and both. It's similar to asking if drawing is an art or a science. Da Vinci's sketches and an Autocad drawing of a planetary gear system are both drawing but only one is likely to be considered art. Similarly, hacking CAN be art and it CAN be science, and sometimes it might be both at the same time and other times it might be neither. Trying to force it into one category or the other is futile. It's much to broad a subject to tie into purely one classification.
Does your job also offer benefits covering stress management and/or human relations training? You seem like you'd benefit tremendously from both. Here's hoping that whatever situation is weighing so heavily on you is soon resolved for the better.
Supervisor: Every time I walk by, he's sitting there staring out the window.
Manager: He thought up the last half dozen products we've sold, all huge hits, by sitting there staring out the window.
Supervisor: Oh, OK. See you in a bit.
Manager: Where are you going?
Supervisor: Maintenance. I'm going to get someone to wash Johnson's window.
I'll also point out that if you're working for Megacorp, "...how many machines should your sysadmin be able to manage?" might be a legitimate question. However, for many of us working for Minicorp, the answer is "All of them."
I think Larry Wall was right in recognizing that simple metrics are often misleading.
If you're a factory worker who's paid to assemble widgets and you goof off for a couple of hours, you probably ARE ripping off your employer. However, many of us, even hourly employees, aren't being paid to assemble as many widgets as possible. We're being paid to accomplish tasks, and one person might do a better job of it working hard six hours a day and goofing off for two than another person working hard for eight hours a day. If you're a sysadmin, is your network functional and secure? If so, does it really matter if you spend a couple of hours browsing/.? Isn't your employer getting what he's paying you for? If you're a programer, do you turn in quality code on time? If you're a supervisor, do your people understand what's expected of them and have the tools and materials they need to do the job? Do you turn in your reports on time and know what's going on with your projects? There are lots and lots of ways to measure job performance, and "works hard for eight hours a day" is often way down on the list of importance and relevance.
Well, in this case, it's pretty easy. Both stories say exactly the same thing - the rate of damage has slowed but the damage hasn't halted, and it's projected to be around 50 years before the damage is completely halted and the ozone recovers to pre-industrial status.
Let's say that you'd need to hire an agent right away to deal with all of the contract offers you'd receive.
Nothing says that just because you release something under the CC that everything you do for the rest of your life is covered under the CC.
The reason that many artists release works under the CC is becuase they want to get exposure so they can get discovered. If you have an album that goes platinum, even if you don't earn a penny from the album, you can consider yourself discovered.
Like I said, there's a reason that record labels sign acts to multi-album deals BEFORE they promote the music. I'm sure that Virgin would be happy to sign you up and put out your next few records after Sony has gone to all the trouble and expense of making you famous.
The bottom line is that the scenario you're describing is so far from reality that it wouldn't even make good fiction. The plot would be too unvelievable.
Your post is remarkably clueless on many fronts, but I'll just address one issue:
but all it takes is for Sony Music to pick up a set of tracks from an artist and make a sudden marketing blitz around the world, and they'd be quite wealthy indeed.
There are thousands of artists out there who would absolutely LOVE for Sony to take their music and market it around the world without signing them to a pesky contract. Sure, the artist might not make any direct compensation for the tracks Sony grabbed, but the exposure would be invaluable. Why do you reckon Sony signs artists to contracts BEFORE they market the music? You think they do it out of the goodness of their heart to benefit the artist?
It DOES parallel the GPL vs BSD scheme. There are two versions of the license. One allows any use, one allows only non-comercial use. If you don't want a comercial entity using your work, release it under the non-comercial version.
Six months of studying isn't cramming. It's self teaching. Cramming is rote memorization, without understanding. I don't put the confidence factor particularly high for an Anonymous Coward on/., but even if you're telling the truth, you're not talking about cramming.
You might be able to cram your way through the CCNA without really having a clue but I doubt it. There's too many simulations and troubleshooting questions, where you have to understand the fundamentals of IP in order to figure out why a setup isn't working. But CCNA is an entry level certification. I guarantee you that you will NOT cram your way through a CCIE certification.
Humor noted, but the "writing" in question was writing ABOUT the language, not IN the language. Perl is designed to mimic many aspects of natural language, and Larry Wall is a linguist. The difinitive Perl books are very well written from an editorial standpoint. YMMV when it comes to the language proper.
I won't say that this never happens but I don't think I've ever seen it where I couldn't find the home page of a business whose name I knew. It may not be the first entry but it's always on the first page. If you have a counter example, please post it. And if it does happen, it still has nothing to do with Google ads. Google (and other search engines) work very hard to return the most relevant results. Google certainly doesn't allow companies to pay to increase their page rank. If you have a solution to the problem of ranking pages that isn't subject to manipulation, I suggest you contact Google. They'd be very interested in what you have to say.
First, you're conflating search results with ads. Search results show up based on a ranking Google does. The algorithm they use is not public information, though some information is known about it. Companies do their best to rig the results so that they get high rankings, and Google is constantly tuning their algorithm to try and return the most relevant results in spite of attempts to manipulate the ranking. This is a tug of war that doesn't seem likely to end in the near future. However, it has absolutely nothing to do with targeted ads.
Targeted ads appear off to the side and they're clearly labeled advertisments. If you don't like the ads that are displayed, ignore them. If you search for Pepsi and a Coke ad pops up, don't click on it. Your results for your search are still right there, completely unaffected. But don't claim that just because you don't care to see Coke ads that Google has to refrain from showing them to everyone.
Widget Co does not have to pay to have their web page show up in a search result. It only has to pay to have Google serve up ads on the side. The cost of advertising is a cost of doing business. Whether you're paying for Google ads or local newspaper ads, they cost money. The larger or more desirable the space they're occupying, the more they cost. Large companies with a big advertising budget always have an advantage over small companies without much to spend. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Google ads or television ads on Superbowl Sunday.
All of the illegal situations you mention involve some sort of fraud - fooling or confusing the customer as to the actual brand of a product. Fraud should certainly be illegal.
But the original decision determined that it was LEGAL for Google to pop up ads when a particular term was entered. It's essentially Google saying "I see you're looking for a car insurance company. Here are some other car insurance companies that you might like to look at." It isn't fraud in any way.
The new decision says that this becomes illegal if, and only if, the ad contains the trademarked word. This makes no sense what-so-ever. If the ad is fraudulent, it should be illegal in and of itself. The fact that it was selected for display based on a competitor's trademark is irrelevant. The ad is fraudulent - likely to confuse consumers, and so illegal. If the ad is NOT fraudulent - it does not, intentionally or unintentionally, confuse the consumer, then there's no reason to make it illegal because it's based on a trademarked keyword.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm simply not a fan of that sort of humor. Reno 911 strikes me as stupid and juvenile, not funny. I certainly have no problem if you enjoy it, though. I'm not writing CC to take it off the air, and I'm not telling you that you're wrong for having a different opinion. I have no doubt that you'd find some of the things I enjoy to be quite lame. (How many /.ers listen to John Prine and James McMurtry?) It's a big world with lots and lots of room for different tastes and opinions. It'd be a big, boring world if everyone liked the same thing.
It struck me as a poor choice to ask the writers of Reno 911 to write Reno 911.
Anyone who suggests 'abandoning the use of the registry' has obviously never written Windows software. What do you suggest we replace it with, INI files?
An XML equivalent but essentially, yeah.
What do you suppose we do about the thousands of existing applications that use the registry?
Provide wrappers that access XML files. Alternatively, keep the registry in place but depricate it.
How do you suggest we support access controls for individual settings and keys - make a single INI file for each one?
Or a single XML file that's stored in the users profile.
At a minimum, the registry should be split into several distinct pieces. Put hardware settings in one file. Put user interface settings in another. Software configs in a third (if you absolutely cannot give each program it's own.) File extension associations in its own. Etc.
Changes like 'get rid of the registry' are changes you make when you release a new OS, not when you release a service pack. OS X, for example, uses flatfiles to store most (if not all) preferences, but that's something they designed in from the start.
So you're saying MS should have done it when they introduced '98. Or 2000. Or XP. Or when Vista comes out...
It's pretty annoying how people always suggest blatantly stupid 'solutions' to problems instead of focusing on real fixes like better design and better testing...
It's pretty annoying how people always reflexivly defend stupid 'solutions' once they've been put into place instead of realizing that they're dead ends which don't work and just getting on with a new, better design...
Define injury. If you're talking about people receiving physical injury, then no, no one was injured. But if you were one of the ones who's data got corrupted, you'd probably not be so quick to shrug it off.
Microsoft should have made that fix available free of charge. Any bug-fix should be free of charge. Since they didn't, what option was there but to sue? I certainly don't think everyone who purchased DOS 6 deserved a big payout. Had I been the judge with carte blanche to decide the case, I'd have forced MS to release the fix for free, pay for the plaintiff's legal fees, and left the door open for anyone who actually lost data due to MS' product to bring suit for specific damages.
So, when considering a candidate for the Supreme Court, one should not concern one's self with the nature of their philosophy or how they might rule on cases where the most fundamental aspects of liberty and human rights might come in to play. Instead, one should only concentrate on whether or not the candidate was succesful in persuading a jury or a judge.
Interesting philosophy of how one should judge a SCOTUS candidate, but I think I'll try to dig just a tad deeper, thanks.
So we should dismiss the nature of the cases she took and the nature of the arguments she made when considering her as a potential justice. What remains? Exactly how should we judge her?
Why is it that everyone thinks they are due some kind of money any time something doesn't work exactly right.
Because it's fraud and/or breach of promise. I bought a product because the manufacturer told me that it would perform a certain task. If it doesn't perform that task, I'm at least entitled to my money back. Depending on the situation, I may be entitled to more. If the product is the Super Wham-O-Dyne tomato slicer which won't slice tomotaos and I have to use a manual knife to make my BLT, well, getting my money back or getting a replacement unit that does work is about the extent of it. If the product is, say, an automobile who's brakes don't work and the result is that I have an accident and my wife is killed, I'm entitled to a whole hell of a lot more than just my money back.
Of course, this is dependent on your using the product as the manufacturer intended. If you use a screw driver as a chisel and it shatter and a pice flies in your eye, the fault is yours, not the manufacturers. They never promised you that the screwdriver would work as a chisel.
In this case, the question is simple: did the software do what Microsoft said it would do? If not, then MS should have replaced or updated the software to work correctly without cost to the consumer.
(Note that what I've said here is my opinon. I'm not a lawyer and this isn't intended to be legal advice or a necesarily valid description of how things actually work in our court system. It's how they should work.)
I neither stated nor implied that she shouldn't be nominated because she has never been a judge. I merely pointed out that she doesn't have a history of judgements to use in evaluating her as a potential SCOTUS judge. Since she does not have a history of judgements, her performance as a lawyer is the only record we have.
She's being nominated to the Supreme Court, where she will influence the direction of court cases in the US for likely the next few decades. She has never been a judge, so we have no history of judgements on which to evaluate her. If we don't use her previous work as a lawyer as a basis of judgement, exactly how should we judge her? Or should we simply confirm her as a Supremen Court Justice and hope for the best?
Einstein was anything but a hack. He was also not an artist in the least.
I'd say that this comment puts you in the category of folks who don't understand what the word means.
I haven't redefined anything. You might want to try reading the Jargon File.
The entry for hacker says, in part:
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
And for hack it includes:
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack foo" is roughly equivalent to "foo is my major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics."
As I said, you might want to learn what the word means before you chime in.
Wow. You might want to find out what the word means before you weigh in. What you're talking about is a form of hacking, but it's only one aspect of a much wider and more complex field. For example, I've heard Einstein's Theory of Relativity described as a beautiful hack, and I'd tend to agree.
Most certainly, people like Edison and George Washington Carver and Eli Whitney were hackers. I'm rather glad they and others didn't leave their hacking behind when they left college (assuming, of course, that they actually went to college, which many great hackers did not.)
To address the question raised in the article, the answer is neither and both. It's similar to asking if drawing is an art or a science. Da Vinci's sketches and an Autocad drawing of a planetary gear system are both drawing but only one is likely to be considered art. Similarly, hacking CAN be art and it CAN be science, and sometimes it might be both at the same time and other times it might be neither. Trying to force it into one category or the other is futile. It's much to broad a subject to tie into purely one classification.
Does your job also offer benefits covering stress management and/or human relations training? You seem like you'd benefit tremendously from both. Here's hoping that whatever situation is weighing so heavily on you is soon resolved for the better.
Reminds me of a joke.
Supervisor: I'm going to fire Johnson.
Manager: Why?
Supervisor: Every time I walk by, he's sitting there staring out the window.
Manager: He thought up the last half dozen products we've sold, all huge hits, by sitting there staring out the window.
Supervisor: Oh, OK. See you in a bit.
Manager: Where are you going?
Supervisor: Maintenance. I'm going to get someone to wash Johnson's window.
I'll also point out that if you're working for Megacorp, "...how many machines should your sysadmin be able to manage?" might be a legitimate question. However, for many of us working for Minicorp, the answer is "All of them."
I think Larry Wall was right in recognizing that simple metrics are often misleading.
/.? Isn't your employer getting what he's paying you for? If you're a programer, do you turn in quality code on time? If you're a supervisor, do your people understand what's expected of them and have the tools and materials they need to do the job? Do you turn in your reports on time and know what's going on with your projects? There are lots and lots of ways to measure job performance, and "works hard for eight hours a day" is often way down on the list of importance and relevance.
If you're a factory worker who's paid to assemble widgets and you goof off for a couple of hours, you probably ARE ripping off your employer. However, many of us, even hourly employees, aren't being paid to assemble as many widgets as possible. We're being paid to accomplish tasks, and one person might do a better job of it working hard six hours a day and goofing off for two than another person working hard for eight hours a day. If you're a sysadmin, is your network functional and secure? If so, does it really matter if you spend a couple of hours browsing
Well, in this case, it's pretty easy. Both stories say exactly the same thing - the rate of damage has slowed but the damage hasn't halted, and it's projected to be around 50 years before the damage is completely halted and the ozone recovers to pre-industrial status.
Let's say that first CD went platinum...
Let's say that you'd need to hire an agent right away to deal with all of the contract offers you'd receive.
Nothing says that just because you release something under the CC that everything you do for the rest of your life is covered under the CC.
The reason that many artists release works under the CC is becuase they want to get exposure so they can get discovered. If you have an album that goes platinum, even if you don't earn a penny from the album, you can consider yourself discovered.
Like I said, there's a reason that record labels sign acts to multi-album deals BEFORE they promote the music. I'm sure that Virgin would be happy to sign you up and put out your next few records after Sony has gone to all the trouble and expense of making you famous.
The bottom line is that the scenario you're describing is so far from reality that it wouldn't even make good fiction. The plot would be too unvelievable.
Your post is remarkably clueless on many fronts, but I'll just address one issue:
but all it takes is for Sony Music to pick up a set of tracks from an artist and make a sudden marketing blitz around the world, and they'd be quite wealthy indeed.
There are thousands of artists out there who would absolutely LOVE for Sony to take their music and market it around the world without signing them to a pesky contract. Sure, the artist might not make any direct compensation for the tracks Sony grabbed, but the exposure would be invaluable. Why do you reckon Sony signs artists to contracts BEFORE they market the music? You think they do it out of the goodness of their heart to benefit the artist?
It DOES parallel the GPL vs BSD scheme. There are two versions of the license. One allows any use, one allows only non-comercial use. If you don't want a comercial entity using your work, release it under the non-comercial version.
Six months of studying isn't cramming. It's self teaching. Cramming is rote memorization, without understanding. I don't put the confidence factor particularly high for an Anonymous Coward on /., but even if you're telling the truth, you're not talking about cramming.
You might be able to cram your way through the CCNA without really having a clue but I doubt it. There's too many simulations and troubleshooting questions, where you have to understand the fundamentals of IP in order to figure out why a setup isn't working. But CCNA is an entry level certification. I guarantee you that you will NOT cram your way through a CCIE certification.
Humor noted, but the "writing" in question was writing ABOUT the language, not IN the language. Perl is designed to mimic many aspects of natural language, and Larry Wall is a linguist. The difinitive Perl books are very well written from an editorial standpoint. YMMV when it comes to the language proper.
I won't say that this never happens but I don't think I've ever seen it where I couldn't find the home page of a business whose name I knew. It may not be the first entry but it's always on the first page. If you have a counter example, please post it. And if it does happen, it still has nothing to do with Google ads. Google (and other search engines) work very hard to return the most relevant results. Google certainly doesn't allow companies to pay to increase their page rank. If you have a solution to the problem of ranking pages that isn't subject to manipulation, I suggest you contact Google. They'd be very interested in what you have to say.
First, you're conflating search results with ads. Search results show up based on a ranking Google does. The algorithm they use is not public information, though some information is known about it. Companies do their best to rig the results so that they get high rankings, and Google is constantly tuning their algorithm to try and return the most relevant results in spite of attempts to manipulate the ranking. This is a tug of war that doesn't seem likely to end in the near future. However, it has absolutely nothing to do with targeted ads.
Targeted ads appear off to the side and they're clearly labeled advertisments. If you don't like the ads that are displayed, ignore them. If you search for Pepsi and a Coke ad pops up, don't click on it. Your results for your search are still right there, completely unaffected. But don't claim that just because you don't care to see Coke ads that Google has to refrain from showing them to everyone.
Widget Co does not have to pay to have their web page show up in a search result. It only has to pay to have Google serve up ads on the side. The cost of advertising is a cost of doing business. Whether you're paying for Google ads or local newspaper ads, they cost money. The larger or more desirable the space they're occupying, the more they cost. Large companies with a big advertising budget always have an advantage over small companies without much to spend. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Google ads or television ads on Superbowl Sunday.
All of the illegal situations you mention involve some sort of fraud - fooling or confusing the customer as to the actual brand of a product. Fraud should certainly be illegal.
But the original decision determined that it was LEGAL for Google to pop up ads when a particular term was entered. It's essentially Google saying "I see you're looking for a car insurance company. Here are some other car insurance companies that you might like to look at." It isn't fraud in any way.
The new decision says that this becomes illegal if, and only if, the ad contains the trademarked word. This makes no sense what-so-ever. If the ad is fraudulent, it should be illegal in and of itself. The fact that it was selected for display based on a competitor's trademark is irrelevant. The ad is fraudulent - likely to confuse consumers, and so illegal. If the ad is NOT fraudulent - it does not, intentionally or unintentionally, confuse the consumer, then there's no reason to make it illegal because it's based on a trademarked keyword.