If you think the pen (or keyboard) is mightier than the sword, let's perform a little experiment, shall we? You grab your keyboard, I'll grab my katana. No, let's make it a little more even. I'll only grab my bokken.
Please note that my bokken is rather less powerful than a black Ford Falcon full of armed thugs.
The pen has its greatest power only where there is already a culture of liberalism, such as in colonial America and France.
The pen did not repel the Turks from Vienna or drive them out of Greece. The Spartans found the pen to be rather useless at Thermopylae and the Athenians likewise at Marathon.
The arrival of the written word did not topple dictatorships. If anything it strengthed them by allowing the transmission of written codes. The telegraph did not topple dictatorships. Nor the telephone. Radio Free Europe, while a great boon to many behind the Iron Curtain, is not responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, and a similar project has had no effect at all in Cuba. The internet did not topple Saddam Hussien.
To topple dictators you need guns. Recent evidence suggests that nowadays those guns pretty much have to be mounted on tanks and airplanes. Angry villagers with torches and pitchforks are no match for tanks and airplanes. They at least need shoulder launched missles.
Thinking the internet can free Tibet or Burma is a wee bit of wishful thinking. Thinking it would do so in the infancy of the WWW is really kinda silly and smacks of cognitive dissonance.
Maybe people want to think that it can because it frees them from having to think of guns. We've had some bad experiences with guns misapplied.
If Burma is going to topple its dictatorship by using the internet, it's going to be to write posts saying, "Please, send us some frickin' tanks!. Oh, and a couple of A-10s would be handy, if you can see your way clear. And maybe some people to train us in their use. Don't forget the ammo."
Of course Burma is in southeast Asia. Remember my mentioning bad experiences with the misapplication of guns?
We're a bit, ummmmmmmmm, gun shy, when it comes to southeast Asia. Beating up Arabs sitting on rich oil fields who have been living on nothing but grass for two weeks is more to our taste these days. Asians like living on grass. And they fight back. And they're not good for headlines in an election year.
When I owned an R/C car racetrack people used to ask me what my wife did. I told them, "She makes trains from kits provided by the parent factory."
Extrapolating from the context in which the question was asked, that of model cars, they usually responded with something like, "Oh, yes, I understand that model trains are still a big business. People like trains."
Then I had to correct them.
"No. You don't understand. She makes trains. Locomotives to be specific. She goes to work in the morning, picks up huge slabs of plate steel, and turns them into trains. She's a welder."
Kinda like Flashdance, only different, since she's a belly dancer.
The cool part is that once she's "assembled a kit" she often gets to drive it out of the assembly shed into the yard.
Can't do that with a Tyco or Lego.
They won't let me take a crack at one though. When the subject comes up they just mumble some legal crap about "liability" or something.
Damn lawyers and insurance underwriters won't let anybody have any fun anymore. I'd really like to have a go at it, there's this move I saw in a cartoon once, and I think I can do it.
Nah, the Butthead next door to me isn't that sort of Butthead. He's mid thirtyish with kids. He always wears white shirts and ties because he likes to. He looks like William Foster. He makes a lot of garbage because if a screw falls out of something "it's broke."
To give you an idea of how little cognition this guy can levy toward creating something, he says he's a programer.
Turns out that means he can use Visual Foxpro and Dreamweaver, kinda.
He works for the state.
He's at absolutely no risk of "Falling Down" because he's underskilled and over educated. He hasn't got the brains for either, or for going crazy.
Without doors you could always climb in through the Windows. They're always the greatest security/intrusion risk, being, by their very nature, terribly insecure. You'll never find a maximum security facility with Windows where they want to be absolutely sure no one can get, or even see, inside.
I'm not exactly sure how chimneys fit into this, but be extra careful around Christmas time. Leaving out a honeypot is reputed to work against malicious behavior in case of actual intrusion though.
With an upward turn of both my health and the weather I have been off enganging in my penchant for experimental paleoanthropology, specializing in those things which leave no archeological trace. A bit of a nonscience, for, while experimental (like Heyerdal's voyages), they rely on inductive reasoning, since, they leave no archeological trace.
I have been making things with either no tools at all, or with tools that Homo Habilis would have found laughably crude (that rock I done found).
In fact, right now, I'm smoking a "paleolithic" pipe I made out of, and with, only things I found in the parking lot next to my house. A bit of pithy weed ( no, I don't know what pithed it off) for the stem, reamed out with a bit of grass straw, a bit of wild bamboo for the bowl, cut with a bit of slate used as found, drilled with a bit of granite used as found. Finishing work done with the side of the bit of slate used for cutting. The end result looks quite modern, it simply took a bit longer to make than if I had used more sophisticated tools, like worked stone.
Natural fiber textiles at least the equal of modern factory produced materials can be made with no tools at all, just fingers, right from the collection of the fiber to the finished good. I don't think there's going to be much of a market for finger woven woodchuck yarn sweatervests though, no matter how much it looks like a modern, factory made, garment.
Add a tool, a stick to tie the end of the twine/yarn to, and ease and speed of manufacture both go up.
Even though it's an inductive "science" it can still prove illuminating. I've found that many anthropologists believe the daftest shit simply because they hypothesise without trying things. I belong to the "They weren't idiots" school of anthropology. If there are two possible ways of doing something, and it's completely impossible to determine which way from the archeological record, I try it. If it turns out you'd have to be a complete idiot to do it one of the ways, and by complete idiot I don't mean dumber than Australopithicus/Habilis, I mean dumber than that that Butthead who lives next door to me (dumber than your average chimp), than the other way is clearly the way it was done.
I can't prove it, other than by the inductive reasoning of "They weren't idiots," but I think that's pretty good inductive reasoning.
My grandfather was the first person in his "city" (North Dartmouth Mass, just outside of New Beford), to have a TV at all. Huge floor cabinet machine housing a 9" screen. The entire village used to come to his house to watch the test pattern for half an hour before Uncle Milty (or whoever) came on.
Although my mother grew up in the New Beford area I did not. I grew up living just a few blocks from the building from which the very first commercial television broadcast was made, and then, subsequently, the very first commercial color broadcast.
The article mentions CBS as the first to broadcast color. That may be true in the grand scheme of things, but RCA had an ace up its experimental sleeve. A business partner who owned an NBC (as the article notes, owned by RCA) affiliated station willing and capable of trying out any experimental technology in a commercial setting.
General Electric.
The building, a little ways from the original site of GE, is now used as the Science building of the local state affiliated community college.
My stepfather was an executive for the GE Broadcasting company and eventually brought home a network owned color set for us to watch, and I well remember the whole family sitting down as a group every Sunday night to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. On NBC, because Disney's orginal network, ABC, had no color capability.
Second? Hell, we've been down this road so many times the cobbles are worn to little nubs. We've had the French scare, the Loyalist scare, the Mexican scare, the Spanish scare, the Nez Perce scare, the bootlegger scare and the British scare alone was milked for 100 years. The Alien and Sedition acts were passed in 1798.
Christ almighty, if you want to get an idea of how far back this goes just read the Bible.
Extrapolate "human nature," put into context with trying to predict your girlfriend's behavior.
Is she going to be your sweetie for life, or are you going to wake up dead one morning with a 10" chef's knife sticking out of your back?
Such are the parameters of trying to predict possible terrorist activity, the boundries of the problem.
Profiling potential terrorists is going to work just about as well as profiling potential wives.
It's a dandy tool of terror for a government to use against its own people though.
Cats tend to treat me as a peer. I've always taken that as an extraordinary compliment. I wish I quite lived up to it.
(By the way. If you've got a cat that likes to butt heads with you, that's a cat that's overtly trying to let you know that it views you at least as something a bit more than its own pair of opposable thumbs. A cat that only rubs its face against you and doesn't butt heads is telling you that you're a can opener)
KFG, I respect you for your normally intelligent and insightful posts, but if you believe that predicting terror is a matter of 'extrapolation' you are living in a dream world my friend.
I think maybe you need to go back and read my post again. Have you had your morning coffee yet?
I agree with you almost entirely, except maybe the "far wiser than us" bit and the "far far smarter than you can imagine" bit.
It is not uncommon for these wise men to turn to me for wisdom, and I imagine that the terrorists are very, very smart, and I'm in the habit of consorting with the smartest men there are, some of whom you never have, and never will, hear of, by design, and some of whom are household names among smart people, so I can imagine a good deal of smart. ..
As well as cunning.
It's abslutely extraordinary what you can learn by just watching cats.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
--George Santayana
Sophmoric: The itch to be original
--Pete Seeger
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9
I shall, I suppose, counter the orginal posters "troll" with one of my own. I too like software that just works. There are really only so many good ways to go about implementing most software tasks, and once those ways are discovered one is most apt to apply one's energies into refinement, not innovation.
While there is some real, solid work going on in software these days, most of it is fashion and barbarous. Most of the solid work really is going on in OSS, but a bit under the radar of the fashion concious, but OSS is not exempt from fashion.
Indeed, I'd say, contrary to the opinion of most involved in it, OSS is currently the bastion of fashion driven software, because it is written by "the people" who have little really deep understanding of what they are doing. They learned Java from the web. They never bothered to learn mathmatics or theory, indeed tend to deride mathmatics and theory.
While they may expend a good deal of mental energy on their code, they do not expend much mental energy at all on what they are doing.
Like, why they are even doing it in the first place, other than their itch. ..to be original.
Which they accomplish by following the trends. Go figure.
Like the Bible, Knuth is revered in passing, but largely unread. Codd is nearly vilified in some corners, or simply dismissed with a wave of the hand as "just theory". ..unread and un-understood, and unimplemented so that no one can even claim they have made a valid comparison with a working product. There's a good OSS project for someone. A project that can go where no man has gone before. A deeply useful project.
Who, in the internet "trained" generation, is even capable of it?
For that matter, who, in the modern trade school that even the universities have become, is capable of it?
The majority of coders are so busy "innovating" that they haven't even bothered to finish building the foundations. Software that just works. On known best principles. Even though it's just an evolutionary extension of someone else's work and not something that will get you a Slashdot headline.
That's what OSS is really all about. Otherwise we really are just better off spending our time making money to buy commercial "products."
No one contributes any code is because the developer ACCEPTS NO CODE. There have been many people who want to help, but because the dude insists on doing it himself, progress moves at a glacial pace for Racer.
Yes, I cover that case in my post. It isn't what one might call an open and collaborative project, although it appears to be from outside, if you kinda squint at it. However, Ruud certainly takes suggestions and implements them when such suggestions fit the project.
But yes, progress is slow, fitful and not always headed in directions I'm fond of. It's Ruud's project. Not mine. I've followed the project since it was first batted around on r.a.s., and even gave up plans for my own OSS project to support it. I admit I expected more.
None of this really has anything to do with my point.
Your last point addresses my point directly and is one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to revive my own OSS project plans or join another project. I'm getting too old for petty bullshit and life is short.
KFG
P.S. Care to buy my copy of Motorsims AMA Superbike and take over my preorder for Trans Am (nee Can Am)? No, huh? Didn't think so. When was the last time their website was updated? It still says "New From Motorsims" under AMA Superbike.
At least Carroll Smith can rest in peace being no longer saddled with association with those people.
I myself am running a pre-SE version of Windows 98 right now as I post, running Mozilla FireHydrant, or whatever it's called at the moment. I use Eudora for mail. I've got a copy of Office 97 lying around in a box somewhere, but really, why bother when I've got Open Office and do virtually all of my editing in Windows with WinVi32?
I think the last bit of software I bought that traces back to Microsoft was Age of Empires II:The Conquerers Expansion. How many years ago was that released?
So, I have some personal experience with the slow down in the purchasing of Microsoft software, although a good many home computers that I've been called to unwonk lately have been running XP, without having to read about it.
I hear rumors thought that this might due, at least in part, to some "Linux" thingy or other, which I also hear does not play by the large, mature, conservative corporate rule sheet.
Can you suggest where I might go to read about some user experiences with this "Linux" thingy and the effect it might have on the software industry and how Microsoft might respond to it?
Or vice versa. The only sticking point at all is that both involved parties recognize the other as part of China, and themselves as the only legitimate Chinese government.
"Microsoft is just one good idea away from oblivion."
I may not have the quote exactly right, but the idea expressed is correct.
Therefore, to protect one's future, if one is a power player, one must protect innovation from outside the company. Excessive innovation from inside the company is, more often than not, antithetical to profits.
As an example from outside IT, a Trinity factory oval racer who used to practice at my track once told me the story of his first race for the team. He not only won, but he broke the track race record by two seconds.
When he got off the driver's stand, glowing with pride and accomplishment, the team manager stormed up to him and said, "Don't ever let me see you do anything like that again, or your fired. We came here with seconds in hand. You only needed to win by one second, not half a lap. Now every other team knows how fast we are, and they're all going to go home and figure out how to go just as fast before they come out to a major meet again. You just threw away a full season's advantage by showing off. And a full season's sales advantage that goes with it."
There is no advantage to an established company in offering too much "advancment" to the public. Especially if they can get the public to buy chrome as advancment.
Anybody from outside who offers advancement when the public is willing to buy chrome simply needs to be stopped.
A large and powerful corporation, again using Microsoft as the obvious example, by necessity becomes conservative. They have little to gain. They can live off of the the return of their outside investments, effectively, for eternity. They can only lose.
They don't like losing.
If they can create a conservative general atmosphere in society and at law that favors them, well, they don't have to because they can't have any real competition.
Other powerful corporations aren't real competition in innovation because they're all playing by the same rule sheet. Only try to win by one second, so you can sell the other seconds you've already got later, when people get tired of this year's chrome.
Unfortunately, not all ideas are created equal, or should be treated equally. Some are better than others. Some bad ideas repeat over and over and over again, over a course of years and it's not unknown for a project head to get testy about them after awhile.
Especially since it's actually pretty rare for someone outside to come up with an idea that the people who work with the code all the time haven't actually already thought of.
Some ideas aren't bad, they just have to wait their turn in line and their priority may be low within the parameters of the project.
For instance, in Racer, a project overtly aimed at providing the best physics engine for driving sims, there is fairly constant call from the modelers, who don't contribute any code, to impliment opening doors and working horns.
While the core physics is yet incomplete.
Opening doors and working horns will come in time, and has been stipulated, when they make it to the top of the priority list. Right now nailing the tire and drive train model is far more important.
As a project head it's all too easy to become a code monkey for everyone with an idea. That isn't the role of a project head. His role is to decide what does and does not belong in the code base, and when it's important for what does belong in the code base to get implimented.
I'd don't know OBSD or Theo, but I do know some of the problems encountered in open collaborative works, or works that are essentially the project of a few, but that take place in fairly public view so the public tends to the think of them as open collaborative works when they are not.
This isn't just a problem in software projects. As a physicist I have spent many, many hours trying to explain to people why their idea for a magnetic perpetual motion machine just won't work. I have to spend these hours because these people haven't taken the trouble to gain a simple high school understanding of physics.
Now, as it happens I make part of my living tutoring basic scientific philosophy and physics. If these people wish to enroll and learn, fine, that's my "job."
But if all they want to do is argue with you, ad infinitum, in swarms, sooner or later you start to reach for the fly swatter and just bat them all away.
Not because you have anything against them, per se. Because life is short.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is because the internet isn't armed.
The internet is a source of gossip.
Dictators are a source of guns.
If you think the pen (or keyboard) is mightier than the sword, let's perform a little experiment, shall we? You grab your keyboard, I'll grab my katana. No, let's make it a little more even. I'll only grab my bokken.
Please note that my bokken is rather less powerful than a black Ford Falcon full of armed thugs.
The pen has its greatest power only where there is already a culture of liberalism, such as in colonial America and France.
The pen did not repel the Turks from Vienna or drive them out of Greece. The Spartans found the pen to be rather useless at Thermopylae and the Athenians likewise at Marathon.
The arrival of the written word did not topple dictatorships. If anything it strengthed them by allowing the transmission of written codes. The telegraph did not topple dictatorships. Nor the telephone. Radio Free Europe, while a great boon to many behind the Iron Curtain, is not responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, and a similar project has had no effect at all in Cuba. The internet did not topple Saddam Hussien.
To topple dictators you need guns. Recent evidence suggests that nowadays those guns pretty much have to be mounted on tanks and airplanes. Angry villagers with torches and pitchforks are no match for tanks and airplanes. They at least need shoulder launched missles.
Thinking the internet can free Tibet or Burma is a wee bit of wishful thinking. Thinking it would do so in the infancy of the WWW is really kinda silly and smacks of cognitive dissonance.
Maybe people want to think that it can because it frees them from having to think of guns. We've had some bad experiences with guns misapplied.
If Burma is going to topple its dictatorship by using the internet, it's going to be to write posts saying, "Please, send us some frickin' tanks!. Oh, and a couple of A-10s would be handy, if you can see your way clear. And maybe some people to train us in their use. Don't forget the ammo."
Of course Burma is in southeast Asia. Remember my mentioning bad experiences with the misapplication of guns?
We're a bit, ummmmmmmmm, gun shy, when it comes to southeast Asia. Beating up Arabs sitting on rich oil fields who have been living on nothing but grass for two weeks is more to our taste these days. Asians like living on grass. And they fight back. And they're not good for headlines in an election year.
Even with the internet.
KFG
In this case I was thinking specifically of America, since that is the purview of the issue at hand.
I was indulging in my penchant for Socratic facetiousness.
KFG
No, no. I don't want to just drive a train. I want to open up one of those new high speed streamliners and see if I can pull a bootleg turn.
KFG
Maybe even if they started collecting names of those at political rallies, and started adding those to the databases.
I don't think you have to worry about that, unless you live a country that's been known to do that sort of thing in the past.
KFG
I am curious to see what they have on file for me.
Nothing.
But they just started one.
KFG
When I owned an R/C car racetrack people used to ask me what my wife did. I told them, "She makes trains from kits provided by the parent factory."
Extrapolating from the context in which the question was asked, that of model cars, they usually responded with something like, "Oh, yes, I understand that model trains are still a big business. People like trains."
Then I had to correct them.
"No. You don't understand. She makes trains. Locomotives to be specific. She goes to work in the morning, picks up huge slabs of plate steel, and turns them into trains. She's a welder."
Kinda like Flashdance, only different, since she's a belly dancer.
The cool part is that once she's "assembled a kit" she often gets to drive it out of the assembly shed into the yard.
Can't do that with a Tyco or Lego.
They won't let me take a crack at one though. When the subject comes up they just mumble some legal crap about "liability" or something.
Damn lawyers and insurance underwriters won't let anybody have any fun anymore. I'd really like to have a go at it, there's this move I saw in a cartoon once, and I think I can do it.
KFG
Nah, the Butthead next door to me isn't that sort of Butthead. He's mid thirtyish with kids. He always wears white shirts and ties because he likes to. He looks like William Foster. He makes a lot of garbage because if a screw falls out of something "it's broke."
To give you an idea of how little cognition this guy can levy toward creating something, he says he's a programer.
Turns out that means he can use Visual Foxpro and Dreamweaver, kinda.
He works for the state.
He's at absolutely no risk of "Falling Down" because he's underskilled and over educated. He hasn't got the brains for either, or for going crazy.
KFG
Without doors you could always climb in through the Windows. They're always the greatest security/intrusion risk, being, by their very nature, terribly insecure. You'll never find a maximum security facility with Windows where they want to be absolutely sure no one can get, or even see, inside.
I'm not exactly sure how chimneys fit into this, but be extra careful around Christmas time. Leaving out a honeypot is reputed to work against malicious behavior in case of actual intrusion though.
And maybe some cookies.
KFG
With an upward turn of both my health and the weather I have been off enganging in my penchant for experimental paleoanthropology, specializing in those things which leave no archeological trace. A bit of a nonscience, for, while experimental (like Heyerdal's voyages), they rely on inductive reasoning, since, they leave no archeological trace.
I have been making things with either no tools at all, or with tools that Homo Habilis would have found laughably crude (that rock I done found).
In fact, right now, I'm smoking a "paleolithic" pipe I made out of, and with, only things I found in the parking lot next to my house. A bit of pithy weed ( no, I don't know what pithed it off) for the stem, reamed out with a bit of grass straw, a bit of wild bamboo for the bowl, cut with a bit of slate used as found, drilled with a bit of granite used as found. Finishing work done with the side of the bit of slate used for cutting. The end result looks quite modern, it simply took a bit longer to make than if I had used more sophisticated tools, like worked stone.
Natural fiber textiles at least the equal of modern factory produced materials can be made with no tools at all, just fingers, right from the collection of the fiber to the finished good. I don't think there's going to be much of a market for finger woven woodchuck yarn sweatervests though, no matter how much it looks like a modern, factory made, garment.
Add a tool, a stick to tie the end of the twine/yarn to, and ease and speed of manufacture both go up.
Even though it's an inductive "science" it can still prove illuminating. I've found that many anthropologists believe the daftest shit simply because they hypothesise without trying things. I belong to the "They weren't idiots" school of anthropology. If there are two possible ways of doing something, and it's completely impossible to determine which way from the archeological record, I try it. If it turns out you'd have to be a complete idiot to do it one of the ways, and by complete idiot I don't mean dumber than Australopithicus/Habilis, I mean dumber than that that Butthead who lives next door to me (dumber than your average chimp), than the other way is clearly the way it was done.
I can't prove it, other than by the inductive reasoning of "They weren't idiots," but I think that's pretty good inductive reasoning.
KFG
My grandfather was the first person in his "city" (North Dartmouth Mass, just outside of New Beford), to have a TV at all. Huge floor cabinet machine housing a 9" screen. The entire village used to come to his house to watch the test pattern for half an hour before Uncle Milty (or whoever) came on.
Although my mother grew up in the New Beford area I did not. I grew up living just a few blocks from the building from which the very first commercial television broadcast was made, and then, subsequently, the very first commercial color broadcast.
The article mentions CBS as the first to broadcast color. That may be true in the grand scheme of things, but RCA had an ace up its experimental sleeve. A business partner who owned an NBC (as the article notes, owned by RCA) affiliated station willing and capable of trying out any experimental technology in a commercial setting.
General Electric.
The building, a little ways from the original site of GE, is now used as the Science building of the local state affiliated community college.
My stepfather was an executive for the GE Broadcasting company and eventually brought home a network owned color set for us to watch, and I well remember the whole family sitting down as a group every Sunday night to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. On NBC, because Disney's orginal network, ABC, had no color capability.
KFG
So we've recreated the 2nd Red Scare
Second? Hell, we've been down this road so many times the cobbles are worn to little nubs. We've had the French scare, the Loyalist scare, the Mexican scare, the Spanish scare, the Nez Perce scare, the bootlegger scare and the British scare alone was milked for 100 years. The Alien and Sedition acts were passed in 1798.
Christ almighty, if you want to get an idea of how far back this goes just read the Bible.
KFG
Extrapolate "human nature," put into context with trying to predict your girlfriend's behavior.
Is she going to be your sweetie for life, or are you going to wake up dead one morning with a 10" chef's knife sticking out of your back?
Such are the parameters of trying to predict possible terrorist activity, the boundries of the problem.
Profiling potential terrorists is going to work just about as well as profiling potential wives.
It's a dandy tool of terror for a government to use against its own people though.
Cats tend to treat me as a peer. I've always taken that as an extraordinary compliment. I wish I quite lived up to it.
(By the way. If you've got a cat that likes to butt heads with you, that's a cat that's overtly trying to let you know that it views you at least as something a bit more than its own pair of opposable thumbs. A cat that only rubs its face against you and doesn't butt heads is telling you that you're a can opener)
KFG
KFG, I respect you for your normally intelligent and insightful posts, but if you believe that predicting terror is a matter of 'extrapolation' you are living in a dream world my friend.
.
I think maybe you need to go back and read my post again. Have you had your morning coffee yet?
I agree with you almost entirely, except maybe the "far wiser than us" bit and the "far far smarter than you can imagine" bit.
It is not uncommon for these wise men to turn to me for wisdom, and I imagine that the terrorists are very, very smart, and I'm in the habit of consorting with the smartest men there are, some of whom you never have, and never will, hear of, by design, and some of whom are household names among smart people, so I can imagine a good deal of smart. .
As well as cunning.
It's abslutely extraordinary what you can learn by just watching cats.
KFG
Can anybody help me and define the limits of the problem "the war against terrorism"?
The human world is made up of human beings who exasperatingly insist on exhibiting human nature.
Extrapolate.
Predict what your girlfriend is going to do, as well as where and when.
Now all you have to do is expand that technology to encompass the general populace.
Did that help?
KFG
This would be a valid criticism if any of these "antiterrorist" technologies had anything to do with security.
They're about the DEA and tracking potential "politcal radicals." i.e. people who are likely to oppose you politically.
KFG
Does this software detect siamese twins?
No. It detects Kevin Bacon.
KFG
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
.to be original.
.unread and un-understood, and unimplemented so that no one can even claim they have made a valid comparison with a working product. There's a good OSS project for someone. A project that can go where no man has gone before. A deeply useful project.
--George Santayana
Sophmoric: The itch to be original
--Pete Seeger
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9
I shall, I suppose, counter the orginal posters "troll" with one of my own. I too like software that just works. There are really only so many good ways to go about implementing most software tasks, and once those ways are discovered one is most apt to apply one's energies into refinement, not innovation.
While there is some real, solid work going on in software these days, most of it is fashion and barbarous. Most of the solid work really is going on in OSS, but a bit under the radar of the fashion concious, but OSS is not exempt from fashion.
Indeed, I'd say, contrary to the opinion of most involved in it, OSS is currently the bastion of fashion driven software, because it is written by "the people" who have little really deep understanding of what they are doing. They learned Java from the web. They never bothered to learn mathmatics or theory, indeed tend to deride mathmatics and theory.
While they may expend a good deal of mental energy on their code, they do not expend much mental energy at all on what they are doing.
Like, why they are even doing it in the first place, other than their itch. .
Which they accomplish by following the trends. Go figure.
Like the Bible, Knuth is revered in passing, but largely unread. Codd is nearly vilified in some corners, or simply dismissed with a wave of the hand as "just theory". .
Who, in the internet "trained" generation, is even capable of it?
For that matter, who, in the modern trade school that even the universities have become, is capable of it?
The majority of coders are so busy "innovating" that they haven't even bothered to finish building the foundations. Software that just works. On known best principles. Even though it's just an evolutionary extension of someone else's work and not something that will get you a Slashdot headline.
That's what OSS is really all about. Otherwise we really are just better off spending our time making money to buy commercial "products."
KFG
No one contributes any code is because the developer ACCEPTS NO CODE. There have been many people who want to help, but because the dude insists on doing it himself, progress moves at a glacial pace for Racer.
Yes, I cover that case in my post. It isn't what one might call an open and collaborative project, although it appears to be from outside, if you kinda squint at it. However, Ruud certainly takes suggestions and implements them when such suggestions fit the project.
But yes, progress is slow, fitful and not always headed in directions I'm fond of. It's Ruud's project. Not mine. I've followed the project since it was first batted around on r.a.s., and even gave up plans for my own OSS project to support it. I admit I expected more.
None of this really has anything to do with my point.
Your last point addresses my point directly and is one of the reasons I'm in no hurry to revive my own OSS project plans or join another project. I'm getting too old for petty bullshit and life is short.
KFG
P.S. Care to buy my copy of Motorsims AMA Superbike and take over my preorder for Trans Am (nee Can Am)? No, huh? Didn't think so. When was the last time their website was updated? It still says "New From Motorsims" under AMA Superbike.
At least Carroll Smith can rest in peace being no longer saddled with association with those people.
P.P.S. See ya 'round RSC, whoever you are.
I myself am running a pre-SE version of Windows 98 right now as I post, running Mozilla FireHydrant, or whatever it's called at the moment. I use Eudora for mail. I've got a copy of Office 97 lying around in a box somewhere, but really, why bother when I've got Open Office and do virtually all of my editing in Windows with WinVi32?
I think the last bit of software I bought that traces back to Microsoft was Age of Empires II:The Conquerers Expansion. How many years ago was that released?
So, I have some personal experience with the slow down in the purchasing of Microsoft software, although a good many home computers that I've been called to unwonk lately have been running XP, without having to read about it.
I hear rumors thought that this might due, at least in part, to some "Linux" thingy or other, which I also hear does not play by the large, mature, conservative corporate rule sheet.
Can you suggest where I might go to read about some user experiences with this "Linux" thingy and the effect it might have on the software industry and how Microsoft might respond to it?
KFG
competition keeps things very even.
Exactly.
KFG
. . .Taiwan is technically PRC territory anyway.
Or vice versa. The only sticking point at all is that both involved parties recognize the other as part of China, and themselves as the only legitimate Chinese government.
KFG
during the antitrust trial:
"Microsoft is just one good idea away from oblivion."
I may not have the quote exactly right, but the idea expressed is correct.
Therefore, to protect one's future, if one is a power player, one must protect innovation from outside the company. Excessive innovation from inside the company is, more often than not, antithetical to profits.
As an example from outside IT, a Trinity factory oval racer who used to practice at my track once told me the story of his first race for the team. He not only won, but he broke the track race record by two seconds.
When he got off the driver's stand, glowing with pride and accomplishment, the team manager stormed up to him and said, "Don't ever let me see you do anything like that again, or your fired. We came here with seconds in hand. You only needed to win by one second, not half a lap. Now every other team knows how fast we are, and they're all going to go home and figure out how to go just as fast before they come out to a major meet again. You just threw away a full season's advantage by showing off. And a full season's sales advantage that goes with it."
There is no advantage to an established company in offering too much "advancment" to the public. Especially if they can get the public to buy chrome as advancment.
Anybody from outside who offers advancement when the public is willing to buy chrome simply needs to be stopped.
A large and powerful corporation, again using Microsoft as the obvious example, by necessity becomes conservative. They have little to gain. They can live off of the the return of their outside investments, effectively, for eternity. They can only lose.
They don't like losing.
If they can create a conservative general atmosphere in society and at law that favors them, well, they don't have to because they can't have any real competition.
Other powerful corporations aren't real competition in innovation because they're all playing by the same rule sheet. Only try to win by one second, so you can sell the other seconds you've already got later, when people get tired of this year's chrome.
KFG
Right.
Some of us have been trying to open people's eyes to that for decades.
China and Brazil have already had their eyes opened on this score. They are both large, resource rich countries.
They might even have an ax or two to grind.
KFG
Unfortunately, not all ideas are created equal, or should be treated equally. Some are better than others. Some bad ideas repeat over and over and over again, over a course of years and it's not unknown for a project head to get testy about them after awhile.
Especially since it's actually pretty rare for someone outside to come up with an idea that the people who work with the code all the time haven't actually already thought of.
Some ideas aren't bad, they just have to wait their turn in line and their priority may be low within the parameters of the project.
For instance, in Racer, a project overtly aimed at providing the best physics engine for driving sims, there is fairly constant call from the modelers, who don't contribute any code, to impliment opening doors and working horns.
While the core physics is yet incomplete.
Opening doors and working horns will come in time, and has been stipulated, when they make it to the top of the priority list. Right now nailing the tire and drive train model is far more important.
As a project head it's all too easy to become a code monkey for everyone with an idea. That isn't the role of a project head. His role is to decide what does and does not belong in the code base, and when it's important for what does belong in the code base to get implimented.
I'd don't know OBSD or Theo, but I do know some of the problems encountered in open collaborative works, or works that are essentially the project of a few, but that take place in fairly public view so the public tends to the think of them as open collaborative works when they are not.
This isn't just a problem in software projects. As a physicist I have spent many, many hours trying to explain to people why their idea for a magnetic perpetual motion machine just won't work. I have to spend these hours because these people haven't taken the trouble to gain a simple high school understanding of physics.
Now, as it happens I make part of my living tutoring basic scientific philosophy and physics. If these people wish to enroll and learn, fine, that's my "job."
But if all they want to do is argue with you, ad infinitum, in swarms, sooner or later you start to reach for the fly swatter and just bat them all away.
Not because you have anything against them, per se. Because life is short.
KFG
He appears to have overlooked that the voice given in the example is management's, which sets the frame of reference:
"You may not bring a cell phone, from home, to work."
As opposed to the employee's voice:
"I'm sorry Honey, but the boss says I can't take my cell phone to work with me."
KFG