Although I'm not familiar with federal policy, our State public records law requires us to keep confidential any information used to evaluate the performance of an employee (or to separate the employee's identification from the record prior to publication).
I imagine some of you have worked for someone who said some uncomplimentary (and no doubt mistaken:) things about you... you don't want that on the web either. That may be much less likely to happen with astronauts, but they're governed by the same rules as geeks and the motor vehicles folks. Heck, even amongst the astronauts, if a crewmember needs to say something about another crewmember's performance, it needs to be said, in case it's important, and kept confidential, in case it's wrong.
That said, I think a depersonalized account should be made available, as even in NASA that sort of personnel information should be for management only.
As a result, sometimes they're co-equal or the one is missing -- if you primarily use shop-control and commercial accounting software, you might have a CTO with a small band of robotics programmers (though if your successful, a CIO will soon be needed). OTOH, a CIO might farm the CTO role out to IBM or someone.
Close, but actually you'll never observe a black hole if they exist -- you can only see the lack of information at the event horizon (the hole in the doughnut, if it's exactly between you and a light source).
If you can see the object, then the good Dr. is right, as an event horizion has not formed and light is escaping:-).
This is exactly what I would like to see. Say I am on a low-rate DSL hookup, my roommate is doing some remote system administration and I'm downloading some large game demo. His X session is sucking up bandwidth that's making my game download slower...
Honestly, what's going to keep me from fiddling my connections (at either end) to do ftp-over-voice-over-ip in order to keep my priority high? After all, compressed, encrypted voice looks a lot like compressed, encrypted programs. QoS will only work if all players are trusted. As far as I can see, QoS will only let us download all that pr0n faster (so bring it on!:).
Thought about that, but then you wind up breathing the slag. You need an engineered material that won't vaporize. Besides, the nickle/iron content isn't the interesting part -- you may be sending down much more volatile/fragile stuff.
Nah -- just get some ceramics from the moon or a passing 'roid and fashion space-shuttle-tile type material, then machine your large hunk o metal into aerodynamic shapes, glue on tiles, and pitch your gliders earthward (aimed at an ocean, please).
The main risk is losing the heat shield and releasing your payload into the atmosphere, or accidentally hitting that trailer in Quazi. As long as all the construction materials come from Out There, it should be cheaper than the elevator.
What we really need the elevator for is moving people and/or materials up there to do the mining in the first place.
The other provider with a nationwide (USA) plan and free long distance is Alltel (at least 'round here). Their plan provides free roaming, too but it's more expensive (go figure) and the digital coverage and service aren't their strong suit.
I just got a Sprint PCS phone, 'cause I mostly stay in town and the promotions were good. If I were doing a lot of driving to small towns I'd still be with Alltel.
(Ok, I still am, but it's a fill-out-the-month thing.)
Yup.. but you forgot "find a vendor for Thingamagics". Part of the UDDI proposal is to provide " a platform-independent, open framework for describing services, discovering
businesses, and integrating business services using the Internet. "
Sounds like this would make it easier to program your order processing system to find vendors, compare catalogs and pick the low-cost shipper for you. Even (especially) for things you never bought before.
The machine loom also caused the death by starvation of many artisan weavers, as they were no longer needed to do the work, and were neither trained nor wanted for other work. So Ned's distress was understandable, if misdirected.
Technological dislocation without adequate humanitarian underpinnings can cause tradgedy, however with proper planning (or plain good luck) it can also provide opportunity. I wouldn't be taking my frustrations out on Carnivore boxes -- I'd be after my government (through proper legal means of course):-).
Re:Digital signatures are not really signatures.
on
GPG vs. PGP?
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· Score: 2
Compare this to a letter that arrives in the emailbox PGP-signed. The return address on the email is billc@whitehouse.gov. You check the key
database, and lo and behold, there's a key there for billc@whitehouse.gov. Does that mean you really received an email from Bill Clinton?
Well, in my state there's a registry of trusted certificate authorities. If BillC has his key in a cert. signed by one of these authorities, and it's the highest-confidence-level cert, then he had to go in person and sign papers and give up authentication just like at the bank. Of course, he could give his key away, just like Mordecai could spend his new car money on drugs (if he were to get a bank loan instead of on-the-spot).
The digital signature has the ability to convey that a person knows the secret to a specific key, and that they signed the document. There must be another mechanism (like a signed certificate authenticated by a trusted CA) to connect that key to a person, and a deterrent (like liability) to prevent that person sharing the secret. Again, process, not technology.
... by a bunch of guys fiddling around with new principles, without a specific commercial goal (though, of course, you're right about the lab). It was used because it was useful, but there was no requirement or assurance that it would be. Bell Labs was rather unique in the freedom from commercial pressures its Fellows enjoyed at that time, and developed many useful and robust things (like unix) in a research environment very like the acedemic research labs (and a few flops, but not many, 'cause the Fellows were chosen for their track record, smarts and work habits). It was an example of the commercial world embracing the ivory tower research model.
It seems to me that a fundamental flaw of Mr. Stallman's open source philosophy is that it implies that adherance to his particular license is of
more importance than the overal quality and value of a product. Most sources agree that KDE is the superior choice of Linux desktop, yet
according to open source proponents GNOME is the better choice simply because it is licensed under the GNU Public License.
It seems to me that your client thinks that I should abide by their license agrement, no? Mr. Stallman believes that certain principles are important, I grant you. He has attempted to embody those principles in his license, also granted. But having done so, others who choose to use the code distributed with that license are bound to abide by it, therefore I believe Mr. Stallman's points about the questionable legality of KDE (in the past) are quite valid.
Let me tell you, the corporate world would rather use the product that provides less function than the one that will get their computers confiscated:-).
But I think you have also fallen into the reporter's trap of reviewing others' information rather than forming your own opinion. Not that you wouldn't still decide what you've decided, but your "Most sources" comment leads me to wonder if the more vocal crowd isn't shaping your report. If you were to do a review right now, you might find that Gnome 1.2 and the current version of KDE offer much the same "quality" with respect to stability and usability, and that the reputation for poor quality of Gnome stems from early adopters' problems with code that was released a little before its time (I'm sure your client never does that:-). I'd urge you to take the plunge and try the "open source" software you're reporting on, rather than rely on others' potentially dated work.
Specifically on Gnome vs KDE:
I'm a Gnome person, but not a programmer for either camp. I see a more robust design in Gnome for componentized applications and complexity management, but I also recognize that the KDE crew has pulled their product up to a similar level, just as the Gnomers have got their bugs under control. I still prefer Gnome because it seems more designed than hacked, and seems (IMHO) to have the better design philosophy but really, by now the differences between the two efforts have become much smaller than they were a year ago.
Back to your point:
The conflict between the ivory tower and the real world is addressed by open source software. Often, however, the ivory tower produces the longer-lasting results. Unix was developed there, and Linux is still held to high standards by its authors (perhaps there's disagreement about how high, but they're there). The difference that open source offers is that if the software doesn't meet the real world needs, you can reshape it. The benefit of the long development cycle adhering to the ivory-tower principles is that you don't have to release service packs as often:-). The corporate world would like to have quality software, but they've shown time and again that something that mostly works today is preferred to something that will work correctly tomorrow. Witness Word vs Wordperfect, Windows NT vs OS/2 (vs a user-friendly unix), etc...
The success of the open-source movement does not depend on businesses adopting it. It's not "in the market" except in the sense that movement is in the bazzar. Nobody needs to buy it for it to succeed. The success of open-source software depends on people taking pride in their work and in doing it right, and deriving their sense of worth from that. That the products are useful and desirable flows from the success of craftsmanship, not the other way around.
[...] meanwhile, back in sunnyvale, amd offers smaller, faster, better cpus which actually provide an upgrade path for existing customers.
Heh... so all I have to do is buy an Athlon, eh?
Last I checked, I had to throw out my AMD K6II and my 256MB of RAM and my mobo to upgrade. So what if I have to toss my $65 case and power supply, too? As long as there's enough competition, the new ones shouldn't cost much more.
'course you can. 'cause I suck at FPS's (but still enjoy them dialed down to my skill level). Just because you get 100 fps doesn't mean I can't see you at 40:-).
Seriously, >30 fps is just gravy -- the difference between adequate and overkill. BTW -- I'll still be in the game racking up kills when your DirectX crashes:-).
No... you can use a loadable module instead. Playing as root is fine if you're disconnected and you wrote the game, otherwise it's not likely to happen 'round my house. Fortunately, the demo doesn't require it (nor does any other loki game I own).
A *nix version of Visio, for instance, could spew all the information you need about the diagram as a text stream and, as long as the format and structure of that stream are documented, you would have all the functionality that OLE provides.
Close, but not quite.
What's really needed is a component model (like Bonobo) and a standard URI-type reference that defines the component in terms of the content to be displayed, like OLE uses. So, if you cut-and-paste from the diagramming tool, you should get a snippet of XML that identifies the Bonobo component that is needed to display and/or edit the diagram, and the description of the diagram data. That way your componentware program can display the diagram exactly the way the diagramming tool can.
In addition, Windows permits various rendered versions of the data to be included in the clipboard structure, so in the hypothetical Linux example your XML snippet would probably define:
A text representation (required)
A Bonobo reference with data (optional)
A PNG or other graphic (encouraged)
A space for both standardized and application-defined extensions (SVG, MPEG, binary data structure, URL, etc).
That would be pretty much analogous to the Clipboard. Ideally, a negotiation could take place to prevent clipboard-overloading (just the Bonobo invocation interface and the minimal definition of the clipping bounds is passed to start, and the request is resolved between apps without the framework in the way), but that would require sharing the clipboard-access code:-)
Miguel and the rest of you are, of course, free to attend to the small matter of implementation:-
Sure, there COULD be bad things that come of this technology, but other great scientific discoveries, like electricity, can also be used for the powers of darkness. Quick, shut down your PC - it uses the Devil's own power!
Don't grin too quickly -- Edison was dead set against AC current, as he couldn't handle the math, and he was heavily invested in DC technology. His "AC Kills" campaign electrocuted a number of horses and dogs... Even smart people can be threatened by new technology.
In the case of Fantasia, Disney should have copyright over the entire thing, except the surviving "sorceror's apprentice" bit. Unless, of course, they claim to have made significant improvements to it. In that case, I should be able to copy the previous version, but not the new one, and I'd have to be careful to base my derivative work, "Sorceror's Apprentice on the Road to Timbuktu", on the previous version.
Basically, that's what's happening. The Mouse, and all the other characters of the early 20th, are extending their proprietary lives...
But consider: Disney took about 50 years to re-do Fantasia. With a 14-year time limit, we'll see Walt's original concept carried out...And after all, most of their profits come from new or derivative works. When was the last time you saw "Steamboat Willie" and paid for it?
BTW -- I think 14 years is still reasonable. If you get it too short, derivative works will be rip-offs or publishers will just wait until a work enters the public domain.
Tinnitus sufferrers can find their computer use is limited by their ability to stand the hum. Tinnitus is "ringing in the ears", usually caused by trauma or as a side-effect of an ear infection. Lack of variation in the soundscape (like silence or white noise) frequently causes the ringing to increase in volume, often becoming intrusive or painful.
So for many, this becomes a serious ergonomic issue, and a handicapping situation. Not "whining".
Thanks to the person posting about QuietPC.com. I notice they have a PIII passive cooler. Anyone know of one for Socket7?
I hope the appeals court is paying attention -- they might get as mad as I am. Who knows, they're already meeting en banc (MS didn't see that coming I'll bet) and they snapped it right up. The appeal might be over next month...
Ok, so I'm an optomist. But the picture for MS isn't as rosy as they'd like to paint it, as I read the situation. They did serious harm to their credibility, and I'm sure that will come across in the transcript (with the doctored video and the reversals by the witnesses). Hopefully DOJ will have sufficient time to point these shenanigans out.
MS has some breathing room now before the sword falls. It's quite likely the appeals court will stay the conduct restrictions, meaning business as usual for the duration. On the other hand, it's a bit of a loss as the court is meeting en banc...
Now MS can't ask for a second hearing by the appeals court before having to go before the Supremes. Though what Diana Ross has to do with it I don't understand:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine some of you have worked for someone who said some uncomplimentary (and no doubt mistaken :) things about you... you don't want that on the web either. That may be much less likely to happen with astronauts, but they're governed by the same rules as geeks and the motor vehicles folks. Heck, even amongst the astronauts, if a crewmember needs to say something about another crewmember's performance, it needs to be said, in case it's important, and kept confidential, in case it's wrong.
That said, I think a depersonalized account should be made available, as even in NASA that sort of personnel information should be for management only.
As a result, sometimes they're co-equal or the one is missing -- if you primarily use shop-control and commercial accounting software, you might have a CTO with a small band of robotics programmers (though if your successful, a CIO will soon be needed). OTOH, a CIO might farm the CTO role out to IBM or someone.
If you can see the object, then the good Dr. is right, as an event horizion has not formed and light is escaping :-).
Honestly, what's going to keep me from fiddling my connections (at either end) to do ftp-over-voice-over-ip in order to keep my priority high? After all, compressed, encrypted voice looks a lot like compressed, encrypted programs. QoS will only work if all players are trusted. As far as I can see, QoS will only let us download all that pr0n faster (so bring it on! :).
Thought about that, but then you wind up breathing the slag. You need an engineered material that won't vaporize. Besides, the nickle/iron content isn't the interesting part -- you may be sending down much more volatile/fragile stuff.
The main risk is losing the heat shield and releasing your payload into the atmosphere, or accidentally hitting that trailer in Quazi. As long as all the construction materials come from Out There, it should be cheaper than the elevator.
What we really need the elevator for is moving people and/or materials up there to do the mining in the first place.
I just got a Sprint PCS phone, 'cause I mostly stay in town and the promotions were good. If I were doing a lot of driving to small towns I'd still be with Alltel.
(Ok, I still am, but it's a fill-out-the-month thing.)
Sounds like this would make it easier to program your order processing system to find vendors, compare catalogs and pick the low-cost shipper for you. Even (especially) for things you never bought before.
Technological dislocation without adequate humanitarian underpinnings can cause tradgedy, however with proper planning (or plain good luck) it can also provide opportunity. I wouldn't be taking my frustrations out on Carnivore boxes -- I'd be after my government (through proper legal means of course) :-).
Well, in my state there's a registry of trusted certificate authorities. If BillC has his key in a cert. signed by one of these authorities, and it's the highest-confidence-level cert, then he had to go in person and sign papers and give up authentication just like at the bank. Of course, he could give his key away, just like Mordecai could spend his new car money on drugs (if he were to get a bank loan instead of on-the-spot).
The digital signature has the ability to convey that a person knows the secret to a specific key, and that they signed the document. There must be another mechanism (like a signed certificate authenticated by a trusted CA) to connect that key to a person, and a deterrent (like liability) to prevent that person sharing the secret. Again, process, not technology.
... by a bunch of guys fiddling around with new principles, without a specific commercial goal (though, of course, you're right about the lab). It was used because it was useful, but there was no requirement or assurance that it would be. Bell Labs was rather unique in the freedom from commercial pressures its Fellows enjoyed at that time, and developed many useful and robust things (like unix) in a research environment very like the acedemic research labs (and a few flops, but not many, 'cause the Fellows were chosen for their track record, smarts and work habits). It was an example of the commercial world embracing the ivory tower research model.
It seems to me that your client thinks that I should abide by their license agrement, no? Mr. Stallman believes that certain principles are important, I grant you. He has attempted to embody those principles in his license, also granted. But having done so, others who choose to use the code distributed with that license are bound to abide by it, therefore I believe Mr. Stallman's points about the questionable legality of KDE (in the past) are quite valid.
Let me tell you, the corporate world would rather use the product that provides less function than the one that will get their computers confiscated :-).
But I think you have also fallen into the reporter's trap of reviewing others' information rather than forming your own opinion. Not that you wouldn't still decide what you've decided, but your "Most sources" comment leads me to wonder if the more vocal crowd isn't shaping your report. If you were to do a review right now, you might find that Gnome 1.2 and the current version of KDE offer much the same "quality" with respect to stability and usability, and that the reputation for poor quality of Gnome stems from early adopters' problems with code that was released a little before its time (I'm sure your client never does that :-). I'd urge you to take the plunge and try the "open source" software you're reporting on, rather than rely on others' potentially dated work.
Specifically on Gnome vs KDE:
I'm a Gnome person, but not a programmer for either camp. I see a more robust design in Gnome for componentized applications and complexity management, but I also recognize that the KDE crew has pulled their product up to a similar level, just as the Gnomers have got their bugs under control. I still prefer Gnome because it seems more designed than hacked, and seems (IMHO) to have the better design philosophy but really, by now the differences between the two efforts have become much smaller than they were a year ago.
Back to your point:
The conflict between the ivory tower and the real world is addressed by open source software. Often, however, the ivory tower produces the longer-lasting results. Unix was developed there, and Linux is still held to high standards by its authors (perhaps there's disagreement about how high, but they're there). The difference that open source offers is that if the software doesn't meet the real world needs, you can reshape it. The benefit of the long development cycle adhering to the ivory-tower principles is that you don't have to release service packs as often :-). The corporate world would like to have quality software, but they've shown time and again that something that mostly works today is preferred to something that will work correctly tomorrow. Witness Word vs Wordperfect, Windows NT vs OS/2 (vs a user-friendly unix), etc...
The success of the open-source movement does not depend on businesses adopting it. It's not "in the market" except in the sense that movement is in the bazzar. Nobody needs to buy it for it to succeed. The success of open-source software depends on people taking pride in their work and in doing it right, and deriving their sense of worth from that. That the products are useful and desirable flows from the success of craftsmanship, not the other way around.
Heh... so all I have to do is buy an Athlon, eh?
Last I checked, I had to throw out my AMD K6II and my 256MB of RAM and my mobo to upgrade. So what if I have to toss my $65 case and power supply, too? As long as there's enough competition, the new ones shouldn't cost much more.
OTOH, Oracle can be slow if you don't configure it right. Which is one good reason to prohibit benchmarks :-)
Seriously, >30 fps is just gravy -- the difference between adequate and overkill. BTW -- I'll still be in the game racking up kills when your DirectX crashes :-).
No... you can use a loadable module instead. Playing as root is fine if you're disconnected and you wrote the game, otherwise it's not likely to happen 'round my house. Fortunately, the demo doesn't require it (nor does any other loki game I own).
Close, but not quite.
What's really needed is a component model (like Bonobo) and a standard URI-type reference that defines the component in terms of the content to be displayed, like OLE uses. So, if you cut-and-paste from the diagramming tool, you should get a snippet of XML that identifies the Bonobo component that is needed to display and/or edit the diagram, and the description of the diagram data. That way your componentware program can display the diagram exactly the way the diagramming tool can.
In addition, Windows permits various rendered versions of the data to be included in the clipboard structure, so in the hypothetical Linux example your XML snippet would probably define:
A text representation (required)
A Bonobo reference with data (optional)
A PNG or other graphic (encouraged)
A space for both standardized and application-defined extensions (SVG, MPEG, binary data structure, URL, etc).
That would be pretty much analogous to the Clipboard. Ideally, a negotiation could take place to prevent clipboard-overloading (just the Bonobo invocation interface and the minimal definition of the clipping bounds is passed to start, and the request is resolved between apps without the framework in the way), but that would require sharing the clipboard-access code :-)
Miguel and the rest of you are, of course, free to attend to the small matter of implementation :-
Don't grin too quickly -- Edison was dead set against AC current, as he couldn't handle the math, and he was heavily invested in DC technology. His "AC Kills" campaign electrocuted a number of horses and dogs... Even smart people can be threatened by new technology.
Apparently, you need to release a similar amount of energy to simulate in real time...
In the case of Fantasia, Disney should have copyright over the entire thing, except the surviving "sorceror's apprentice" bit. Unless, of course, they claim to have made significant improvements to it. In that case, I should be able to copy the previous version, but not the new one, and I'd have to be careful to base my derivative work, "Sorceror's Apprentice on the Road to Timbuktu", on the previous version.
But consider: Disney took about 50 years to re-do Fantasia. With a 14-year time limit, we'll see Walt's original concept carried out...And after all, most of their profits come from new or derivative works. When was the last time you saw "Steamboat Willie" and paid for it?
BTW -- I think 14 years is still reasonable. If you get it too short, derivative works will be rip-offs or publishers will just wait until a work enters the public domain.
You can put on an MP3 to avoid silence, but a 42 dBa whine means you have to play the MP3 TOO LOUD to drown it out.
So for many, this becomes a serious ergonomic issue, and a handicapping situation. Not "whining".
Thanks to the person posting about QuietPC.com. I notice they have a PIII passive cooler. Anyone know of one for Socket7?
Ok, so I'm an optomist. But the picture for MS isn't as rosy as they'd like to paint it, as I read the situation. They did serious harm to their credibility, and I'm sure that will come across in the transcript (with the doctored video and the reversals by the witnesses). Hopefully DOJ will have sufficient time to point these shenanigans out.
Now MS can't ask for a second hearing by the appeals court before having to go before the Supremes. Though what Diana Ross has to do with it I don't understand :-).