It sounds like this guy is the victim of abuse by a local government official. When that happens, it's a job for the FBI. He's in pain now, but if the FBI investigates and determines that local officials have overstepped their bounds by destroying the guy's business for having commited an offense that should probably result in a small monetary fine, then the local goverment official could actually be prosecuted. Following conviction (or even following acquital, as in the OJ case) there could be civil penalties. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind.
I can't help but be reminded of Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. In real life, the Dukes could have the FBI take him out.
The same thing has happened in real life with a lot of cases, most noteably civil rights abuses in the South where local governments committed crimes against Blacks.
It sounds to me like not only MS, but a lot of other big corporations (drug companies come to mind) need to price appropriately for foreign markets. This is especially true for something like software, where you could set up a CD printing plant in India and make CDs for almost nothing a piece. That would help grow the Indian economy, and eventually MS would be able to charge a higher price for the Indian version. Instead, by pricing it at the ridiculously high US level, they've make piracy socially acceptable.
A much milder example of this occurs here in the US, where high cigarette taxes have got ordinary people violating the law by mail-ordering from Indian (Native American) reservations or low-tax states. I live in Virginia, which probably has the lowest cig tax, and crooks load up minivans with cigs here and truck them to New York. The New York tax is so high that they just created a way for criminals (some have speculated that this includes terrorists) to raise money.
In other words, if a tax on anything is too high, people will just refuse to pay the tax and factor in the penalty when caught as a "cost of business". In the case of Windows, the likelyhood of getting caught is nil for most Indians, and the tax is a year's average pay! Whooowee! If Windows cost $34,000 (isn't that the US median income?) I'd have only one thing to say:
There are two schools of thought on this. The first one is that Linux is pro-capitalist because companies are using a different "service based" business model. Adherents to this school of thought argue that the service model is a better way to distribute software and will win in the long run.
The other school of thought is that Linux is anti-capitalist because it seeks to drive other operating systems out of the market and replace them with a public monopoly. When the public monopoly fails to achieve timely development, it is likely to seek government funding (and already has in some cases). Thus, the government eventually becomes the sole provider of OS development services. Government ownership of a business is the classic definition of socialism.
Contrary to what the other guy said, posts about Linux and Socialism are *not* trolls.
As you might have guessed, I hold to the 2nd school of thought. The first school makes sense as long as the government "stays out" doesn't fund it. Proponents of the first school argue that the government already funds proprietary software by providing PD research and enforcing copyright law. The counterargument to that is that PD research is available to both camps. The cost of enforcing copyright law argument falls apart when you realize that if all software were GPL'd, the government would have to enforce "exclusive supplier" contracts which could effectively negate the GPL.
Also, Linux is under GPL, which came from RMS, who is an RED:). But seriously, if you read the GNU website you will see that it makes no secret of the fact that the movement is based in Leftist ideology.
And the debate will almost certainly go on and on from here...
Re:It's cloudy in Northern Virgina so far...
on
Meet The Leonids
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· Score: 2
At least we *know* it's going to be a dud this year. The moon is full and the radar shows those clouds you mention spread over a wide area. Last year I stayed up, and then fog rolled in half an hour before peak. The only people in NoVA who did well last year were the ones that drove out to Fauquier. 12:30 AM and I'm going to bed. I'll leave the blinds up though. If we have a *real* meteor storm, the clouds won't matter. I read accounts of one back in the 19th century where people woke out of a sound sleep. Frankly, I don't think I will ever do much better than the unusually strong Perseids of '93. I saw at least a dozen bright ones that left trails that year, and one that was so bright it cast a shadow and made a noise. I turned just in time to see it disappear.
I'm not usually one to side with the anti-bush puppet-protesting Stankoists commies; but I'll give the Devil its due on this one. A similar Google search for Prodigene + "Bill Clinton" turned up nothing similar.
Politics aside, this business of releasing geneticly altered crops into the wild smacks of the kind of overconfidence and "put on your manager hat" thinking that lead to the sinking of the Titanic and the Challenger disaster. It's only a matter of time before we do something really silly like kill all the corn or turn our wheat into poison.
I never understood why Payola was bad to begin with. It's just a different business model. There's plenty of room for Payola stations and ad-based stations and combinations thereof. I suppose misrepresenting the fact that you got Payola is immoral, but Payola in and of itself doesn't strike me as bad... unless it is accompanied by "take the money or take a bullet" which I understand it was in some cases.
That's because the law is a public monopoly, and all the law is open source. They can't make money off the law, so they have to make money providing "service and support". So, they have a vested interest in writing laws that are hard to understand.
On the other hand, if we could choose from a multitude of proprietary legal vendors, the laws would almost certainly be simpler. Of course, you couldn't have a purely unregulated legal market because someone might go into "business", declare his home a sovereign state, and make wife beating legal. However, a regulated legal market with broad mandates such as upholding the Constitution and collecting revenue could be interesting. If people got disgusted with "pro-NRA flat tax 2.0", they could register their gun and switch to "progressive tax abortion rights unlimited 3.04".
The only trouble is, what happens when holders of "unlimited land use rights 4.5" move in next door to someone who just purchased "English common law 253.4 with rigid Home Owner Association bylaws service pack 2"?
As a desktop user, Windows has provided me with 99% uptime (and that missing 1% is for software upgrades requiring reboot, not crashes). I simply can't use the stability argument anymore.
The stability argument never made any sense. All the *NIX server people couldn't understand why all the Windows* desktop people liked an OS that couldn't stay up without a reboot every few hours. The answer was obvious: The average Windows* work user only needs to stay up eight hours anyway. They turn the machine off when they go home! For home users, it's more like 2 hours. In the early days, MSFT didn't fixate on uptime because all they needed was a few hours.
Of course this legacy carried over into the server software, which was bad. When MSFT saw it couldn't penetrate the server market as much as it wanted, then uptime really started to matter. Remember, MSFT started out catering to hobbiests! Uptime didn't matter. People were happy enough that they had a 4k basic and a Disk Operating System for their 2 MHz 8-bit systems. None of the "serious" software companies were doing that. Now MSFT has metamorphosed into a "serious" company so uptime is becoming more important, and they have made progress.
If the government were not paying for the research, then you'd have a point. However, if the government is paying for the research, then I the taxpayer should have free access to the results of that research. There is a valid argument that the government could charge me a user fee for accessing the information, in proportion to the increase in cost to the taxpayer due to my access. However, there is no valid argument for anybody to charge me for the information itself, since I've already payed for it.
Notice, this is not the same as the argument that GPL advocates use to oppose government use of BSD licenses. In that case, the knowledge is available to both the public and the publishers. Software publishers couldn't hide the unmodified BSD code.
In this case, it's possible that the information is being hidden and only being made available to corporations and if so, that's wrong. However, after digging up the google cache for PubScience, it appears to be only an index to journal articles, many of which were already copyrighted anyway. Presumeably, research that's public is still available--it's just a lot harder to find it now.
This sounds like a case where metatags or
something would be useful--that way, any government research available online could be more easily Googled.
There is also the possibility that the government is now more likely to obstruct the free flow of information for security purposes (real or imagined). I imagine a creative terrorist could put some of the DOE research to destructive use. So, this might be a backdoor way of classifying DOE data. It's like a weaker level of classification below CONFIDENTIAL. Potential terrorists have to pay for it, and that means establishing a relationship with a company which will leave a paper trail and create "suspicious purchasing patterns".
how long can my 300 run before it's finally too slow
At least as long as mine. When I first got it, I OC'd it to 450. Although it was cool to see stuff compile so much faster, I decided that having IE occasionally display liquid web pages (text rendering and then not being erased--if you've seen it then you know what I'm talking about; it looks a lot like the page is melting). So I never OC'd again./me often wonders how many "Windows problems" are really "crappy hardware from Best Buy problems". I know that some mfcts have actually stuck OC'd CPUs in a box, and that's the kind of wierd crap that happens; but I digress.
The only reason I am thinking of getting a new computer is so I can have something mobile/wireless. The new Tablet PC might be the ticket, but I want to let the early adopters deal with the bugs first. I also will want to use my new mobile as a desktop with a full keyboard that doesn't have the superfluous Windows keys. I have a feeling that will be the real challenge. Does *anybody* make a USB keyboard with the "fat" enter key, no Windows keys, etc? I'm typing this on an IBM keyboard that comes close to that ideal, except it has a small enter key, an oversized backslash key (?) and a large backspace key. My favorite keyboard, an Acer circa 1995, sits propped up in the corner, the victim of "stickiness" from overuse and an unfortunate incident involving an AT to PS2 adapter that broke apart.
Right. Who died and made Bruce Perens chairman of the Bureau Of Standard English? In fact, the USA doesn't even *have* a standard English, and if English were ever made the official language for voting and what-not, we would probably have to have such a thing. That's one of the strongest arguments against making English a legal requirement in certain settings. Make it a requirement, and we end up with the French situation where some beurocrat gets all in a snit because people are saying "Le Big Mac".
At any rate, "open source" is one way to say what Taiwan wants. "Open Source" with capital letters is the Open Source trademark as it were, and they're welcome to use it as a trademark (service mark?) as long as people understand that if it isn't capitalized it could mean something else. It's far more likely that the Taiwanese simply said "we want the source" and didn't use anything that translates nicely into "Open Source", "Shared Source", "Disclosed Source", "Free Software" or any other trade/service mark.
Extreme Programming Explained (Beck)
Planning Extreme Programming (Beck & Fowler)
Extreme Programming Installed (Jeffries et al)
Extreme Programming Examined (Succi & Marchesi)
Extreme Programming in Practice (Newkirk & Martin)
Extreme Programming Explored (Wake)
Extreme Programming Applied (Auer & Miller)
Extreme Programming Debunked (Archie D. Bunker)
Extreme Programming Filters Into Academia (Fileas Snodgras, PhD)
Learn Extreme Programming in 21 minutes (QUE Books)
Extreme Programming Departs And Thanks You For All The Fish (Sqeeeeeek sqk sqk sqk)
Designing, Touting And Debunking Methodologies For Fun And Profit (Popular Science Press)
Extreme No Money Down Real Estate (Carlton Sheets)
Let's say that the quality of the code is roughly proportional to QN, where N is the number of developers and Q is the quality of each developer.
The alleged value of Open Source is that it allows you to increase the value of N by a dramatic number. Even if the developers are merely average, you can get a higher QN with Open Source than with closed source for many projects.
Of course, if the number of half-finished projects on Sourceforge is any indicator, simply opening up is not enough. You have to have some appeal to developers or you aren't going to raise your N much.
Then of course there is the other factor, Q. Even if you have something really cool, there is no gaurantee that those interested will be any better than average, and you will also have to expend some effort "managing" those who are below average or who are just plain crackpots.
Something tells me that the NSA has no trouble attracting developers with a very high "Q" and in sufficient "N" to do an excellent job.
Yes, I know about the "mythical man month" and that you can't just add up developers as I've suggested. That's why this is just an approximation.
Frankly, I think your post borders on Trollish because you've got "only" and "fully secure" in there; but there are probably plenty of people on/. who will eat up your post, just as there are plenty of people who think that obscurity==security. Of course neither side is right; Open Source isn't a panacea, but giving up obsccurity isn't always such a bright idea either.
Because it's gauranteed to elicit responses like yours, followed by more page views, followed by more ad revenue. Frankly, I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down to read this post, which I anticipated as soon as I read the headline.
Do you think the/. editors aren't aware of this little linguistic duel? This, BTW, is also the same reason they don't really care about polishing the stories, and may in fact be intentionally putting little grammar and spelling gaffes into them--more page views, more ad revenue. I put forth that theory many posts ago; though I don't claim to be the originator of it.
At any rate, "cracker" is already reserved for crazy people, a racial slur used against Whites by Blacks, and most commonly a crunchy snack food. Overloading it any further just didn't make sense. Hacker can be used exclusively for those who break into computers as far as I'm concerned. We already have many thesaurus entries with less sinister connotations: geek, nerd, guru, and hobbiest, all of which may be modified with "computer" as an adjective when the context is unclear (which it usually isn't). Speaking of context, when modified with the name of something (e.g., Linux hacker, assembly hacker) the word regains its positive connotation; but you still need to be careful when using it in the company of laymen.
At any rate, I seem to recall a time when the/. editors were on the side of the purists; but that time has passed. Some may choose to look back to a time before/. "sold out". I prefer to think that the battle is over and the "cracker" advocates lost.
However, I will give you guys something in your favor. Use of the term "safe cracker" persists so we have introduced yet another context-sensitive rule into the English language, making it that much harder for people to learn the language.
Could it be simply that "computer cracker" is too aliterative and just doesn't sound right? Also, a safe cracker may literally have to crack (break) something to get in, whereas a hacker (a good one anyway) usually doesn't break anything.
I first saw it at the arcade near the big food court at Springfield Mall (Virginia). It was "Americanized" with rap, rock, etc... actually, I think you could choose genres. I didn't play it; there was this teenage dude playing it, and I thought to myself at the time "wow! not only is it a non-violent video game, it could be a great way to learn music".
Currently, the HURD doesn't support benchmarking software
Oh man! I take back every bad thing I ever said about RMS and friends. Anyone who can disable benchmarking software deserves not only a McArthur grant, but international acclaim and recognition at every level. Why... oh... OK. Go ahead. Give him his Free Software tax. He deserves it. I'll be there to applaud him at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Bureau Of Software Development in Washington DC. Imagine! At last. No more benchmarks. This is a red letter day indeed.
Re:Last year?! People have had these for a decade.
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Microsoft Hypes XP Tablets
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· Score: 3, Insightful
: if so many people are so excited about this technology every time they see it, how come it still isn't very well known
IIRC, hypertext was first demonstrated in 1968, and people who saw the demo got really excited. Then of course there is the infamous XEROX PARC deal where they demoed a fully functional GUI and all the suits could come up with was "How can we attach a copier the size of a refrigerator to this?" The rest is history. It may take the muscle of MSFT to not only hype the technology, but also to take customer feedback, respond to it, and create a winning product. I mean, sure they had a mouse back in the 1960s, but it's a long way from an upside-down trackball the size of a softball to the first GUI Mac. I don't mean to say that the earlier tablets are that crude; but sometimes you need just the right refinement to push something into the mainstream.
Now that we have smaller, cooler CPUs, the time may be right. The "ooh that's cool" feature has always been there. What will be new is the "hey, I can use this all the time". Before it was "this gets heavy, hot, and uncomfortable after a while, and the software doesn't work well enough".
Once again, the Simpsons has something to say about this: "Beat up Martin" --> "Eat up Martha", followed by Nelson throwing his Newton. So... when I get a chance to test one, "Beat up Martin" will be the first thing I write.
Well, *often* they are. I can tell you why that is the case in one word: Outlook. A less virulent example of code and data mixing can be found on web pages that incorporate Javascript, PHP and other "code in the webpage" technologies.
data resides in specific files, acted upon by executable code residing in other files.
Largely true. Config information may play a part, and files may have to be "registered" using data in other parts of the system, but for the most part one file is a thing in and of itself. That's a good thing. I want to be able to back up the file. I don't want my computer popping up a dialog box and telling me I need to calculate the Heisenberg uncertainty probability envelope to locate my data. I don't want to run an intelligent benign worm to crawl half the internet and restore my files. I want to grab the CD I burned. What, pray tell, replaces the file?
Someone, or something, must remember the association between data in a given file, the action the user wishes to perform with/on that data, and the name of the file that contains the appropriate executable code.
Not true. If I want, I can run.c files in an interpreter, compile them, or edit them with a text editor. Windows and *NIX will both let you open any file with any program. There is no gaurantee of course that the program itself will open the file or interpret it with any meaning, but at least you are not constrained by the OS. Historicly, MacOS was much more picky about this; I'm not sure about OS X.
I have no quibbles with your last two bulleted points being true; but I don't have a problem with that being the state of the art either. Steering wheels are the dominant steering method on cars for a reason. We tried tillers in the early days. Nobody liked them.
7) Despite Gates/Dell being the popular winners, 1337 Hax0r sweeps in the electoral college.
8) The next session of Congress opens with a proposal from an 11 year old girl in South Korea, who "sent this bill to have your advice".
Thirty years from now, the greatest challenge to our armed forces will be how to deal with the POWs. No power on Earth will be able to oppose us when we decide to bend other nations to our will.
It's more than just writing on the screen. The tablets come with integrated wireless, they are supposed to be low-power enough so you can walk around with them all day, and when you need a keyboard you can sit the tablet down next to a keyboard (which may also be wirless) and type normally. No, I wouldn't want to write my graduate thesis with a stylus, but websurfing wirelessly and whipping out quick comments like this to/. might be fun. Then of course there is any situation where you are taking notes, like class, a press conference, or a political meeting. People won't just use their tablets in "tablet mode". This has the potential to be a very flexible technology and that's why it's great.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like this guy is the victim of abuse by a local government official. When that happens, it's a job for the FBI. He's in pain now, but if the FBI investigates and determines that local officials have overstepped their bounds by destroying the guy's business for having commited an offense that should probably result in a small monetary fine, then the local goverment official could actually be prosecuted. Following conviction (or even following acquital, as in the OJ case) there could be civil penalties. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind.
I can't help but be reminded of Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. In real life, the Dukes could have the FBI take him out.
The same thing has happened in real life with a lot of cases, most noteably civil rights abuses in the South where local governments committed crimes against Blacks.
It sounds to me like not only MS, but a lot of other big corporations (drug companies come to mind) need to price appropriately for foreign markets. This is especially true for something like software, where you could set up a CD printing plant in India and make CDs for almost nothing a piece. That would help grow the Indian economy, and eventually MS would be able to charge a higher price for the Indian version. Instead, by pricing it at the ridiculously high US level, they've make piracy socially acceptable.
A much milder example of this occurs here in the US, where high cigarette taxes have got ordinary people violating the law by mail-ordering from Indian (Native American) reservations or low-tax states. I live in Virginia, which probably has the lowest cig tax, and crooks load up minivans with cigs here and truck them to New York. The New York tax is so high that they just created a way for criminals (some have speculated that this includes terrorists) to raise money.
In other words, if a tax on anything is too high, people will just refuse to pay the tax and factor in the penalty when caught as a "cost of business". In the case of Windows, the likelyhood of getting caught is nil for most Indians, and the tax is a year's average pay! Whooowee! If Windows cost $34,000 (isn't that the US median income?) I'd have only one thing to say:
Aaarh, Matey.
There are two schools of thought on this. The first one is that Linux is pro-capitalist because companies are using a different "service based" business model. Adherents to this school of thought argue that the service model is a better way to distribute software and will win in the long run.
The other school of thought is that Linux is anti-capitalist because it seeks to drive other operating systems out of the market and replace them with a public monopoly. When the public monopoly fails to achieve timely development, it is likely to seek government funding (and already has in some cases). Thus, the government eventually becomes the sole provider of OS development services. Government ownership of a business is the classic definition of socialism.
Contrary to what the other guy said, posts about Linux and Socialism are *not* trolls.
As you might have guessed, I hold to the 2nd school of thought. The first school makes sense as long as the government "stays out" doesn't fund it. Proponents of the first school argue that the government already funds proprietary software by providing PD research and enforcing copyright law. The counterargument to that is that PD research is available to both camps. The cost of enforcing copyright law argument falls apart when you realize that if all software were GPL'd, the government would have to enforce "exclusive supplier" contracts which could effectively negate the GPL.
Also, Linux is under GPL, which came from RMS, who is an RED :). But seriously, if you read the GNU website you will see that it makes no secret of the fact that the movement is based in Leftist ideology.
And the debate will almost certainly go on and on from here...
At least we *know* it's going to be a dud this year. The moon is full and the radar shows those clouds you mention spread over a wide area. Last year I stayed up, and then fog rolled in half an hour before peak. The only people in NoVA who did well last year were the ones that drove out to Fauquier. 12:30 AM and I'm going to bed. I'll leave the blinds up though. If we have a *real* meteor storm, the clouds won't matter. I read accounts of one back in the 19th century where people woke out of a sound sleep. Frankly, I don't think I will ever do much better than the unusually strong Perseids of '93. I saw at least a dozen bright ones that left trails that year, and one that was so bright it cast a shadow and made a noise. I turned just in time to see it disappear.
Now, if the gentic modifications had jumped to say, badgers
Or worse yet, it could jump to dogs and cats. That reminds me, it's time to feed Rover, my golden r
NO CARRIER
I'm not usually one to side with the anti-bush puppet-protesting Stankoists commies; but I'll give the Devil its due on this one. A similar Google search for Prodigene + "Bill Clinton" turned up nothing similar.
Politics aside, this business of releasing geneticly altered crops into the wild smacks of the kind of overconfidence and "put on your manager hat" thinking that lead to the sinking of the Titanic and the Challenger disaster. It's only a matter of time before we do something really silly like kill all the corn or turn our wheat into poison.
I never understood why Payola was bad to begin with. It's just a different business model. There's plenty of room for Payola stations and ad-based stations and combinations thereof. I suppose misrepresenting the fact that you got Payola is immoral, but Payola in and of itself doesn't strike me as bad... unless it is accompanied by "take the money or take a bullet" which I understand it was in some cases.
That's because the law is a public monopoly, and all the law is open source. They can't make money off the law, so they have to make money providing "service and support". So, they have a vested interest in writing laws that are hard to understand.
On the other hand, if we could choose from a multitude of proprietary legal vendors, the laws would almost certainly be simpler. Of course, you couldn't have a purely unregulated legal market because someone might go into "business", declare his home a sovereign state, and make wife beating legal. However, a regulated legal market with broad mandates such as upholding the Constitution and collecting revenue could be interesting. If people got disgusted with "pro-NRA flat tax 2.0", they could register their gun and switch to "progressive tax abortion rights unlimited 3.04".
The only trouble is, what happens when holders of "unlimited land use rights 4.5" move in next door to someone who just purchased "English common law 253.4 with rigid Home Owner Association bylaws service pack 2"?
As a desktop user, Windows has provided me with 99% uptime (and that missing 1% is for software upgrades requiring reboot, not crashes). I simply can't use the stability argument anymore.
The stability argument never made any sense. All the *NIX server people couldn't understand why all the Windows* desktop people liked an OS that couldn't stay up without a reboot every few hours. The answer was obvious: The average Windows* work user only needs to stay up eight hours anyway. They turn the machine off when they go home! For home users, it's more like 2 hours. In the early days, MSFT didn't fixate on uptime because all they needed was a few hours.
Of course this legacy carried over into the server software, which was bad. When MSFT saw it couldn't penetrate the server market as much as it wanted, then uptime really started to matter. Remember, MSFT started out catering to hobbiests! Uptime didn't matter. People were happy enough that they had a 4k basic and a Disk Operating System for their 2 MHz 8-bit systems. None of the "serious" software companies were doing that. Now MSFT has metamorphosed into a "serious" company so uptime is becoming more important, and they have made progress.
If the government were not paying for the research, then you'd have a point. However, if the government is paying for the research, then I the taxpayer should have free access to the results of that research. There is a valid argument that the government could charge me a user fee for accessing the information, in proportion to the increase in cost to the taxpayer due to my access. However, there is no valid argument for anybody to charge me for the information itself, since I've already payed for it.
Notice, this is not the same as the argument that GPL advocates use to oppose government use of BSD licenses. In that case, the knowledge is available to both the public and the publishers. Software publishers couldn't hide the unmodified BSD code.
In this case, it's possible that the information is being hidden and only being made available to corporations and if so, that's wrong. However, after digging up the google cache for PubScience, it appears to be only an index to journal articles, many of which were already copyrighted anyway. Presumeably, research that's public is still available--it's just a lot harder to find it now.
This sounds like a case where metatags or something would be useful--that way, any government research available online could be more easily Googled.
There is also the possibility that the government is now more likely to obstruct the free flow of information for security purposes (real or imagined). I imagine a creative terrorist could put some of the DOE research to destructive use. So, this might be a backdoor way of classifying DOE data. It's like a weaker level of classification below CONFIDENTIAL. Potential terrorists have to pay for it, and that means establishing a relationship with a company which will leave a paper trail and create "suspicious purchasing patterns".
how long can my 300 run before it's finally too slow
At least as long as mine. When I first got it, I OC'd it to 450. Although it was cool to see stuff compile so much faster, I decided that having IE occasionally display liquid web pages (text rendering and then not being erased--if you've seen it then you know what I'm talking about; it looks a lot like the page is melting). So I never OC'd again. /me often wonders how many "Windows problems" are really "crappy hardware from Best Buy problems". I know that some mfcts have actually stuck OC'd CPUs in a box, and that's the kind of wierd crap that happens; but I digress.
The only reason I am thinking of getting a new computer is so I can have something mobile/wireless. The new Tablet PC might be the ticket, but I want to let the early adopters deal with the bugs first. I also will want to use my new mobile as a desktop with a full keyboard that doesn't have the superfluous Windows keys. I have a feeling that will be the real challenge. Does *anybody* make a USB keyboard with the "fat" enter key, no Windows keys, etc? I'm typing this on an IBM keyboard that comes close to that ideal, except it has a small enter key, an oversized backslash key (?) and a large backspace key. My favorite keyboard, an Acer circa 1995, sits propped up in the corner, the victim of "stickiness" from overuse and an unfortunate incident involving an AT to PS2 adapter that broke apart.
Right. Who died and made Bruce Perens chairman of the Bureau Of Standard English? In fact, the USA doesn't even *have* a standard English, and if English were ever made the official language for voting and what-not, we would probably have to have such a thing. That's one of the strongest arguments against making English a legal requirement in certain settings. Make it a requirement, and we end up with the French situation where some beurocrat gets all in a snit because people are saying "Le Big Mac".
At any rate, "open source" is one way to say what Taiwan wants. "Open Source" with capital letters is the Open Source trademark as it were, and they're welcome to use it as a trademark (service mark?) as long as people understand that if it isn't capitalized it could mean something else. It's far more likely that the Taiwanese simply said "we want the source" and didn't use anything that translates nicely into "Open Source", "Shared Source", "Disclosed Source", "Free Software" or any other trade/service mark.
Extreme Programming Explained (Beck)
Planning Extreme Programming (Beck & Fowler)
Extreme Programming Installed (Jeffries et al)
Extreme Programming Examined (Succi & Marchesi)
Extreme Programming in Practice (Newkirk & Martin)
Extreme Programming Explored (Wake)
Extreme Programming Applied (Auer & Miller)
Extreme Programming Debunked (Archie D. Bunker)
Extreme Programming Filters Into Academia (Fileas Snodgras, PhD)
Learn Extreme Programming in 21 minutes (QUE Books)
Extreme Programming Departs And Thanks You For All The Fish (Sqeeeeeek sqk sqk sqk)
Designing, Touting And Debunking Methodologies For Fun And Profit (Popular Science Press)
Extreme No Money Down Real Estate (Carlton Sheets)
I don't know where to start
Format the drive and install the LinuxOne distro.
Bill Gates didn't know about the McMainerberry whupin'.
Let's say that the quality of the code is roughly proportional to QN, where N is the number of developers and Q is the quality of each developer.
The alleged value of Open Source is that it allows you to increase the value of N by a dramatic number. Even if the developers are merely average, you can get a higher QN with Open Source than with closed source for many projects.
Of course, if the number of half-finished projects on Sourceforge is any indicator, simply opening up is not enough. You have to have some appeal to developers or you aren't going to raise your N much.
Then of course there is the other factor, Q. Even if you have something really cool, there is no gaurantee that those interested will be any better than average, and you will also have to expend some effort "managing" those who are below average or who are just plain crackpots.
Something tells me that the NSA has no trouble attracting developers with a very high "Q" and in sufficient "N" to do an excellent job.
Yes, I know about the "mythical man month" and that you can't just add up developers as I've suggested. That's why this is just an approximation.
Frankly, I think your post borders on Trollish because you've got "only" and "fully secure" in there; but there are probably plenty of people on /. who will eat up your post, just as there are plenty of people who think that obscurity==security. Of course neither side is right; Open Source isn't a panacea, but giving up obsccurity isn't always such a bright idea either.
Because it's gauranteed to elicit responses like yours, followed by more page views, followed by more ad revenue. Frankly, I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down to read this post, which I anticipated as soon as I read the headline.
Do you think the /. editors aren't aware of this little linguistic duel? This, BTW, is also the same reason they don't really care about polishing the stories, and may in fact be intentionally putting little grammar and spelling gaffes into them--more page views, more ad revenue. I put forth that theory many posts ago; though I don't claim to be the originator of it.
At any rate, "cracker" is already reserved for crazy people, a racial slur used against Whites by Blacks, and most commonly a crunchy snack food. Overloading it any further just didn't make sense. Hacker can be used exclusively for those who break into computers as far as I'm concerned. We already have many thesaurus entries with less sinister connotations: geek, nerd, guru, and hobbiest, all of which may be modified with "computer" as an adjective when the context is unclear (which it usually isn't). Speaking of context, when modified with the name of something (e.g., Linux hacker, assembly hacker) the word regains its positive connotation; but you still need to be careful when using it in the company of laymen.
At any rate, I seem to recall a time when the /. editors were on the side of the purists; but that time has passed. Some may choose to look back to a time before /. "sold out". I prefer to think that the battle is over and the "cracker" advocates lost.
However, I will give you guys something in your favor. Use of the term "safe cracker" persists so we have introduced yet another context-sensitive rule into the English language, making it that much harder for people to learn the language.
Could it be simply that "computer cracker" is too aliterative and just doesn't sound right? Also, a safe cracker may literally have to crack (break) something to get in, whereas a hacker (a good one anyway) usually doesn't break anything.
I first saw it at the arcade near the big food court at Springfield Mall (Virginia). It was "Americanized" with rap, rock, etc... actually, I think you could choose genres. I didn't play it; there was this teenage dude playing it, and I thought to myself at the time "wow! not only is it a non-violent video game, it could be a great way to learn music".
Ummm... pizza delivery.
We didn't order a pizza.
Ummm... Candygram.
Oh. I wonder who could have sent--GRRRGH, Chomp, chomp, chomp!
Currently, the HURD doesn't support benchmarking software
Oh man! I take back every bad thing I ever said about RMS and friends. Anyone who can disable benchmarking software deserves not only a McArthur grant, but international acclaim and recognition at every level. Why... oh... OK. Go ahead. Give him his Free Software tax. He deserves it. I'll be there to applaud him at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Bureau Of Software Development in Washington DC. Imagine! At last. No more benchmarks. This is a red letter day indeed.
: if so many people are so excited about this technology every time they see it, how come it still isn't very well known
IIRC, hypertext was first demonstrated in 1968, and people who saw the demo got really excited. Then of course there is the infamous XEROX PARC deal where they demoed a fully functional GUI and all the suits could come up with was "How can we attach a copier the size of a refrigerator to this?" The rest is history. It may take the muscle of MSFT to not only hype the technology, but also to take customer feedback, respond to it, and create a winning product. I mean, sure they had a mouse back in the 1960s, but it's a long way from an upside-down trackball the size of a softball to the first GUI Mac. I don't mean to say that the earlier tablets are that crude; but sometimes you need just the right refinement to push something into the mainstream.
Now that we have smaller, cooler CPUs, the time may be right. The "ooh that's cool" feature has always been there. What will be new is the "hey, I can use this all the time". Before it was "this gets heavy, hot, and uncomfortable after a while, and the software doesn't work well enough".
Once again, the Simpsons has something to say about this: "Beat up Martin" --> "Eat up Martha", followed by Nelson throwing his Newton. So... when I get a chance to test one, "Beat up Martin" will be the first thing I write.
"Data" and "Code" are separate and inviolable
Well, *often* they are. I can tell you why that is the case in one word: Outlook. A less virulent example of code and data mixing can be found on web pages that incorporate Javascript, PHP and other "code in the webpage" technologies.
data resides in specific files, acted upon by executable code residing in other files.
Largely true. Config information may play a part, and files may have to be "registered" using data in other parts of the system, but for the most part one file is a thing in and of itself. That's a good thing. I want to be able to back up the file. I don't want my computer popping up a dialog box and telling me I need to calculate the Heisenberg uncertainty probability envelope to locate my data. I don't want to run an intelligent benign worm to crawl half the internet and restore my files. I want to grab the CD I burned. What, pray tell, replaces the file?
Someone, or something, must remember the association between data in a given file, the action the user wishes to perform with/on that data, and the name of the file that contains the appropriate executable code.
Not true. If I want, I can run .c files in an interpreter, compile them, or edit them with a text editor. Windows and *NIX will both let you open any file with any program. There is no gaurantee of course that the program itself will open the file or interpret it with any meaning, but at least you are not constrained by the OS. Historicly, MacOS was much more picky about this; I'm not sure about OS X.
I have no quibbles with your last two bulleted points being true; but I don't have a problem with that being the state of the art either. Steering wheels are the dominant steering method on cars for a reason. We tried tillers in the early days. Nobody liked them.
7) Despite Gates/Dell being the popular winners, 1337 Hax0r sweeps in the electoral college.
8) The next session of Congress opens with a proposal from an 11 year old girl in South Korea, who "sent this bill to have your advice".
Thirty years from now, the greatest challenge to our armed forces will be how to deal with the POWs. No power on Earth will be able to oppose us when we decide to bend other nations to our will.
Unless they have box-cutters.
It's more than just writing on the screen. The tablets come with integrated wireless, they are supposed to be low-power enough so you can walk around with them all day, and when you need a keyboard you can sit the tablet down next to a keyboard (which may also be wirless) and type normally. No, I wouldn't want to write my graduate thesis with a stylus, but websurfing wirelessly and whipping out quick comments like this to /. might be fun. Then of course there is any situation where you are taking notes, like class, a press conference, or a political meeting. People won't just use their tablets in "tablet mode". This has the potential to be a very flexible technology and that's why it's great.