Well yes, but in fact both things can be true simultaneously.
Aspirin is pretty amazing stuff--painkiller, anti-inflammatory, blood thinner, fever reducer, stroke preventative, and more. The list goes on.
HOWEVER, it also can cause stomach bleeding and bleeding ulcers, tinnitus, Reyes syndrome, prolonged bleeding; and has a high number of interactions with other drugs. Oh, and overdoses (both acute and chronic) can be lethal.
I suspect it would be a prescription drug if it were introduced today. Then again, naproxen is an OTC drug in the US, so who knows?
I think the real key is to understand that medicine is effective because it affects the body--and that _can_ be dangerous. Aspirin isn't a panacea without consequences, because nothing is.
...let this be a lesson: In writing a book about business success, you don't have to be right, you just have to appear right until enough copies are sold. The same holds true for anything where 'secrets' are believed to be the key to success. Consider Jim Cramer or Jack Welsh for examples.
Collins is a writer. Whether or not he believes what he writes is exactly as important as whether or not it's true. Advice books are for people looking for quick answers, not correct ones.
You're right. However, you're missing an important point: Hardware and software vendors implicitly collude to create a continuous captive market demand for their products.
Windows version "x" won't run acceptably on anything less than a 2GHz processor with 4GB RAM--time to upgrade your computer! Video card "y" only has drivers available for Vista--time to upgrade your OS! Support for application "z" has been dropped, and the new version requires more RAM and Windows 7--time to upgrade everything!!!
Honestly, find a modern computer which can run Windows 2000, and you'll have a blazing fast machine. XP isn't _much_ slower, and has the advantage of newer device support.
Strictly speaking, an OS shouldn't have "features" from the user's point of view. Gluing a GUI to the OS was arguably Microsoft's first act of truly evil genius. Same thing with the web browser. THESE ARE NOT OPERATING SYSTEM FUNCTIONS, but they help increase the hardware requirements (and the hardware requirement delta between versions), and hence sell hardware, which sells software, which sells...
In a just world, Microsoft would have taken the code base for Windows 2000, added support for 64-bit multicore processors, newer hardware and so forth, tweaked the UI a bit (XP has some clear advantages--and some clear disadvantages), and LEFT THE REST ALONE! Most of the serious code changes between versions have been for no reason except adding "features" (i.e. stupid crutches and applications), which slow things down.
But hey--it's all about marketing, sales, and profits. That's the reality of the industry.
*and maybe explicitly--who knows what goes on behind closed doors?
They may or may not be quite as free as you want in terms of development (i.e. the story generally drags you along whether you want it to or not) but the classic graphics adventures are great for storyline. Find a copy of Grim Fandango if you can. Also look at The Longest Journey.
Puzzle games are fun, and World of Goo seems to be the current addiction, with a bit of a silly storyline to it. Also, a few years back was Psychonauts, with surprising depth. (And not coincidentally, written by the creator of Grim Fandango.)
I've got two essential lines in my.exrc (yes, this is for real vi, but works in all derivatives):
map K:s/^/##/^V^M map ^K:s/^##//^V^M
(note that the ^K ^V and ^M are control characters, the ^ in the substitution patterns are literal carats)
Shift-K comments lines. Ctrl-K uncomments them. As an admin, I use this all the time. When I've done some more involved programming in C, I changed it to C-style comment substitution just as successfully.
OK, regardless of whether they censor words or not, at certain hours or all the time, they will almost certainly screw up on the context.
Imagine these two bits of TV audio: "I'm gonna rip your *BEEP*in' panties off, bend you over this table, and *BEEP* you in the *BEEP* until you bleed."
Great! No dirty words, we must be OK!
Of course, this leads to the other extreme: "Cancer of the *BEEP* is often caused by a viral infection, often caused by unprotected *BEEP*."
Hey, great. Again, we're safe--this time, from learning.
It sounds outrageous, but in reality it's not that different. Watch what gets visually blocked out (naughty bits on 70-year-olds undergoing life-saving surgery) vs. what gets shown ('stripper pole' exercise shows, simulated sex in music videos, all fine because there are clothes in the way).
Of course, censoring based on context requires continual thought and effort, so it's easier to just ban away what we don't like, and let the cutting edge ooze slowly forward.
Fascinating, and very relevant. Thanks for some insight!
There are differences, though. For starters, it's not necessarily about making it incompatible with "the enemy" (i.e. the internet) so much as not explicitly tying it to internet compatibility. That is to say, if the AF came up with this new network (Internet 3?) and the rest of the world adopted it, the sudden compatibility wouldn't be a problem.
Also, the interface between the two realms would be much easier to achieve than with trains, because it would be strictly in the electronic/digital world. No shifting of cars and cargo between trains, for instance.
Also, the internet already exists, and the new network wouldn't invalidate that. It would be more like having two tracks of different gauges running parallel, but if you wanted to get to the military, you would have to be on the odd one. (which of course would have more switches, heavier security, etc.)
But all any of this is saying is that the analogy isn't perfect, which is no surprise--no analogy ever is. However, it's an important cautionary tale which anyone who undertakes to reinvent the wheel needs to keep in mind.
The headline here says 'rewrite the rules of the internet', whereas the Wired article talks about 'rewriting the rules of cyberspace.' Subtle difference here.
The internet exists as it is--fundamentally an IP-based network connected in all the ways we know about, routing, addressing, etc.
The thing is, there's no reason that the Air Force (or anyone else) couldn't create their own, entirely incompatible version. Start with something that has guaranteed QoS, hard-wired source addressing, encryption at the equivalent of the transport layer, content-metadata in the packets (or equivalent to packets--it doesn't have to be a packet protocol at all), etc..
If you need to connect it to the internet, create a tunneling protocol, or a translating switch. Make it different. Make it incompatible. Make it rigid in its requirements. You CAN create a secure network, but not if it's based on the same technology that makes up the existing internet.
I'm in Canada, and we've got about the same population as California, spread out over more land than the entire US, which is a logistics nightmare in its own right. We manage as well as Australia. The thing about hand-counting is that it scales. Ten times the population means ten times the number of people to count--which is the same percentage of the population, conveniently enough.
I think part of the problem is that your federal elections aren't federally controlled. Voting in California isn't necessarily the same as it is in Utah or Florida or New England, and that's just mind-boggling!
Another issue is that the US has been pursuing 'better' voting technology for decades instead of simply using 'correct' voting technology. Put an "x" in a circle beside your choice. Nothing easier to understand, and nothing easier to count correctly. Touch screens, levers, punch cards, etc., are simply the WRONG technology for the task!
Re:Democrats in the US still rely on fradulent vot
on
How We Used To Vote
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'm not from the USA, so I really don't have any allegiance to either party.
That said, I'm fascinated that you complain about Democrats relying on fraudulent votes, when the last two elections were won by massive electoral fraud by the Republicans, and they're trying to do the same this time.
Show me how many votes have been switched in favour of each party, and I'll show you a Republican landslide. Show me questionable voting technology that shouldn't be allowed, and I'll show you equipment manufactured by companies with close Republican ties.
From the outside looking in, I can't imagine why your populace isn't begging the UN for election observers, except that of course, most of you don't trust the UN.
Taking things out of context gives us this:
on
How We Used To Vote
·
· Score: 1
"The article notes the American penchant for trying to fix voting..."
That really sums up far more than the article itself does.
1) Bullshit. 2) So what? "Web 2.0" is nothing but a CPU-intensive marketing scam. 3) ("No, wait--THREE! Three points!") The DMCA is NOT better than nothing, it's actually worse than nothing.
I'm disappointed. Wired is usually better than this.
This isn't an easy shift for me to make. I've lived with DST all my life, and am very much a traditionalist about stuff like this.
However, after dealing with the DST change a few years ago, I really started to think about it, and realised that I have no love for DST at all. Let's just dump it, and be done with it. Allowing kids the extra hour to stay out until midnight instead of 11pm isn't worth much. Economically, the only effect is that people might shop less in the evenings (the real reason for pushing DST out for another six weeks or whatever).
DST wasn't a great idea to start with, and it's too difficult to bother with in a connected world. Good riddance.
When I read stories like this, or like the "RAID-5 will die next year" article earlier today, I feel like I'm in the wrong job. I mean, I could shoot my mouth off, spouting stupid things that almost make sense if you don't scratch the surface too hard.
People who get paid to write/create online may find that jobs (and payment) are scarcer, but people who provide volunteer time (wikipedia, etc.) aren't going to suddenly stop doing it because they're unemployed. In fact, some of them are probably going to have more time on their hands.
I predict that there will be an increase in online suicide notes in the next three years, and also that everyone will point to the internet as the problem instead of recognising it as a time-sink for the already suicidally depressed. Unfortunately, I don't have any specious facts to bolster my opinion (which of course, I'd angrily claim to be inevitable and obvious to anyone but the most clueless), so I guess I'll never be on Fox News, write for Fast Company, or blog (for pay!) on Internet Evolution.
Ummm...ZFS has a lot more to offer than replication/snapshots.
Someone else mentioned resilvering. That's a big bonus, in that it cuts down on resync time, sometimes drastically.
However, disk scrubbing is even bigger--reading ALL of the data from disks and confirming the integrity of it, finding unreadable blocks and relocating them.
And what happens when a block is readable but corrupted (i.e. bit-rot)? Hah--we have CRC checksums to detect that, and correct it!
There are? Who? Maybe 50k across Canada, maybe even 100k. Out of the 20k people who voted against Prentice in his own riding, how many of them did so because of C-61?
How can a small number of people stop this legislation? I'm open to ideas here.
"...although it wouldn't take significant changes to make it acceptable..."
Yeah, it would. It really needs to be gutted and rewritten. There are endless flaws in it, and in fact, there are substantial parts which are flat-out contradictory in it.
"...we must hold out hope that any party leading a minority government wouldn't be so foolish as to pass such consumer-hostile legislation."
Not a chance. This election proved to Canada and the PCs that Harper will never win a majority. However, the lead-up to the election proved that until the Liberals can get their party shaken out and cleaned up under a new leader, they won't force another election--they can't risk pissing off the public even more (three elections in roughly four years--who's up for another one in spring 2010?), which means they'll complain and bluster as they have for the past 2.5 years, but run away hiding when a confidence vote comes up.
C-61 was introduced last spring, and was only suspended to the fall session, before the election was called. How much outrage from the public did it create? How much damage did it do to the conservatives? Here's a hint: Nearly none. They'll quietly introduce this bill again (with some minor changes but the basics of 'assume the consumers are criminals' left intact), and the 50 000 Canadians who actually care won't be able to stop it. The rest of the country will be encouraged to worry about the economy, which is perfectly capable of sinking further then recovering on its own.
Bottom line: Nobody will force an election on this issue, so the sooner they get it rammed through, the longer they'll have to make people forget about it.
This just breaks my heart. We had John Chan running again for the NDP--an excellent and thoughtful candidate. We had Eric Donovan, one of the more passionate and intelligent candidates I've ever seen, running for the Greens. Both ran strong campaigns and made a significant effort to talk to the people, in order to represent them. However, the invisible Liberal candidate (can't remember his name) managed to garner 11% of the vote just for existing, and the winner of the race is a proven liar and corporate sellout, who has an ESTABLISHED TRACK RECORD of turning his back on his constituents.
I look around at my neighbors and friends, and I just don't understand how we we can be such a tiny minority in this province. I'd guess that less than one person in ten that I know would vote for any of Harper's conservatives, and yet...
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand the word faith.
"...If these are generally believed (faith!)..."
That's not faith, that's belief. Belief without evidence is faith.
Well yes, but in fact both things can be true simultaneously.
Aspirin is pretty amazing stuff--painkiller, anti-inflammatory, blood thinner, fever reducer, stroke preventative, and more. The list goes on.
HOWEVER, it also can cause stomach bleeding and bleeding ulcers, tinnitus, Reyes syndrome, prolonged bleeding; and has a high number of interactions with other drugs. Oh, and overdoses (both acute and chronic) can be lethal.
I suspect it would be a prescription drug if it were introduced today. Then again, naproxen is an OTC drug in the US, so who knows?
I think the real key is to understand that medicine is effective because it affects the body--and that _can_ be dangerous. Aspirin isn't a panacea without consequences, because nothing is.
Um...your point is what exactly?
Lego is a Danish company. The article is in Dutch. A Dutch website wrote about a Danish company.
Pour some water on it--if that's not enough, then try flushing it or jumping on it. Or both.
Once the magic smoke has been let out of your Blackberry, I predict your productivity will go up tremendously.
(Hint: I despise blackberries. Terrible devices, designed badly.)
...let this be a lesson: In writing a book about business success, you don't have to be right, you just have to appear right until enough copies are sold. The same holds true for anything where 'secrets' are believed to be the key to success. Consider Jim Cramer or Jack Welsh for examples.
Collins is a writer. Whether or not he believes what he writes is exactly as important as whether or not it's true. Advice books are for people looking for quick answers, not correct ones.
'I don't like either of those options, how about "just more of the same Microsoft software?"'
I don't like that option either!
You're right. However, you're missing an important point: Hardware and software vendors implicitly collude to create a continuous captive market demand for their products.
Windows version "x" won't run acceptably on anything less than a 2GHz processor with 4GB RAM--time to upgrade your computer!
Video card "y" only has drivers available for Vista--time to upgrade your OS!
Support for application "z" has been dropped, and the new version requires more RAM and Windows 7--time to upgrade everything!!!
Honestly, find a modern computer which can run Windows 2000, and you'll have a blazing fast machine. XP isn't _much_ slower, and has the advantage of newer device support.
Strictly speaking, an OS shouldn't have "features" from the user's point of view. Gluing a GUI to the OS was arguably Microsoft's first act of truly evil genius. Same thing with the web browser. THESE ARE NOT OPERATING SYSTEM FUNCTIONS, but they help increase the hardware requirements (and the hardware requirement delta between versions), and hence sell hardware, which sells software, which sells...
In a just world, Microsoft would have taken the code base for Windows 2000, added support for 64-bit multicore processors, newer hardware and so forth, tweaked the UI a bit (XP has some clear advantages--and some clear disadvantages), and LEFT THE REST ALONE! Most of the serious code changes between versions have been for no reason except adding "features" (i.e. stupid crutches and applications), which slow things down.
But hey--it's all about marketing, sales, and profits. That's the reality of the industry.
*and maybe explicitly--who knows what goes on behind closed doors?
They may or may not be quite as free as you want in terms of development (i.e. the story generally drags you along whether you want it to or not) but the classic graphics adventures are great for storyline. Find a copy of Grim Fandango if you can. Also look at The Longest Journey.
Puzzle games are fun, and World of Goo seems to be the current addiction, with a bit of a silly storyline to it. Also, a few years back was Psychonauts, with surprising depth. (And not coincidentally, written by the creator of Grim Fandango.)
I've got two essential lines in my .exrc (yes, this is for real vi, but works in all derivatives):
map K :s/^/## /^V^M :s/^## //^V^M
map ^K
(note that the ^K ^V and ^M are control characters, the ^ in the substitution patterns are literal carats)
Shift-K comments lines. Ctrl-K uncomments them. As an admin, I use this all the time. When I've done some more involved programming in C, I changed it to C-style comment substitution just as successfully.
Most useful two extra keys in my arsenal.
OK, regardless of whether they censor words or not, at certain hours or all the time, they will almost certainly screw up on the context.
Imagine these two bits of TV audio:
"I'm gonna rip your *BEEP*in' panties off, bend you over this table, and *BEEP* you in the *BEEP* until you bleed."
Great! No dirty words, we must be OK!
Of course, this leads to the other extreme:
"Cancer of the *BEEP* is often caused by a viral infection, often caused by unprotected *BEEP*."
Hey, great. Again, we're safe--this time, from learning.
It sounds outrageous, but in reality it's not that different. Watch what gets visually blocked out (naughty bits on 70-year-olds undergoing life-saving surgery) vs. what gets shown ('stripper pole' exercise shows, simulated sex in music videos, all fine because there are clothes in the way).
Of course, censoring based on context requires continual thought and effort, so it's easier to just ban away what we don't like, and let the cutting edge ooze slowly forward.
Fascinating, and very relevant. Thanks for some insight!
There are differences, though. For starters, it's not necessarily about making it incompatible with "the enemy" (i.e. the internet) so much as not explicitly tying it to internet compatibility. That is to say, if the AF came up with this new network (Internet 3?) and the rest of the world adopted it, the sudden compatibility wouldn't be a problem.
Also, the interface between the two realms would be much easier to achieve than with trains, because it would be strictly in the electronic/digital world. No shifting of cars and cargo between trains, for instance.
Also, the internet already exists, and the new network wouldn't invalidate that. It would be more like having two tracks of different gauges running parallel, but if you wanted to get to the military, you would have to be on the odd one. (which of course would have more switches, heavier security, etc.)
But all any of this is saying is that the analogy isn't perfect, which is no surprise--no analogy ever is. However, it's an important cautionary tale which anyone who undertakes to reinvent the wheel needs to keep in mind.
Man, I'm going to have to get another hard drive. This list is growing too fast!
The headline here says 'rewrite the rules of the internet', whereas the Wired article talks about 'rewriting the rules of cyberspace.' Subtle difference here.
The internet exists as it is--fundamentally an IP-based network connected in all the ways we know about, routing, addressing, etc.
The thing is, there's no reason that the Air Force (or anyone else) couldn't create their own, entirely incompatible version. Start with something that has guaranteed QoS, hard-wired source addressing, encryption at the equivalent of the transport layer, content-metadata in the packets (or equivalent to packets--it doesn't have to be a packet protocol at all), etc..
If you need to connect it to the internet, create a tunneling protocol, or a translating switch. Make it different. Make it incompatible. Make it rigid in its requirements. You CAN create a secure network, but not if it's based on the same technology that makes up the existing internet.
I'm in Canada, and we've got about the same population as California, spread out over more land than the entire US, which is a logistics nightmare in its own right. We manage as well as Australia. The thing about hand-counting is that it scales. Ten times the population means ten times the number of people to count--which is the same percentage of the population, conveniently enough.
I think part of the problem is that your federal elections aren't federally controlled. Voting in California isn't necessarily the same as it is in Utah or Florida or New England, and that's just mind-boggling!
Another issue is that the US has been pursuing 'better' voting technology for decades instead of simply using 'correct' voting technology. Put an "x" in a circle beside your choice. Nothing easier to understand, and nothing easier to count correctly. Touch screens, levers, punch cards, etc., are simply the WRONG technology for the task!
OK, I'm not from the USA, so I really don't have any allegiance to either party.
That said, I'm fascinated that you complain about Democrats relying on fraudulent votes, when the last two elections were won by massive electoral fraud by the Republicans, and they're trying to do the same this time.
Show me how many votes have been switched in favour of each party, and I'll show you a Republican landslide. Show me questionable voting technology that shouldn't be allowed, and I'll show you equipment manufactured by companies with close Republican ties.
From the outside looking in, I can't imagine why your populace isn't begging the UN for election observers, except that of course, most of you don't trust the UN.
"The article notes the American penchant for trying to fix voting..."
That really sums up far more than the article itself does.
1) Bullshit.
2) So what? "Web 2.0" is nothing but a CPU-intensive marketing scam.
3) ("No, wait--THREE! Three points!") The DMCA is NOT better than nothing, it's actually worse than nothing.
I'm disappointed. Wired is usually better than this.
...and I'm spending all of my brain power trying to keep up with my 11-month-old son, instead of saving the universe!
Actually, maybe that's OK after all. Screw the universe. I'll hang out with the kid and find out all the places that Cheerios are supposed to go.
I just have to ask:
"Javascript was not created by the opensource community"
So what? Who said it was? The OP said it was created by "...people in the Unixy world..."
This isn't an easy shift for me to make. I've lived with DST all my life, and am very much a traditionalist about stuff like this.
However, after dealing with the DST change a few years ago, I really started to think about it, and realised that I have no love for DST at all. Let's just dump it, and be done with it. Allowing kids the extra hour to stay out until midnight instead of 11pm isn't worth much. Economically, the only effect is that people might shop less in the evenings (the real reason for pushing DST out for another six weeks or whatever).
DST wasn't a great idea to start with, and it's too difficult to bother with in a connected world. Good riddance.
When I read stories like this, or like the "RAID-5 will die next year" article earlier today, I feel like I'm in the wrong job. I mean, I could shoot my mouth off, spouting stupid things that almost make sense if you don't scratch the surface too hard.
People who get paid to write/create online may find that jobs (and payment) are scarcer, but people who provide volunteer time (wikipedia, etc.) aren't going to suddenly stop doing it because they're unemployed. In fact, some of them are probably going to have more time on their hands.
I predict that there will be an increase in online suicide notes in the next three years, and also that everyone will point to the internet as the problem instead of recognising it as a time-sink for the already suicidally depressed. Unfortunately, I don't have any specious facts to bolster my opinion (which of course, I'd angrily claim to be inevitable and obvious to anyone but the most clueless), so I guess I'll never be on Fox News, write for Fast Company, or blog (for pay!) on Internet Evolution.
Ummm...ZFS has a lot more to offer than replication/snapshots.
Someone else mentioned resilvering. That's a big bonus, in that it cuts down on resync time, sometimes drastically.
However, disk scrubbing is even bigger--reading ALL of the data from disks and confirming the integrity of it, finding unreadable blocks and relocating them.
And what happens when a block is readable but corrupted (i.e. bit-rot)? Hah--we have CRC checksums to detect that, and correct it!
Now THAT'S resiliency!
"There are too many people paying attention."
There are? Who? Maybe 50k across Canada, maybe even 100k. Out of the 20k people who voted against Prentice in his own riding, how many of them did so because of C-61?
How can a small number of people stop this legislation? I'm open to ideas here.
A couple of things:
"...although it wouldn't take significant changes to make it acceptable..."
Yeah, it would. It really needs to be gutted and rewritten. There are endless flaws in it, and in fact, there are substantial parts which are flat-out contradictory in it.
"...we must hold out hope that any party leading a minority government wouldn't be so foolish as to pass such consumer-hostile legislation."
Not a chance. This election proved to Canada and the PCs that Harper will never win a majority. However, the lead-up to the election proved that until the Liberals can get their party shaken out and cleaned up under a new leader, they won't force another election--they can't risk pissing off the public even more (three elections in roughly four years--who's up for another one in spring 2010?), which means they'll complain and bluster as they have for the past 2.5 years, but run away hiding when a confidence vote comes up.
C-61 was introduced last spring, and was only suspended to the fall session, before the election was called. How much outrage from the public did it create? How much damage did it do to the conservatives? Here's a hint: Nearly none. They'll quietly introduce this bill again (with some minor changes but the basics of 'assume the consumers are criminals' left intact), and the 50 000 Canadians who actually care won't be able to stop it. The rest of the country will be encouraged to worry about the economy, which is perfectly capable of sinking further then recovering on its own.
Bottom line: Nobody will force an election on this issue, so the sooner they get it rammed through, the longer they'll have to make people forget about it.
This just breaks my heart. We had John Chan running again for the NDP--an excellent and thoughtful candidate. We had Eric Donovan, one of the more passionate and intelligent candidates I've ever seen, running for the Greens. Both ran strong campaigns and made a significant effort to talk to the people, in order to represent them.
However, the invisible Liberal candidate (can't remember his name) managed to garner 11% of the vote just for existing, and the winner of the race is a proven liar and corporate sellout, who has an ESTABLISHED TRACK RECORD of turning his back on his constituents.
I look around at my neighbors and friends, and I just don't understand how we we can be such a tiny minority in this province. I'd guess that less than one person in ten that I know would vote for any of Harper's conservatives, and yet...