*nod* It appears you're right, which makes it all the more puzzling. Their report still flies in the face of everything I know about the industry and the players involved. They had better have a really thorough, rock-solid report or I'm going to tend up deciding they're either incompetent, serving their own interests, or in somebody else's pocket.
Ars Technica has a reputation and history too. And while they tend to be pretty friendly to Open Source and those ideals they aren't as rabidly one-sided as Slashdot has had a tendency to be. Not that I consider that to be a problem with Slashdot mind you. I like Slashdot for what it is. But it's still true that Slashdot has a tendency to have a certain editorial bias in the articles and to a much lesser extent in the comments as well.
But Ars Technica also has a reputation. And many points in their article do fit with my experience, even if it's hard to find solid justification of them due to the fact that the report isn't publicly available. Their offhand comment about the Burton Group having a strong self-interest also seems to not be justified.
I think it's clear in my post that I do not equate ODF with OpenOffice. I mention that there are other interoperable implementations. But I do think it's clear that OpenOffice is currently the major implementer of ODF, and as such has a major influence on the standard.
And while Open Source Software is not the same thing as Open Information Standards, I do not think you can have one without the other. I've rarely seen a standards document that really and truly described all the nuances well enough to implement the standard in a clean room. The real documentation has been code that implements it. I think all standards should require an Open Source program that fully implements them as a way of documenting the standard.
Wow, a well reasoned comment that for the side I'm not on!:-)
I am not intimately familiar with either ODF or OOXML. I am passingly familiar with both. I also have an understanding of the culture of the communities they come out of.
As for ODF, I know Open Source. And I know the proprietary Unix world before it. And while Open Office is mind numbingly complex, the source is out there and I consider the source the ultimate arbiter of any protocol or file format. Standards documents are merely high quality documentation and not definitive. Additionally there are various other implementations that interoperate with Open Office via ODF to a greater or lesser extent, and I know there will be a lot of pressure to make that support more complete as time goes on.
And while Sun might be the major contributor to Open Office, they don't have the same kind of control that Microsoft has over Microsoft Word. And the existence of other interoperable implementations decreases the effect their influence on Open Office has on the ODF document format.
I also know the culture that OOXML comes out, though not as well. It's clear that Microsoft bought ISO votes, and this behavior is not unusual for them. It's clear from even a casual reading of the standard that it will be impossible to create an interoperable program without access to proprietary Microsoft source code. It's even clear that Microsoft themselves couldn't create an interoperable version without using their own source code. For example I doubt anybody knows how Word 97 formatting works in detail except to know that a particular block of Microsoft proprietary code implements it. Microsoft also has a strong history of having 'standards' they claim are open, but actually require Microsoft proprietary technology in some way to implement.
So this mysterious report by this well-respected group is interesting to me as they seem to be telling me that everything experience has taught me is all wrong. The kind of broad sweeping changes in both cultures required for my experience to be rendered obsolete surely couldn't happen without my notice. My first impulse is to figure out if they were paid to do it. My next impulse is to figure out if they have a strongly self-interested reason to do it. The latter appears to be the case. No matter how respected they might be, their bread and butter is threatened if Microsoft Office significantly diminishes in importance. I would expect the legion of string theory theorists to (initially at least, until the more intellectually honest ones among them really took the time to understand things) call anybody who questioned string theory a crackpot regardless of whether or not they were right, and I would also expect a company who makes the majority of it's money from the existence of the Microsoft Office ecosystem to react similarly, no matter how respected they are.
So until they can produce this mysterious report for public perusal, comment and dissection, I think that believing it to be total hogwash is completely justified by past experience and knowledge of the players involved.
It's about who owns their computer, them or the people who write the software. I point out numerous instances where various bits of proprietary software cause their computer to act in the developers best interests and against their own. DRM is one such, but there are others. I talk about how having the source code available allows 3rd parties to check up on the code and hold the original programmers accountable.
This is a complex argument, and hard for some people to grasp. But when people do it's pretty effective. Some people still don't care, but it's a much smaller percentage than the ones who think they don't care whether or not they have the source.
I think, maybe, I could refine it by linking it to voting machine issues and more people might get it then.
I also talk a bit about how they can give any software they have to friends for free and that it's perfectly legal and everything, and really that's how it should be. But that's a minor part of my little presentation.
I find it amusing that you get modded up further for just providing a link that demonstrates your much more substantive and interesting comment a couple levels up.
The biggest evidence is that the robot does not run Linux. Heathkit was beloved of inveterate tinkers and people who play with technology. Such people may run Windows at home, but I suspect most of them would rather play with Linux. The core user base of Linux is made of those kinds of people. Heathkit as lost touch.
The case in Duluth was lost by an incompetent defense that tried to pull the wool over the jury's eyes. The jury saw through it and punished them for it.
Well, my thought was maybe there was some sort of cap on the number of people who could understand mathematical concepts that was below infinity.:-)
And regarding the book's title, I agree completely. I was trying to tell a brilliant young (pre-HS age) friend when I was in college that certain titles are conferred upon you by others and you can't assume them yourself without seeming arrogant. And that was for something relatively minor like 'Unix Wizard'.:-)
That leads me to an interesting musing, if there were an infinite number of people, would there then be an infinite number of people (even if it were still a small fraction of the total infinite number of people) capable of evaluating the theorems and proofs in Stephen Wolfram's book?
I agree wholeheartedly. The real test is not Wolfram's perceived reputation among either mathematicians or everybody else. The real test is how well his work holds up to scrutiny.
But criticizing any individual person putting his work under that scrutiny for holding a grudge is silly. It's precisely those kinds of emotional attachments which drive people to do the hard work of grinding through the theories and either proving or disproving them. It neither makes their work more or less valid.
Ahh, yes. But the great thing about math is that whether or not you have a grudge, everybody can look at the proof and see if you're right or not.
Personally, if I were a mathemetician, I might have something of a grudge against Stephen Wolfram too. An arrogant person who hypes his own name and abilities far beyond what is justified by the available material then publishes a giant tome of half-baked reasoning that everybody fawns over because of his hyped reputation.
Actually, that isn't a solution. People working on Linux desktops can be tricked into entering their logins and passwords just as readily as people working on Windows desktops. Also, if you know the environment well enough, Firefox has enough holes that PCs can still become infected with malware. With the way most corporations standardize applications and rollout you can learn what version of various things everybody's desktop is likely to have and specifically target your malware at it.
Something you can do that doesn't address the malware issue, but does address the password capturing issue is to use secure ID dongles for all logins form outside the firewall. That way capturing a password isn't enough because there's a component of the password you just captured that will change in less than 60 seconds.
People in a company I was working for awhile ago received a phishing email that was targeted to us and our environment. I, and a few other people noticed something weird. I did research and realized it was phishing fairly quickly and got the network people to immediately block that site and send out mail to everybody asking anybody who visited that site before it was blocked to have their computer fully checked for malware.
I think we narrowly avoided disaster that day, and I suspect none of the security people (I was not among them) quite realized exactly what happened. I was immensely surprised by how targeted it was.
I can easily understand why a user might've been taken in, and I don't blame them at all. I found the whole thing very unsettling.
Oh, that one did it when I saw it the first time, and even now.:-) The "I am from the Internet and I'm here to glue messages to your cats." one also managed to get a laugh out of me.
I feel that way about all advertising supported media. But gaming magazines and online media are so bad that I wouldn't even think of going to them for an honest review. I go to them to find user posted information about a game, like a walkthrough for some particularly difficult area or something along those lines.
Computer gaming related media is, IMHO, a laughingstock. I don't know why they even bother to have reviews. About the only site I might trust is Penny Arcade.
I've stopped watching TV and rarely read newspapers, listen to the radio because I know most of it's there to serve the advertisers, and any value I might derive from it is purely to entice me to buy into the fantasy that the medium has some vague sort of integrity.
I will watch TV shows I buy on DVD if many people I know think very highly of them.
I actually suggest a similar course of action for most people. Most information out there nowadays is memetically infectious trash. People should practice some sort of general hygiene and careful selection of sources.
It disappoints me that so much media on the web is advertiser supported. I buy a Slashdot subscription in part in an attempt to encourage the site to keep a relatively high level of journalistic integrity.
If that's how everybody felt, we wouldn't have Free Software at all. I'm happy the GPLv2 exists, and even happier the GPLv3 exists. It prevents all of my hard work from being sucked into some stupid marketing machine and sold back to me with ribbons, bright packaging and no freedom.
It is clear that Taubes is a charlatan. It is also clear that many in the medical establishment have an agenda.
They see fat and cholesterol in plaques on artery walls and assume that it got there because people were eating fat. That assumption is still being made, and there is no current evidence that I know of that strongly supports it.
The biggest thing I got out of that piece, aside from the fact that Taubes is a manipulative liar, was that a low calorie diet is what makes you lose weight no matter where you're getting your calories from. And that it isn't at all clear that you are more satiated by fat calories than carbohydrate calories.
I found the one quote that people who go on the Atkin's diet need the supervision of a doctor in order to avoid falling over dead from heart disease to be quite telling. Everything I've read about the link between fat and heart disease says that there isn't a clear, strong link, and that certain fats are very bad, but most natural fats are neither bad nor good, and some are very good.
IMHO, the medical establishment prides itself on an information disparity between themselves and their patients. They want to keep that disparity there and react very poorly when it's challenged. And until someone publishes some clear studies showing that fat is definitely bad, I'm going to take anything any doctor says about fat and cholesterol with a giant grain of salt (figuratively speaking of course, there's a fair amount of evidence that too much salt is bad for you).
Do you think there is a better way of handling multithreading than mutexes and semaphores? If so, what would set of primitives do you think would best suit the task?
I may be getting an offer from Google soon, and work-life balance is a huge issue for me. I'm 36. When I was younger (say 8-25) I was willing to focus that exclusively. Now I'm not.
I've always blamed the rude person and not the technology.
I have no sympathy for the kind of passive-aggressive luddism that would cause someone to want to use a jammer or a faraday cage to destroy the usefulness of a technology that is otherwise extraordinarily useful.
So, in my mind, since he has chosen to blame the technology instead of the people, there must be some reason aside from simply having been repeatedly annoyed.
Slashdot Mirror
*nod* It appears you're right, which makes it all the more puzzling. Their report still flies in the face of everything I know about the industry and the players involved. They had better have a really thorough, rock-solid report or I'm going to tend up deciding they're either incompetent, serving their own interests, or in somebody else's pocket.
Ars Technica has a reputation and history too. And while they tend to be pretty friendly to Open Source and those ideals they aren't as rabidly one-sided as Slashdot has had a tendency to be. Not that I consider that to be a problem with Slashdot mind you. I like Slashdot for what it is. But it's still true that Slashdot has a tendency to have a certain editorial bias in the articles and to a much lesser extent in the comments as well.
But Ars Technica also has a reputation. And many points in their article do fit with my experience, even if it's hard to find solid justification of them due to the fact that the report isn't publicly available. Their offhand comment about the Burton Group having a strong self-interest also seems to not be justified.
It's a very puzzling situation.
I think it's clear in my post that I do not equate ODF with OpenOffice. I mention that there are other interoperable implementations. But I do think it's clear that OpenOffice is currently the major implementer of ODF, and as such has a major influence on the standard.
And while Open Source Software is not the same thing as Open Information Standards, I do not think you can have one without the other. I've rarely seen a standards document that really and truly described all the nuances well enough to implement the standard in a clean room. The real documentation has been code that implements it. I think all standards should require an Open Source program that fully implements them as a way of documenting the standard.
Wow, a well reasoned comment that for the side I'm not on! :-)
I am not intimately familiar with either ODF or OOXML. I am passingly familiar with both. I also have an understanding of the culture of the communities they come out of.
As for ODF, I know Open Source. And I know the proprietary Unix world before it. And while Open Office is mind numbingly complex, the source is out there and I consider the source the ultimate arbiter of any protocol or file format. Standards documents are merely high quality documentation and not definitive. Additionally there are various other implementations that interoperate with Open Office via ODF to a greater or lesser extent, and I know there will be a lot of pressure to make that support more complete as time goes on.
And while Sun might be the major contributor to Open Office, they don't have the same kind of control that Microsoft has over Microsoft Word. And the existence of other interoperable implementations decreases the effect their influence on Open Office has on the ODF document format.
I also know the culture that OOXML comes out, though not as well. It's clear that Microsoft bought ISO votes, and this behavior is not unusual for them. It's clear from even a casual reading of the standard that it will be impossible to create an interoperable program without access to proprietary Microsoft source code. It's even clear that Microsoft themselves couldn't create an interoperable version without using their own source code. For example I doubt anybody knows how Word 97 formatting works in detail except to know that a particular block of Microsoft proprietary code implements it. Microsoft also has a strong history of having 'standards' they claim are open, but actually require Microsoft proprietary technology in some way to implement.
So this mysterious report by this well-respected group is interesting to me as they seem to be telling me that everything experience has taught me is all wrong. The kind of broad sweeping changes in both cultures required for my experience to be rendered obsolete surely couldn't happen without my notice. My first impulse is to figure out if they were paid to do it. My next impulse is to figure out if they have a strongly self-interested reason to do it. The latter appears to be the case. No matter how respected they might be, their bread and butter is threatened if Microsoft Office significantly diminishes in importance. I would expect the legion of string theory theorists to (initially at least, until the more intellectually honest ones among them really took the time to understand things) call anybody who questioned string theory a crackpot regardless of whether or not they were right, and I would also expect a company who makes the majority of it's money from the existence of the Microsoft Office ecosystem to react similarly, no matter how respected they are.
So until they can produce this mysterious report for public perusal, comment and dissection, I think that believing it to be total hogwash is completely justified by past experience and knowledge of the players involved.
It's about who owns their computer, them or the people who write the software. I point out numerous instances where various bits of proprietary software cause their computer to act in the developers best interests and against their own. DRM is one such, but there are others. I talk about how having the source code available allows 3rd parties to check up on the code and hold the original programmers accountable.
This is a complex argument, and hard for some people to grasp. But when people do it's pretty effective. Some people still don't care, but it's a much smaller percentage than the ones who think they don't care whether or not they have the source.
I think, maybe, I could refine it by linking it to voting machine issues and more people might get it then.
I also talk a bit about how they can give any software they have to friends for free and that it's perfectly legal and everything, and really that's how it should be. But that's a minor part of my little presentation.
I wonder if cephelopods tinker. I think they've been known to.
I find it amusing that you get modded up further for just providing a link that demonstrates your much more substantive and interesting comment a couple levels up.
That's depressing to learn. :-(
The biggest evidence is that the robot does not run Linux. Heathkit was beloved of inveterate tinkers and people who play with technology. Such people may run Windows at home, but I suspect most of them would rather play with Linux. The core user base of Linux is made of those kinds of people. Heathkit as lost touch.
The case in Duluth was lost by an incompetent defense that tried to pull the wool over the jury's eyes. The jury saw through it and punished them for it.
Yes. Infinity is funny that way.
Well, my thought was maybe there was some sort of cap on the number of people who could understand mathematical concepts that was below infinity. :-)
And regarding the book's title, I agree completely. I was trying to tell a brilliant young (pre-HS age) friend when I was in college that certain titles are conferred upon you by others and you can't assume them yourself without seeming arrogant. And that was for something relatively minor like 'Unix Wizard'. :-)
Well, we are talking mathematicians here.
That leads me to an interesting musing, if there were an infinite number of people, would there then be an infinite number of people (even if it were still a small fraction of the total infinite number of people) capable of evaluating the theorems and proofs in Stephen Wolfram's book?
I agree wholeheartedly. The real test is not Wolfram's perceived reputation among either mathematicians or everybody else. The real test is how well his work holds up to scrutiny.
But criticizing any individual person putting his work under that scrutiny for holding a grudge is silly. It's precisely those kinds of emotional attachments which drive people to do the hard work of grinding through the theories and either proving or disproving them. It neither makes their work more or less valid.
Ahh, yes. But the great thing about math is that whether or not you have a grudge, everybody can look at the proof and see if you're right or not.
Personally, if I were a mathemetician, I might have something of a grudge against Stephen Wolfram too. An arrogant person who hypes his own name and abilities far beyond what is justified by the available material then publishes a giant tome of half-baked reasoning that everybody fawns over because of his hyped reputation.
While this is likely true, it doesn't make it right.
Most underrated comment on this story so far.
Actually, that isn't a solution. People working on Linux desktops can be tricked into entering their logins and passwords just as readily as people working on Windows desktops. Also, if you know the environment well enough, Firefox has enough holes that PCs can still become infected with malware. With the way most corporations standardize applications and rollout you can learn what version of various things everybody's desktop is likely to have and specifically target your malware at it.
Something you can do that doesn't address the malware issue, but does address the password capturing issue is to use secure ID dongles for all logins form outside the firewall. That way capturing a password isn't enough because there's a component of the password you just captured that will change in less than 60 seconds.
People in a company I was working for awhile ago received a phishing email that was targeted to us and our environment. I, and a few other people noticed something weird. I did research and realized it was phishing fairly quickly and got the network people to immediately block that site and send out mail to everybody asking anybody who visited that site before it was blocked to have their computer fully checked for malware.
I think we narrowly avoided disaster that day, and I suspect none of the security people (I was not among them) quite realized exactly what happened. I was immensely surprised by how targeted it was.
I can easily understand why a user might've been taken in, and I don't blame them at all. I found the whole thing very unsettling.
Oh, that one did it when I saw it the first time, and even now. :-) The "I am from the Internet and I'm here to glue messages to your cats." one also managed to get a laugh out of me.
Your sig line is the first thing all day that has managed to elicit spontaneous laughter from me. :-)
I feel that way about all advertising supported media. But gaming magazines and online media are so bad that I wouldn't even think of going to them for an honest review. I go to them to find user posted information about a game, like a walkthrough for some particularly difficult area or something along those lines.
Computer gaming related media is, IMHO, a laughingstock. I don't know why they even bother to have reviews. About the only site I might trust is Penny Arcade.
I've stopped watching TV and rarely read newspapers, listen to the radio because I know most of it's there to serve the advertisers, and any value I might derive from it is purely to entice me to buy into the fantasy that the medium has some vague sort of integrity.
I will watch TV shows I buy on DVD if many people I know think very highly of them.
I actually suggest a similar course of action for most people. Most information out there nowadays is memetically infectious trash. People should practice some sort of general hygiene and careful selection of sources.
It disappoints me that so much media on the web is advertiser supported. I buy a Slashdot subscription in part in an attempt to encourage the site to keep a relatively high level of journalistic integrity.
If that's how everybody felt, we wouldn't have Free Software at all. I'm happy the GPLv2 exists, and even happier the GPLv3 exists. It prevents all of my hard work from being sucked into some stupid marketing machine and sold back to me with ribbons, bright packaging and no freedom.
It is clear that Taubes is a charlatan. It is also clear that many in the medical establishment have an agenda.
They see fat and cholesterol in plaques on artery walls and assume that it got there because people were eating fat. That assumption is still being made, and there is no current evidence that I know of that strongly supports it.
The biggest thing I got out of that piece, aside from the fact that Taubes is a manipulative liar, was that a low calorie diet is what makes you lose weight no matter where you're getting your calories from. And that it isn't at all clear that you are more satiated by fat calories than carbohydrate calories.
I found the one quote that people who go on the Atkin's diet need the supervision of a doctor in order to avoid falling over dead from heart disease to be quite telling. Everything I've read about the link between fat and heart disease says that there isn't a clear, strong link, and that certain fats are very bad, but most natural fats are neither bad nor good, and some are very good.
IMHO, the medical establishment prides itself on an information disparity between themselves and their patients. They want to keep that disparity there and react very poorly when it's challenged. And until someone publishes some clear studies showing that fat is definitely bad, I'm going to take anything any doctor says about fat and cholesterol with a giant grain of salt (figuratively speaking of course, there's a fair amount of evidence that too much salt is bad for you).
Do you think there is a better way of handling multithreading than mutexes and semaphores? If so, what would set of primitives do you think would best suit the task?
I may be getting an offer from Google soon, and work-life balance is a huge issue for me. I'm 36. When I was younger (say 8-25) I was willing to focus that exclusively. Now I'm not.
I've always blamed the rude person and not the technology.
I have no sympathy for the kind of passive-aggressive luddism that would cause someone to want to use a jammer or a faraday cage to destroy the usefulness of a technology that is otherwise extraordinarily useful.
So, in my mind, since he has chosen to blame the technology instead of the people, there must be some reason aside from simply having been repeatedly annoyed.