I would add, "* perfection can't be achieved within today's software lifecycle's".
Maybe at some point in the future, the software lifecycle will be longer.
A particularly mature piece of software might be considered "done" from the
standpoint of features. Then, its lifecycle is indefinite. You might consider
analog signal decoding as a very simple program with a feature set that is "done".
In the early days of FM radio there was debate about the best circuit for
decoding a signal, then they settled on a particular way of doing it.
Almost all modern software is considerably more complicated, although I
wager that much of the low-level communication software such as digital
radio and cell phone packet processing is approaching "done", or "perfection".
These are relatively simple programs that have to work with a high degree
of reliability.
An office suite, OTOH, is way too complicated, with way too many features being
added for this to happen. However, it's not too hard to imagine that 100 years
from now there will be some kind of standard for office suite features, and you
will be able to get work done in minimum feature mode. It will virtually never
fail. Office suites will be DONE. They'll be perfect. Fortunately, we'll all
be dead or at the very least retired by then, so there's no need to worry about
programmers losing all their jobs just yet.
In other words, as you more succinctly put it, "someday we will".
Too much eye candy and/or AJAX nonsense. This
is especially true for image search. My laptop
chokes trying to render it sometimes. I shouldn't have to
buy the lates, greatest, desktop replacement laptop
just do do an image search. Also, it seems to want
to popup or something when you click an image. Maybe
there's a fix for that which doesn't involve dumbing
down my IE security settings. I have to admit I never
tried it on Chrome, I just gave up on it and went
back to Google.
Because of their non-simple interface, I never even
got to realize they were missing depth.
My idea of arms control is double-checked coordinates,
and officers who aren't afraid to turn their keys. They
come after superpowers with MIRVs, next thing you know
they'll be trying to take away my mutated anthrax. I need
that. For duck huntin'.
(Don't mod unless you know what sarcasm is, and have watched every episode of Futurama
at least twice).
First, the cat's out of the bag.
Somebody else will just come up
with a similar script. Second, the
aforementioned silly items already
make FB worthless for me.
I never got attached enough to FB to care
about installing a script. I went back to
the simplicity of Twitter for that kind of thing,
and check my FB once every few weeks just to
see if anything is really different. Every time
I do that, I see page after page of people's horoscopes
from yesterday. I sigh and close the window.
POTUS didn't make the policy. It's a Twitter account,
so I assume this is what they do when you forget your PW.
Now, even if somebody got total control of the POTUS
Twitter account and started posting all kinds of outrageous
crap, we'd figure that out pretty quickly and lay the blame
where it belongs--Twitter.
Should they have better security? Maybe. It's not
the nuclear football though. One-time pads with armed
guards and officers turning keys simultaneously is just
a bit of overkill for a web site where you post your golf scores.
At the very least, they could put a SID chip
in there, in addition to a modern sound card. They could also support hundreds of
virtual instances of the original C64 on such
a machine. They could load it with all the original
ROMs too, including BASIC.
Genuine SID sound would really rock though.
I understand there are some SID clones being made.
The original vintage chips are available too, they
could put those in a "special edition" and charge
more.
For those not aware, the SID chip made the sounds
on the C64. It was a digital-analog hybrid, and thus
has some unique qualities.
If you could actually coordinate a mass shaking
of laptops, with appropriately staggered times
and shaking characteristics, I would be very, very impressed.
Maybe someday, the people who argue
over semantics will win. It'll go something
like this: Congratulations. You won the semantic
argument. We won everything else.
You'll obviously need to be scaling before
you invest in a system that involves a big vat
full of oil.
Also, what does the fire marshall think of
a big vat full of oil? Hazardous disposal? Oh
boy... some company goes BK, and they leave behind
a big vat full oil and outdated electronics.
I didn't dig deep enough to see if they are actively pumping
the oil or not. If they are, they're not doing it right.
Any system that really cuts cooling costs should be
using a LTD engine to transform the heat into useful work.
Of course, you still need to reject the heat someplace.
At one place, it was my understanding that they had a helluva
time trying to explain to some manager why they had to cut
a hole in the building to let heat out of the server room.
It's the same basic thermodynamics of "what happens if you leave
the refrigerator door open". The room just gets hotter.
So. You'll have to have some kind of oil-air heat exchanger
someplace. The hole for an oil line coming out of
the server room is smaller... but it's an oil line. Back
to the hazard factor...
Don't get me wrong. I understand why they used oil in things
like Crays. The rate of heat exchange between the electronics
and the oil is evidently better. It's the same reason why 50
degree water gives you hypothermia in 10 minutes and 50 degree air doesn't.
So. That leads us to the questions: Is your overall system
efficiency going to be better in some way by running hotter? Does that
savings offset the cost of the oil system?
Plainly, a commodity Intel server box doesn't run hot enough to require
oil for effective heat transfer, unless you overclock it. If you can get
twice the effective computing power in a room with fire-hot overclocked
servers and the fancy oil cooler, ok maybe it's worth it?
Note: I don't lay any claim to be an expert in this field. These
are just the kind of questions I think a generally intelligent person
should ask. If somebody who really knows this stuff can *politely*
rebut, then great.
Patch the strip utility on Linux,
send in the patch and see if it gets accepted.
Then let's see a follow-up of that on Slashdot.
She's taking a lot of flack here; but there's value
in the work. It just needs to be applied in a more
practical way.
Wow, that generated more commentary than I thought it would
for something so deep in the comments. Plenty of "arguments from authority",
and ad hominems which are easy to dismiss. Yeah, they were a *legal* monopoly, that's
not what I'm disputing. The best posters (and the ones who were most
persuasive to me) were the ones who cited examples where people really
felt trapped--especially the guy who can't do his taxes without MS.
I suppose if I were one of the Netscape guys I'd have a different opinion,
although the Be Inc. guy didn't think browser bundling was anticompetitive.
I'm surprised people didn't disagree more about a hardware
monopoly and/or business model being breakable.
After all, Apple was in this discussion and nobody mentions how
their machines were first built?
A Beowulf cluster of Arduino-like machines that click together
and fit in a box, in your pocket. That could be the result of the
next Homebrew Computer Club, and the cycle begins again...
I don't care what the courts say. I'm not usually
a defender of the "let the market sort everything out"
mentality; but by the time the court ruled, Linux
already had some pretty useable desktops, and OS X was
not far behind. Defining "PC" as "IBM clone" was a
travesty. Whoever prosecuited MS was smart, and got
away with that. I remember joking at the time, "so
an iMac's not a Personal Computer, eh?".
Also, the MS "monopoly" is far less problematic
than what would happen if Apple's way of doing biz
took hold. It was MS that forced hardware vendors
to be open. No PC clones, no open BIOS, and arguably
NO LINUX. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
If a proprietary hardware business model dominates,
it's much harder to break than a "monopoly" in software.
After all, a rather small core of hackers demonstrated
that very fact. Developing an open competing *hardware*
platform would be an order of magnitude more difficult,
I think.
Hopefully we don't end up with a choice of iPhone-like
lockin, or homebrew Arduino-based machines 10 years from now.
If somebody took your BSD code, added nothing to
it, and resold it, they didn't steal from you.
At least, that's what a BSD opponent would have to
agree, in order to avoid being a hypocrit. In general,
Free Software advocates don't believe information
can be "stolen", so surely you can't be suggesting
that your BSD code was stolen in this case.
What if they took your BSD code, added "something" to
it, and resold it? Are you suggesting that you have
a right to "something"? On what basis do you lay claim
to "something" since it's their work, not yours?
Finally, even though I strongly prefer BSD to GPL, I've contributed
to GPL. I don't believe in allowing ideology to become
a brick wall between me and other programmers.
It's better to not deal with companies
that need a CC for "free" trials; but if you
screw up and get in a situation like this, just
call your CC company, complain, and tell them to reject
any charges from them. It's not like it's the power
company and they can turn off your
lights. They'll eventually just stop provisioning
you with (service you don't need). Problem solved.
OK, now that my knee is done jerking
and I've at least skimmed TFA, there are some
interesting tidbits.
Dr. McLeroy pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
This might not be such a bad thing if it leads
students to learn more. For example, in going over
materials regarding the Panthers, they might learn
that group exercised 2nd ammendment rights. It was the
fear of Blacks with guns that led to some of the first
(the first?) gun control measures in California.
The law was, IIRC, signed into law by... Ronald Reagan!
I'd love to be there when a student raises his
hand in class to ask the teacher why a Republican
would sign gun control legislation, or presents
this fact in an oral report about the Panthers.
Oh, and I wasn't taught this in school. I knew
nothing of it until I moved to the Bay Area and learned
more about the Panthers simply because I heard they
got started in this area. That caused me to become
curious and read up on their history. School certainly
didn't teach it.
Hearing the adults argue about all this will probably
teach the kids in ways that neither side anticipated.
Slashdot Mirror
If a cosmic ray flips a bit in the (insert safe language here) array boundary checker, then what?
I would add, "* perfection can't be achieved within today's software lifecycle's".
Maybe at some point in the future, the software lifecycle will be longer. A particularly mature piece of software might be considered "done" from the standpoint of features. Then, its lifecycle is indefinite. You might consider analog signal decoding as a very simple program with a feature set that is "done". In the early days of FM radio there was debate about the best circuit for decoding a signal, then they settled on a particular way of doing it.
Almost all modern software is considerably more complicated, although I wager that much of the low-level communication software such as digital radio and cell phone packet processing is approaching "done", or "perfection". These are relatively simple programs that have to work with a high degree of reliability.
An office suite, OTOH, is way too complicated, with way too many features being added for this to happen. However, it's not too hard to imagine that 100 years from now there will be some kind of standard for office suite features, and you will be able to get work done in minimum feature mode. It will virtually never fail. Office suites will be DONE. They'll be perfect. Fortunately, we'll all be dead or at the very least retired by then, so there's no need to worry about programmers losing all their jobs just yet.
In other words, as you more succinctly put it, "someday we will".
Too much eye candy and/or AJAX nonsense. This is especially true for image search. My laptop chokes trying to render it sometimes. I shouldn't have to buy the lates, greatest, desktop replacement laptop just do do an image search. Also, it seems to want to popup or something when you click an image. Maybe there's a fix for that which doesn't involve dumbing down my IE security settings. I have to admit I never tried it on Chrome, I just gave up on it and went back to Google.
Because of their non-simple interface, I never even got to realize they were missing depth.
My idea of arms control is double-checked coordinates, and officers who aren't afraid to turn their keys. They come after superpowers with MIRVs, next thing you know they'll be trying to take away my mutated anthrax. I need that. For duck huntin'.
(Don't mod unless you know what sarcasm is, and have watched every episode of Futurama at least twice).
First, the cat's out of the bag. Somebody else will just come up with a similar script. Second, the aforementioned silly items already make FB worthless for me.
I never got attached enough to FB to care about installing a script. I went back to the simplicity of Twitter for that kind of thing, and check my FB once every few weeks just to see if anything is really different. Every time I do that, I see page after page of people's horoscopes from yesterday. I sigh and close the window.
Based on what people are saying wrt to receiving a large sum in Russia, the origin of the phrase "white elephant" comes to mind.
POTUS didn't make the policy. It's a Twitter account, so I assume this is what they do when you forget your PW.
Now, even if somebody got total control of the POTUS Twitter account and started posting all kinds of outrageous crap, we'd figure that out pretty quickly and lay the blame where it belongs--Twitter.
Should they have better security? Maybe. It's not the nuclear football though. One-time pads with armed guards and officers turning keys simultaneously is just a bit of overkill for a web site where you post your golf scores.
At the very least, they could put a SID chip in there, in addition to a modern sound card. They could also support hundreds of virtual instances of the original C64 on such a machine. They could load it with all the original ROMs too, including BASIC.
Genuine SID sound would really rock though. I understand there are some SID clones being made. The original vintage chips are available too, they could put those in a "special edition" and charge more.
For those not aware, the SID chip made the sounds on the C64. It was a digital-analog hybrid, and thus has some unique qualities.
If you could actually coordinate a mass shaking of laptops, with appropriately staggered times and shaking characteristics, I would be very, very impressed.
Haven't some Apple machines had this for a few years now? IIRC, it was called "SeisMac" or something like that.
What scientists say: (insert abstract followed by lengthy, scholarly work which includes some mention of sex).
What journalists hear: SEX, SEX,SEX,SEX,SEX,SEX,SEX,SEX... Oh, BTW SEX!
The preceding was an homage to Gary Larson author of The Far Side.
Maybe someday, the people who argue over semantics will win. It'll go something like this: Congratulations. You won the semantic argument. We won everything else.
You'll obviously need to be scaling before you invest in a system that involves a big vat full of oil.
Also, what does the fire marshall think of a big vat full of oil? Hazardous disposal? Oh boy... some company goes BK, and they leave behind a big vat full oil and outdated electronics.
I didn't dig deep enough to see if they are actively pumping the oil or not. If they are, they're not doing it right. Any system that really cuts cooling costs should be using a LTD engine to transform the heat into useful work.
Of course, you still need to reject the heat someplace. At one place, it was my understanding that they had a helluva time trying to explain to some manager why they had to cut a hole in the building to let heat out of the server room. It's the same basic thermodynamics of "what happens if you leave the refrigerator door open". The room just gets hotter.
So. You'll have to have some kind of oil-air heat exchanger someplace. The hole for an oil line coming out of the server room is smaller... but it's an oil line. Back to the hazard factor...
Don't get me wrong. I understand why they used oil in things like Crays. The rate of heat exchange between the electronics and the oil is evidently better. It's the same reason why 50 degree water gives you hypothermia in 10 minutes and 50 degree air doesn't.
So. That leads us to the questions: Is your overall system efficiency going to be better in some way by running hotter? Does that savings offset the cost of the oil system?
Plainly, a commodity Intel server box doesn't run hot enough to require oil for effective heat transfer, unless you overclock it. If you can get twice the effective computing power in a room with fire-hot overclocked servers and the fancy oil cooler, ok maybe it's worth it?
Note: I don't lay any claim to be an expert in this field. These are just the kind of questions I think a generally intelligent person should ask. If somebody who really knows this stuff can *politely* rebut, then great.
"trillions of atoms" and "barely visible with the naked eye"
Well, since Avogadro's number represents 12 grams of carbon-12, it isn't surprising that trillions of atoms would still be invisible.
Patch the strip utility on Linux, send in the patch and see if it gets accepted. Then let's see a follow-up of that on Slashdot. She's taking a lot of flack here; but there's value in the work. It just needs to be applied in a more practical way.
You almost certainly googled around for information on your sound card before purchasing it. That's the real solution, regardless of OS.
Will the 1872 mining law apply? Let the plundering begin. (sarcasm)
Wow, that generated more commentary than I thought it would for something so deep in the comments. Plenty of "arguments from authority", and ad hominems which are easy to dismiss. Yeah, they were a *legal* monopoly, that's not what I'm disputing. The best posters (and the ones who were most persuasive to me) were the ones who cited examples where people really felt trapped--especially the guy who can't do his taxes without MS. I suppose if I were one of the Netscape guys I'd have a different opinion, although the Be Inc. guy didn't think browser bundling was anticompetitive.
I'm surprised people didn't disagree more about a hardware monopoly and/or business model being breakable. After all, Apple was in this discussion and nobody mentions how their machines were first built?
A Beowulf cluster of Arduino-like machines that click together and fit in a box, in your pocket. That could be the result of the next Homebrew Computer Club, and the cycle begins again...
Microsoft was never and is not a monopoly.
I don't care what the courts say. I'm not usually a defender of the "let the market sort everything out" mentality; but by the time the court ruled, Linux already had some pretty useable desktops, and OS X was not far behind. Defining "PC" as "IBM clone" was a travesty. Whoever prosecuited MS was smart, and got away with that. I remember joking at the time, "so an iMac's not a Personal Computer, eh?".
Also, the MS "monopoly" is far less problematic than what would happen if Apple's way of doing biz took hold. It was MS that forced hardware vendors to be open. No PC clones, no open BIOS, and arguably NO LINUX. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
If a proprietary hardware business model dominates, it's much harder to break than a "monopoly" in software. After all, a rather small core of hackers demonstrated that very fact. Developing an open competing *hardware* platform would be an order of magnitude more difficult, I think.
Hopefully we don't end up with a choice of iPhone-like lockin, or homebrew Arduino-based machines 10 years from now.
If somebody took your BSD code, added nothing to it, and resold it, they didn't steal from you. At least, that's what a BSD opponent would have to agree, in order to avoid being a hypocrit. In general, Free Software advocates don't believe information can be "stolen", so surely you can't be suggesting that your BSD code was stolen in this case.
What if they took your BSD code, added "something" to it, and resold it? Are you suggesting that you have a right to "something"? On what basis do you lay claim to "something" since it's their work, not yours?
Finally, even though I strongly prefer BSD to GPL, I've contributed to GPL. I don't believe in allowing ideology to become a brick wall between me and other programmers.
And labor unions, and trial lawyers. There will be no true progress until a movement emerges that gores the oxen of both major parties.
It's better to not deal with companies that need a CC for "free" trials; but if you screw up and get in a situation like this, just call your CC company, complain, and tell them to reject any charges from them. It's not like it's the power company and they can turn off your lights. They'll eventually just stop provisioning you with (service you don't need). Problem solved.
He's making an assumption you forgot: that the kids think for themselves, whatever the adults want to show them.
Thanks for helping out while I was away. You hit the nail pretty well there.
OK, now that my knee is done jerking and I've at least skimmed TFA, there are some interesting tidbits.
Dr. McLeroy pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
This might not be such a bad thing if it leads students to learn more. For example, in going over materials regarding the Panthers, they might learn that group exercised 2nd ammendment rights. It was the fear of Blacks with guns that led to some of the first (the first?) gun control measures in California. The law was, IIRC, signed into law by... Ronald Reagan!
I'd love to be there when a student raises his hand in class to ask the teacher why a Republican would sign gun control legislation, or presents this fact in an oral report about the Panthers.
Oh, and I wasn't taught this in school. I knew nothing of it until I moved to the Bay Area and learned more about the Panthers simply because I heard they got started in this area. That caused me to become curious and read up on their history. School certainly didn't teach it.
Hearing the adults argue about all this will probably teach the kids in ways that neither side anticipated.
Another shot from a school book repository. The real God has an ironic sense of humor, I think.