Because he was so much an 11 year old in all other respects. He had an 11 year old's social skills, and everything else that came with being 11.
If a woman walked into my workplace and started acting like an air-headed bimbo I'd have a hard time taking her seriously too, even if turns out that she developed a public key encryption method that isn't defeated by quantum computing. Especially if she was always asking the men around to 'help' her.
When certain aspects of a personality don't come over, like in text chat, it doesn't matter. But when you hear them a whole bunch of things you didn't notice before suddenly pop out and it's really hard to ignore them and just pay attention to the important thing.
I don't think anybody is complaining about Firefox having competition. Firefox has done just fine against everybody.
But why does a presentation that Apple puts on completely ignore a browser with 25% market share and pretend it doesn't exist? That seems a bit odd to me. They can present anything they like, but I do think this reveals that Apple doesn't really think of Open Source as being any kind of force at all. Or, at least, Steve Jobs wishes it weren't.
If he's competently leading the party, does it matter if he's an 11 year old boy or a 70 year old woman? Either way you're getting things done.
This is true. But it's really hard to take them seriously anyway. I knew an 11 year old in college who was better at math than I was and knew more of it. It was still really hard to take him seriously. In took a serious act of willpower, even though I knew, intellectually, that he really did know more than I did.
Now, that's an interesting argument, and one I don't necessarily disagree with. But most people will not install it themselves no matter what anybody thinks. Things have to be secure by default, not secure if you install a bunch of extra stuff.
*rolls eyes* Like most people are ever going to install NoScript. I suppose you think that Microsoft was perfectly reasonable in declaring C2 security certification when NT wasn't connected to a network too?
I don't care what you think, nobody is going to use that extension by default and it will never be enabled by default. Your attempt to make measurements of Firefox security with it enabled are reminiscent of Microsoft's attempts to get C2 certification for Windows NT when it wasn't connected to a network.
The most meaningful measurement of security for an application is looking at the default installation. Most people will never get beyond that.
You might consider using OpenID for stuff like this. I really hate having millions of passwords for millions of different sites.
Re:How about a more rational debate, Linus?
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 0
Subversion has more problems that the fact it doesn't support a distributed model. I also think Linus' comments were rude, and I know the Subversion team is filled with good solid professional developers.
At the time Subversion was created the distributed model wasn't well understood. In fact, experience with CVS led people to believe that version control in general was a complicated problem requiring a lot of careful thought and engineering to solve. This led the Subversion team to make a number of extremely conservative choices and led to a product that, IMHO, is extremely over-engineered and lacks critical features that were discovered to be important and easy to implement after Subversion's basic foundation was already layed.
Additionally this over-engineering has resulted in a system that is very slow for what it does.
Subversion handles branches OK, but it handles merges extremely poorly. Branching and merging were considered exotic operations when CVS was considered the peak of version control goodness, but with the rise of distributed SCMs making those operations nearly trivial, it's realized that these are actually fundamental SCM operations that every SCMS should handle very well.
The distributed model is a strict superset of the centralized model. I don't consider them to be a choice. I would always choose to use a SCMS that could handle a distributed model over one that couldn't, all other things being equal. Becuse of worse comes to worse, I can emulated the centralized model with my decentralized tool easily enough.
I don't really have a problem with how Subversion handles tags, though, IMHO, it does obscure to some degree exactly which revision you just tagged. But I do have a major problem with three things about Subversion... It is horribly slow for what it does. It is ridiculously complex for what it does. It's over-engineered in the extreme. And it handles branching and merging extremely poorly. So poorly that I couldn't in good conscience seriously recommend performing those operations except under very controlled conditions.
The only good thing about it is that it has a model that's very familiar to people who are used to CVS.
Re:how to learn git? - answer, don't!
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 4, Interesting
My favorite, of course, is Mercurial. My main draw is that I had been interested in distributed SCMs for years, but had never found one that made any sense to me whatsoever. I was on the hunt again and stumbled on Mercurial, and I've been hooked ever since.
Of the various distributed SCMs, Mercurial is the easiest to use one I've found. And it's pretty fast, though not quite as fast as git (though I have some ideas on how to fix that). And since it's written in Python with only a very small C component it runs on many platforms.
Hmm... I'm not claiming the US government is behind the attacks, but I still think some of the theories and ideas that some of these people have still bear looking into. They hang together remarkably well, and they are largely devoid of any speculation as to the larger picture, only that observations of some particular event in the tragedy seem to be inconsistent with the official explanation of the reasons for event. And those inconsistencies seem real to me.
There is little or no wild-eyed speculation about vast networks of people organizing some horrible thing. Only questions about specific physical events that really should have better answers than they currently do.
The official version is a conspiracy theory too BTW. It posits this vast conspiracy called Al-Queda. Yet you are willing to swallow that with no question while trying to brand people who have very specific questions about very specific pieces of verifiable physical evidence as 'conspiracy theorists'.
I think I agree with you. I someone copied the Geico Gecko, that would be trademark violation and/or copyright infringement. But if someone has a cute little talking animal advertising their low-price insurance, that isn't. This is the second case, not the first.
It also affects variety. If you can afford a slimmer profit margin you can carry things that don't make as much money. For large stores that really don't actually have much variety for their size this isn't an issue, but for a smaller store that focuses on a wide selection it's a huge issue.
Change the wording of the article! Yes, it's from the original article. But it's very clearly misleading and needs to be changed.
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
Unless you have a rockstar skillset or otherwise have the company by the balls, Goliath does not negotiate with David.
I don't know where this unreasoning fear of authority comes from, but you are quite wrong. Most places will negotiate if you ask.
The only time I've entered into an employment agreement or signed an NDA I wasn't happy with was when I was desperate for a job, any job. And that's only happened once in all my 18 years of working.
It has only lost its populism because it's beginning to succeed. Not the other way around. The other poster quoting George Bernard Shaw has it right on the nose.
I saw an Oracle representative give a talk on "Free Software from Oracle" in Belfast last year. It turned out that he thought Free Software was software they don't charge for. Fortunately, Richard Stallman was out getting a massage, he gave his own talk an hour later. The audience tore the Oracle guy to shreds and insisted that he say "cost-less" instead of "Free" for the rest of the talk. IMO it was a pretty low moment for Oracle.
I am highly amused. Was it only 10 years ago that it was thought that 'Free Software' was a poor term because of the overloading of the word 'Free'. But now it seems that the 'no cost' meaning of the word is coming under attack in the software world at least.:-)
I would be able to pass your test, but not in 5 minutes. I've put together and repaired numerous PCs. But I don't think I'd like to work for you, even if I did pass your test in the time allotted. And if I had realized that you had put all the problems there yourself when you 'leapt in and fixed the problem', I would get hostile and leave.
Really? I could do better -- how about killing people and taking their stuff?
But, if you do that, they'll stop making and acquiring new stuff. Really, that's just a downward spiral. A good parasite knows that killing its host isn't the key to survival.
In addition, once this road is crossed -- impeaching for , and every time the president/vp is in office, and a different party has a majority in the senate and house, you'll see an impeachment. It's the same thing that happened once the line was crossed with judicial appointments.
I think this line was crossed when Clinton was impeached. But never mind that, Dick Cheney really, really deserves it. Clinton only deserved it a little. Lying in front of a Grand Jury should get you kicked out of office. Adultery shouldn't or we would likely have had the majority of our presidents removed from office. DIck Cheney has committed multiple crimes that are at least as serious as lying to a grand jury, if not moreso.
There's something about the diffusion of responsbility involved in a company being public that tends to cause such companies to become inordinately rapacious and evil. All the decision makers can point to the fact that they're 'morally' obligated to do whatever it takes for the company to make as much as it can for stockholders. And the stockholders have a really hard time getting together to tell the company that some actions are just too far.
But when the number of stockholders is smaller and known, their sense of personal responsibility and morality can be appealed to, and they're more likely to pay attention to it regardless.
This makes me all jittery too. I have very little trust of public companies. I think the laws surrounding them are in need of even more serious reform than they've gotten so far (SOX and HIPPA being examples of laws that bring back some accountability).
But, the other person to reply made a really good point about InnoDB. This may not be all bad. And realistically, if it turns bad MySQL can be forked.
This leaves a field in which no idea is used until the patent expires, significantly slowing innovation. It actually hurts the little guy a lot more than the big guy.
I watch this happen in the CS field all the time. For example, I have some ideas that might possibly build on arithmetic compression. But I'm not bothering to develop them because arithmetic compression is patented, and I know it. Not only that, but people keep on patenting wider and wider circles of ideas around it. It's likely that the field won't be free enough of patent garbage for me to bother with until 2030 or so.
Which disappoints me, but it ought to disappoint everybody else a whole heck of a lot more. The thing is, people never really seem to notice something that isn't there that could be.
We need a good tag for headlines like these. Maybe 'sensationalism' or 'misleading' or both. If they get tagged as being obviously bad often enough, maybe we'll see people stop trying to use this tactic to make their article seem more important than it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Because he was so much an 11 year old in all other respects. He had an 11 year old's social skills, and everything else that came with being 11.
If a woman walked into my workplace and started acting like an air-headed bimbo I'd have a hard time taking her seriously too, even if turns out that she developed a public key encryption method that isn't defeated by quantum computing. Especially if she was always asking the men around to 'help' her.
When certain aspects of a personality don't come over, like in text chat, it doesn't matter. But when you hear them a whole bunch of things you didn't notice before suddenly pop out and it's really hard to ignore them and just pay attention to the important thing.
I don't think anybody is complaining about Firefox having competition. Firefox has done just fine against everybody.
But why does a presentation that Apple puts on completely ignore a browser with 25% market share and pretend it doesn't exist? That seems a bit odd to me. They can present anything they like, but I do think this reveals that Apple doesn't really think of Open Source as being any kind of force at all. Or, at least, Steve Jobs wishes it weren't.
This is true. But it's really hard to take them seriously anyway. I knew an 11 year old in college who was better at math than I was and knew more of it. It was still really hard to take him seriously. In took a serious act of willpower, even though I knew, intellectually, that he really did know more than I did.
Now, that's an interesting argument, and one I don't necessarily disagree with. But most people will not install it themselves no matter what anybody thinks. Things have to be secure by default, not secure if you install a bunch of extra stuff.
*rolls eyes* Like most people are ever going to install NoScript. I suppose you think that Microsoft was perfectly reasonable in declaring C2 security certification when NT wasn't connected to a network too?
I don't care what you think, nobody is going to use that extension by default and it will never be enabled by default. Your attempt to make measurements of Firefox security with it enabled are reminiscent of Microsoft's attempts to get C2 certification for Windows NT when it wasn't connected to a network.
The most meaningful measurement of security for an application is looking at the default installation. Most people will never get beyond that.
You might consider using OpenID for stuff like this. I really hate having millions of passwords for millions of different sites.
Subversion has more problems that the fact it doesn't support a distributed model. I also think Linus' comments were rude, and I know the Subversion team is filled with good solid professional developers.
At the time Subversion was created the distributed model wasn't well understood. In fact, experience with CVS led people to believe that version control in general was a complicated problem requiring a lot of careful thought and engineering to solve. This led the Subversion team to make a number of extremely conservative choices and led to a product that, IMHO, is extremely over-engineered and lacks critical features that were discovered to be important and easy to implement after Subversion's basic foundation was already layed.
Additionally this over-engineering has resulted in a system that is very slow for what it does.
Subversion handles branches OK, but it handles merges extremely poorly. Branching and merging were considered exotic operations when CVS was considered the peak of version control goodness, but with the rise of distributed SCMs making those operations nearly trivial, it's realized that these are actually fundamental SCM operations that every SCMS should handle very well.
The distributed model is a strict superset of the centralized model. I don't consider them to be a choice. I would always choose to use a SCMS that could handle a distributed model over one that couldn't, all other things being equal. Becuse of worse comes to worse, I can emulated the centralized model with my decentralized tool easily enough.
I don't really have a problem with how Subversion handles tags, though, IMHO, it does obscure to some degree exactly which revision you just tagged. But I do have a major problem with three things about Subversion... It is horribly slow for what it does. It is ridiculously complex for what it does. It's over-engineered in the extreme. And it handles branching and merging extremely poorly. So poorly that I couldn't in good conscience seriously recommend performing those operations except under very controlled conditions.
The only good thing about it is that it has a model that's very familiar to people who are used to CVS.
My favorite, of course, is Mercurial. My main draw is that I had been interested in distributed SCMs for years, but had never found one that made any sense to me whatsoever. I was on the hunt again and stumbled on Mercurial, and I've been hooked ever since.
Of the various distributed SCMs, Mercurial is the easiest to use one I've found. And it's pretty fast, though not quite as fast as git (though I have some ideas on how to fix that). And since it's written in Python with only a very small C component it runs on many platforms.
That's how I routinely install for even one computer. I don't use the DVD for anything other than booting into the installer.
Hmm... I'm not claiming the US government is behind the attacks, but I still think some of the theories and ideas that some of these people have still bear looking into. They hang together remarkably well, and they are largely devoid of any speculation as to the larger picture, only that observations of some particular event in the tragedy seem to be inconsistent with the official explanation of the reasons for event. And those inconsistencies seem real to me.
There is little or no wild-eyed speculation about vast networks of people organizing some horrible thing. Only questions about specific physical events that really should have better answers than they currently do.
The official version is a conspiracy theory too BTW. It posits this vast conspiracy called Al-Queda. Yet you are willing to swallow that with no question while trying to brand people who have very specific questions about very specific pieces of verifiable physical evidence as 'conspiracy theorists'.
I think I agree with you. I someone copied the Geico Gecko, that would be trademark violation and/or copyright infringement. But if someone has a cute little talking animal advertising their low-price insurance, that isn't. This is the second case, not the first.
It also affects variety. If you can afford a slimmer profit margin you can carry things that don't make as much money. For large stores that really don't actually have much variety for their size this isn't an issue, but for a smaller store that focuses on a wide selection it's a huge issue.
Change the wording of the article! Yes, it's from the original article. But it's very clearly misleading and needs to be changed.
I don't know where this unreasoning fear of authority comes from, but you are quite wrong. Most places will negotiate if you ask.
The only time I've entered into an employment agreement or signed an NDA I wasn't happy with was when I was desperate for a job, any job. And that's only happened once in all my 18 years of working.
It has only lost its populism because it's beginning to succeed. Not the other way around. The other poster quoting George Bernard Shaw has it right on the nose.
I am highly amused. Was it only 10 years ago that it was thought that 'Free Software' was a poor term because of the overloading of the word 'Free'. But now it seems that the 'no cost' meaning of the word is coming under attack in the software world at least. :-)
I would be able to pass your test, but not in 5 minutes. I've put together and repaired numerous PCs. But I don't think I'd like to work for you, even if I did pass your test in the time allotted. And if I had realized that you had put all the problems there yourself when you 'leapt in and fixed the problem', I would get hostile and leave.
But, if you do that, they'll stop making and acquiring new stuff. Really, that's just a downward spiral. A good parasite knows that killing its host isn't the key to survival.
I think this line was crossed when Clinton was impeached. But never mind that, Dick Cheney really, really deserves it. Clinton only deserved it a little. Lying in front of a Grand Jury should get you kicked out of office. Adultery shouldn't or we would likely have had the majority of our presidents removed from office. DIck Cheney has committed multiple crimes that are at least as serious as lying to a grand jury, if not moreso.
There's something about the diffusion of responsbility involved in a company being public that tends to cause such companies to become inordinately rapacious and evil. All the decision makers can point to the fact that they're 'morally' obligated to do whatever it takes for the company to make as much as it can for stockholders. And the stockholders have a really hard time getting together to tell the company that some actions are just too far.
But when the number of stockholders is smaller and known, their sense of personal responsibility and morality can be appealed to, and they're more likely to pay attention to it regardless.
This makes me all jittery too. I have very little trust of public companies. I think the laws surrounding them are in need of even more serious reform than they've gotten so far (SOX and HIPPA being examples of laws that bring back some accountability).
But, the other person to reply made a really good point about InnoDB. This may not be all bad. And realistically, if it turns bad MySQL can be forked.
This leaves a field in which no idea is used until the patent expires, significantly slowing innovation. It actually hurts the little guy a lot more than the big guy.
I watch this happen in the CS field all the time. For example, I have some ideas that might possibly build on arithmetic compression. But I'm not bothering to develop them because arithmetic compression is patented, and I know it. Not only that, but people keep on patenting wider and wider circles of ideas around it. It's likely that the field won't be free enough of patent garbage for me to bother with until 2030 or so.
Which disappoints me, but it ought to disappoint everybody else a whole heck of a lot more. The thing is, people never really seem to notice something that isn't there that could be.
We need a good tag for headlines like these. Maybe 'sensationalism' or 'misleading' or both. If they get tagged as being obviously bad often enough, maybe we'll see people stop trying to use this tactic to make their article seem more important than it is.