Alan Turing was gay!! This is important.
on
Enigma
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
This film is a travesty in that it ignores one of the most important and fascinating aspects of the true story - which is Alan Turings homosexuality.
This brilliant mathematician who almost single handedly won the war, and in the process effectively invented the computer was eventually driven to an early death by the heartless British establishment of the time. To not only ignore this fact, but go so far as to center the thinly disguised Turing character in a plot involving not one, but two beautiful woman is to completely fail to tell history with the passion it deserves.
Also, it really fails to really get the point across that not only did the work at Blethchly park 'save lives' it was one huge reason behind the ultimate success in the war for the allies.
It also fails to really explore the fact that in these days of great inspiration and pressure the British came bloody close to inventing the computer!!
Its a pathetic, dissapointing movie (with beautiful sets). Cryptomonicon (the novel) is muuuuch better
weeell.. the first thing you need to understand is that some of these content management systems are really toolkits, some are more out-of-the box experiences... its kinda a spectrum.
my opinion - beware the hell of out of box stuff, (like red dot), you wanna budget about 50/50 buy vs build (or, better still save half your budget and use an open source system)
the open source alternatives, arsdigita, midgard, Zope Content Framework, are really every bit as good as the mid range CMS systems, but if the bureacracy is gonna wanna spend 400,000 dollars on a CMS systems like Vignette (bleech!) then nobody's gonna stop them.
<not a troll, no really>everybody, of course, is keeping a damn close eye on Microsoft, and their systyem is really shaping up, i gotta say, (if you like that sort of thing </not a troll>
if you want more, good info, check out cmswatch.com and *the*, definitive cms-list
Here are some links to coverage about "Black Hawk Down" from indymedia.org:
---
"Expose Black Hawk Down"
by Amnesty International of Northern Arizona Uni
www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=116352 ---
MP3 Statement... clients.loudeye.com/imc/mayday/expose_blackhawk_do wn.mp3 ...The moral of the movie seems to be 'Americans get tougher'. No mention is made in the movie of the Oil Concessions that many people believe were the real reasons for the American Intervention... ---
International ANSWER has issued a call to leaflet/picket theaters and set the record-and U.S. past and current aims and actions in Somalia and that region-correct. madison.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2680 ..a people friendly event
PS. I still intend to see the movie, 'cause of the special effects', eh ?
--- Thankyou for showing me your wonderful gun, please allow me to lie down on the ground - Extract from UN Cambodian PhraseBook.
Hell If I was in charge of Airport security, after seeing this I would set up a honeypot and get ahold of a 200 dollar rdf and start nabbing anyone that tried this, thow em up on federal charges.
So, let me get this straight... If you were in charge, then instead of fixing the holes, you would concentrate on throwing people in federal prison, for being bright enough to notice and point out the security flaws you had failed to notice. Good plan. Don't let anyone question your security.
In fact, this story was a good way to highlight the problem in a prominent enough way to actually get something done about it. If we threw these people in jail then nothing would be done and the security hole would remain !
--
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
OK. Hello.. What about the people *on the other side* who get killed by these drones.
What you're doing is basically pretending that anybody not Americans doesn't exist. You're effectively playing that age old game of pretending they are not human, because they do not count in your equation.
So, sure. Given your assumptions, it is moral. But back in the real world, these people actually exist! Every single Afghan civilian who dies from a US bomb (be it hyperbaric or not) feels exactly the same pain as their last blood drains away. Whether they be Taliban or Northern Alliance, they leave behind a family suffering from exactly the same level of grief, pain and anguish as those left behind in the aftermath of the WTC attack here in NYC.
Oh, OK - sure, when you fight a war, you 'need' to pretend that the other side are dogs in order to win - but at some point, the whole thing becomes so unbalanced and so unfair that these assumptions themselves become immoral. Like for example, if three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians are killed by these so called smart bombs, and yet your media continues to talk about 'virtually no casulaties' in that war. At that point it has become so obscene, that it is in fact immoral for those of us with all the money and high-tech drones not to recognise and understand (and try very very hard to avoid) the pain and anguish which is suffered by our fellow human beings, when we choose, for whatever reason, to wage war upon them.
i know a lot of engineers who delight in owning a raft of smug books like this, books that blame management, blame business process, blame technological illiteracy..
however, my experience is that it is these same
people who are so guarded with their opinions that they never contribute, who are so smug in their sneering complacency that they will never get off their arse to actually help those who might know less than them, or to actually find a workable, real world, *solution* to the problems they delight in pointing out.
the book itself sounds fine, but its the people who use them like as a weapon to back up their smug and lazy indifference.. well they piss me off.
ps. i am not a 'bus' grad.. im a software engineer who everyday in the trenches works hard to actually *do* something about technical illiteracy and misguided business plans.. and very infrequently does it help to call any of these people 'stupid'.
--
While not at the grandmaster level of Asimov, Heinlen or Herbert, he will probably reach that level.
Obviously just my opinion but id say he has already reached it. The first chapters Cryptomonicon definitely stand my test of time,
and remain my all time favourite.
I know that nobody that matters will ever read this.
But, pleeeease, if anyone is thinking of adding this so called 'feature' to, say, Mozilla.
Dont do it!
Just say no. Writing sites to use javascript 'well' - ie so they function with javascript turned off, and at the same time keep the client happy is becoming harder and harder by the minute. But having to write it so it works ok for people that have certain chunks of javascript enabled but not others ? That would be just impossibe.
As an example of the sort of difference this can make, consider the case of Steve Outtrim and Sausage Software. I used to work for Sausage Software back in 1996
Sausage's main product was shareware. (I know I know, but just for the sake of argument, consider this case.)
The thing was - instead of saying 'please send a cheque or money order to foo' it said, 'unlock this product by buying a key at our online store'. At that stage online credit card processing was not all that common (1995).
But doing that was, I believe, the main difference between Steve being just another VB shareware developer and his becoming a multi-millionaire. Quite literally, this guy was worth 90 million dollars last time i saw a newspaper article - this largely through sales of shares in the company whose single major success was a shareware HTML editor (HotDog)
I'm not suggesting that OSS developers are the same as Shareware developers. But I think a lot of people would be suprised by how many people actually use there products out there in the wide world.
So being proactive will probably make a *big* difference.
The MS java vm (at least the 1.1 version) was in fact the best of the breed.. As a simple 1.1 based vm (admittedly without some key features such as RMI) it was the best, fastest, stablest VM out there bar none... (Sorry but its true)
With 95%+ browser market share going to MS at the moment, this is basically just another option we effectively can't use on mainstream sites, thereby having to resort to *stuff that M$ approve of* (like flash). The biggest loser from all this in-fighting over java, is us the developers (oh, ok and a few users).
Of course if sun hadn't sued M$, but more particularly if M$ hadn't been such arseholes about java in the first place then none of this would never have happened.
One of the few really good things about java was its support in browsers all the way back to netscape 1.1 (at least the core 1.02 jdk). Now thats gone. arghhh!!!! Just when 1.1 support was starting to be universal.
I supsected as much would happen when installing the early beta.Net SDK's on my windoze partition wasted java support in IE. Clearly MS have basically ported the entire J++ dev to C#. C# being very similar to Java, the only people that lose from this development are people trying to develop cross-platform apps.
So this is actually a really nasty blow on the part of MS. Did Sun not see this coming? Arrghhhh!
I'm not sure the analogy is valid. Sure, with the invention of the printing press, the amount of information available to your average peasant went up many-old, but it was nowhere near to the capacity of the human being
Its only recently, as in the last few decades that it been the case that there is actually more information coming at any random peasant than they can possibly absorb/accomodate in their lifetime.
--
since this comment itself has no special value,
and you are reading it, you need better habits
I'd bet a pound to a penny you could get a good Echelon-type system together for even one billion...
Let me see if i understand the logic here.. The internet will not democratize China, partly due to their setting up an 'Echelon type' system. So what does that make us ? (ie those countries in the west already living under an echelon type system).. dictatorships??
in my personal
experience admittedly, mostly
in recent history, real
working stiffs such as myself, and
especially joe blows at home encounter,
primarily, bash.
'standard' has to be a word that shifts with
the times..
Hell yeah ! Man its exactly this sort of bloat-ware focused - feature heavy attitude that has killed the whole Netscape / Mozilla codebase.
Everyone knows that software success relies on delivering a good, *minimal*, fast, well engineered feature set ASAP. If you do that right, you can always extend it later.
> To top it off, I expect the Mozilla codebase to last for several years, if not more.
Arrrgghhh!!! No. Please worry about the future in the *future* for crying out loud - there is no way that Mozilla 1.0 is going to be enuff for the long term - there is no way to know now what is going to be the desirable/hip technology in a couple of years. Just give me an alternative to IE that works, and is fast - and I'll switch in a second. And for my Linux partition - please please please!!
I just want a decent browser, with dynamic HTML, JavaScript and fast stable loading - thats all.
God help me, but this drives me nuts. I can't believe this guy (EverCode) is supposedly a mozilla coder - he sounds more like one of my goddam clients.
Slashdot Mirror
This film is a travesty in that it ignores one of the most important and fascinating aspects of the true story - which is Alan Turings homosexuality.
This brilliant mathematician who almost single handedly won the war, and in the process effectively invented the computer was eventually driven to an early death by the heartless British establishment of the time. To not only ignore this fact, but go so far as to center the thinly disguised Turing character in a plot involving not one, but two beautiful woman is to completely fail to tell history with the passion it deserves.
Also, it really fails to really get the point across that not only did the work at Blethchly park 'save lives' it was one huge reason behind the ultimate success in the war for the allies.
It also fails to really explore the fact that in these days of great inspiration and pressure the British came bloody close to inventing the computer!!
Its a pathetic, dissapointing movie (with beautiful sets). Cryptomonicon (the novel) is muuuuch better
Ok, sure. I don't disagree with you - but one small point.
I wasn't actually talking about "SharePoint", rather Microsoft''s "Content Management Server" (Yes, I know its a stupid name)
These are two different things.
weeell.. the first thing you need to understand is that some of these content management systems are really toolkits, some are more out-of-the box experiences... its kinda a spectrum.
my opinion - beware the hell of out of box stuff, (like red dot), you wanna budget about 50/50 buy vs build (or, better still save half your budget and use an open source system)
the open source alternatives, arsdigita, midgard, Zope Content Framework, are really every bit as good as the mid range CMS systems, but if the bureacracy is gonna wanna spend 400,000 dollars on a CMS systems like Vignette (bleech!) then nobody's gonna stop them.
<not a troll, no really>everybody, of course, is keeping a damn close eye on Microsoft, and their systyem is really shaping up, i gotta say, (if you like that sort of thing </not a troll>
if you want more, good info, check out cmswatch.com and *the*, definitive cms-list
Yeah ! I agree with you. Mod the moron down
and someone mod this guy up.
Well put.
---
Go to www.indymedia.org for more info.
Here are some links to coverage about "Black Hawk Down" from indymedia.org:o wn.mp3
...The moral of the movie seems to be 'Americans get tougher'. No mention is made in the movie of the Oil Concessions that many people believe were the real reasons for the American Intervention...
..a people friendly event
.
---
"Expose Black Hawk Down"
by Amnesty International of Northern Arizona Uni
www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=116352
---
MP3 Statement...
clients.loudeye.com/imc/mayday/expose_blackhawk_d
---
International ANSWER has issued a call to leaflet/picket theaters and set the record-and U.S. past and current aims and actions in Somalia and that region-correct.
madison.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2680
PS. I still intend to see the movie, 'cause of the special effects', eh ?
---
Thankyou for showing me your wonderful gun, please allow me to lie down on the ground - Extract from UN Cambodian PhraseBook
Hell If I was in charge of Airport security, after seeing this I would set up a honeypot and get ahold of a 200 dollar rdf and start nabbing anyone that tried this, thow em up on federal charges .
So, let me get this straight... If you were in charge, then instead of fixing the holes, you would concentrate on throwing people in federal prison, for being bright enough to notice and point out the security flaws you had failed to notice. Good plan. Don't let anyone question your security.
In fact, this story was a good way to highlight the problem in a prominent enough way to actually get something done about it. If we threw these people in jail then nothing would be done and the security hole would remain !
--
About the only group of people it's bad for are the companies that make the flags that get draped on coffins.
OK. Hello.. What about the people *on the other side* who get killed by these drones.
What you're doing is basically pretending that anybody not Americans doesn't exist. You're effectively playing that age old game of pretending they are not human, because they do not count in your equation.
So, sure. Given your assumptions, it is moral. But back in the real world, these people actually exist! Every single Afghan civilian who dies from a US bomb (be it hyperbaric or not) feels exactly the same pain as their last blood drains away. Whether they be Taliban or Northern Alliance, they leave behind a family suffering from exactly the same level of grief, pain and anguish as those left behind in the aftermath of the WTC attack here in NYC.
Oh, OK - sure, when you fight a war, you 'need' to pretend that the other side are dogs in order to win - but at some point, the whole thing becomes so unbalanced and so unfair that these assumptions themselves become immoral. Like for example, if three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians are killed by these so called smart bombs, and yet your media continues to talk about 'virtually no casulaties' in that war. At that point it has become so obscene, that it is in fact immoral for those of us with all the money and high-tech drones not to recognise and understand (and try very very hard to avoid) the pain and anguish which is suffered by our fellow human beings, when we choose, for whatever reason, to wage war upon them.
Oh, OK, sure, flame me into karma hell
but isn't this a patch?
--
greenpeace++
i want a phone a pda but i have no desire for a keyboard.. i want my pda to recognize my speech, and failing that, my writing..
--
i know a lot of engineers who delight in owning a raft of smug books like this, books that blame management, blame business process, blame technological illiteracy..
however, my experience is that it is these same
people who are so guarded with their opinions that they never contribute, who are so smug in their sneering complacency that they will never get off their arse to actually help those who might know less than them, or to actually find a workable, real world, *solution* to the problems they delight in pointing out.
the book itself sounds fine, but its the people who use them like as a weapon to back up their smug and lazy indifference.. well they piss me off.
ps. i am not a 'bus' grad.. im a software engineer who everyday in the trenches works hard to actually *do* something about technical illiteracy and misguided business plans.. and very infrequently does it help to call any of these people 'stupid'.
--
miles take your
While not at the grandmaster level of Asimov, Heinlen or Herbert, he will probably reach that level.
Obviously just my opinion but id say he has already reached it. The first chapters Cryptomonicon definitely stand my test of time,
and remain my all time favourite.
Hah!
If you look at the pDf you will see it right there in the *Official* list.
Sure its low down, but it proves the boring woman who claimed this was just an urban, wrong wrong wrong.
hah !
the bad news, however
is that, the NSA can very likely
break PGP encryption.. at this point...
Certainly that is my pessimistic
expectation..
I know that nobody that matters will ever read this.
But, pleeeease, if anyone is thinking of adding this so called 'feature' to, say, Mozilla.
Dont do it!
Just say no. Writing sites to use javascript 'well' - ie so they function with javascript turned off, and at the same time keep the client happy is becoming harder and harder by the minute. But having to write it so it works ok for people that have certain chunks of javascript enabled but not others ? That would be just impossibe.
Argghhh!!!
I completely agree.
As an example of the sort of difference this can make, consider the case of Steve Outtrim and Sausage Software. I used to work for Sausage Software back in 1996
Sausage's main product was shareware. (I know I know, but just for the sake of argument, consider this case.)
The thing was - instead of saying 'please send a cheque or money order to foo' it said, 'unlock this product by buying a key at our online store'. At that stage online credit card processing was not all that common (1995).
But doing that was, I believe, the main difference between Steve being just another VB shareware developer and his becoming a multi-millionaire. Quite literally, this guy was worth 90 million dollars last time i saw a newspaper article - this largely through sales of shares in the company whose single major success was a shareware HTML editor (HotDog)
I'm not suggesting that OSS developers are the same as Shareware developers. But I think a lot of people would be suprised by how many people actually use there products out there in the wide world.
So being proactive will probably make a *big* difference.
-- I have I think, I do. Didn't I?
fucking eh.. big ups to that point dude..
---
I have no more mana so I am gonna waste bandwidth.
bullshit, this is a big deal.
.Net SDK's on my windoze partition wasted java support in IE. Clearly MS have basically ported the entire J++ dev to C#. C# being very similar to Java, the only people that lose from this development are people trying to develop cross-platform apps.
The MS java vm (at least the 1.1 version) was in fact the best of the breed.. As a simple 1.1 based vm (admittedly without some key features such as RMI) it was the best, fastest, stablest VM out there bar none... (Sorry but its true)
With 95%+ browser market share going to MS at the moment, this is basically just another option we effectively can't use on mainstream sites, thereby having to resort to *stuff that M$ approve of* (like flash). The biggest loser from all this in-fighting over java, is us the developers (oh, ok and a few users).
Of course if sun hadn't sued M$, but more particularly if M$ hadn't been such arseholes about java in the first place then none of this would never have happened.
One of the few really good things about java was its support in browsers all the way back to netscape 1.1 (at least the core 1.02 jdk). Now thats gone. arghhh!!!! Just when 1.1 support was starting to be universal.
I supsected as much would happen when installing the early beta
So this is actually a really nasty blow on the part of MS. Did Sun not see this coming? Arrghhhh!
I'm really really sad to hear this news.
I'm not sure the analogy is valid. Sure, with the invention of the printing press, the amount of information available to your average peasant went up many-old, but it was nowhere near to the capacity of the human being
Its only recently, as in the last few decades that it been the case that there is actually more information coming at any random peasant than they can possibly absorb/accomodate in their lifetime.
--
since this comment itself has no special value, and you are reading it, you need better habits
more interesting to see how it compares to the sun compiler than gcc, g++..
please dont let the MS marketing/legal fool you, folks..
C# = java not c
---
q. why ?
a. bite me .
sure, an improved mail protocol is nice idea.. but the transition would have to hurt i tell ya.
How about improving on the efforts already beng made around blacklists and blocking open relays..
i think whats needed to really make them effective is more $$$$..
that, and perhaps, is a new protocol for reporting spam - especially if we can get it built into the next email clients
lets call off the war on drugs and start a govt funded war on spam!!
no, really
--
who ? wha?
uhh.. and Microsoft. Gack. What is it with this 'pretend they dont exist' thing - its not going to make them go away !
I'd bet a pound to a penny you could get a good Echelon-type system together for even one billion...
Let me see if i understand the logic here.. The internet will not democratize China, partly due to their setting up an 'Echelon type' system. So what does that make us ? (ie those countries in the west already living under an echelon type system).. dictatorships??
in my personal experience admittedly, mostly in recent history, real working stiffs such as myself, and especially joe blows at home encounter, primarily, bash.
'standard' has to be a word that shifts with the times..
no no. not yay at all, this is terrible terrible news..
if, as i suspect they will, MS remove java support from IE then my world will be a much sadder more boring place.
interestingly, as soon as I installed the PDC developers edition (including C# etc) java in the browser stopped working.
booo..
--
http://switch.to/miles
Hell yeah ! Man its exactly this sort of bloat-ware focused - feature heavy attitude that has killed the whole Netscape / Mozilla codebase.
Everyone knows that software success relies on delivering a good, *minimal*, fast, well engineered feature set ASAP. If you do that right, you can always extend it later.
> To top it off, I expect the Mozilla codebase to last for several years, if not more.Arrrgghhh!!! No. Please worry about the future in the *future* for crying out loud - there is no way that Mozilla 1.0 is going to be enuff for the long term - there is no way to know now what is going to be the desirable/hip technology in a couple of years. Just give me an alternative to IE that works, and is fast - and I'll switch in a second. And for my Linux partition - please please please!!
I just want a decent browser, with dynamic HTML, JavaScript and fast stable loading - thats all.
God help me, but this drives me nuts. I can't believe this guy (EverCode) is supposedly a mozilla coder - he sounds more like one of my goddam clients.