FWIW I'm very impressed with the response of the American people to this unprecedented crisis. I thought the newscasters did an unusually objective job of covering the event (despite the recurrent technical problems), and the talking head experts had very interesting things to say. Fox even wheeled out Ollie North and Newt Gingrich for comments, and even they had surprisingly incisive things to say (!).
The discussions on Slashdot were atypically mature (at least at moderation level 3;-) ), and people kept the crass jokes and politicking to an amazing minimum. I am the moderator of a forum that reflects a much less (ahem) savvy/sophisticated subculture, and I was impressed to see my users put aside their flamewars for a day and engage in mature discussion.
We live in a period of extreme political cynicism/complacency, but yesterday reaffirmed my faith in the American people and our elected representatives. Probably everyone will revert to their non-noble selves once the shock has worn off, but I just wanted to say that it's cool, for a moment, to have old-skool solidarity with your neighbors in the face of a common enemy.:-)
We've been using Crosslink.net, and their service also sucks. The technical support people are very friendly, but they never have any clue what is wrong. Most of the reps do not even know basic networking. The real problem seems to be that they subcontract everything out to 3rd party providers, so you're always waiting on the phone for them to contact a 3rd party. Our network regularly goes down 2-3 times a week, usually for somewhere between 2-10 hours. Also, once it was running at 0.2k/s for an entire week and they couldn't even "verify" that there was a problem. We've only had Crosslink for a few months, but I'm ready to try someone else.
I hear that CAIS/Covad at least has a 95% uptime guarantee or something like that.
Have you used Windows lately? Most Windows applications (including Explorer) export OLE interfaces which can be programmed using scripts written in Visual Basic. Many applications also have VBA support, providing an embedded visual editor and debugger. And if you don't like Visual Basic, there's an interface called "ActiveScript" that allows application developers to easily support an unlimited variety of plug-in languages, including Perl, Python, Java, and Lisp.
You really have try this stuff to see how superior it is to the Unix model (in which a script's only interface to the world is through executing programs and maybe some limited access to C libraries). Compared to the standardized, object-based world of COM/CORBA, something like "bash" seems like an ancient artifact.
It's true that many of the leading window managers for X are incorporating CORBA, but currently (let's be honest) the support is nowhere near the maturity of COM under Windows. From that perspective, one could argue that Windows has *better* scripting than Linux. There are certainly many areas where Linux is superior, but I would hesitate to say that scripting is one of them.
Lastly, I should mention that the Explorer shell has a ton of hooks for customization and extension -- check out www.windowblinds.net for an example of what is possible.
All this technology is not yet widely known or used, since it's relatively new, and since Windows users are less likely to tinker with their desktop than Linux users. But it is catching on, and IMO the design is a lot better than the huge mess of competing "standards" that is X Windows.
Their 1-click ordering feature is similarly problematic; it gets turned on by default every time you buy something. I'm not sure where it stores all your credit card and address info (cookies or on the remote server?), but it does and makes it *real* easy to use them.
How exactly did they measure the number of people using unlicensed software? This issue is so complex that simple statistics like that can't possibly be accurate or even meaningful.
To begin with, the only people who conduct these sorts of "studies" have an obvious bias. You always hear them quoting figures about the X billions of dollars that piracy allegedly "costs" the software industry each year. But in which cases was a "sale" actually lost? Would the person have really bought a copy if he couldn't have pirated it? And those who did buy it, what if they did so because they heard about it from a friend who had an illegal copy? Or maybe they got locked-in to a particular product at college *because* a pirated version was available, and then they convinced their employer to buy 5 licenses when they got their first job.
And where did this data come from in the first place? Did the researchers call up 1000 random phone numbers and ask people how much pirated software they were using, then add 2/5 to compensate for possible dishonest answers?:-)
Besides, the news source was AOL quoting Reuters -- not exactly the first place I'd go for trustworthy technology journalism.:-)
When I was in college, I used to incorporate technical subjects in my papers for non-technical classes because I knew the professor, being unfamiliar with the subject, would have less opportunity for criticism. It worked pretty consistently. I think the same is true with most of Hofstadter's audience, especially those who awarded him a Pulitzer Prize.
Clarity and efficiency are the essence of good writing, and GEB has neither. It's a 700 page stream-of-consciousness rambling, with very little focus or organization. Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that it took him 20 years to figure out what the book's about? Hofstadter is a smart guy and he has some interesting things to say, but in my opinion he's a pretty lousy writer.
Furthermore, being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean you are knowledgable. I can't say much about Escher or Bach, but Hofstadter's discussion of mathematics, biology, and computer science is pretty amateur. Although the subject matter he discusses is indeed profound, it's nowhere near as mystical or difficult to understand as he makes it out to be. The best things in GEB are citations and retellings of work by greater men than Douglas Hofstadter.
Smart people frequently make the assumption that intelligence equals knowledge, and that just because they are knowledgable in one area, they can speak authoritatively about all things. Standards are pretty low in world full of mediocre people, and it's an easy mistake to make.
P.S. Another example of a good book that's about 5 times as long as it needed to be is "Atlas Shrugged".:-)
Everyone knows what a hacker is: it's a person who defeats computer security systems. Everyone knows what a cracker is: it's a person who defeats computer copy protection schemes. Maybe a long time ago these words meant something different, but half the words in the English language once meant something different. Words mean what the majority of the people say they mean. Get over it!
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW I'm very impressed with the response of the American people to this unprecedented crisis. I thought the newscasters did an unusually objective job of covering the event (despite the recurrent technical problems), and the talking head experts had very interesting things to say. Fox even wheeled out Ollie North and Newt Gingrich for comments, and even they had surprisingly incisive things to say (!).
;-) ), and people kept the crass jokes and politicking to an amazing minimum. I am the moderator of a forum that reflects a much less (ahem) savvy/sophisticated subculture, and I was impressed to see my users put aside their flamewars for a day and engage in mature discussion.
:-)
The discussions on Slashdot were atypically mature (at least at moderation level 3
We live in a period of extreme political cynicism/complacency, but yesterday reaffirmed my faith in the American people and our elected representatives. Probably everyone will revert to their non-noble selves once the shock has worn off, but I just wanted to say that it's cool, for a moment, to have old-skool solidarity with your neighbors in the face of a common enemy.
Peace,
Gonz
We've been using Crosslink.net, and their service also sucks. The technical support people are very friendly, but they never have any clue what is wrong. Most of the reps do not even know basic networking. The real problem seems to be that they subcontract everything out to 3rd party providers, so you're always waiting on the phone for them to contact a 3rd party. Our network regularly goes down 2-3 times a week, usually for somewhere between 2-10 hours. Also, once it was running at 0.2k/s for an entire week and they couldn't even "verify" that there was a problem. We've only had Crosslink for a few months, but I'm ready to try someone else.
I hear that CAIS/Covad at least has a 95% uptime guarantee or something like that.
Have you used Windows lately? Most Windows applications (including Explorer) export OLE interfaces which can be programmed using scripts written in Visual Basic. Many applications also have VBA support, providing an embedded visual editor and debugger. And if you don't like Visual Basic, there's an interface called "ActiveScript" that allows application developers to easily support an unlimited variety of plug-in languages, including Perl, Python, Java, and Lisp.
You really have try this stuff to see how superior it is to the Unix model (in which a script's only interface to the world is through executing programs and maybe some limited access to C libraries). Compared to the standardized, object-based world of COM/CORBA, something like "bash" seems like an ancient artifact.
It's true that many of the leading window managers for X are incorporating CORBA, but currently (let's be honest) the support is nowhere near the maturity of COM under Windows. From that perspective, one could argue that Windows has *better* scripting than Linux. There are certainly many areas where Linux is superior, but I would hesitate to say that scripting is one of them.
Lastly, I should mention that the Explorer shell has a ton of hooks for customization and extension -- check out www.windowblinds.net for an example of what is possible.
All this technology is not yet widely known or used, since it's relatively new, and since Windows users are less likely to tinker with their desktop than Linux users. But it is catching on, and IMO the design is a lot better than the huge mess of competing "standards" that is X Windows.
http://www.ratloop.com/~gonz/hoax/
Obviously the author has left something out...
Their 1-click ordering feature is similarly problematic; it gets turned on by default every time you buy something. I'm not sure where it stores all your credit card and address info (cookies or on the remote server?), but it does and makes it *real* easy to use them.
How exactly did they measure the number of people using unlicensed software? This issue is so complex that simple statistics like that can't possibly be accurate or even meaningful.
:-)
:-)
To begin with, the only people who conduct these sorts of "studies" have an obvious bias. You always hear them quoting figures about the X billions of dollars that piracy allegedly "costs" the software industry each year. But in which cases was a "sale" actually lost? Would the person have really bought a copy if he couldn't have pirated it? And those who did buy it, what if they did so because they heard about it from a friend who had an illegal copy? Or maybe they got locked-in to a particular product at college *because* a pirated version was available, and then they convinced their employer to buy 5 licenses when they got their first job.
And where did this data come from in the first place? Did the researchers call up 1000 random phone numbers and ask people how much pirated software they were using, then add 2/5 to compensate for possible dishonest answers?
Besides, the news source was AOL quoting Reuters -- not exactly the first place I'd go for trustworthy technology journalism.
When I was in college, I used to incorporate technical subjects in my papers for non-technical classes because I knew the professor, being unfamiliar with the subject, would have less opportunity for criticism. It worked pretty consistently. I think the same is true with most of Hofstadter's audience, especially those who awarded him a Pulitzer Prize.
:-)
Clarity and efficiency are the essence of good writing, and GEB has neither. It's a 700 page stream-of-consciousness rambling, with very little focus or organization. Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that it took him 20 years to figure out what the book's about? Hofstadter is a smart guy and he has some interesting things to say, but in my opinion he's a pretty lousy writer.
Furthermore, being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean you are knowledgable. I can't say much about Escher or Bach, but Hofstadter's discussion of mathematics, biology, and computer science is pretty amateur. Although the subject matter he discusses is indeed profound, it's nowhere near as mystical or difficult to understand as he makes it out to be. The best things in GEB are citations and retellings of work by greater men than Douglas Hofstadter.
Smart people frequently make the assumption that intelligence equals knowledge, and that just because they are knowledgable in one area, they can speak authoritatively about all things. Standards are pretty low in world full of mediocre people, and it's an easy mistake to make.
P.S. Another example of a good book that's about 5 times as long as it needed to be is "Atlas Shrugged".
Everyone knows what a hacker is: it's a person who defeats computer security systems. Everyone knows what a cracker is: it's a person who defeats computer copy protection schemes. Maybe a long time ago these words meant something different, but half the words in the English language once meant something different. Words mean what the majority of the people say they mean. Get over it!