People use the word "addicted" as if it is an OK thing. By definition, an addiction is not OK.
If there is something that you do a lot, and you enjoy doing it, it's a hobby.
If you enjoy doing something, you do it a lot, it causes problems in your personal or social life, and you sometimes wish you could stop doing it (but you always seem to keep doing it), then it's an addiction (yes, this is a simplification, but there isn't room here for an entire phych textbook).
Internet and gaming addictions are very real. If your gaming has gone beyond a hobby and it's a problem for you, then I suggest you honestly look at the problem and take steps to fix it.
There are good books on the subject of internet and gaming addictions, and any mental health professional can help.
If you do this, you're probably setting yourself up as an ISP (after all, you are providing internet access to customers, and that's what an ISP does). Even if you don't think you're an ISP, your upstream provider might (and might have a clause in the DSL contract you signed about not re-selling the service).
Also, the description of "common carrier" says "... usually subject to regulation by Federal and state regulatory commissions". You can't claim "common carrier" immunity without also paying attention to your responsibilities.
What are you going to do when the feds arrive and say someone released the latest $1 billion virus from your IP address, and can they please see your records so they know who was connected at 22:53 on June 4th, 2004?
You would be wise to get legal advice (and not the kind you get from Slashdot) to determine what your liability is and what your responsibilities are, both to your upstream ISP and to the state and federal regulatory commissions.
It may be that the $10 that Starbucks charges is mostly to cover the record-keeping costs, the "allow the feds to wiretap" costs, and all the other legal requirements of an ISP.
Or, you could ignore the legal implications and just hope and pray that nothing goes wrong. I expect that is exactly what all the other free wi-fi providers are doing.
Well, I know that in the./ world I'm going to be jumped on for saying this, but there may be some truth to it.
Obviously playing a video games does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like smoking one cigarette won't give the smoker cancer.
But I think the link is there. Repeatedly acting out realistic scenes of violence against realistic people must desensitize someone to violence, and that cannot be a good thing.
In my town we've just had our another case of a bunch of teenagers beating another student to death. I hate to sound like an old man, but what's going on here? "Back in my day", when you kicked the shit out of someone you didn't like in school, you would stop kicking once the person was lying down and not getting back up. Yes, people did get beaten on for having the wrong skin colour or for being in the wrong clique, but they didn't die as a result of the beatings.
I can't be certain why violence by kids is so much more serious now, but I think video games are at least part of the problem. Because they are interactive, they condition you to act out to harm others and that makes them a large part of the problem.
I think the games can be improved without radically changing them. The martial arts games could have a rule that if you hit your opponent while s/he was down, you forfeit the game. The game should be just as challenging and fun, but it would encourage a somewhat more sportsman-like attitude than the current "kick them until they stop moving" attitude.
When I was young and poor and stupid, I used to buy the cheapest equipment I could find, and then I would frequently berate myself when the quality turned out to be lousy and I needed to replace it shortly after buying it.
When I wanted to replace my old 14.4 modem, I decided I wasn't going to fall for that trap again. I wasn't going to buy a cheap clone. I was going to buy a brand name. I was going to pay extra for the security of knowing that it wasn't a compatable, it was the original. I bought a 56k internal Hayes modem. It cost a lot more, but it had a good guarentee and the brand name.
The modem was built before the 56K standard was offical, and they promised an upgrade to make it compatable when the eventual standard came out. The company folded before that happened.
Now I have a very expensive 56K modem that can only connect at 33.6 to any standard servers.
Re:Pffft .... Commander Keen
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Masters of Doom
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· Score: 1
What are you talking about? Keen was (and still is) the best game that ID ever produced. It was the last "fun" game, before getting into the (more popular, for reasons I'll never understand) "kill, blood, guts, and gore" games. Yes, the newer ID games have very realistic lighting in the dark corridors, and quite realistic blood when you blow somebody/something away. But what kind of sick person would get enjoyment out of watching someone bleed to death after you've shot them?
At the risk of being moderated Troll and Redundant, Why are these people posting Word Documents online?
The Word Wide Web is not the Microsoft Wide Web.
Post in plain ASCII text, or HTML if you feel the need to pretty it up.
People keep using tools that are far more powerful and complex than they need, then they screw up, and blame the tools. Pick a simple tool to do a simple job, and you don't need to worry about your ignorance of the tools you are using causing you problems.
This may be a surprise to a lot of IT workers, but most people aren't as smart as they think they are, and most bosses are smarter than their workers think the bosses are.
Instead of approaching the problem as "My idiot boss is doing something that I know is stupid", try approaching it as "I don't understand why my boss is doing this. I should learn."
It may turn out that your boss learns something from you. If so, you win because the boss now has a higher impression of you.
Or (more likely) you will learn more about the situation, and possibly understand why the boss made the decision s/he did. In which case, you still win, because learning is a good thing, and because your boss is impressed that you care enough to learn more than just the bare minimum of your job.
Finally, don't confuse subjective with objective. Many decisions are not clear-cut, and come down to subjective "better" or "more important" criteria. If your boss' opinion of the relative importance of two things differs from yours, then you two can make different decisions even with exactly the same facts. All you can do in this case is to try to understand why your boss ranks things that way (because, referring to the start of this post, chances are that the person with more experience and more success in the field has a better feeling for "more important" and "better").
What I'd like to know is: does he manage to profit from it?
It's actually not that hard. All you do is not own anything. Make sure that all your assets are actually owned by someone you trust (your SO, spouse, sibling, etc.). Then, you declare bankruptcy, and let the courts take everything you own (which is nothing).
Also, you live hand-to-mouth. When the money is rolling in, you buy expensive cars, live well, and lavish gifts on all people who are close to you. You don't save it, 'cause you know that the courts are going to take away your savings later. When the money stops rolling in, then you depend on your friends, SO, siblings for a while, as you dream up a new scam (business).
Basically, once you've accepted the fact that you aren't going to have good credit, then there is no fear of declaring bankruptcy.
For a certain kind of businessman, declaring bankruptcy is sort of like a fisherman deciding "All the fish here have been harvested, so it's time to pull up anchor and go somewhere else." In their minds, there's nothing immoral or embarrassing about it, it's just how they put food on the table.
The Auto Industry's conspiracy department had so much success accepting payback from the oil industry to not make fuel efficient cars that they have branched out into getting money from the RIAA to not make cars MP3-compatable.
There's always a big stink about convicted criminals elected or appointed to public office, and I think it's overblown.
There are two sort of people in the world: those who get things done, and those who sit on their buts and whine (about people getting things done or about people not getting things done).
The people who get things done occasionally fall on the wrong side of the law. Sometime it's because the law is stupid, sometimes it's because they make honest mistakes, sometimes because they are trying (in the name of efficiency and competition) to skirt as close to the edge as possible but they end up going over the edge. (Sometimes it's because they are truly evil psychopaths, but that's much more rare.)
In most cases, when these people break the law, they admit that they broke the law, they (sometimes) apologise, they change the way they're doing things, they pay the penalty (usually a fine), and then they move on with their lives, getting more stuff done.
The people who never even come close to breaking the law are the people who never take risks, and they are the people who don't get things done (at least not as much as they would if they took more risks).
The same argument applies when we wonder why a company would hire a CEO that has declared bankruptcy in the past. To be successful, you've got to take risks. And when you take risks, you have to accept that sometimes there will be failures. Taking a business into bankruptcy does not mean you're an incompetent CEO, it only means you are willing to take risks. And as long as the rest of your resume shows that your risks are usually smart, that makes you a good candidate.
To make a more mundane comparison, it's like downhill skiing. Every time I go skiing for a day, I fall at least once, and I consider it a day well spent. If I fall dozens of times, then I know I'm in over my head. If I never fall, it means I'm piddling along on the bunny slopes and I could take on the more challenging slopes. Falling once or twice tells me that I'm working right on the edge of my ability.
With the "eat your own dogfood" approach, I tolerate a much worse UI in apps I write than in commercial apps. This is for a few reasons: 1) Since I wrote it, I know how to use it, and other people's idea of "usability" isn't so important. 2) Open Source is often based on the "scratch your own itch" idea, namely that developers will fix bugs that bother them, or add the features that they want. With respect to setup and config, once I've got the program set up and configured -- no matter how hard it was -- it's not a problem anymore. That's why paramaters are hard-coded into code I write for my own use -- they are the way I want it, and it doesn't make my life any easier to use a config file. 3) Once the program does what I want it to do, it's good enough, and I'm likely to stop developing it. 4) I am my own user, so I'm sure that the code does exactly what I want. But I'm not normal, nor do I really care what a normal person wants. Commercial software is more concerned with doing what the "typical" or "average" user wants, and therefore must appeal to a wider range of people.
I've generally found that commercial software is better documented and easier to use and configure. On the other hand, free software often works better (once you manage to make it work). That's because, in general, free software develoeprs are more concerned with making it work, and commercial ones with making it sell.*
There are exceptions. There are some free software developers who are really interested in making something that many others can use and enjoy, and they put a lot of effort into broad usability. There are also some commercial-run free software groups (mozilla, openoffice) where there is a corporate push to make the products like commercial ones (well documented, easy to use, appeals to people other than the developers who wrote it). I expect that there are also commercial products that are more concerned with getting a job done than they are with selling a product, but I also expect they don't stay in business long.
*This is the paragraph designed to get the posting moderated as flamebait.
I have yet to see humans create something completely new that they cannot understand.
How about the economy? It's a completely human-created thing, and we have no idea how it works. There are tons of theories (at least 2 for each economist), but none of those theories are good enough to answer one simple question: "What will the stock market do next week?".
Oh, and complex software, too. Once you get 100 people writing code on the same project, there is no single person who understands it. You try to design it so that one person can understand one level of abstraction well enough, but you don't even try to have one person understand each and every line of code.
When I first saw that comment, I thought "Hah, of course not. It's exactly as secure, since it's identical code.". But after a moment or two of thinking, I realized that he's right.
A good working definition of "Secure" can be "does what the user expects it to do (and nothing else)".
With this definition, well-tested does mean more secure, simply because a well-tested bit of code is much less likely to surprise you.
... It's probably bad karma to reply to my own post, but what the heck!
I used the word "rectifier" without much of an explaination of what it is. This is mostly because I'm not an EE, and I don't know in great details what it does. In general terms, however, it's part of the system that takes the power from your alternator, and smoothes, polishes, and munges it into a form that's suitable for charging your bike's battery and powering your bike's electrical system. It normally generates heat (perhaps that's how it gets rid of excess energy?), which is why it has a heatsink attached to it. If you increase the bike's power usage, youu increase the amount of power going through it, which increases the heat. Which, as I said before, causes it to burn out and stop working after a few months of over-use.
When it stops working, you don't get charging power to your battery. Which means that after an hour or so, your battery is dead, and so is the bike.
Is there someone out there with some specific info about what you need to do if you want to safely increase the current load on your bike? Like "replace your AB-240 model thingy with a newer CD-999 model thingy ($22.96 at Radio Shack)"?
If not, maybe you can find a discussion list dedicated to your bike model, and there should be someone there who can tell you how to safely add electrical load to your bike without long-term damage.
When I do my motorcycle touring, I usually use the credit-card-camping technique (restraunts and motels). Motels provide a simple place to plug in the laptop overnight, and even in a restraunt you can get an hour or so of charging time while you eat.
I get the impression that you will be roughing it more than I do. But if you aren't using the laptop much, you won't need much charging time. So you may be able to get away with finding somewhere to plug it in every few days, and not worry about overloading your bike's electrical.
Which brings me to my second point. If you are going to install any extra electrical on your bike, I suggest you talk to your mechanic about replacing your bike's rectifier with a stronger one. I don't know how good or bad your bike's electrical system is, but I do know that on my bike, adding any electrical load (including extra-bright lights) will cause the rectifier to burn out after a few months use.
I tried to look up "kleenex" in my dictionary, and it's not there. But I did find this: "klaxon: n a type of loud horn used on fire engines... [former trademark]"
How many of you knew that a klaxon refers to a specific brand of horn, and not to just any annoying horn?
As someone who's spent several years managing programmers, I can tell you this: the number one cause of bad programs is poor programmers. I find that good programmers write good code, regardless of the language. And bad programmers write bad code, also regardless of the language.
Now, to give you some ammo for your religious war: Strong typing is for weak minds. If your friend doesn't have the mental decipline to keep track of his types, he's welcome to use the Java compilier as a crutch to do it for him. If you know what you're doing, you don't need any smart-assed compiler trying to tell you what you're doing.
My compromise between fun and fuel is to ride a bike. My bike's engine is not quite as big as my car's engine (850 vs 1000 cc, respectively).
I ride the bike places when I want to arrive smiling, and I drive the car when I want to get there warm and dry.
I know that if I wanted to be as fuel-efficient as possible I could replace the bike with a tiny moped-like thing, but what I have now is more fun than a big-ass car, and more fuel-efficient than a tiny econobox, so I figure it's a win-win solution.
If you really care about what's in the agreement, then I respectfully suggest that slashdot isn't the best place to get legal advice. I would either sign it if I didn't care, or spend a hundred bucks talking to a lawyer about exactly what should be (and shouldn't be) in the contract before I signed it. Yes, it's expensive. But the free advice you get from slashdot is probably worth every penny you're paying for it. Try to find a lawyer who specializes in employment law, of course.
I had saved over 100 MB of detailed reliability statistics for all sorts of hard drives for the last 15 years. Unfortunately, I was keeping them on an IBM hard drive, and it failed last week. Sorry.
What?!?!? What kind of Econ-101 textbook did this come from? Maybe "exploiting economies of scale" is important to some business professor, but real businesses are in business for one reason: to make money. Lots of money.
Using capital more efficiently is based on the idea that the business people are motivated by society's greater good. Making lots of money is based on the idea that business people are motivated by their own personal need/greed.
While I don't particularly like greed, history has shown that the economic system based on greed has worked much better than the one based on society's greater good.
I think it depends a lot on the discovery, and the preparation that society needs to do. For example, I wouldn't worry too much about a new super-weapon, since we've already got lots of really deadly weapons, and we (sort of) manage to not destroy ourselves with them.
The time-travel case is logically impossible (to my simple logic, at any rate), and I can't think of how society would prepare for it anyway. So I'd just let loose.
The new energy source sounds like it would be good, and the disadvantages (widespread unemployment in the oil business) would not be affected by the timing of the release of the info, they would be affected by the timing of the implementation (which would take quite a while anyway).
Discovering an algorithm to factor really large (non-prime) numbers in time proportional to the size of the numbers e.g. O(log(n)) time, would be a more interesting case. If you could factor a 8192-bit composite number into two 4096-bit primes in a second or less, that would render RSA encryption obsolete, and I suspect it might obsolete other encryption algorithms, too.
In that case, I would:
Create a black-box demonstration device, to prove that I do have the algorithm. Invite people to send me large composite numbers, and I'll send them back the factors. Don't bother coding a full crack of RSA, since the cryptographers will understand that this means RSA is effectively dead. This is needed because if everyone simply thinks I'm a crackpot, then the warning would be ignored.
Set a fairly short time frame. After all, if I've figured it out, there's a good chance someone else would. And that someone else might elect to keep the knowledge secret, and simply profit by being able to crack RSA (somehow I think this would be really helpful in banking fraud).
Make several copies of the black box and instructions. Take each copy to a different "well-respected" law firm, with instructions to deliver it to a different destination after (e.g.) two months. I might also even try UPS and/or FedEx, but only as a decoy (since they are such an obvious target).
I'd have the timed packages delivered to:
ACM
EFF
NSA/CSIS (of course, they will already have it before the delivery, I'm just being polite!)
some mathematics journals
department head of math at several universities
Clean off all the pirated software and pr0n from my computer. You just know that shortly after I prove I have this algorithm, every computer I've ever touched will be in the hands of a three-letter government agency.:-)
Announce to the world that I can factor huge composite numbers (via slashdot and comp.sci.math), and invite people to e-mail me (or publicly post) the product of two huge primes. Announce my intention to publish the details in N days.
Publish the factors.
Wait for all hell to break loose.
Never again visit the friendly U. S. of A., because I'll be thrown in jail for violating the DMCA.
The question is: how long is long enough? If you go for too short of time before disclosure, then the banks and everyone else don't have a chance to update their software. If you go for too long a time, then organized crime and various governments will have lots of time to take the technology away from you and use it against society.
Tom makes a very good point, and he gives some good advice (although he may have intended it to be sarcasm).
I was going to reply to kwishot's post by saying "... and who is this Elizabeth Smart person anyway?", because I've never heard of her.
The reason for this is that I don't pay attention to (or money for) commercial news. It's too biased and untrustworthy (and usually too American-centric). I get all my news from the taxpayer-funded CBC. I realize that it has it's own bias, and I sure can't trust it to report fairly on the government that's paying for it, but I think they are far more likely to be motivated by "news" instead of "market" then the commercial news outlets.
So, you should take his advice. Set your dial to NPR or PBS (or BBC, or CBC, or any other non-commercially funded news source), and maybe you will get a slightly less market-biased new feed.
Slashdot Mirror
People use the word "addicted" as if it is an OK thing. By definition, an addiction is not OK.
If there is something that you do a lot, and you enjoy doing it, it's a hobby.
If you enjoy doing something, you do it a lot, it causes problems in your personal or social life, and you sometimes wish you could stop doing it (but you always seem to keep doing it), then it's an addiction (yes, this is a simplification, but there isn't room here for an entire phych textbook).
Internet and gaming addictions are very real. If your gaming has gone beyond a hobby and it's a problem for you, then I suggest you honestly look at the problem and take steps to fix it.
There are good books on the subject of internet and gaming addictions, and any mental health professional can help.
If you do this, you're probably setting yourself up as an ISP (after all, you are providing internet access to customers, and that's what an ISP does). Even if you don't think you're an ISP, your upstream provider might (and might have a clause in the DSL contract you signed about not re-selling the service).
Also, the description of "common carrier" says "... usually subject to regulation by Federal and state regulatory commissions". You can't claim "common carrier" immunity without also paying attention to your responsibilities.
What are you going to do when the feds arrive and say someone released the latest $1 billion virus from your IP address, and can they please see your records so they know who was connected at 22:53 on June 4th, 2004?
You would be wise to get legal advice (and not the kind you get from Slashdot) to determine what your liability is and what your responsibilities are, both to your upstream ISP and to the state and federal regulatory commissions.
It may be that the $10 that Starbucks charges is mostly to cover the record-keeping costs, the "allow the feds to wiretap" costs, and all the other legal requirements of an ISP.
Or, you could ignore the legal implications and just hope and pray that nothing goes wrong. I expect that is exactly what all the other free wi-fi providers are doing.
Well, I know that in the ./ world I'm going to be jumped on for saying this, but there may be some truth to it.
Obviously playing a video games does not guarantee the player will become homicidal. Just like smoking one cigarette won't give the smoker cancer.
But I think the link is there. Repeatedly acting out realistic scenes of violence against realistic people must desensitize someone to violence, and that cannot be a good thing.
In my town we've just had our another case of a bunch of teenagers beating another student to death. I hate to sound like an old man, but what's going on here? "Back in my day", when you kicked the shit out of someone you didn't like in school, you would stop kicking once the person was lying down and not getting back up. Yes, people did get beaten on for having the wrong skin colour or for being in the wrong clique, but they didn't die as a result of the beatings.
I can't be certain why violence by kids is so much more serious now, but I think video games are at least part of the problem. Because they are interactive, they condition you to act out to harm others and that makes them a large part of the problem.
I think the games can be improved without radically changing them. The martial arts games could have a rule that if you hit your opponent while s/he was down, you forfeit the game. The game should be just as challenging and fun, but it would encourage a somewhat more sportsman-like attitude than the current "kick them until they stop moving" attitude.
When I was young and poor and stupid, I used to buy the cheapest equipment I could find, and then I would frequently berate myself when the quality turned out to be lousy and I needed to replace it shortly after buying it.
When I wanted to replace my old 14.4 modem, I decided I wasn't going to fall for that trap again. I wasn't going to buy a cheap clone. I was going to buy a brand name. I was going to pay extra for the security of knowing that it wasn't a compatable, it was the original. I bought a 56k internal Hayes modem. It cost a lot more, but it had a good guarentee and the brand name.
The modem was built before the 56K standard was offical, and they promised an upgrade to make it compatable when the eventual standard came out. The company folded before that happened.
Now I have a very expensive 56K modem that can only connect at 33.6 to any standard servers.
What are you talking about? Keen was (and still is) the best game that ID ever produced. It was the last "fun" game, before getting into the (more popular, for reasons I'll never understand) "kill, blood, guts, and gore" games.
Yes, the newer ID games have very realistic lighting in the dark corridors, and quite realistic blood when you blow somebody/something away. But what kind of sick person would get enjoyment out of watching someone bleed to death after you've shot them?
... then suffer foot wounds.
At the risk of being moderated Troll and Redundant,
Why are these people posting Word Documents online?
The Word Wide Web is not the Microsoft Wide Web.
Post in plain ASCII text, or HTML if you feel the need to pretty it up.
People keep using tools that are far more powerful and complex than they need, then they screw up, and blame the tools. Pick a simple tool to do a simple job, and you don't need to worry about your ignorance of the tools you are using causing you problems.
This may be a surprise to a lot of IT workers, but most people aren't as smart as they think they are, and most bosses are smarter than their workers think the bosses are.
Instead of approaching the problem as "My idiot boss is doing something that I know is stupid", try approaching it as "I don't understand why my boss is doing this. I should learn."
It may turn out that your boss learns something from you. If so, you win because the boss now has a higher impression of you.
Or (more likely) you will learn more about the situation, and possibly understand why the boss made the decision s/he did. In which case, you still win, because learning is a good thing, and because your boss is impressed that you care enough to learn more than just the bare minimum of your job.
Finally, don't confuse subjective with objective. Many decisions are not clear-cut, and come down to subjective "better" or "more important" criteria. If your boss' opinion of the relative importance of two things differs from yours, then you two can make different decisions even with exactly the same facts. All you can do in this case is to try to understand why your boss ranks things that way (because, referring to the start of this post, chances are that the person with more experience and more success in the field has a better feeling for "more important" and "better").
It's actually not that hard. All you do is not own anything. Make sure that all your assets are actually owned by someone you trust (your SO, spouse, sibling, etc.). Then, you declare bankruptcy, and let the courts take everything you own (which is nothing).
Also, you live hand-to-mouth. When the money is rolling in, you buy expensive cars, live well, and lavish gifts on all people who are close to you. You don't save it, 'cause you know that the courts are going to take away your savings later. When the money stops rolling in, then you depend on your friends, SO, siblings for a while, as you dream up a new scam (business).
Basically, once you've accepted the fact that you aren't going to have good credit, then there is no fear of declaring bankruptcy.
For a certain kind of businessman, declaring bankruptcy is sort of like a fisherman deciding "All the fish here have been harvested, so it's time to pull up anchor and go somewhere else." In their minds, there's nothing immoral or embarrassing about it, it's just how they put food on the table.
Insightful? Two people modded this as "insightful"?
People, I was joking! The parent post is not insightful, it's [-1, Sarcastic]. I'm making fun of all the conspiracy theorists!
(This posting should be modded [-1, Redundant]. Any other modding will result in further criticism.)
The Auto Industry's conspiracy department had so much success accepting payback from the oil industry to not make fuel efficient cars that they have branched out into getting money from the RIAA to not make cars MP3-compatable.
There's always a big stink about convicted criminals elected or appointed to public office, and I think it's overblown.
There are two sort of people in the world: those who get things done, and those who sit on their buts and whine (about people getting things done or about people not getting things done).
The people who get things done occasionally fall on the wrong side of the law. Sometime it's because the law is stupid, sometimes it's because they make honest mistakes, sometimes because they are trying (in the name of efficiency and competition) to skirt as close to the edge as possible but they end up going over the edge. (Sometimes it's because they are truly evil psychopaths, but that's much more rare.)
In most cases, when these people break the law, they admit that they broke the law, they (sometimes) apologise, they change the way they're doing things, they pay the penalty (usually a fine), and then they move on with their lives, getting more stuff done.
The people who never even come close to breaking the law are the people who never take risks, and they are the people who don't get things done (at least not as much as they would if they took more risks).
The same argument applies when we wonder why a company would hire a CEO that has declared bankruptcy in the past. To be successful, you've got to take risks. And when you take risks, you have to accept that sometimes there will be failures. Taking a business into bankruptcy does not mean you're an incompetent CEO, it only means you are willing to take risks. And as long as the rest of your resume shows that your risks are usually smart, that makes you a good candidate.
To make a more mundane comparison, it's like downhill skiing. Every time I go skiing for a day, I fall at least once, and I consider it a day well spent. If I fall dozens of times, then I know I'm in over my head. If I never fall, it means I'm piddling along on the bunny slopes and I could take on the more challenging slopes. Falling once or twice tells me that I'm working right on the edge of my ability.
Those who never fail aren't trying hard enough.
While I agree, I'd also disagree a bit.
With the "eat your own dogfood" approach, I tolerate a much worse UI in apps I write than in commercial apps. This is for a few reasons:
1) Since I wrote it, I know how to use it, and other people's idea of "usability" isn't so important.
2) Open Source is often based on the "scratch your own itch" idea, namely that developers will fix bugs that bother them, or add the features that they want. With respect to setup and config, once I've got the program set up and configured -- no matter how hard it was -- it's not a problem anymore. That's why paramaters are hard-coded into code I write for my own use -- they are the way I want it, and it doesn't make my life any easier to use a config file.
3) Once the program does what I want it to do, it's good enough, and I'm likely to stop developing it.
4) I am my own user, so I'm sure that the code does exactly what I want. But I'm not normal, nor do I really care what a normal person wants. Commercial software is more concerned with doing what the "typical" or "average" user wants, and therefore must appeal to a wider range of people.
I've generally found that commercial software is better documented and easier to use and configure. On the other hand, free software often works better (once you manage to make it work). That's because, in general, free software develoeprs are more concerned with making it work, and commercial ones with making it sell.*
There are exceptions. There are some free software developers who are really interested in making something that many others can use and enjoy, and they put a lot of effort into broad usability. There are also some commercial-run free software groups (mozilla, openoffice) where there is a corporate push to make the products like commercial ones (well documented, easy to use, appeals to people other than the developers who wrote it). I expect that there are also commercial products that are more concerned with getting a job done than they are with selling a product, but I also expect they don't stay in business long.
*This is the paragraph designed to get the posting moderated as flamebait.
How about the economy? It's a completely human-created thing, and we have no idea how it works. There are tons of theories (at least 2 for each economist), but none of those theories are good enough to answer one simple question: "What will the stock market do next week?".
Oh, and complex software, too. Once you get 100 people writing code on the same project, there is no single person who understands it. You try to design it so that one person can understand one level of abstraction well enough, but you don't even try to have one person understand each and every line of code.
When I first saw that comment, I thought "Hah, of course not. It's exactly as secure, since it's identical code.". But after a moment or two of thinking, I realized that he's right.
A good working definition of "Secure" can be "does what the user expects it to do (and nothing else)".
With this definition, well-tested does mean more secure, simply because a well-tested bit of code is much less likely to surprise you.
... It's probably bad karma to reply to my own post, but what the heck!
I used the word "rectifier" without much of an explaination of what it is. This is mostly because I'm not an EE, and I don't know in great details what it does. In general terms, however, it's part of the system that takes the power from your alternator, and smoothes, polishes, and munges it into a form that's suitable for charging your bike's battery and powering your bike's electrical system. It normally generates heat (perhaps that's how it gets rid of excess energy?), which is why it has a heatsink attached to it. If you increase the bike's power usage, youu increase the amount of power going through it, which increases the heat. Which, as I said before, causes it to burn out and stop working after a few months of over-use.
When it stops working, you don't get charging power to your battery. Which means that after an hour or so, your battery is dead, and so is the bike.
Is there someone out there with some specific info about what you need to do if you want to safely increase the current load on your bike? Like "replace your AB-240 model thingy with a newer CD-999 model thingy ($22.96 at Radio Shack)"?
If not, maybe you can find a discussion list dedicated to your bike model, and there should be someone there who can tell you how to safely add electrical load to your bike without long-term damage.
When I do my motorcycle touring, I usually use the credit-card-camping technique (restraunts and motels). Motels provide a simple place to plug in the laptop overnight, and even in a restraunt you can get an hour or so of charging time while you eat.
I get the impression that you will be roughing it more than I do. But if you aren't using the laptop much, you won't need much charging time. So you may be able to get away with finding somewhere to plug it in every few days, and not worry about overloading your bike's electrical.
Which brings me to my second point. If you are going to install any extra electrical on your bike, I suggest you talk to your mechanic about replacing your bike's rectifier with a stronger one. I don't know how good or bad your bike's electrical system is, but I do know that on my bike, adding any electrical load (including extra-bright lights) will cause the rectifier to burn out after a few months use.
I tried to look up "kleenex" in my dictionary, and it's not there. But I did find this: "klaxon: n a type of loud horn used on fire engines ... [former trademark]"
How many of you knew that a klaxon refers to a specific brand of horn, and not to just any annoying horn?
As someone who's spent several years managing programmers, I can tell you this: the number one cause of bad programs is poor programmers. I find that good programmers write good code, regardless of the language. And bad programmers write bad code, also regardless of the language.
Now, to give you some ammo for your religious war: Strong typing is for weak minds. If your friend doesn't have the mental decipline to keep track of his types, he's welcome to use the Java compilier as a crutch to do it for him. If you know what you're doing, you don't need any smart-assed compiler trying to tell you what you're doing.
My compromise between fun and fuel is to ride a bike. My bike's engine is not quite as big as my car's engine (850 vs 1000 cc, respectively).
I ride the bike places when I want to arrive smiling, and I drive the car when I want to get there warm and dry.
I know that if I wanted to be as fuel-efficient as possible I could replace the bike with a tiny moped-like thing, but what I have now is more fun than a big-ass car, and more fuel-efficient than a tiny econobox, so I figure it's a win-win solution.
It is about a pig farmer who is accused of murdering ... (that's why we have these silly things called "trials").
Also, there's been no offical news to justify the "... and fed them to his pigs" statement.
If you really care about what's in the agreement, then I respectfully suggest that slashdot isn't the best place to get legal advice.
I would either sign it if I didn't care, or spend a hundred bucks talking to a lawyer about exactly what should be (and shouldn't be) in the contract before I signed it.
Yes, it's expensive. But the free advice you get from slashdot is probably worth every penny you're paying for it.
Try to find a lawyer who specializes in employment law, of course.
I had saved over 100 MB of detailed reliability statistics for all sorts of hard drives for the last 15 years. Unfortunately, I was keeping them on an IBM hard drive, and it failed last week. Sorry.
What?!?!? What kind of Econ-101 textbook did this come from? Maybe "exploiting economies of scale" is important to some business professor, but real businesses are in business for one reason: to make money. Lots of money.
Using capital more efficiently is based on the idea that the business people are motivated by society's greater good. Making lots of money is based on the idea that business people are motivated by their own personal need/greed.
While I don't particularly like greed, history has shown that the economic system based on greed has worked much better than the one based on society's greater good.
I think it depends a lot on the discovery, and the preparation that society needs to do. For example, I wouldn't worry too much about a new super-weapon, since we've already got lots of really deadly weapons, and we (sort of) manage to not destroy ourselves with them.
The time-travel case is logically impossible (to my simple logic, at any rate), and I can't think of how society would prepare for it anyway. So I'd just let loose.
The new energy source sounds like it would be good, and the disadvantages (widespread unemployment in the oil business) would not be affected by the timing of the release of the info, they would be affected by the timing of the implementation (which would take quite a while anyway).
Discovering an algorithm to factor really large (non-prime) numbers in time proportional to the size of the numbers e.g. O(log(n)) time, would be a more interesting case. If you could factor a 8192-bit composite number into two 4096-bit primes in a second or less, that would render RSA encryption obsolete, and I suspect it might obsolete other encryption algorithms, too.
In that case, I would:
The question is: how long is long enough? If you go for too short of time before disclosure, then the banks and everyone else don't have a chance to update their software. If you go for too long a time, then organized crime and various governments will have lots of time to take the technology away from you and use it against society.
Tom makes a very good point, and he gives some good advice (although he may have intended it to be sarcasm).
I was going to reply to kwishot's post by saying "... and who is this Elizabeth Smart person anyway?", because I've never heard of her.
The reason for this is that I don't pay attention to (or money for) commercial news. It's too biased and untrustworthy (and usually too American-centric). I get all my news from the taxpayer-funded CBC. I realize that it has it's own bias, and I sure can't trust it to report fairly on the government that's paying for it, but I think they are far more likely to be motivated by "news" instead of "market" then the commercial news outlets.
So, you should take his advice. Set your dial to NPR or PBS (or BBC, or CBC, or any other non-commercially funded news source), and maybe you will get a slightly less market-biased new feed.