On the other, we see slashdot outrage any time a social convention is established / followed that actually attempts to impose social codes of behavior.
On the contrary: what we see here is a moral innovation -- an attempt at creating new and nontraditional codes -- which severely contradicts several established, traditional moral codes.
One of those established, traditional moral codes is called freedom of speech. It holds that it is morally wrong for those in power to restrict others' telling of the truth or proclaiming of beliefs. It does not authorize just any speech: for instance, false speech such as slander is beyond its pale. However, to threaten a person with prosecution for stating the (ugly) truth violates this moral principle.
Another moral code violated here, more recent but still established, is called the public's right to know. It is similar to freedom of speech: it holds that it is morally wrong to allow those in power to hold the general public in a state of ignorance for private benefit. The Blackboard company is in a position to benefit from the public's ignorance if it is not held responsible for its violation of its clients' trust by selling them vulnerable software. If it can suppress the fact of the vulnerability from public disclosure, it is gaining an immoral benefit. Those capable of denying it this ill-gotten gain are obligated to do so.
An instantiation of these moral codes online, a recent but also well-known moral principle, is called full disclosure. It holds that since the harm to the public caused by ignorance of security problems outweighs the harm caused by their exposure; and since vendors such as Blackboard must be prevented from benefiting from the public ignorance; that those who discover security flaws should reveal them in a responsible fashion to the public. One step of this disclosure is to notify the vendor; but when the vendor refuses to take moral responsibility, it is fully acceptable and desired to go to the public with the full and ugly truth.
To advocate protecting the Blackboard company from its responsibility to its clients (universities and students) and the general public is not a moral position. It is precisely an amoral one: one which defends the status quo, or the position of an entity with power, against justified moral claims by others. Please refrain from standing on a pseudo-moral high horse when you are in fact advocating "might makes right" and damning the public's and individuals' rights.
The general word for a person whose occupation involves technical skill is technician. It is a plain and simple word without the legal baggage of engineer or the managerial sound of administrator, and it fits much of what "system administrators" do.
Plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians are the model I'm suggesting here. These are people who install, maintain, and repair systems in their various fields. They are not engineers, but neither are they assembly-line workers: they take existing products and fit them to the customer's needs according to a plan and best practices. They plan and carry out maintenance, and do repairs. The lineman who fixes your telephone service when the storm knocks it out is a technician, not an engineer: he (or she) didn't design the thing, but he's trained in how to put it back into working order when it b0rks itself.
Another word, with some history in computer practice, is operator. The role this word referred to several years ago seems now to be filled mostly by junior sysadmins. The operator, as I understand it, was the guy who changed the backup tapes, swapped the disk packs, knew how to add users and police disk quota, but didn't necessarily have the deeper knowledge necessary to do involved repairs.
One difficulty is that computer jobs tend to encompass a wider range of tasks, including a lot of improvisation with whatever tools are suited to the worker's skills. Many of today's sysadmins doubtless know more about programming than electricians know about electrical engineering or most plumbers know about fluid dynamics -- though this does not mean that a computer technician is interchangeable with a programmer. The sysadmin needs little CS; the programmer had better have enough to tell a big-O analysis from a giant robot anime.
Take my job, for instance. I do some of what I'm calling computer technician work -- installing software, doing maintenance, responding to problems, planning backups. I have specific knowledge in computer security and do a range of tasks related, from firewall administration to advising sysadmins and programmers around the site. But I also have some CS background and I do more than a bit of programming myself -- some related to system administration, some to other site-specific needs. And then there's the technical writing.
To look at Excel Saga (which I find very entertaining) one must almost conclude that it was designed explicitly to be impossible to put on American television. As I understand it, some of it was pretty controversial in Japan -- but that's not the end of it:
It leans heavily on the manga. Most anime is based on manga, but Excel Saga slumps drunkenly against the manga, pawing in hilariously intoxicated affection at it. Look no further than Koshi Rikudo's introductions to each episode.
It's too full of Japanese media references that the American audience doesn't get. Why do you think ADV added the little "Pop-Up Video"-style cultural reference guide? Nobody watching cable television is going to know that "Bowling Girls" is a reference to "Morning Girls" -- to say nothing of any the visual puns upon Japanese commercials or products. Otaku can laugh at jokes that have to be explained to them, but most folks can't.
The existence of ACROSS is a running joke about... terrorism. Yeah.
Some of the episodes refer to genres of anime and manga that are not popular here, such as sports anime. Nadesico could get away with the "playing on anime cliches" routine once in a while, since it otherwise makes some sense.
Nabeshin. Brilliant, but... incomprehensible.
Menchi. While the idea of dog as emergency food may be funny in Japan where it plays on stereotypes, it is not funny at all to most Americans. Most folks here are more likely to think it appropriate to discuss fucking a dog than eating one.
So as funny as I may find Excel Saga, I hold up zero hope that it would ever make it to American television.
(really, though, even $0.37 is a bargain for what it's doing, compared to the cost to send something FedEx Ground...)
There are laws forbidding private carriers from getting into the first-class mail business, actually -- and from charging less than the USPS does for certain classes of express mail. The Postal Service is a government-enforced monopoly. The Constitution requires the government to operate post offices -- but it does not require that they be given an otherwise illicit monopoly.
Especially in light of the fact that probably 99 percent of everyone who uses email doesnt give a shit about spam.
If that's so, then why are the major consumer ISPs currently in an advertising battle over who has the best spam filtering? I can't hardly turn on the television these days without seeing an ad from AOL, Earthlink, or MSN touting "now with better spam blocking!" or "protects your kids' email from porn spam!" The one with the butterfly dumping the spammers down the hole is kind of funny, no?
The fact that the majors are advertising spam filtering to the general public indicates to me that they perceive a demand. My guess is that their tech support staff went to the bosses and said, "You know, we're sick of Mabel Homemaker ringing us up and bitching us out about the Russian teen porn spam her husband and kids get. If the mail admins would start using SBL, we could play more Quake -- I mean, handle more important calls."
C++ is a scrawny, bald, naked saint in a loincloth who lives in a crumbling adobe hut where the desert and the jungle meet. He speaks in terse riddles, that expand out into pages of text if you bother to solve them. He can do the work of ten engineers and a hundred strong laborers merely by tapping his staff on the ground and shouting cryptic epithets.
For the lurkers: "Generic programming" is the idea that when you make a class to represent a generic data structure -- like, say, a stack -- it should be instantiable as a stack of integers, a stack of strings, or any other particular data type.
In C++, you do generic programming by writing template functions, into which the compiler fills in the types you need. This is basically a fancy sort of preprocessing. However, template syntax is thoroughly alien to the C roots of C++, and as it turns out can be used to do surprisingly maniacal things. See the links above for the curiously shaped results.
In Python, as in Lisp and other dynamically typed languages, generic programming just kinda falls out of the way the language works. If you make a data structure, by default it can hold more or less any type of object. There's actually a limitation in Python here, though. In earlier versions, a lot of data structures, like dictionaries (hash tables), could only hold immutable values as their keys. (Immutables aren't exactly constants -- they're values that can't be edited in place. You can't edit the string value "foo" in Python, any more than you can change what the number 2 means.) Nowadays, any object that implements the protocol for hashability can be used as a key.
I like Python. I also like Perl. I think it's rather silly that people read these two as mutually exclusive. Both languages have their strengths.
Perl is fast. There's no two ways about it -- Perl's code base has pretty obviously been heavily optimized, and programs written in it tend to be amazingly fast, especially considering that they are being bytecode-compiled rather than compiled to native code.
Python is more readable. Past a certain degree of complexity of operations, Perl code starts to look like noise; Python code doesn't. Perl mongers tout the expressiveness of their language, but Pythonistas note theirs' readability.
Perl is amazing for quick 'n dirty text processing. I wouldn't think of using Python when what I want to do is translate among document formats. That is Perl's native land -- where it ably and easily supplanted earlier Unix tools such as sed and awk, and remains in the forefront.
Python deals better with complicated data structures. Ever read the perllol manpage? When you start to deal with nested structures in Perl, you have to play silly buggers with references, and if you do the wrong thing, you get ARRAY(0x6590) instead of your data. Python copes sanely with complex expressions and never gives you nonsense like that.
Both Python and Perl have lots of modules handy. CPAN is hugely impressive. So is the Python standard library.
Both Python and Perl speak the Web's languages fluently. The fact that both are embeddable as Apache modules (mod_perl and mod_python) should say enough -- but both can also parse HTML, XML, or what-have-you.
Perl is great on the command line. There are so many ideas in text transformation that can be expressed in a single line of Perl -- no need to comment it, it's just a one-liner! -- and that can be quickly put to use in ordinary systems administration via perl -e.
Python is great on the interactive top-level. Need to debug a Python module? Start Python in interactive mode, import the module, and start introspecting.
Perl has plenty of room for your own style. This is a language whose possible syntax is huger than anyone has bothered to describe. If you learn it intimately, you can say exactly what you want in a minimum of bytes. There's a reason Perl fans like one-liners: the language is perfect for them.
Python makes modularity and object-orientation make sense. In Perl, OOP is kind of a bag on the side, an extra feature tossed in to make modules easier to use. In Java, OOP is a Soviet political officer constantly intruding in your work and making sure you comply with the Party's way of doing things. In Python, OOP is just the way things work: everything's an object and it just makes sense.
Me? I use bash for one-liners, Perl for ten-liners, and Python for thousand-liners.
One of my most unreasonable in-house support clients does this. He's the most likely guy here to raise his voice to support staff, or to come up with bizarre demands on how we should fix his problem (rather than simply that it should be fixed), or to demand that something be done now because he didn't prepare in advance.
I actually like it that this guy does cc: my boss, because it makes it plain as day to my boss that the guy is unreasonable. He sees all the SHOUTY CAPS, all the "this is urgent and must be fixed immediately!" and the offensive sig block, too.
Re:Two points - not quite, IMO
on
The Tyranny of Email
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The first point-- that it "breaks your concentration-- to me is a matter of personal reaction to email. Are you compulsively checking it? Do you have audio and visual cues blasting you when something hits your inbox?
I agree fully. The telephone is much more of an interruption of concentration than email, by far -- but if my mail client were beeping or jangling at me whenever new mail comes in, I might see it the other way.
#ifdef NERD_METAPHORS
I do both coding and technical support in the course of my work. If I am in the middle of writing a piece of code and the phone rings, I have to do a mental stack backtrace to get out of "Python mode" and into "speaking English to humans mode". This leaves the large amount of program state I was holding in my head in a shambles that I have to completely reconstruct before I can get back to coding.
However, if I receive an email, I will check it once I have reached some kind of pausing point in the code -- finish writing a function or module, or get the comments of what the current block is going to do sketched out. The user gets almost as fast of service (since I write small functions) and I get more code written. So email works much better in the course of my dual coding/support job than the phone does.
#endif/* NERD_METAPHORS */
However, I know people who use Eudora and have it set to full-on noisy mode, with the pop-up dialog box and the loud doo-DOO-doo! sound effect whenever new mail comes in. Gah. I could never work that way.
Dude, nobody is going to take away your kustome kernel
Of course not. I was just pointing out why not -- it's a braindead proposition to suggest that a "standard" binary kernel would work for the Linux community.
The fact is that recent x86 workstation/server hardware is pretty standard and that's 99% of the Linux market.
It is a good thing that the Linux kernel developers and projects such as Debian are not driven by this narrow "market", then. It is perfectly fine for commercial distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake to limit their audience to users of the very most common pieces of hardware. (Mandrake, recall, began as a fork of Red Hat compiled with Pentium optimization -- abandoning compatibility with 386 and 486 chips. And Red Hat recently dropped support for SPARC and Alpha.) This allows them to be profitable, which is what they are for.
However, that's the commercial Linux workstation/server market, which is only a subset of the broader Linux community. The broader community includes people running Yellow Dog Linux on PowerPC, Debian GNU on PA-RISC, tiny embedded systems on m68k and ARM, and so on, and so on. It is this larger and more inclusive grouping which the Linux kernel project chooses to support, which is why it must stay as general as possible. Building special binaries for Joe Sixpack's Dell box is not in that job description -- it's in Dell's.
Linux developers really need to stabalize driver interfaces. I should be able to go to kernel.org and download the latest kernel *binary*, then install a binary driver from the CD-ROM that came from my NVIDIA card.
Which one of the ten or so architectures that Linux supports should that one official kernel binary be compiled for? i386, because it's what you use? PowerPC, because it's what I use? System/390, because IBM is the shiznit? All of them? Jeez, even Debian, which ships for more architectures than any other distribution, has trouble with that. (Part of why Debian is slow on releases is everything has to compile on PA-RISC and m68k, you know. Debian is not a PC operating system.)
Which compatibility options should be set? Do you want to run that kernel on a broken Toshiba laptop that needs a special flavor of APM to keep from locking up at startup? Do you have a PS/2 with MCA cards, and need that enabled, while nobody else uses it? (Why should the kernel I use suffer from your bloat?) Do you have some funky flavor of Alpha motherboard? Or perhaps do you have the latest Dell high-end server and need a couple of extra patches to keep your system from crashing on the nonstandard motherboard?
In short: If you want a kernel compiled for the particular weirdities of your hardware, get your OEM to do it, or buy from a VAR that does. Some OEMs already do this -- like Dell, on the workstations and servers they ship with Red Hat installed. (Rumors of Dell "dropping Linux support" are greatly exaggerated. They support it just fine on workstations and servers -- just not desktops, which are made with cheap WinHardware to keep the price down.) Yes, the Dell kernel comes with the nVidia driver already installed, since most Dells have nVidia cards. (Though that is changing -- recently, I've been seeing more Radeons in Dells, which is much easier on the software upgrade path.)
Hardware is weird. Even i386 is a lot less "standard", across the entire product universe, than Microsoft and Intel (and Dell!) would like you to think. And -- unlike Microsoft -- Linux (the kernel project, not some distro) does not abandon old hardware and tell people to spend money on upgrades before they can run the latest release. Because of this, it is essentially impossible to make one kernel that is perfect (or even adequate) for everyone. That is why there are so many options in "make menuconfig", and that is why you should expect to build your own kernel (or pay someone to do so) if you want the most out of your hardware.
Having so much effort wasted on many different distributions is stupid. Can you imagine what type of improvements could have been made to Linux in general with the programming time invested in maintaining many different distributions?
What makes you think programmer time is fungible? It's not. More to the point -- what makes you think that anyone would have bothered with Linux in the first place, including Linus himself, if it didn't come with the freedom to do your own thing?
It is an error to assume that if the people who worked on this project had not worked on it, that their time and knowledge would have been spent on some other Linux-related project. If the Linux community had been afraid of "wasted effort" -- better known as diversity -- as you seem to be, perhaps they never would have bothered at all. They'd be using Windows, or maybe Solaris, and keeping their ideas to themselves.
Remember, this whole Linux thing started when Linus said the existing free Unix distributions (Minix and BSD) weren't quite what he was looking for, and went off to do his own thing. Or, alternately, when RMS said the existing software systems didn't quite offer the freedoms he wanted, and went off to make one that would. If Linus and RMS had stopped to worry about whether they were duplicating someone else's efforts, where would we be? Nowhere.
The choice is not whether people work on different projects or on the same project. The choice is whether people work on projects of their own choosing, or work on no project at all. To cut into people for exercising freedom is not advancing Linux; it is attacking the very wellspring of exuberance that birthed Linux and keeps it advancing.
See also my journal entry, second section, on "wasted effort" Stalinism.
RE: Unauthorized Distribution of the Copyrighted Motion Picture Entitled Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
The people sending these notices have no idea whether the files are there on your student's system or not.
How do I know? I'm a security technician / systems admin for a research institution. We don't have many people trying to use bootleg file sharing programs -- and our networks guys block some of the more common ones. We still get these notices from MPAA and BSA claiming that we have everything from movies to office software up for download on KaZaA.
No, that's not the funny part. The funny part is that the IP addresses given in these threats, 80% of the time, are IP addresses that do not have computers on them... and never have. We have a few subnets still reserved for future expansion, never been used... and these are where the copyright terrorists claim we have bootleg files. (The other 20% of the time, the addresses exist, but they still don't have any files on them.)
As far as I can tell, somewhere out there is a glitch in a KaZaA implementation that is listing our disused addresses as hot places to get movies... and the terrorists are believing it, without even checking. That's right. They don't download the file from your student's system and then send the threat. They see a link to that system, do nothing whatsoever to verify it, and send the terrorist threat.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what it is: a terrorist threat, a threat of harm (specifically, abuse of the legal system, spurious prosecution), by a non-governmental group, in order to scare people into going along with a radical political movement.
If you bust your students, the terrorists have already won.
This is quite annoying to students who find out the "MAC tied to port" bit by accidently misplugging their computers into the wrong side-by-side ports after rearranging their desks.
It sounds pretty annoying to students who want to take their laptops down to the library to do research, and plug them in there, too...
Interesting that they tracked the individuals down using MAC addresses for computers in their dorms...
I've never heard of any other Uni having the foresight to record this and it seems like a valid piece of info to have to include in any registration document (as per cable modem setup)
You don't even need to copy it down at sign-up time... just take it out of the DHCP server logs, or the ARP tables on the building router, then look for the MAC address on a switch port in the hall switch. Provided you know your wiring -- and know what switch port goes to what dorm room -- you just narrowed your problem down to the spammer and his roommate.
(Why yes, I did used to be a sysadmin at a college with a bandwidth hogs problem.)
If no phone was involved, how do you make a legal case for using the telephone facsimile machine laws to control it?
No fax machine (not "telephone") was used to send it, but a fax machine was used to receive it. Thus, the obligations which apply to sending things to fax machines apply, but the obligations which apply to sending things from fax machines do not apply.
(Hint - was *your* e-mail stamped with the originating phone number at the top of each page?;)
Sure was. The phone number was the null string, since there was no phone involved in sending. Moreover, since email is not the sort of fax that is divided into pages, it has zero pages. Therefore since the originating phone number must be printed on the top of each page, it need be printed only zero times. That was done precisely as the law requires.
The legal definition of a fax machine is not dependent upon what you, or the marketing division of the Xerox Corporation, call a fax machine. The relevant legal definition of "electronic facsimile machine" is spelled out in plain English in the statute law. A claim that this definition does not model what you think of as a fax machine does not enter into the issue. The words "electronic facsimile machine" are simply a string variable, standing in for the full definition given elsewhere in the statute. The statute could use the word "zruty" in place of "electronic facsimile machine" -- since it gives a clear definition of what is meant by the term, there is precious little weasel space.
Mr. Shein, I saw your presentation at the MIT Spam Conference. You seemed to be suggesting that the way to reduce the cost of spam to mail server owners was to charge or tax spammers for the "privilege" of sending spam, and thus monetarily compensate the sites which receive and process it. I do not see how this can work for the large number of Internet sites, such as my own workplace, which are not ISPs, but which still have a significant spam problem.
I am a security technician and sysadmin for a research institution. My clients, who are scientists, are not interested in being paid to watch advertisements, or in having our institution funded by advertisements shown to them in email. We don't want to be paid to receive spam; we just want not to receive it. We just want the spam attack, the theft of our resources and our people's time, to stop. Do you see any way this can be reconciled?
That said, you can't run Galeon from KDE without first installing the GNOME libraries, and even after you do that, it doesn't have the same look and feel as the rest of your KDE apps.
I don't think that's nearly so much of a problem as
it might seem. Actual differences in user interface
behavior matter more than appearance -- and
in this regard the GNOME and KDE developers have been
unifying their user interface design recommendations.
As it stands, a GNOME user needs to install 200 MB of KDE libraries just to use KMail.
But, you see, except for football hooligans (who might
call themselves "purists"), there's not really such a
thing as a consciously exclusive "GNOME user" or "KDE user".
Reasonable and sensible people install the libraries they
need to get their work done, rather than fighting over it
-- and newbies click "install everything" and get both
without thinking about it.
By saying that "GNOME users" would have to take on an
extra burden in order to have KDE libraries available,
and that this is a problem for ordinary non-hooligan
users, you are implying that anyone besides hooligans
worries about what desktop environment they, as users,
"belong to". But ordinary Linux users don't do that.
They don't regard themselves as "belonging to" a desktop
environment; they just use what works.
In your journal, you liken those of us who want to see more consolidation and cooperation in the free software community to Soviet economic planners. I think that's a bit far-fetched. [...] Standards actually encourage freedom of choice and promote the creation of different alternatives to choose from.
Sometimes. There is a vast difference, though, between
writing an open protocol and letting people implement it,
and attempting to impose "standardization" upon diverse
people and projects who do not want it -- projects which
value their differences.
What I was referring to, with the "Soviet planner" analogy,
was not standardization at all. It was rather the tendency
on the part of some commentators to criticize exuberant
and diverse development as "wasted effort" or "redundant".
For instance, there are the folks who say "Why did KDE
waste time coming up with their own browser? It would be
better if they just helped Mozilla!" or "Those GNOME people
forked the Linux desktop environment just to spite KDE; what
a waste of time!" And I think we can agree that's just
foolishness.
If I write a GNOME app, I alienate all the KDE users out there. If I release a KDE app, I alienate the GNOME users.
Nonsense. The vast majority of people who happen to be running either KDE or GNOME are neither football hooligans nor jingoists about it. They will run whatever applications will help them get their job done. There is after all nothing about the KDE window manager which woukd make GNOME apps quit working, nor vice versa.
I use KDE chiefly because I like its window manager, its browser, and its flavor of xterm. That doesn't stop me from running GNOME and GTK applications, such as dia or nessus. (And I'm glad it doesn't, since I'm a security technician and would be a little hosed without nessus.)
If you are concerned about "alienating" the football hooligan type of user -- well, recall the old Chinese parable about the man, his son, and the donkey. You can't please everyone, and if you try to please all the fanatics, you just end up falling in the river.
(Regarding the mistaken idea that the friendly competition between GNOME and KDE constitutes "wasted effort", I will only direct the reader to the second of my ways to make yourself look stupid. The existence of choice is itself valuable, not a waste.)
Re:It's all about the money
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's pro-capitalist though, which is why it is allowed to exist.
And thus we have an excellent illustration of the difference between the interests of certain capitalists and the usual meaning of capitalism, the free market. The copyright regime allows certain moneyed interests to pursue what is economically called "rent-seeking" behavior: the pursuit of legislation and legal precedent for private benefit, without regard for its effect on other people's property rights or personal liberties.
Increasingly, it should be obvious that the "intellectual property" approach -- the discussion of copyright as a kind of property rather than as a special privilege granted to advance a particular public good -- exists solely to make this rent-seeking seem legitimate. If copyright is "property", then temporal limits upon it seem absurd; after all, we do not have limits upon the amount of time any other property ownership remains valid.
However, copyright is not property. It is a privilege granted by government, which permits a certain party (the copyright holder) to forbid others from using their own actual and physical property (e.g. hard disks, CD blanks) for particular purposes, namely copying the covered works. This privilege may well be legitimate insofar as it serves the public benefit, by encouraging the production of original works. Yet perhaps it is not so legitimate, in a period of history when evidently many artists and creators will create high-quality works whilst disclaiming any such protection. I'm not sure.
However, either way, this "intellectual property" talk has to stop. It's just a sneaky way of slipping unfounded assumptions (namely, that copyright is like property) into the public discourse. Let's call property "property", and copyright "copyright" -- and rent-seeking "corruption".
I know this is going to sound terribly odd (and might make me come off as a total n00b) but I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that PHP doesn't need a debugger (at least not yet). Really, I've been playing around with PHP for months now, playing around with string functions, loops, databases, recursion, and the like and I've never need any debugging tool more advanced from echo.
The kind of debugging tools you need or will find useful
depend not only on the kind of language you are using, but
the kind of problems you are solving and the style in which
you program.
For instance, if you write bottom-up and do unit tests compulsively, you may
rarely if ever see the need to step through the execution of a
higher level function with a debugger. If you write top-down, however, it may be much
more necessary since the exact behavior of your lower level units may
be less certain to you.
I, for one, do most of my coding in a language with an
interactive top-level -- Python -- wherein unit testing is easy and
exception handling and stack backtraces work reasonably. I
don't use the debugger; I unit-test my functions and classes from
the interactive interpreter.
In languages without an interactive top-level,
such as Perl or PHP, it may be useful to use a debugger to fake
one. (You can do this in Perl by executing "perl -de 42",
for instance.) It's not quite as useful as a real one, as found in
Python or Lisp, but it does help.
Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 also includes more than 300 UNIX utilities and tools that behave exactly as they would on UNIX systems, plus a software development kit (SDK) that supports over 1900 UNIX APIs and migration tools such as make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.
Yes, that means that Microsoft distributes GNU software, and indeed in so doing complies with the GPL by passing along the source.
They put in in people inside a capsule thats the size of a grain of rice and most of that size is the capsule. The devices consist of a single TINY microchip (grain of sand size) and a very tiny inductor (two grains of sand size).
The truly irritating thing -- for someone who likes to think of himself as skeptical and rational -- is that it wasn't so long ago this was the stuff of paranoid schizophrenia.
I didn't say "the stuff of science fiction", mind you. I said "the stuff of paranoid schizophrenia." I knew people years before this RFID stuff was public, who believed that "someone" had implanted a "chip" or a "radio transmitter" inside their bodies, to track them. Those people were mentally disturbed and their beliefs were delusions. Now... well... these things exist, they are getting widely deployed -- people put them in their dogs after all.
I'm going to sound like a Kuro5hin poster to ask this -- but what does it mean about our society that we are making paranoid delusions come true so easily? Apparently our laws encourage it, our police and other government agencies are all very willing to forward it, and our industries to implement it.
If we want to live in a dystopia, all we need to do is implement the technologies and policies of dystopia. If we want to live in an insane society, all we need to do is implement the technologies and policies of insanity. I'd rather neither, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary: what we see here is a moral innovation -- an attempt at creating new and nontraditional codes -- which severely contradicts several established, traditional moral codes.
One of those established, traditional moral codes is called freedom of speech. It holds that it is morally wrong for those in power to restrict others' telling of the truth or proclaiming of beliefs. It does not authorize just any speech: for instance, false speech such as slander is beyond its pale. However, to threaten a person with prosecution for stating the (ugly) truth violates this moral principle.
Another moral code violated here, more recent but still established, is called the public's right to know. It is similar to freedom of speech: it holds that it is morally wrong to allow those in power to hold the general public in a state of ignorance for private benefit. The Blackboard company is in a position to benefit from the public's ignorance if it is not held responsible for its violation of its clients' trust by selling them vulnerable software. If it can suppress the fact of the vulnerability from public disclosure, it is gaining an immoral benefit. Those capable of denying it this ill-gotten gain are obligated to do so.
An instantiation of these moral codes online, a recent but also well-known moral principle, is called full disclosure. It holds that since the harm to the public caused by ignorance of security problems outweighs the harm caused by their exposure; and since vendors such as Blackboard must be prevented from benefiting from the public ignorance; that those who discover security flaws should reveal them in a responsible fashion to the public. One step of this disclosure is to notify the vendor; but when the vendor refuses to take moral responsibility, it is fully acceptable and desired to go to the public with the full and ugly truth.
To advocate protecting the Blackboard company from its responsibility to its clients (universities and students) and the general public is not a moral position. It is precisely an amoral one: one which defends the status quo, or the position of an entity with power, against justified moral claims by others. Please refrain from standing on a pseudo-moral high horse when you are in fact advocating "might makes right" and damning the public's and individuals' rights.
Plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians are the model I'm suggesting here. These are people who install, maintain, and repair systems in their various fields. They are not engineers, but neither are they assembly-line workers: they take existing products and fit them to the customer's needs according to a plan and best practices. They plan and carry out maintenance, and do repairs. The lineman who fixes your telephone service when the storm knocks it out is a technician, not an engineer: he (or she) didn't design the thing, but he's trained in how to put it back into working order when it b0rks itself.
Another word, with some history in computer practice, is operator. The role this word referred to several years ago seems now to be filled mostly by junior sysadmins. The operator, as I understand it, was the guy who changed the backup tapes, swapped the disk packs, knew how to add users and police disk quota, but didn't necessarily have the deeper knowledge necessary to do involved repairs.
One difficulty is that computer jobs tend to encompass a wider range of tasks, including a lot of improvisation with whatever tools are suited to the worker's skills. Many of today's sysadmins doubtless know more about programming than electricians know about electrical engineering or most plumbers know about fluid dynamics -- though this does not mean that a computer technician is interchangeable with a programmer. The sysadmin needs little CS; the programmer had better have enough to tell a big-O analysis from a giant robot anime.
Take my job, for instance. I do some of what I'm calling computer technician work -- installing software, doing maintenance, responding to problems, planning backups. I have specific knowledge in computer security and do a range of tasks related, from firewall administration to advising sysadmins and programmers around the site. But I also have some CS background and I do more than a bit of programming myself -- some related to system administration, some to other site-specific needs. And then there's the technical writing.
One job title? Ten? I have no idea.
So as funny as I may find Excel Saga, I hold up zero hope that it would ever make it to American television.
Sigh.
There are laws forbidding private carriers from getting into the first-class mail business, actually -- and from charging less than the USPS does for certain classes of express mail. The Postal Service is a government-enforced monopoly. The Constitution requires the government to operate post offices -- but it does not require that they be given an otherwise illicit monopoly.
If that's so, then why are the major consumer ISPs currently in an advertising battle over who has the best spam filtering? I can't hardly turn on the television these days without seeing an ad from AOL, Earthlink, or MSN touting "now with better spam blocking!" or "protects your kids' email from porn spam!" The one with the butterfly dumping the spammers down the hole is kind of funny, no?
The fact that the majors are advertising spam filtering to the general public indicates to me that they perceive a demand. My guess is that their tech support staff went to the bosses and said, "You know, we're sick of Mabel Homemaker ringing us up and bitching us out about the Russian teen porn spam her husband and kids get. If the mail admins would start using SBL, we could play more Quake -- I mean, handle more important calls."
So tell me about C++ templates. In Python, we get generic functions by using dynamic typing, rather than putting a whole 'nother alien Turing-complete language in the compiler.
For the lurkers: "Generic programming" is the idea that when you make a class to represent a generic data structure -- like, say, a stack -- it should be instantiable as a stack of integers, a stack of strings, or any other particular data type.
In C++, you do generic programming by writing template functions, into which the compiler fills in the types you need. This is basically a fancy sort of preprocessing. However, template syntax is thoroughly alien to the C roots of C++, and as it turns out can be used to do surprisingly maniacal things. See the links above for the curiously shaped results.
In Python, as in Lisp and other dynamically typed languages, generic programming just kinda falls out of the way the language works. If you make a data structure, by default it can hold more or less any type of object. There's actually a limitation in Python here, though. In earlier versions, a lot of data structures, like dictionaries (hash tables), could only hold immutable values as their keys. (Immutables aren't exactly constants -- they're values that can't be edited in place. You can't edit the string value "foo" in Python, any more than you can change what the number 2 means.) Nowadays, any object that implements the protocol for hashability can be used as a key.
Me? I use bash for one-liners, Perl for ten-liners, and Python for thousand-liners.
One of my most unreasonable in-house support clients does this. He's the most likely guy here to raise his voice to support staff, or to come up with bizarre demands on how we should fix his problem (rather than simply that it should be fixed), or to demand that something be done now because he didn't prepare in advance.
I actually like it that this guy does cc: my boss, because it makes it plain as day to my boss that the guy is unreasonable. He sees all the SHOUTY CAPS, all the "this is urgent and must be fixed immediately!" and the offensive sig block, too.
I agree fully. The telephone is much more of an interruption of concentration than email, by far -- but if my mail client were beeping or jangling at me whenever new mail comes in, I might see it the other way.
#ifdef NERD_METAPHORS
I do both coding and technical support in the course of my work. If I am in the middle of writing a piece of code and the phone rings, I have to do a mental stack backtrace to get out of "Python mode" and into "speaking English to humans mode". This leaves the large amount of program state I was holding in my head in a shambles that I have to completely reconstruct before I can get back to coding.
However, if I receive an email, I will check it once I have reached some kind of pausing point in the code -- finish writing a function or module, or get the comments of what the current block is going to do sketched out. The user gets almost as fast of service (since I write small functions) and I get more code written. So email works much better in the course of my dual coding/support job than the phone does.
#endif /* NERD_METAPHORS */
However, I know people who use Eudora and have it set to full-on noisy mode, with the pop-up dialog box and the loud doo-DOO-doo! sound effect whenever new mail comes in. Gah. I could never work that way.
Of course not. I was just pointing out why not -- it's a braindead proposition to suggest that a "standard" binary kernel would work for the Linux community.
It is a good thing that the Linux kernel developers and projects such as Debian are not driven by this narrow "market", then. It is perfectly fine for commercial distributions such as Red Hat and Mandrake to limit their audience to users of the very most common pieces of hardware. (Mandrake, recall, began as a fork of Red Hat compiled with Pentium optimization -- abandoning compatibility with 386 and 486 chips. And Red Hat recently dropped support for SPARC and Alpha.) This allows them to be profitable, which is what they are for.
However, that's the commercial Linux workstation/server market, which is only a subset of the broader Linux community. The broader community includes people running Yellow Dog Linux on PowerPC, Debian GNU on PA-RISC, tiny embedded systems on m68k and ARM, and so on, and so on. It is this larger and more inclusive grouping which the Linux kernel project chooses to support, which is why it must stay as general as possible. Building special binaries for Joe Sixpack's Dell box is not in that job description -- it's in Dell's.
Which one of the ten or so architectures that Linux supports should that one official kernel binary be compiled for? i386, because it's what you use? PowerPC, because it's what I use? System/390, because IBM is the shiznit? All of them? Jeez, even Debian, which ships for more architectures than any other distribution, has trouble with that. (Part of why Debian is slow on releases is everything has to compile on PA-RISC and m68k, you know. Debian is not a PC operating system.)
Which compatibility options should be set? Do you want to run that kernel on a broken Toshiba laptop that needs a special flavor of APM to keep from locking up at startup? Do you have a PS/2 with MCA cards, and need that enabled, while nobody else uses it? (Why should the kernel I use suffer from your bloat?) Do you have some funky flavor of Alpha motherboard? Or perhaps do you have the latest Dell high-end server and need a couple of extra patches to keep your system from crashing on the nonstandard motherboard?
In short: If you want a kernel compiled for the particular weirdities of your hardware, get your OEM to do it, or buy from a VAR that does. Some OEMs already do this -- like Dell, on the workstations and servers they ship with Red Hat installed. (Rumors of Dell "dropping Linux support" are greatly exaggerated. They support it just fine on workstations and servers -- just not desktops, which are made with cheap WinHardware to keep the price down.) Yes, the Dell kernel comes with the nVidia driver already installed, since most Dells have nVidia cards. (Though that is changing -- recently, I've been seeing more Radeons in Dells, which is much easier on the software upgrade path.)
Hardware is weird. Even i386 is a lot less "standard", across the entire product universe, than Microsoft and Intel (and Dell!) would like you to think. And -- unlike Microsoft -- Linux (the kernel project, not some distro) does not abandon old hardware and tell people to spend money on upgrades before they can run the latest release. Because of this, it is essentially impossible to make one kernel that is perfect (or even adequate) for everyone. That is why there are so many options in "make menuconfig", and that is why you should expect to build your own kernel (or pay someone to do so) if you want the most out of your hardware.
What makes you think programmer time is fungible? It's not. More to the point -- what makes you think that anyone would have bothered with Linux in the first place, including Linus himself, if it didn't come with the freedom to do your own thing?
It is an error to assume that if the people who worked on this project had not worked on it, that their time and knowledge would have been spent on some other Linux-related project. If the Linux community had been afraid of "wasted effort" -- better known as diversity -- as you seem to be, perhaps they never would have bothered at all. They'd be using Windows, or maybe Solaris, and keeping their ideas to themselves.
Remember, this whole Linux thing started when Linus said the existing free Unix distributions (Minix and BSD) weren't quite what he was looking for, and went off to do his own thing. Or, alternately, when RMS said the existing software systems didn't quite offer the freedoms he wanted, and went off to make one that would. If Linus and RMS had stopped to worry about whether they were duplicating someone else's efforts, where would we be? Nowhere.
The choice is not whether people work on different projects or on the same project. The choice is whether people work on projects of their own choosing, or work on no project at all. To cut into people for exercising freedom is not advancing Linux; it is attacking the very wellspring of exuberance that birthed Linux and keeps it advancing.
See also my journal entry, second section, on "wasted effort" Stalinism.
The people sending these notices have no idea whether the files are there on your student's system or not.
How do I know? I'm a security technician / systems admin for a research institution. We don't have many people trying to use bootleg file sharing programs -- and our networks guys block some of the more common ones. We still get these notices from MPAA and BSA claiming that we have everything from movies to office software up for download on KaZaA.
No, that's not the funny part. The funny part is that the IP addresses given in these threats, 80% of the time, are IP addresses that do not have computers on them ... and never have. We have a few subnets still reserved for future expansion, never been used ... and these are where the copyright terrorists claim we have bootleg files. (The other 20% of the time, the addresses exist, but they still don't have any files on them.)
As far as I can tell, somewhere out there is a glitch in a KaZaA implementation that is listing our disused addresses as hot places to get movies ... and the terrorists are believing it, without even checking. That's right. They don't download the file from your student's system and then send the threat. They see a link to that system, do nothing whatsoever to verify it, and send the terrorist threat.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what it is: a terrorist threat, a threat of harm (specifically, abuse of the legal system, spurious prosecution), by a non-governmental group, in order to scare people into going along with a radical political movement.
If you bust your students, the terrorists have already won.
It sounds pretty annoying to students who want to take their laptops down to the library to do research, and plug them in there, too ...
(Why yes, I did used to be a sysadmin at a college with a bandwidth hogs problem.)
No fax machine (not "telephone") was used to send it, but a fax machine was used to receive it. Thus, the obligations which apply to sending things to fax machines apply, but the obligations which apply to sending things from fax machines do not apply.
Honestly, I thought that part was obvious.
Sure was. The phone number was the null string, since there was no phone involved in sending. Moreover, since email is not the sort of fax that is divided into pages, it has zero pages. Therefore since the originating phone number must be printed on the top of each page, it need be printed only zero times. That was done precisely as the law requires.
The legal definition of a fax machine is not dependent upon what you, or the marketing division of the Xerox Corporation, call a fax machine. The relevant legal definition of "electronic facsimile machine" is spelled out in plain English in the statute law. A claim that this definition does not model what you think of as a fax machine does not enter into the issue. The words "electronic facsimile machine" are simply a string variable, standing in for the full definition given elsewhere in the statute. The statute could use the word "zruty" in place of "electronic facsimile machine" -- since it gives a clear definition of what is meant by the term, there is precious little weasel space.
I am a security technician and sysadmin for a research institution. My clients, who are scientists, are not interested in being paid to watch advertisements, or in having our institution funded by advertisements shown to them in email. We don't want to be paid to receive spam; we just want not to receive it. We just want the spam attack, the theft of our resources and our people's time, to stop. Do you see any way this can be reconciled?
Please do not spam Slashdot with repeated message content.
I don't think that's nearly so much of a problem as it might seem. Actual differences in user interface behavior matter more than appearance -- and in this regard the GNOME and KDE developers have been unifying their user interface design recommendations.
But, you see, except for football hooligans (who might call themselves "purists"), there's not really such a thing as a consciously exclusive "GNOME user" or "KDE user". Reasonable and sensible people install the libraries they need to get their work done, rather than fighting over it -- and newbies click "install everything" and get both without thinking about it.
By saying that "GNOME users" would have to take on an extra burden in order to have KDE libraries available, and that this is a problem for ordinary non-hooligan users, you are implying that anyone besides hooligans worries about what desktop environment they, as users, "belong to". But ordinary Linux users don't do that. They don't regard themselves as "belonging to" a desktop environment; they just use what works.
Sometimes. There is a vast difference, though, between writing an open protocol and letting people implement it, and attempting to impose "standardization" upon diverse people and projects who do not want it -- projects which value their differences.
What I was referring to, with the "Soviet planner" analogy, was not standardization at all. It was rather the tendency on the part of some commentators to criticize exuberant and diverse development as "wasted effort" or "redundant". For instance, there are the folks who say "Why did KDE waste time coming up with their own browser? It would be better if they just helped Mozilla!" or "Those GNOME people forked the Linux desktop environment just to spite KDE; what a waste of time!" And I think we can agree that's just foolishness.
Nonsense. The vast majority of people who happen to be running either KDE or GNOME are neither football hooligans nor jingoists about it. They will run whatever applications will help them get their job done. There is after all nothing about the KDE window manager which woukd make GNOME apps quit working, nor vice versa.
I use KDE chiefly because I like its window manager, its browser, and its flavor of xterm. That doesn't stop me from running GNOME and GTK applications, such as dia or nessus. (And I'm glad it doesn't, since I'm a security technician and would be a little hosed without nessus.)
If you are concerned about "alienating" the football hooligan type of user -- well, recall the old Chinese parable about the man, his son, and the donkey. You can't please everyone, and if you try to please all the fanatics, you just end up falling in the river.
(Regarding the mistaken idea that the friendly competition between GNOME and KDE constitutes "wasted effort", I will only direct the reader to the second of my ways to make yourself look stupid. The existence of choice is itself valuable, not a waste.)
And thus we have an excellent illustration of the difference between the interests of certain capitalists and the usual meaning of capitalism, the free market. The copyright regime allows certain moneyed interests to pursue what is economically called "rent-seeking" behavior: the pursuit of legislation and legal precedent for private benefit, without regard for its effect on other people's property rights or personal liberties.
Increasingly, it should be obvious that the "intellectual property" approach -- the discussion of copyright as a kind of property rather than as a special privilege granted to advance a particular public good -- exists solely to make this rent-seeking seem legitimate. If copyright is "property", then temporal limits upon it seem absurd; after all, we do not have limits upon the amount of time any other property ownership remains valid.
However, copyright is not property. It is a privilege granted by government, which permits a certain party (the copyright holder) to forbid others from using their own actual and physical property (e.g. hard disks, CD blanks) for particular purposes, namely copying the covered works. This privilege may well be legitimate insofar as it serves the public benefit, by encouraging the production of original works. Yet perhaps it is not so legitimate, in a period of history when evidently many artists and creators will create high-quality works whilst disclaiming any such protection. I'm not sure.
However, either way, this "intellectual property" talk has to stop. It's just a sneaky way of slipping unfounded assumptions (namely, that copyright is like property) into the public discourse. Let's call property "property", and copyright "copyright" -- and rent-seeking "corruption".
The kind of debugging tools you need or will find useful depend not only on the kind of language you are using, but the kind of problems you are solving and the style in which you program.
For instance, if you write bottom-up and do unit tests compulsively, you may rarely if ever see the need to step through the execution of a higher level function with a debugger. If you write top-down, however, it may be much more necessary since the exact behavior of your lower level units may be less certain to you.
I, for one, do most of my coding in a language with an interactive top-level -- Python -- wherein unit testing is easy and exception handling and stack backtraces work reasonably. I don't use the debugger; I unit-test my functions and classes from the interactive interpreter.
In languages without an interactive top-level, such as Perl or PHP, it may be useful to use a debugger to fake one. (You can do this in Perl by executing "perl -de 42", for instance.) It's not quite as useful as a real one, as found in Python or Lisp, but it does help.
From the Product Overview for Microsoft Services for Unix 3.0:
Yes, that means that Microsoft distributes GNU software, and indeed in so doing complies with the GPL by passing along the source.
The truly irritating thing -- for someone who likes to think of himself as skeptical and rational -- is that it wasn't so long ago this was the stuff of paranoid schizophrenia.
I didn't say "the stuff of science fiction", mind you. I said "the stuff of paranoid schizophrenia." I knew people years before this RFID stuff was public, who believed that "someone" had implanted a "chip" or a "radio transmitter" inside their bodies, to track them. Those people were mentally disturbed and their beliefs were delusions. Now ... well ... these things exist, they are getting widely deployed -- people put them in their dogs after all.
I'm going to sound like a Kuro5hin poster to ask this -- but what does it mean about our society that we are making paranoid delusions come true so easily? Apparently our laws encourage it, our police and other government agencies are all very willing to forward it, and our industries to implement it.
If we want to live in a dystopia, all we need to do is implement the technologies and policies of dystopia. If we want to live in an insane society, all we need to do is implement the technologies and policies of insanity. I'd rather neither, thanks.