Yeah, and what's even crazier is international news coverage of some sick old guy in Italy.
It's almost like some people think that events can exist within a larger context, and that even smallish events could possibly have deeper meanings and impacts.
The Quiet Earth. That whole mess started with a large scale wireless power initiative.
On the bright side, anyone who dies at the exact moment this stuff is deployed can look forward to an existance happily unmarred by traffic jams, cell phones in theatres, and income taxes.
...for about 5 years in the mid to late 90's. I started doing the testing on basic network equipment and graduated over time to oversee the testing methodology for every product comparison we ran.
I can tell you that, if the testers themselves are competent, it's a moot point. For instance, when testing server hardware by using a database application, I always insisted that the databases be identical and configured as identically as possible. Normal stumbling blocks were issues with stock disk sizes, but we always ensured that RAID configurations were as similar as possible within the realm of reason.
Testing is an art form. It requires a thorough and repeatable plan as well as a good bit of knowledge about real world usage of equipment and software (would it be realistic to enable a non-battery backed write cache on a raid controller in a database application?)
I can say that many, many vendors attempted to put one over on us. And it's entirely possible that I missed some of them, and they benefitted because of it. However, in general, professional test procedures should expose and nullify any sort of vendor tweakage of equipment or software.
Key principles for good testing: - Set any basic configuration to manufacturer's public recommendations
- Don't let vendor representatives touch anything. If they need to send someone into the lab, allow them to recommend changes, and document all of those for later review / revocation
- If third party hardware/software is involved in a test, use the third party as a sounding board. If you're testing a layer 3 switch using streaming media, talk to the streaming media provider about realistic stream rates and usage patterns.
- If at all possible, wipe and reload vendor equipment and software. You should be looking at the setup process anyway, so that helps the test as well as helping to prevent shenanigans.
In short, good test procedures prevent, or at least mitigate, the kind of abuse in question. And, as consimers of reviews and tests, it's in all of our best interests to get educated and develop opinions about the competence, thoroughness, and honesty of any souce.
Are you suggesting that fiction is inherently damaging because people lack the capacity to distinguish it from reality? As with any "people are so stupid" argument, I'll only give you validity points if you're speaking for yourself. Do you have problems differentiation fiction from reality? Or are you just making this condescending generalization about everyone else?
Children exposed to porn without any understanding of its falseness could well develop misunderstandings and bad attitudes that screw up their sex life when they grow up.
...as opposed to the way it's just fine for children to be exposed to Star Wars, the Lion King, or the Love Boat without any understanding of their falseness?
And I'm not sure there's any more value to making generalizations about "most" porn than there is in making generalizations about "most" men, "most" blacks, or "most" Ukranians. If most of the porn you've seen is misogynistic, maybe you're largely watching misogynistic porn for some reason?
I hate this whole "I'm so smart that I can deal with porn, but the poor children are so stupid and impressionable that we need to protect them" argument. It's arrogant, condescending, and intellectually cheap, all at the same time.
And listen to this last sentence: you think porn is more harmful to children than violence. Now, either you think that seeing a Playboy centerfold is worse for a kid's health than being, oh, say, shot (!), or you that images of sexual activity are more harmful than images of brutality. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter, but even that's a totally ridiculous position. If media images and bad parenting can turn a good kid into a raving misogynist who has "bad attitudes" about sex, surely those same images can turn him into a brutal killer who has "bad attitudes" about conflict resolution. Either kids are morons who ape what they see in the media or they're not. Pick one, and stick with it.
It starts to make sense, I have no idea what Swiss laws against exposing undercover law enforcement agents say.
Well, do you know what the Swiss laws against even mentioning undercover law enforcement agents are? Perhaps you're violating them now, and the FBI should raid slashdot.
That's the problem with the argument that every internet content provider is subject to the laws of every country on Earth.
And, yes, to the extent that the FBI has decided that its job is to protect foreign secret police rather than American citizens, it does reflect negatively on the Bush administration. Considering how often they oversimplify terrorism ("they hate us because we're free"), they sure don't seem very interested in actual freedom of the press. At least not when the press is anti-establishment... even against foreign establishments.
It's a clever idea, but current protocols wouldn't work at all, including bittorrent.
The moment that there's any kind of money or power (even social power) involved, there's a huge incentive for people to hack the system. Unless you're willing to wait for an entire 30? 60? 90? 120? minute broadcast to complete and be hash-verified against authenticated sources, you're going to have people who connect directly to the source and substitute their own (forged / humorous / slanderous / obscene) content in place of the actual broadcast.
In order for something like this to work, you'd need some method for clients to verify that the content they've received (and passed on!) is the content that the original source sent. And bang! You're right back to single points of failure and the slashdot effect. Sure, it's better to validate a hash than get a whole block, but it's still tough.
Not to say that it can't be done, but I don't believe it can be done in the current bittorrent distribution model for streaming content. I'd welcome correction on that, of course.
That's a very interesting quote from the Constitution.
It seems to me that one could argue that the Constitution prohibits copyright terms that are generally expected to be longer than the author's lifetime. That is, if you grant someone rights for a "limited time," that the person in question should expect those rights to expire at some point.
Note that the Constitution is also clear that the rights are being granted to "authors and inventors," *not* their heirs, designees, estates, etc. If copyright were intended to be perpetual and handed down among generations and corporations, wouldn't the Constitution say that?
Nobody's complaining that Ars was first with it. The complaint is that this/. article is a cut-and-paste of the first paragraph of the Ars article, with the links changed so they don't go to Ars.
I don't think anyone would be complaining if the submitter had written their own summary of the eetimes article. What's lame is not only taking the entire submitted paragraph from another site without credit, but also removing the link *in* that paragraph to a previous Ars article.
Damn straight. How lame is it to submit a cut-and-paste paragraph, while changing the links so there's only one eetimes link and no arstechnica links? Not to mention not giving credit for where the cut-and-paste came from.
My guess is that InfoWorld is dynamically generating the RSS for each request. A simple host-side cache of the generated XML, so hits just talk to the HTTP server and not the app server, would probably make this a non-issue.
Or are they *really* getting more RSS hits than image requests? If -- somehow -- that's the case, spend $500/mo on Akamai or Speedera and point RSS stuff there, and give the CDN a reasonable timeout (30 minutes or something). That guarantees you no more than about 500 hits per timeout period, or maybe one every 10 seconds. Surely the app server can handle that.
Then again, what do I know? I only worked there for five years, including two on infoworld.com. It's been a few years, but unless things have changed dramatically, that is one messed up IT organization.
Yeah, because if you can keep a windsheild from cracking with a new coating, you must be able to reduce emissions by 30% with about the same amount of investment (and therefore final product cost increase).
I disagree on both counts. While I doubt that anyone is entering addresses manually, a (new) confirmed email address is worth about $0.10. Do you really think there aren't *any* coders in the entire world who would bother to automate a/. email scraper, because it would only make a couple of thousand dollars a month?
And, of course, such a scraper could easily monitor every board that runs on slashcode, not just slashdot.
Uh-huh, Mr. gidds@NOsPAm.cix.co.uk. You don't think the spammers regularly suck down all of/. and parse the email addresses? I would, if I were one of them. A *lot* of email addresses, and all you need is a human to look at the obfuscation system once a day.
If in 10 years Microsoft does a turn around and starts supporting Linux will we all forget the evils of the past?
I sure hope so. One of the defining (and refreshing) characterstics of geeks is their pragmatism. If, in 10 years, Microsoft is behaving decently and contributing to the computing community in a way similar to what IBM's doing today, sure, I'd be friendly towards them.
What's the alternative? Draw up a big list of "evil" companies who can never be redeemed for the sins of their past, and then hunker down and hate them for the rest of our lives? There probably wouldn't be many alternatives for IT products, let alone food and footwear, after a couple of decades.
Deal with it. Microsoft is *not* evil in some intrinsic, satanic sense. They're just doing evil and dishonest things. If that changes in the future, I for one will welcome them back into the fold.
Here's their list from last year. Me, I'd rather buy 4 good paperbacks than 1 hardcover, and I only found one book from the new list available in paperback (admittedly, I only looked for 20-25).
And someone rememeber to remind me to revisit this list next year.
In the absence of significant gravity, won't a significant amount of the force used to launch the harpoon serve to actually propel Rosetta *away* from the asteroid? Can someone explain what's to keep the harpoon from going "boink" against the comet and Rosetta from not just bouncing but actually being propelled into space by the harpoon launch?
Ok, I've started a mini-debate with that post. A quick Google turns up some evidence in my favor.
According to the article, in an abbreviated IQ test (50 questions) the average for football player's score is the same as the average for other professions. Of course, you'll note that the average for programmers is higher than the average for any particular position on the football field. But I wasn't asserting that football players are geniuses, just that the game requires a reasonable level of intelligence.
Cheers
-b
Re:Football IP?
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I partly agree. Football is unique in the sports world, though, because of it's play-by-play dynamic (you could argue the point for baseball, but the "plays" in baseball are much, much simpler). Coaches have an amazingly complex job of deciding, for each play, which players to put on the field and what play to call. Players, too, need to read the opposition and adjust not just athletically but also who to cover and whatnot.
There's certainly a run-time (har!) atheltic component, but there is also a very cerebral component that many players have to participate in (seeing, for instance, that the pre-snap motion on offense has overloaded one side of zone coverage and will leave a receiver uncovered... and then calling a timeout to prevent the play from starting).
I'm not saying it's chess-level, at least for the players, just that people who characterize it as devoid of intellectual participation are 1) wrong, and 2) engaging in stereotyping. It's like someone saying that top-notch programming doesn't involve intelligence because "you just tell the computer what to do and it does it." Only someone with a complete lack of understanding of the process would make such an assertion, and the same goes for football.
Show me someone who actually understands the game and who says that players are generally not smart and the game isn't intellectual, and I'll concede the point. You won't find someone like that, though. (No fair going back to the 1930's when that was closer to being true).
...CNN to watch "Child's Pay" on a channel which doesn't censor its ads
Try running an add on CNN featuring full frontal nudity and see if they don't "censor" it. I think what the zealots mean is "...a channel that didn't decline to run *our* ad."
Every media outlet practices this kind of "censorship" (the quotes because actual censorship requires government involvement). Moveon is right to vote with their wallet and even to encourage a CBS boycott. They are wrong, however, to characterize CBS's refusal to run their ad as "censorship" or to state that CNN does not exercise the same kind of editorial control over the ads they run.
Cheers -b
Re:Football IP?
on
Superbowling
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So you didn't see any need for the (remember, youth) players to make relatively complex split-second decisions in that? Nevermind the jargon, look at the decision making and then tell me it's just a bunch of dumb guys knocking each other down.
You can think what you want, you're just wrong in this case. There *are* dumb football players, but they're in the minority and are never the stars. It's an amazingly complex game, though it certainly is easy to miss that, especially if you base opinions on stereotypes rather than an actual understanding of the game. Might as well say that chess is just a couple of morons pushing plastic things around a board.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and what's even crazier is international news coverage of some sick old guy in Italy.
It's almost like some people think that events can exist within a larger context, and that even smallish events could possibly have deeper meanings and impacts.
Pretty ridiculous, isn't it?
-b
The Quiet Earth. That whole mess started with a large scale wireless power initiative.
On the bright side, anyone who dies at the exact moment this stuff is deployed can look forward to an existance happily unmarred by traffic jams, cell phones in theatres, and income taxes.
Cheers
-b
...for about 5 years in the mid to late 90's. I started doing the testing on basic network equipment and graduated over time to oversee the testing methodology for every product comparison we ran.
I can tell you that, if the testers themselves are competent, it's a moot point. For instance, when testing server hardware by using a database application, I always insisted that the databases be identical and configured as identically as possible. Normal stumbling blocks were issues with stock disk sizes, but we always ensured that RAID configurations were as similar as possible within the realm of reason.
Testing is an art form. It requires a thorough and repeatable plan as well as a good bit of knowledge about real world usage of equipment and software (would it be realistic to enable a non-battery backed write cache on a raid controller in a database application?)
I can say that many, many vendors attempted to put one over on us. And it's entirely possible that I missed some of them, and they benefitted because of it. However, in general, professional test procedures should expose and nullify any sort of vendor tweakage of equipment or software.
Key principles for good testing:
- Set any basic configuration to manufacturer's public recommendations
- Don't let vendor representatives touch anything. If they need to send someone into the lab, allow them to recommend changes, and document all of those for later review / revocation
- If third party hardware/software is involved in a test, use the third party as a sounding board. If you're testing a layer 3 switch using streaming media, talk to the streaming media provider about realistic stream rates and usage patterns.
- If at all possible, wipe and reload vendor equipment and software. You should be looking at the setup process anyway, so that helps the test as well as helping to prevent shenanigans.
In short, good test procedures prevent, or at least mitigate, the kind of abuse in question. And, as consimers of reviews and tests, it's in all of our best interests to get educated and develop opinions about the competence, thoroughness, and honesty of any souce.
Cheers
-b
Are you suggesting that fiction is inherently damaging because people lack the capacity to distinguish it from reality? As with any "people are so stupid" argument, I'll only give you validity points if you're speaking for yourself. Do you have problems differentiation fiction from reality? Or are you just making this condescending generalization about everyone else?
Cheers
-b
...as opposed to the way it's just fine for children to be exposed to Star Wars, the Lion King, or the Love Boat without any understanding of their falseness?
And I'm not sure there's any more value to making generalizations about "most" porn than there is in making generalizations about "most" men, "most" blacks, or "most" Ukranians. If most of the porn you've seen is misogynistic, maybe you're largely watching misogynistic porn for some reason?
I hate this whole "I'm so smart that I can deal with porn, but the poor children are so stupid and impressionable that we need to protect them" argument. It's arrogant, condescending, and intellectually cheap, all at the same time.
And listen to this last sentence: you think porn is more harmful to children than violence. Now, either you think that seeing a Playboy centerfold is worse for a kid's health than being, oh, say, shot (!), or you that images of sexual activity are more harmful than images of brutality. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter, but even that's a totally ridiculous position. If media images and bad parenting can turn a good kid into a raving misogynist who has "bad attitudes" about sex, surely those same images can turn him into a brutal killer who has "bad attitudes" about conflict resolution. Either kids are morons who ape what they see in the media or they're not. Pick one, and stick with it.
Cheers
-b
Well, do you know what the Swiss laws against even mentioning undercover law enforcement agents are? Perhaps you're violating them now, and the FBI should raid slashdot.
That's the problem with the argument that every internet content provider is subject to the laws of every country on Earth.
And, yes, to the extent that the FBI has decided that its job is to protect foreign secret police rather than American citizens, it does reflect negatively on the Bush administration. Considering how often they oversimplify terrorism ("they hate us because we're free"), they sure don't seem very interested in actual freedom of the press. At least not when the press is anti-establishment... even against foreign establishments.
Cheers
-b
It's a clever idea, but current protocols wouldn't work at all, including bittorrent.
The moment that there's any kind of money or power (even social power) involved, there's a huge incentive for people to hack the system. Unless you're willing to wait for an entire 30? 60? 90? 120? minute broadcast to complete and be hash-verified against authenticated sources, you're going to have people who connect directly to the source and substitute their own (forged / humorous / slanderous / obscene) content in place of the actual broadcast.
In order for something like this to work, you'd need some method for clients to verify that the content they've received (and passed on!) is the content that the original source sent. And bang! You're right back to single points of failure and the slashdot effect. Sure, it's better to validate a hash than get a whole block, but it's still tough.
Not to say that it can't be done, but I don't believe it can be done in the current bittorrent distribution model for streaming content. I'd welcome correction on that, of course.
Cheers
-b
Yes, because if she were truly fair, she would be equally outraged by people expressing views that she supports. Er, wait...
That's a very interesting quote from the Constitution.
It seems to me that one could argue that the Constitution prohibits copyright terms that are generally expected to be longer than the author's lifetime. That is, if you grant someone rights for a "limited time," that the person in question should expect those rights to expire at some point.
Note that the Constitution is also clear that the rights are being granted to "authors and inventors," *not* their heirs, designees, estates, etc. If copyright were intended to be perpetual and handed down among generations and corporations, wouldn't the Constitution say that?
Cheers
-b
Nobody's complaining that Ars was first with it. The complaint is that this /. article is a cut-and-paste of the first paragraph of the Ars article, with the links changed so they don't go to Ars.
I don't think anyone would be complaining if the submitter had written their own summary of the eetimes article. What's lame is not only taking the entire submitted paragraph from another site without credit, but also removing the link *in* that paragraph to a previous Ars article.
Cheers
-b
Damn straight. How lame is it to submit a cut-and-paste paragraph, while changing the links so there's only one eetimes link and no arstechnica links? Not to mention not giving credit for where the cut-and-paste came from.
Cheers
-b
My guess is that InfoWorld is dynamically generating the RSS for each request. A simple host-side cache of the generated XML, so hits just talk to the HTTP server and not the app server, would probably make this a non-issue.
Or are they *really* getting more RSS hits than image requests? If -- somehow -- that's the case, spend $500/mo on Akamai or Speedera and point RSS stuff there, and give the CDN a reasonable timeout (30 minutes or something). That guarantees you no more than about 500 hits per timeout period, or maybe one every 10 seconds. Surely the app server can handle that.
Then again, what do I know? I only worked there for five years, including two on infoworld.com. It's been a few years, but unless things have changed dramatically, that is one messed up IT organization.
Cheers
-b
Yeah, because if you can keep a windsheild from cracking with a new coating, you must be able to reduce emissions by 30% with about the same amount of investment (and therefore final product cost increase).
Logic, people, logic.
-b
How is this different from FPGA's?
Thanks
-b
Like geekdom wasn't an expensive enough hobby already. Now your $15k household furnishings go obsolete in a few years, too.
Cheers
-b
I disagree on both counts. While I doubt that anyone is entering addresses manually, a (new) confirmed email address is worth about $0.10. Do you really think there aren't *any* coders in the entire world who would bother to automate a /. email scraper, because it would only make a couple of thousand dollars a month?
And, of course, such a scraper could easily monitor every board that runs on slashcode, not just slashdot.
Cheers
-b
Uh-huh, Mr. gidds@NOsPAm.cix.co.uk. You don't think the spammers regularly suck down all of /. and parse the email addresses? I would, if I were one of them. A *lot* of email addresses, and all you need is a human to look at the obfuscation system once a day.
Cheers
-b
I sure hope so. One of the defining (and refreshing) characterstics of geeks is their pragmatism. If, in 10 years, Microsoft is behaving decently and contributing to the computing community in a way similar to what IBM's doing today, sure, I'd be friendly towards them.
What's the alternative? Draw up a big list of "evil" companies who can never be redeemed for the sins of their past, and then hunker down and hate them for the rest of our lives? There probably wouldn't be many alternatives for IT products, let alone food and footwear, after a couple of decades.
Deal with it. Microsoft is *not* evil in some intrinsic, satanic sense. They're just doing evil and dishonest things. If that changes in the future, I for one will welcome them back into the fold.
Cheers
-b
With my organizational skills, a library is more expensive than just buying a hardcover in the first place.
Cheers
-b
Here's their list from last year. Me, I'd rather buy 4 good paperbacks than 1 hardcover, and I only found one book from the new list available in paperback (admittedly, I only looked for 20-25).
And someone rememeber to remind me to revisit this list next year.
Cheers
-b
In the absence of significant gravity, won't a significant amount of the force used to launch the harpoon serve to actually propel Rosetta *away* from the asteroid? Can someone explain what's to keep the harpoon from going "boink" against the comet and Rosetta from not just bouncing but actually being propelled into space by the harpoon launch?
Cheers
-b
Ok, I've started a mini-debate with that post. A quick Google turns up some evidence in my favor.
According to the article, in an abbreviated IQ test (50 questions) the average for football player's score is the same as the average for other professions. Of course, you'll note that the average for programmers is higher than the average for any particular position on the football field. But I wasn't asserting that football players are geniuses, just that the game requires a reasonable level of intelligence.
Cheers
-b
I partly agree. Football is unique in the sports world, though, because of it's play-by-play dynamic (you could argue the point for baseball, but the "plays" in baseball are much, much simpler). Coaches have an amazingly complex job of deciding, for each play, which players to put on the field and what play to call. Players, too, need to read the opposition and adjust not just athletically but also who to cover and whatnot.
There's certainly a run-time (har!) atheltic component, but there is also a very cerebral component that many players have to participate in (seeing, for instance, that the pre-snap motion on offense has overloaded one side of zone coverage and will leave a receiver uncovered... and then calling a timeout to prevent the play from starting).
I'm not saying it's chess-level, at least for the players, just that people who characterize it as devoid of intellectual participation are 1) wrong, and 2) engaging in stereotyping. It's like someone saying that top-notch programming doesn't involve intelligence because "you just tell the computer what to do and it does it." Only someone with a complete lack of understanding of the process would make such an assertion, and the same goes for football.
Show me someone who actually understands the game and who says that players are generally not smart and the game isn't intellectual, and I'll concede the point. You won't find someone like that, though. (No fair going back to the 1930's when that was closer to being true).
So it's a pet peeve. Deal with it.
Cheers
-b
Try running an add on CNN featuring full frontal nudity and see if they don't "censor" it. I think what the zealots mean is "...a channel that didn't decline to run *our* ad."
Every media outlet practices this kind of "censorship" (the quotes because actual censorship requires government involvement). Moveon is right to vote with their wallet and even to encourage a CBS boycott. They are wrong, however, to characterize CBS's refusal to run their ad as "censorship" or to state that CNN does not exercise the same kind of editorial control over the ads they run.
Cheers
-b
So you didn't see any need for the (remember, youth) players to make relatively complex split-second decisions in that? Nevermind the jargon, look at the decision making and then tell me it's just a bunch of dumb guys knocking each other down.
You can think what you want, you're just wrong in this case. There *are* dumb football players, but they're in the minority and are never the stars. It's an amazingly complex game, though it certainly is easy to miss that, especially if you base opinions on stereotypes rather than an actual understanding of the game. Might as well say that chess is just a couple of morons pushing plastic things around a board.
Cheers
-b