And how are they going to prove that you deleted the data, not the person who sold you the camera?
I agree that it's an ugly situation, but if we take this line of paranoia to extremes, then you should never ever buy any second hand gear, because it might once have had classified material on it, and the gov't might trace the sale to you and assume that you're the one who deleted the data and toss you in Gitmo.
Wrong! "Their" as a singular pronoun is not improper (and there are scholars who are fans of, e.g. Jane Austen who will slap you silly for suggesting that it is). These days, it is, at best, informal, and many consider it colloquial and ugly, but no one who actually studies the language would suggest that it's improper. Awkward, distasteful and best avoided, maybe, but not improper. (Note: middle-school English teachers are not generally considered to be among the set of people who actually study the language.)
Its use is controversial (to put it mildly), and I don't think anyone would suggest that it should be used in formal writing, but only the ignorant claim that it's wrong. (See also: split infinitive.)
Possibly, or possibly they're trying to protect their own interests, much as Red Hat was when they preemptively sued SCO.
to attract attention to their terrible company
Ah yes, we all know that companies never change: IBM is still a hostile predator who refuses to acknowledge any software that wasn't developed in-house. They'd never in a million years consider supporting something as alien as Linux.
The nineties called and want their whine back (as well as their stale "decade X called and wants its Y back" joke).:)
I find it ironic when Windows users whine about Real (and in my experience, it's only Windows users that whine about Real). Everything they complain about in Real is among the reasons I stopped using... er, actually, never really started using... Windows. What's the difference between MS and Real? Real's main product is 90% open source, they actively support the community development efforts, their software has been bundled with Debian for years (at least, the 90% which meet the DFSG), they actively support Linux, and they seem to have made a massive effort to change their corporate culture since they hit rock-bottom in the early part of this decade (not unlike how IBM changed after bottoming out after the PS2 disaster). But some people can't forget the fact that they once saw an ad ten years ago, so Real will be evil forever. Dumbasses!:)
When SCO was going around saying they were going to sue Linux users for vague, unspecified "IP" claims, Red Hat preemptively sued SCO, telling them, essentially, to put-up-or-shut-up about their claims.
The tests will tell you if you broke anything they test in a way they test for.
You're still going too far. The tests will tell you if you broke anything they test in a way they correctly test for.
You can be confident in the knowledge that the tests do indeed test the changes you're trying to make, and discover (after much hair-pulling) that your changes now tickle an obscure bug in the tests. This may result in the tests claiming your code is broken when it's not (the good case) or that your code works properly when it doesn't (the evil case).
Of course, we were supposed to assume that we're dealing with good tests. Heck, if we're going to assume impossible things, why not assume that the code works in the first place, so it doesn't need testing!:)
I'm a big fan of testing, especially automated unit tests and regression tests, because they mean that you need to make two matching errors to actually let an error slip through. But I also don't assume that "pass the tests" == "working code". You still need to make readable, maintainable code so that when the whole thing blows up in your face, you still have a slight chance of being able to fix it.
My biggest complaint about the whole TDD crowd is that they seem to think it doesn't matter of the code is maintainable--as long as it passes the tests, it's magically ok. Like a lot of movements, TDD/XP/Agile is a collection of good ideas being marketed as a silver bullet. TANSB.:)
Yeah, that's the thing that gets me about the whole "moon-landing-was-faked" thing. Do these idiots really think Russia was just going to take the US's word for it? And that was back when only really the Superpowers and a few of their best buddies would have had the technology to track the mission. These days, I'll bet that Luxembourg and Sri Lanka have the ability to confirm or deny the success of the launch on their own.
Sheesh, it's free/libre/open source these days, so the only thing that's likely to kill it is...well, honestly, I can't think of anything. If FLOSS were easy to kill, BSD and Linux would both already be dead. Anyway, I really don't care all that much what's under the hood as long as the userspace is GNU. GNU/{Linux,BSD,Solaris} are all good enough for me. No, it's not because I'm a freedom fanatic; it's because GNU software is top quality. In fact, I tend to think that GNU/Solaris would be my ideal system.
the GNU toolkit that Stallman near single-handedly wrote.
Um, I think Roland McGrath might take exception to that. Anyway, some might argue that BSD was already pretty well established by the time the GNU project started, and GNU definitely leveraged BSD, even if it didn't use it directly. BSD could arguably be considered the first really major international "open source" project, and guess where it started?:)
(Yes, I realize I'm mostly agreeing with you. I'm just quibbling over the details. Kudos on tracking down the starting date for SHARE, though, which my stepfather was a regular attendee of.)
I've got no sympathy for either side in this one. The guy is clearly an asshat who is a hair's-breadth short of being a pure domain-squatting subhuman scum. The fact that he went out and registered a bunch of {city}{olympic-year} domains makes that clear. His only minor possible redeeming feature is that he doesn't appear to be in this for the money. But if he gets away with this crap, the next one will be!
And in this corner, weighing in at the proverbial 2000 pounds, we have the extremely offensive, litigious bastards at the IOC who deserve to lose every trademark they can for dumping all over the Special Oly^H^H^HGames, among many, many other things. If they win, it's going to be a tragedy for everyone who has a legitimate, established domain that happens to conflict with some brand-new just-imagined trademark.
I only see one way out. We have to kill everyone involved. The IOC, the Chicago bidders, the guy with the domain, ICANN, the rest of the population of Chicago, everyone who lives in a city that has or will ever bid on the Olympics, everyone with a computer, everyone with a trademark, everyone with a name...kill 'em all! It's the only way to be sure!:)
If you don't like testing, perhaps its because you are insecure about your abilities to get the job done.
Alternative option: maybe you're a prima donna who doesn't work well with others. In my experience, it's almost always one or the other.
That said, there are plenty of places that have incompetent testing. Consider the testing to be two-way. If they're asking stupid questions or administering the tests in a stupid way, then you probably don't want to work there. On the other hand, if they're not asking any questions, then they're probably infiltrated with incompetents already and you don't want to work there. If HR is asking you programming questions, or giving you a form with programming questions on it, flee. If some of the top developers are asking you basic programming questions, then you might want to work there.
If you're at all competent, the questions they ask should tell you as much about the company as the answers will tell the company about you. The questions I was asked while interviewing (and how I was asked them) were a big factor in my decision to accept my current position.
Fair enough. The "scientists-say" factor in reporting is always annoying. Compared to the "scientists [read: one biologist with crackpot theories of physics] say that the LHC may destroy the world" reporting we've already seen recently, this seems pretty innocuous. Still, it never hurts to point out when someone's speculating in advance of the evidence. I think it's going a little far to say "that's not science", but I suppose that if that's what it takes to get the point across, no harm done.:)
Ah yes. Speculation (also known as "forming a hypothesis") is clearly not any part of science. So glad you could point that out.:)
I agree, this one seems fairly ad hoc, but that doesn't mean it can't be tested by examining the evidence in light of this hypothesis. And I would have to say that your examples seem cherry-picked, since you left out: atomic theory, continental drift, relativity, speciation, neutrinos, Technicium, and much much more. Its true that random speculation (and its complement, serendipity) are not the best approaches to science, but they can be fruitful.
Of course, I didn't RTFA. If TFA presented this as a fact rather than as speculation, then you've got a valid beef, but I would tend to suspect that the fault lies with the reporter in that case, not the speculator who, it must be admitted, did come up with an interesting hypothesis, if not a very solid one.
Now there's a dumb comment. I don't like stupid black people or stupid Asian people or stupid Jewish people or stupid Muslims or stupid white people or stupid programmers or stupid...anything. Nothing to do with the race, skin color, religion, gender, sexual preference or whatever: I just don't like stupid people.
I have absolutely nothing against religious people per se, but for some reason the ones in the US are letting the stupidest among them dominate the political debate, and that fills me with some contempt even for the smart ones. Speak out and make it clear that being religious doesn't automatically make you an idiot, or the idiots will be the only thing the rest of us see and associate with your religion!
And by "speak out", I don't mean whine about how people are starting to assume that all US Xtians are idiots. Stand up and tell the idiots in your creed what idiots they're being. Publicly. Tell them that they're making a mockery of your religion. That'll earn you my respect.
Yes it does. The fact that "begs the question" with no object has a special meaning in logic doesn't change the common English meaning of those words. The special meaning of "begs the question" to refer to circular reasoning really only applies (and only can apply) where there is no question provided to demonstrate what is being begged.
Yes, I know you just wanted to show off how smart you were by demonstrating that you knew of a special meaning for the phrase "begs the question". That begs the question: does a random piece of knowledge actually make you smart? I'd suggest that the answer to that is: no, but I came to that conclusion by assuming that someone trying to show off their pedantry without understanding what they're talking about must be an idiot, which begs the question.:)
Actually, you just have to enable it. See http://bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html. They don't enable it by default or advertise the feature in order to mollify the networks, but it's still there.
The rest of your post I basically agree with, but I thought I should pass that tip along.
And if the original compiler was gcc, and trojaned in the way the paper describes, then the triple compilation wouldn't catch it.
But given the significant, massive changes that have been made to gcc over the years (not to mention all the other compilers that have been used to build it), the hack that the paper describes would need to involve hard-AI beyond what we have been able to achieve, and would probably take weeks to complete a single pass of compilation on the typical sort of machine used to compile gcc.
Systems were smaller, simpler, and hadn't been evolving for as many years (or had as many major components rewritten from scratch) back in the days Thompson wrote that paper.
(I built gcc with a C interpreter once, and then used the interpreted gcc to compile gcc. I did it mostly as a stress test of the interpreter, but it also served as a quick check for Thompson's trojan, which I didn't find--not that I was expecting to for the reasons cited above.)
You are correct about the purpose of the triple compilation, though. Trying to catch Thompson's hack that way would be pointless both because it wouldn't detect the hack and because the hack is no longer practical.
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
cosmic rays move fast and don't hang around the earth.
And they collide with bodies throughout the universe--not just the Earth. The universe is big. If these sort of collisions really created Hawking-radiation-proof mini-black-holes, the universe would be so full of them that we'd be swatting them away like flies. And while they may start out fast, after a few hundred million years, many will have slowed down appreciably.
But heck, why let a little common sense interfere with a good paranoid doomsday scenario? Doomsday scenarios sell better.:)
Being able to deal with extreme conditions imposes a cost on a species in terms of the biological machinery necessary to survive those conditions. Under mild conditions, such species are often out-competed by less hardy species...
Careful there. You're going to destroy people's delusions that evolution is some sort of absolute linear scale, with "more evolved" creatures always beating the "less evolved". Without nonsense notions like "the ladder of evolution" climbing ever upwards. how will eugenicists and social darwinists spread their creeds?:)
If the only way to be literally "more evolved" is to have a faster reproduction rate and/or use an r-selection reproductive strategy, then humans aren't the pinnacle of creati^H^H^H^H^H^Hevolution (in fact, cockroaches would rank higher), and we can't allow thinking like that, now, can we?
- The JFS in Linux is based on the JFS from OS/2, which was not based (except conceptually) on anything earlier. - The original JFS from AIX is dead, and has been replaced in AIX with a port of the JFS from OS/2.
you must realize that there are NO 'large parts' of OS/2 that have been open sourced.
That may be mostly true, but JFS is an exception to that rule. It was OS/2's JFS that was open-sourced, not AIX's.
Yeah, there's only a little over 20,000 precompiled MIPS packages here. (Well, technically, somewhere in here, with an index located here.) I tend to think that 20,000+ is a little bit more than zero, but maybe that's just me.:)
Slashdot Mirror
And how are they going to prove that you deleted the data, not the person who sold you the camera?
I agree that it's an ugly situation, but if we take this line of paranoia to extremes, then you should never ever buy any second hand gear, because it might once have had classified material on it, and the gov't might trace the sale to you and assume that you're the one who deleted the data and toss you in Gitmo.
The masculine pronoun is the proper default
Wrong! "Their" as a singular pronoun is not improper (and there are scholars who are fans of, e.g. Jane Austen who will slap you silly for suggesting that it is). These days, it is, at best, informal, and many consider it colloquial and ugly, but no one who actually studies the language would suggest that it's improper. Awkward, distasteful and best avoided, maybe, but not improper. (Note: middle-school English teachers are not generally considered to be among the set of people who actually study the language.)
Its use is controversial (to put it mildly), and I don't think anyone would suggest that it should be used in formal writing, but only the ignorant claim that it's wrong. (See also: split infinitive.)
Real looks to be pulling a publicity stunt.
Possibly, or possibly they're trying to protect their own interests, much as Red Hat was when they preemptively sued SCO.
to attract attention to their terrible company
Ah yes, we all know that companies never change: IBM is still a hostile predator who refuses to acknowledge any software that wasn't developed in-house. They'd never in a million years consider supporting something as alien as Linux.
The nineties called and want their whine back (as well as their stale "decade X called and wants its Y back" joke). :)
I find it ironic when Windows users whine about Real (and in my experience, it's only Windows users that whine about Real). Everything they complain about in Real is among the reasons I stopped using ... er, actually, never really started using ... Windows. What's the difference between MS and Real? Real's main product is 90% open source, they actively support the community development efforts, their software has been bundled with Debian for years (at least, the 90% which meet the DFSG), they actively support Linux, and they seem to have made a massive effort to change their corporate culture since they hit rock-bottom in the early part of this decade (not unlike how IBM changed after bottoming out after the PS2 disaster). But some people can't forget the fact that they once saw an ad ten years ago, so Real will be evil forever. Dumbasses! :)
When SCO was going around saying they were going to sue Linux users for vague, unspecified "IP" claims, Red Hat preemptively sued SCO, telling them, essentially, to put-up-or-shut-up about their claims.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=169 (from 2003).
The tests will tell you if you broke anything they test in a way they test for.
You're still going too far. The tests will tell you if you broke anything they test in a way they correctly test for.
You can be confident in the knowledge that the tests do indeed test the changes you're trying to make, and discover (after much hair-pulling) that your changes now tickle an obscure bug in the tests. This may result in the tests claiming your code is broken when it's not (the good case) or that your code works properly when it doesn't (the evil case).
Of course, we were supposed to assume that we're dealing with good tests. Heck, if we're going to assume impossible things, why not assume that the code works in the first place, so it doesn't need testing! :)
I'm a big fan of testing, especially automated unit tests and regression tests, because they mean that you need to make two matching errors to actually let an error slip through. But I also don't assume that "pass the tests" == "working code". You still need to make readable, maintainable code so that when the whole thing blows up in your face, you still have a slight chance of being able to fix it.
My biggest complaint about the whole TDD crowd is that they seem to think it doesn't matter of the code is maintainable--as long as it passes the tests, it's magically ok. Like a lot of movements, TDD/XP/Agile is a collection of good ideas being marketed as a silver bullet. TANSB. :)
Yeah, that's the thing that gets me about the whole "moon-landing-was-faked" thing. Do these idiots really think Russia was just going to take the US's word for it? And that was back when only really the Superpowers and a few of their best buddies would have had the technology to track the mission. These days, I'll bet that Luxembourg and Sri Lanka have the ability to confirm or deny the success of the launch on their own.
Sheesh, it's free/libre/open source these days, so the only thing that's likely to kill it is...well, honestly, I can't think of anything. If FLOSS were easy to kill, BSD and Linux would both already be dead. Anyway, I really don't care all that much what's under the hood as long as the userspace is GNU. GNU/{Linux,BSD,Solaris} are all good enough for me. No, it's not because I'm a freedom fanatic; it's because GNU software is top quality. In fact, I tend to think that GNU/Solaris would be my ideal system.
the GNU toolkit that Stallman near single-handedly wrote.
Um, I think Roland McGrath might take exception to that. Anyway, some might argue that BSD was already pretty well established by the time the GNU project started, and GNU definitely leveraged BSD, even if it didn't use it directly. BSD could arguably be considered the first really major international "open source" project, and guess where it started? :)
(Yes, I realize I'm mostly agreeing with you. I'm just quibbling over the details. Kudos on tracking down the starting date for SHARE, though, which my stepfather was a regular attendee of.)
The obvious solution to that is simply to put the Earth-side tether on a rail. A Great Circle rail.
In fact, a Great Circle rail would open up all kinds of possibilities, from LEO elevators to the Grand Terra-Luna Suspension Bridge. :)
You're not the only one who wants to know: http://www.printfection.com/retro-future/I-Still-Want-My-Flying-Car-T-Shirt/_p_895385
(Note: I have no association with that site, although I did buy the T-Shirt.) :)
I've got no sympathy for either side in this one. The guy is clearly an asshat who is a hair's-breadth short of being a pure domain-squatting subhuman scum. The fact that he went out and registered a bunch of {city}{olympic-year} domains makes that clear. His only minor possible redeeming feature is that he doesn't appear to be in this for the money. But if he gets away with this crap, the next one will be!
And in this corner, weighing in at the proverbial 2000 pounds, we have the extremely offensive, litigious bastards at the IOC who deserve to lose every trademark they can for dumping all over the Special Oly^H^H^HGames, among many, many other things. If they win, it's going to be a tragedy for everyone who has a legitimate, established domain that happens to conflict with some brand-new just-imagined trademark.
I only see one way out. We have to kill everyone involved. The IOC, the Chicago bidders, the guy with the domain, ICANN, the rest of the population of Chicago, everyone who lives in a city that has or will ever bid on the Olympics, everyone with a computer, everyone with a trademark, everyone with a name...kill 'em all! It's the only way to be sure! :)
We're working on it. :)
If you don't like testing, perhaps its because you are insecure about your abilities to get the job done.
Alternative option: maybe you're a prima donna who doesn't work well with others. In my experience, it's almost always one or the other.
That said, there are plenty of places that have incompetent testing. Consider the testing to be two-way. If they're asking stupid questions or administering the tests in a stupid way, then you probably don't want to work there. On the other hand, if they're not asking any questions, then they're probably infiltrated with incompetents already and you don't want to work there. If HR is asking you programming questions, or giving you a form with programming questions on it, flee. If some of the top developers are asking you basic programming questions, then you might want to work there.
If you're at all competent, the questions they ask should tell you as much about the company as the answers will tell the company about you. The questions I was asked while interviewing (and how I was asked them) were a big factor in my decision to accept my current position.
Fair enough. The "scientists-say" factor in reporting is always annoying. Compared to the "scientists [read: one biologist with crackpot theories of physics] say that the LHC may destroy the world" reporting we've already seen recently, this seems pretty innocuous. Still, it never hurts to point out when someone's speculating in advance of the evidence. I think it's going a little far to say "that's not science", but I suppose that if that's what it takes to get the point across, no harm done. :)
cheers
Ah yes. Speculation (also known as "forming a hypothesis") is clearly not any part of science. So glad you could point that out. :)
I agree, this one seems fairly ad hoc, but that doesn't mean it can't be tested by examining the evidence in light of this hypothesis. And I would have to say that your examples seem cherry-picked, since you left out: atomic theory, continental drift, relativity, speciation, neutrinos, Technicium, and much much more. Its true that random speculation (and its complement, serendipity) are not the best approaches to science, but they can be fruitful.
Of course, I didn't RTFA. If TFA presented this as a fact rather than as speculation, then you've got a valid beef, but I would tend to suspect that the fault lies with the reporter in that case, not the speculator who, it must be admitted, did come up with an interesting hypothesis, if not a very solid one.
Now there's a dumb comment. I don't like stupid black people or stupid Asian people or stupid Jewish people or stupid Muslims or stupid white people or stupid programmers or stupid...anything. Nothing to do with the race, skin color, religion, gender, sexual preference or whatever: I just don't like stupid people.
I have absolutely nothing against religious people per se, but for some reason the ones in the US are letting the stupidest among them dominate the political debate, and that fills me with some contempt even for the smart ones. Speak out and make it clear that being religious doesn't automatically make you an idiot, or the idiots will be the only thing the rest of us see and associate with your religion!
And by "speak out", I don't mean whine about how people are starting to assume that all US Xtians are idiots. Stand up and tell the idiots in your creed what idiots they're being. Publicly. Tell them that they're making a mockery of your religion. That'll earn you my respect.
Yes it does. The fact that "begs the question" with no object has a special meaning in logic doesn't change the common English meaning of those words. The special meaning of "begs the question" to refer to circular reasoning really only applies (and only can apply) where there is no question provided to demonstrate what is being begged.
Yes, I know you just wanted to show off how smart you were by demonstrating that you knew of a special meaning for the phrase "begs the question". That begs the question: does a random piece of knowledge actually make you smart? I'd suggest that the answer to that is: no, but I came to that conclusion by assuming that someone trying to show off their pedantry without understanding what they're talking about must be an idiot, which begs the question. :)
Tivos don't allow 30 second skipping ...
Actually, you just have to enable it. See http://bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html. They don't enable it by default or advertise the feature in order to mollify the networks, but it's still there.
The rest of your post I basically agree with, but I thought I should pass that tip along.
And if the original compiler was gcc, and trojaned in the way the paper describes, then the triple compilation wouldn't catch it.
But given the significant, massive changes that have been made to gcc over the years (not to mention all the other compilers that have been used to build it), the hack that the paper describes would need to involve hard-AI beyond what we have been able to achieve, and would probably take weeks to complete a single pass of compilation on the typical sort of machine used to compile gcc.
Systems were smaller, simpler, and hadn't been evolving for as many years (or had as many major components rewritten from scratch) back in the days Thompson wrote that paper.
(I built gcc with a C interpreter once, and then used the interpreted gcc to compile gcc. I did it mostly as a stress test of the interpreter, but it also served as a quick check for Thompson's trojan, which I didn't find--not that I was expecting to for the reasons cited above.)
You are correct about the purpose of the triple compilation, though. Trying to catch Thompson's hack that way would be pointless both because it wouldn't detect the hack and because the hack is no longer practical.
cosmic rays move fast and don't hang around the earth.
And they collide with bodies throughout the universe--not just the Earth. The universe is big. If these sort of collisions really created Hawking-radiation-proof mini-black-holes, the universe would be so full of them that we'd be swatting them away like flies. And while they may start out fast, after a few hundred million years, many will have slowed down appreciably.
But heck, why let a little common sense interfere with a good paranoid doomsday scenario? Doomsday scenarios sell better. :)
Being able to deal with extreme conditions imposes a cost on a species in terms of the biological machinery necessary to survive those conditions. Under mild conditions, such species are often out-competed by less hardy species...
Careful there. You're going to destroy people's delusions that evolution is some sort of absolute linear scale, with "more evolved" creatures always beating the "less evolved". Without nonsense notions like "the ladder of evolution" climbing ever upwards. how will eugenicists and social darwinists spread their creeds? :)
If the only way to be literally "more evolved" is to have a faster reproduction rate and/or use an r-selection reproductive strategy, then humans aren't the pinnacle of creati^H^H^H^H^H^Hevolution (in fact, cockroaches would rank higher), and we can't allow thinking like that, now, can we?
JFS was in AIX way before it was in OS/2.
- The JFS in Linux is based on the JFS from OS/2, which was not based (except conceptually) on anything earlier.
- The original JFS from AIX is dead, and has been replaced in AIX with a port of the JFS from OS/2.
you must realize that there are NO 'large parts' of OS/2 that have been open sourced.
That may be mostly true, but JFS is an exception to that rule. It was OS/2's JFS that was open-sourced, not AIX's.
Depends. I let my niece read it, and in just a few hours she learned a bunch of new words. :)
And four zeros is more than (one) zero. I rest my case. :)
No precompiled apps to download,
Yeah, there's only a little over 20,000 precompiled MIPS packages here. (Well, technically, somewhere in here, with an index located here.) I tend to think that 20,000+ is a little bit more than zero, but maybe that's just me. :)