CBS went for agressive personalities (uh oh, Katz, you hear that? maybe you have another chance to talk about profiling!) but screwed up and got someone who was actually violent
CBS, knowing that real[istic] acts of violence are not generally well accepted on broadcast TV, decided not to air the full detail of the incident
CBS, knowing that censorship on the internet is significantly less prominent than it is on TV, and that the web is a much more content-on-demand based medium, decided to make the more violent material available online
CBS decided to charge for some of its online content
CBS declined to decide for other people what standards (i.e. age) its viewers should be held to in order to view their content
Problems with those:
Oops. Mistake, probably not really CBS's fault.
Yeah, TV does suck. But no fault here.
Good for CBS. They shouldn't have to censor themselves.
Fine, they are free to do so.
Hooray for CBS. Leave the v-chips to the real big brother.
Apparently the main defense is take out tiny portions of the music. Small enough that CD player error correction will accomodate, but a direct data transfer will turn into bursts of gibberish.
Does this mean that if you play your CD (analogfully) into an audio in to your computer/mp3-making device, the copy protection is 100% defeated? If so, that's good enough for me. Is there any hope that any digital watermarking/copy protection/enforcing dumb formats system won't suffer from this weakness?
Of the solutions listed above, I think only nickserve and chanserve would be actual significant improvements. It would also be nice if there was better enforcement of all the servers running the same software, or at least software that follows the same rules (there have been glaring exceptions to this in the past, dunno if it still holds).
I think there's one thing above all else about EFNet (and afaik, all IRC networks) which desperately needs to be fixed: it's designed with the most retarded possible network topology, a tree. A few simple redundant links and an improved inter-server protocol would result in it being many times less useful (and hopefully less tempting) to packet a server. But I've never seen anyone discuss actually implementing this.
I think the difference is more real than that. There's a difference between "You can distribute modified versions of this code, as long as you keep these license conditions..." and "You can't." It isn't as simple as a difference between one set of restrictions and another. I find pine/pico's license especially disappointing, because with about 5 more features, pico would be a perfectly usable minimalist editor. Some of these features have been written, and put into pico, but you'll never find the source code available for the enhancements available as anything but patches.
(there are ways to track this) (reread the 4th to last paragraph if you missed this part)
...was the only comment in this entire essay that was interesting enough to be worth my attention out of the 5 or so minutes it took me to read all of it. At yet Katz didn't think it was worth HIS attention any more than the parenthetical that it got.
This is an idiotic statement and utterly devoid of any basis in reality. Until MacOS 8 was released every previous generation of the Macintosh, all the way back to 1986 and the Mac Plus, could run current software.
That's nice, but let's get the stats right.
Everything up to System 6.x (1987) ran on everything which had been released at that time.
System 7.0 (1991) was the first System to require 2 megs of RAM (this effectively eliminates only the mac 128 and 512, unless you do significant upgrading to the 512). This lasted through 7.5.5, although 2 megs was probably not nearly enough for a real install of 7.5.x.
System 7.6 (1996) was the first System to eliminate 68000s (most old Macs), 68020s (MacII), and 68030s which were not 32-bit clean (SE/30, etc.). I believe the RAM requirement went up to 8 megs of physical memory here, too.
MacOS 8.0 (1997) eliminated all non-PPC or 68040 Macs. This meant the oldest Mac MacOS 8 could run on was a Quadra 700, which came out in October 1991. So this is about a 6 year spread of Macs at the most at this point. I believe it also upped RAM requirements to 16 megs.
MacOS 8.5 (1998) was a big one, the first to require a PowerMac of any kind. The FIRST PowerMac was March of 1994, but lets not forget that Apple was still making 68040 Macs until April 1995. RAM requirement is now 32 megs, I think. So Apple is now down to a 3.5-4.5 year spread for what hardware their most current software will run on. Fortunately, until 3/24/2001 (unless you count MacOS X Server or the public beta), the requirements have not gone up at all. 9.1 still runs on 7 year old Macs.
MacOS X (2001) requires a G3/G4. The *first* G3 was November, 1997. So basically, if you're machine is over 3.5 years old, you're out. This is not impressive. I find it unbelievable that Apple can ship a product which does not run on any hardware which was shipping a the time when they shipped the second beta (Rhapsody b2 in 1997) of the product. I guess I don't care that much, though, since I already ordered my copy.:P
Still, I think Apple's doing better than Microsoft did with Windows 95, which shipped in August 1995 and didn't [really] run on a 386.
If you're suggesting that the comparitive market caps have anything to do with the "size" of the companies as you refer to them in the first paragraph, you're mistaken. As a games player/developer, you don't especially care how much a company is worth on paper. The fact that nVidia is worth approximately half as much as ATI doesn't tell me anything about how many people actually use ATI or nVidia cards (I have no statistics about these amounts). Here's to hoping that 3dfx dies a miserable death.
Innovation should focus on improvements and what works should be left as unchanged as possible. That way, people keep their existing tools and techniques and can develop from a base that is functionally complete. Also it saves the effort to re-invent the wheel and to teach "new" stuff that is equivalent to old stuff. Thus, C++ is as close to C as possible - but no closer.
Or, in other words, "I strive for the mediocre." This is the Windows Way. Sure, Windows sucks (or maybe it doesn't). But in any case, it's a "base that is functionally complete" to use B.S.'s words. But Windows 2000 will be just like old windows, but it will suck less (or so they purport). The Linux Way is to find the best standard and then make the best implementation of it possible. This too is far from perfect innovation, but at the moment it seems to be working better for a lot of people.
Stroustrop's attitude is what fails to challenge what needs to be. The questions should be "Is it acceptable that this is as slow as it is?" and "Does this really need to be as complicated as it is?" and "Why is it so difficult to get functionality x here?" C++ merely asks the question "What can we do with this and make it suck a little less?"
It seems to me that a lot of the programmers who prefer C++ do so mainly because C++ is what they were exposed to in school, rather than other programming languages and other systems of OO programming. The reason I've learned C++ (rather than simply C) is because my university decided that C++ would be a good language to teach students in the process of teaching computer science. This is an interesting choice, to say the least. Besides all the difficulty of the strict memory management required by C, many introductory computer science students struggle with C++'s implementation of templates and operator overloading - two programming models which seem to complicate the language a lot without adding much in the way of new functionality or useful structure.
Where do you see C++ in relation to education and it's role as a student of computer science's first programming language?
In penance, let me offer the following: While I don't know if formal Mac versions were released for any of his previous Infocom/Activision games, free/shareware interpreters for many platforms are available
I played Douglas Adams's infocom games Bureaucracy and Hitchhikers' Guide on a Mac in the mid-1980s. I don't know how much of a lag this was behind other platforms, but it can't have been much, because the Mac was a pretty new platform at the time. There was surely no question of "bankrupting the company."
The thing to do isn't to get a patent, but to publish the technology instead, so that it can't be patented at all.
This assumes that the existance of prior (published) art prevents a patent from being issued. This is obviously not the case. Most of the patents which slashdotters find objectionable are for ideas which are already in existence and obvious. The Amazon.com pattent is obvious and not an original idea, it was already "published" before it was patented. Even the idea of a open patent system falls through here, because who's going to think of patenting such trivial things?
Maybe a better idea would be just to pattent EVERYTHING - breathing, drinking water, using toilet paper, slashdotting and flooding the patent office until they're forced to reform patent legislation and practice. The problem with this is that, IIRC, it costs money to apply for a patent. Slashdotters should be campaigning for better US patent office administrators, except I don't think our republic allows those to be elected by the people.
Normally when a comment starts with that subject it's a flame. This is not a flame, read on.
This is Katz's third installment of a column where he defends his right to write for slashdot from a whole lot of people who don't think he should, some more intellectually than others. JonKatz's right to post is not news, it's not for nerds, and it really doesn't need to have a whole column dedicated to it. The cluebie sign reads "take it to private email."
JonKatz will not take it to email, because he is a sensationalist author who needs this kind of drivel to promote his work.
Katz continues to deny that there is any possibility that his opposition might have even one thing right about him. If you deny the validity of any opposition you deny the validity of your own argument. Katz writes:
But the founders of this site never meant for Slashdot to be an exclusive club for programmers using a particular computer operating system. An obvious poke at people who don't like Katz's use of Windows. Here's another clue, on slashdot, no one knows what OS you use. Unless you know me, you probably don't know what OS I use. I happen to use linux, but not as my primary operating system, and not as what I'm writing in right now. Oh no! No one knows what operating system you use unless you tell them. The complaint about Katz's OS comes from his decision to tell us by using mangled HTML and nonstandard characters. This is a totally valid complaint, and you SHOULD expect better from slashdot. I wouldn't tolerate a book that was published in this format, would you? I'm amazed CmdrTaco and the slashdot editors allowed this to begin with.
Katz says nothing in his recent articles. He has nothing to say and isn't very good at being insightful. I've been trying to catch up on slashdot tonight and I'm tired so I'll just make a few comments:
Communities naturally tend to exclude some people and make others feel welcome. Hurray for ethnocentrism and stereotyping. Please do not take out your frustrations with your own culture on the rest of the world and call it "natural."
Adolescent males are hungry for attention and peer approval. Note even more ethnocentrism. This would sound really great next to a quote from one of JonKatz's essays on the evils of profiling, but I haven't got one. Anyway, it seems Katz has changed his mind about profiling kids.
Should we be concerned that entire social groups - women, newcomers - don't feel welcome here? I'd REALLY like to see some evidence for this. In the second part of this series there was a large thread about black people and women being slashdot readers. We need statistics before anyone can make sweeping comments like this. Slashdot offers total anonymity and transparency. No one has to know who you are, or even that you're reading. I see no reason why slashdot should necessarily cause people to not feel welcome.
An entire generation has grown up learning how to communicate viscerally and impulsively, which is both exciting and creative. They also take no responsibility for what they say, and learn to think impulsively and instinctively. If there's one thing slashdot has done which I approve of greatly, it's create a forum where the media has to take responsibility for what they post - or be demonstrated wrong by readers. With rare exceptions like the Sengan incident, no news post on slashdot does not appear without the ability to post responses to that article and say "HEY, you're wrong, here's why..."
As for his suggestions:
More moderation. Require all members to moderate discussions. What kind of freedom is this? All this will ever do is dilute the efficiency of the moderation system and make slashdot membership a burden (not that it would last very long). I like the infrequent moderation point awarding system.
Innovate. Could sites have "free-fire" zones, areas designated for posters who want absolute freedom, but that others can avoid if they wish? This sounds like Microsoft's idea of innovation. Anyone who was around in the days when BBSes were at their zenith knows that flame pits are not a new idea. Maybe you only have to remember the internet longer than 3 years ago. While "free-fire zones" or flame forums or whatever you name them can be fun for a while, I've never seen them be very effective in moving drivel away from the "on-topic" zones nor get people to channel their hostility to them. I don't see why slashdot should serve as a room with padded walls for those who want one.
I'm finding encryption challenges progressively lamer. What are we supposed do be doing? Besides trying to win money with chances which rival that of your average US state lottery, I think we're trying to prove that the encryption that the government wants to restrict us to is weak. The DES projects have proved this - for single pass 56-bit DES keys, the code can be broken quickly if you have a huge amount of cracking power available to you. The CSC project has proved that it's a little harder right now but it can be done. The RC5 project (which is pretty useless at this point), has already proved that if you're using RC5 encryption with a 64-bit key length, for the moment, you're safe unless you're paranoid about strange people with phenomenal amounts of cracking power. Is this what we want to prove? that 64-bit keys are good enough? I was under the impression we wanted free access to 128-512-bit keys for everyone.
The one thing which still interests me is the use of these contests as a way to chart CPU power over time. The RC5 project is currently about 17.5% complete, after 815 days - but look at how much faster the second 1% went compared to the first 1%. This is (among other things) Moore's law in action. The one thing that disappoints me about the CSC project is that there never got to be a AltiVec (Velocity Engine) enabled version for powerpc G4s. The RC5 client now has a AltiVec version and it's about a 4x speed improvement. That's impressive.
I think projects like GIMPS and OGR are far more useful and worthwhile. I don't like SETI because of the especially closed method of the project and the rather arrogant idea that looking for something, which may or may not be there, in a way that may or may not find it, while we may or may not understand what we're doing, is useful.
I will continue to crack RC5 blocks until something better comes along.
I find it really unfortunate that Lawrence Bender and his people are doing this, because it means it probably won't completely suck, and it deserves to. I must say I'm surprised, one thing about Bender's movies is that they've always been in some way new and original, and not typical Hollywood rehashing of the same themes we've already seen before. Not JonKatz. JonKatz is pro-Geek, anti-Censorship, anti-American/Establishment, anti-Conservative, anti-Religious, pro-Conspiracy-Theory, pro-Porn, pro-mp3, pro-linux, anti-MS. Wow, what an amazing set of original creeds! (or not) I can't wait to see all the twists and surprises in this movie!
JonKatz loves to play off the contradiction which is the popularity of 'alternative' culture. Geeks are alternative, so JonKatz has to write good things about them. Same with linux and mp3s and everything else. The y2k bug became too mainstream, so JonKatz had to say that it was a stupid overhyped thing which didn't matter.
The problem is that he doesn't actually think for himself too often. If you remember any of the old articles he posted (the ones where he stilled talked about computers, and used the word 'geek' 3 times per paragraph), it was obvious he had no idea what he was talking about or being a geek was. Of course sometimes he got the main point correct, but only incidentally, and without a lot of depth of discussion behind it.
The best part of JonKatz's articles has always been the user comments. I don't think we'll get that in the movie.
Besides, JonKatz once called Contact a failure, how can he ever be involved with the making of a good movie?
I can't wait to see how many times he uses the word 'geek' and uses microsoft-html in his movie.
Kids have forgotten the value of a library because they can just browse the internet.
And I think that's beautiful. A library represents everything which is proprietary and wrong with the information distribution of the world. A library is a closed system where people with cards can get books which have been selected by the few to be available to the many. And the books in publication are those which have been published by those with the relatively rare capacity to publish a book. This is a self-preserving system which has no interest in bringing new, challenging ideas into the system.
The internet has no such structure. Anyone can publish anything, and be heard without the approval of a third party who has no business interfering in the affairs of readers. This directly supports people with challenging or unpopular ideas, because they can be heard, too, in this medium. Not to mention the technical benefits of the internet over a library: access from any point at any time, powerful searching technology, the practicality of information being updated in a timely fashion, and the existance of a forum for discussion and disagreement about the content. It's far more difficult to access a library from Guam at 2:00am. It's far more difficult to find a book with a [computerized] card catalog than it is to use Google. Making comments in the margins of a book if you disagree with the author is usually frowned upon, and the opportunity for an interactive discussion is nil.
If a kid's going to play Quake rather than go out in the schoolyard and see what a fight really feels like, he's going to grow up with misconcieved and possibly fatal preconceptions of just how fragile human existence really is. And what about all of those "educational" programs that show little kids outdoors, exploring these cartoon worlds.
I, for one, would have much preferred it if Quake had been around when I was eight years old so my classmates could have had something better to take their eight- and nine-year-old angst out on besides me. But I guess that's just me.
And, most important, anyone who sits in front of a computer for hours at a time knows that they are the most ergonomically incorect devices this side of a guillotine. My back, wrists, and eyes are all damaged on a continual basis from these unnaturaly devices. Do we want our kids growing up with bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome? School desks and video game consoles at hmoe are bad enough - do we want them to think that bad posture and continuous back pain is the norm?
One wonders what millennia we live in when a computer is blamed for the incompetence of its user. Computers have never been ergonomically incorrect devices. Find yourself suitable desk and working environment and stop blaming Microsoft for your pain; for once it isn't their fault.
I am sure that this type of effect (and the systemwide transparency too) is only possible because of openGL
I think it's a conspiracy to get us all to buy G4s. Realtime shrinking and growing and dimming/translucent-izing of windows and icons is something which could use a lot of CPU overhead - something which is totally unacceptable in an operating system. I'm glad apple has left window movement as a hollow outline in MacOS, it means it can be fast and unbloated. However, I'm betting the OSX/aqua graphic toys can be done using the G4's Altivec instructions ("Velocity Engine"). Using Altivec would mean very little extra cpu load because most of the time in a desktop environment you aren't going to be using altivec for much else. This screws over those of us who "merely" have fast G3s, though.
Weather is by definition public domain and I don't see any copyright infringement from using the information therein.
The weather is of course, not copyrightable as it is public domain - but a weather forecast, as I imagine The Weather Channel has, should definitely be copyrightable. They put their own (well, someone's) research and effort into making original scientific predictions about the weather. It is up to the meteorologists who will own the copyrights, and it is up the the copyright holders what any licensing terms will be.
This has been one of the worst JonKatz pieces since he first used the word "geek" in vain. Watch Gattaca. There are 2 issues:
Genetically selecting people to be more ideal.
Identifying people by their genes to determine everything about them, that someone such as an employer might need to know.
Katz may be somewhat confused about this, but these two are entirely different issues which have almost nothing to do with each other. How close are we to these goals?
How close are we to genetic selection of ideal children? Sure, eventually we'll be able to remove physical defects, tendencies to some diseases, etc. from our children. This may happen in the coming decades, even. Is this bad? Maybe questionable, but overall it's a great achievement for humanity, just like penicillin. How close are we to making super-intelligent children? That will never happen, let alone in the "early 21st Century" as Katz describes. No amount of genetic research will ever find the key to people being born intelligent.
But lets say genetic engineering did have some undesirable consequence in the next century. This would be the fault of the evil Human Genome Project. WHAT? Idiot. The Human Genome Project is about learning, information, and adding to the amount of data available to humanity. If Jon Katz believes learning information can be dangerous he is the Big Brother of his own personal 1984, not the scientists of the Human Genome Project. He would just as quickly be the person to blame gun manufacturers for genocide.
What about using a person's DNA to identify everything anyone needs to know about them? DNA tests are nothing new. I seem to remember something about a highly publicized trial and a retired football player. They'll get faster, and more common, and maybe somed day we'll be taking DNA tests to use an ATM. DNA tests will never be sufficient for job interviews, as is the case in Gattaca, because DNA will never be an indicator of how intelligent, knowledgeable, or talented a person is.
Re:Why I hate Mac keyboards
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
this is the single biggest thing that I hate about typical Mac's...they have the nibs on "d" and "k"
Unfortunately, on recent keyboards (the "iMac" Apple USB keyboard and some powerbook keyboards) Apple has sunken into the mindless conformity that is jf keyboard nipples (wtf is a nib? The word is "nipples"). Nipples on d and k are actually far superior. No, this is not a matter of opinion, this is a fact about human interface design. A person can get used to either fj nipples or dk nipples so the while personal preference does matter, it's only a matter of which one a person uses. What makes dk nipples superior is that there's a more or less equal chance of putting your fingers down left/right/inward/outward shifted from the correct position for typing. dk nipples give you positive feedback no matter which direction you're off in. That is, you feel the nipple being on the wrong finger, as opposed to just failing to feel a nipple at all. As any intelligent interface designer will tell you, positive feedback is many, many times better than negative feedback.
Call me a capitalist swine, but, owning stock in the evil empire, the 5 baby bills would be the most profitable by far.
This is why I disagree.
MS has basically 3 kinds of products which they make money off of (I make no claim of being objective about MS here):
Software which sucks but people think they want it so they buy it
Software which sucks but MS makes it so people buy it
Software which sucks but MS tells them they want it and they believe them so they buy it
Under the first category comes stuff like Windows 95/98. The consumer-OS minimicrosoft (or Baby Bill) will probably grow beyond its simple fractional value of the total microsoft. This is where the "split up MS == more money for MS" idea comes from, I think.
The second category includes things like Office2000 and other horrible microsoft bloatware products which aren't entirely bad, but are pretty lame compared to what else is available. The minimicrosoft which keep these products (consumer/business application software maybe?) will only be able to grow and continue to make money if they start making good products. Similarly, MSN/Hotmail will not control the amount of marketshare they currently do without being supported, run, funded, and owned by microsoft. Overall this isn't bad.
The last category includes utter crap like MS IIS and VC++ and Exchange and anything else MS has for server-type applications (NT if we're really lucky, but more likely MS will convince the DOJ that they deserve to have one company for all OS development). These are products which are so bad that if they were given away free (free speech or free beer, it doesn't matter) by a random company no one would use them because they suck so much compared to the alternatives. Would anyone use IIS over apache if microsoft didn't make it? I doubt it, for one.
I really like this solution. It's much better than the open-source-ify windows solution. That would suck, simply because there's no code in any microsoft program which is worth salvaging IMHO. The best thing that could come out of that is that someone could make a linux-windows hybrid of some kind, and it would be popular. This does not need to happen. Linux does not need to be more like windows.
Any word on when a MacOS/PPC client will be available? The client list seems a lot shorter than distributed's list for rc5/des, but this seems like one particular glaring omission.
I like perl, but I have to take issue with just about everything you said.
Interpreted languages (like Perl and Python) make it easier to develop things in a hurry because you can make changes without re-compiling.
If you spend a majority of your time on a project waiting for it to compile rather than writing code, you either have a really slow processor or a really small project. A much more relevant measure of rapid development is how quickly people can make the project work. If one person is working on a project, and can write perl code efficiently, that's great. Perl does not especially promote code readability. If a larger group of people is working on a project and they spend a large amount of time just figuring out how each other's code works, that's a problem. C does promote code readability which may be desired in such cases.
The performance bottleneck is bandwidth, not performance. Usually, it's the speed of someone's modem, or the crowded internet backbones that slow down a web-page's performance.
Or not. It depends enitrely on the application. If it's a big database intensive project, performance could easily be the bottleneck. Look at, say, slashdot. Slashdot runs on several machines and the load is still huge. When I read slashdot from school it's painfully obvious that it's the database which is slow, not the bandwidth. I don't have to explain to you that it's an issue of both latency and throughput. The program is latent and the page download is throughput, and most of the server-side processing has to be finished before the bandwidth-intensive moving can even begin. If you're making a cgi project which will run on a quad-athlon, and only have several modem users (you WISH you were so lucky), sure, the speed of the language isn't going to make a difference. If you have to buy nice hardware that just raises the price of the project.
I'd just like to remind everybody that recycling a name, that is, giving a name to a new computer that had been previously used on an old computer, is very immoral and should not be permitted. For example, if you have a box called "Fusion" and you get an entirely new computer you cannot name that computer "Fusion" just because it is replacing the old computer (hi Psychos:P) You must pick a new name for the new computer.
Of course this leads to the question of upgrades? What if all the disks are replaced, or a new OS is installed on the disks? What if the CPU is replaced with a faster one? Of course cases last forever if you treat them well and a case could conceivably contain one computer and then an entirely new one. I believe the best resolution to this issue is that the motherboard owns the name. That is, the name is associated with the computer's motherboard, and any time an upgrade goes so far as to replacing the motherboard, that is when the computer becomes a different computer, and a new name must be found.
800 on the math SAT implies that you answered EVERY SINGLE question CORRECTLY. No blanks, no errors. Are you telling me that 5% of the HS seniors who take the SAT do that, which is what 95th percentile implies?
False. Depending on when you take the test, you can get one, maybe even two wrong and still get an 800. When I got an 800 (late 96 or early 97), it was 97th or 98th percentile.
800s are easy to come by. 1600 (combined, obviously) are not impossible either. I had friends from high school who got 1600s, as far as I can recall they never went on any talk shows next to genius chess players, though.
Slashdot Mirror
- CBS went for agressive personalities (uh oh, Katz, you hear that? maybe you have another chance to talk about profiling!) but screwed up and got someone who was actually violent
- CBS, knowing that real[istic] acts of violence are not generally well accepted on broadcast TV, decided not to air the full detail of the incident
- CBS, knowing that censorship on the internet is significantly less prominent than it is on TV, and that the web is a much more content-on-demand based medium, decided to make the more violent material available online
- CBS decided to charge for some of its online content
- CBS declined to decide for other people what standards (i.e. age) its viewers should be held to in order to view their content
Problems with those:Apparently the main defense is take out tiny portions of the music. Small enough that CD player error correction will accomodate, but a direct data transfer will turn into bursts of gibberish.
Does this mean that if you play your CD (analogfully) into an audio in to your computer/mp3-making device, the copy protection is 100% defeated? If so, that's good enough for me. Is there any hope that any digital watermarking/copy protection/enforcing dumb formats system won't suffer from this weakness?
Of the solutions listed above, I think only nickserve and chanserve would be actual significant improvements. It would also be nice if there was better enforcement of all the servers running the same software, or at least software that follows the same rules (there have been glaring exceptions to this in the past, dunno if it still holds).
I think there's one thing above all else about EFNet (and afaik, all IRC networks) which desperately needs to be fixed: it's designed with the most retarded possible network topology, a tree. A few simple redundant links and an improved inter-server protocol would result in it being many times less useful (and hopefully less tempting) to packet a server. But I've never seen anyone discuss actually implementing this.
-HrebI think the difference is more real than that. There's a difference between "You can distribute modified versions of this code, as long as you keep these license conditions..." and "You can't." It isn't as simple as a difference between one set of restrictions and another. I find pine/pico's license especially disappointing, because with about 5 more features, pico would be a perfectly usable minimalist editor. Some of these features have been written, and put into pico, but you'll never find the source code available for the enhancements available as anything but patches.
(there are ways to track this)
(reread the 4th to last paragraph if you missed this part)
...was the only comment in this entire essay that was interesting enough to be worth my attention out of the 5 or so minutes it took me to read all of it. At yet Katz didn't think it was worth HIS attention any more than the parenthetical that it got.
That's nice, but let's get the stats right. Everything up to System 6.x (1987) ran on everything which had been released at that time.
System 7.0 (1991) was the first System to require 2 megs of RAM (this effectively eliminates only the mac 128 and 512, unless you do significant upgrading to the 512). This lasted through 7.5.5, although 2 megs was probably not nearly enough for a real install of 7.5.x.
System 7.6 (1996) was the first System to eliminate 68000s (most old Macs), 68020s (MacII), and 68030s which were not 32-bit clean (SE/30, etc.). I believe the RAM requirement went up to 8 megs of physical memory here, too.
MacOS 8.0 (1997) eliminated all non-PPC or 68040 Macs. This meant the oldest Mac MacOS 8 could run on was a Quadra 700, which came out in October 1991. So this is about a 6 year spread of Macs at the most at this point. I believe it also upped RAM requirements to 16 megs.
MacOS 8.5 (1998) was a big one, the first to require a PowerMac of any kind. The FIRST PowerMac was March of 1994, but lets not forget that Apple was still making 68040 Macs until April 1995. RAM requirement is now 32 megs, I think. So Apple is now down to a 3.5-4.5 year spread for what hardware their most current software will run on. Fortunately, until 3/24/2001 (unless you count MacOS X Server or the public beta), the requirements have not gone up at all. 9.1 still runs on 7 year old Macs.
MacOS X (2001) requires a G3/G4. The *first* G3 was November, 1997. So basically, if you're machine is over 3.5 years old, you're out. This is not impressive. I find it unbelievable that Apple can ship a product which does not run on any hardware which was shipping a the time when they shipped the second beta (Rhapsody b2 in 1997) of the product. I guess I don't care that much, though, since I already ordered my copy. :P
Still, I think Apple's doing better than Microsoft did with Windows 95, which shipped in August 1995 and didn't [really] run on a 386.
If you're suggesting that the comparitive market caps have anything to do with the "size" of the companies as you refer to them in the first paragraph, you're mistaken. As a games player/developer, you don't especially care how much a company is worth on paper. The fact that nVidia is worth approximately half as much as ATI doesn't tell me anything about how many people actually use ATI or nVidia cards (I have no statistics about these amounts).
Here's to hoping that 3dfx dies a miserable death.
Innovation should focus on improvements and what works should be left as unchanged as possible. That way, people keep their existing tools and techniques and can develop from a base that is functionally complete. Also it saves the effort to re-invent the wheel and to teach "new" stuff that is equivalent to old stuff. Thus, C++ is as close to C as possible - but no closer.
Or, in other words, "I strive for the mediocre." This is the Windows Way. Sure, Windows sucks (or maybe it doesn't). But in any case, it's a "base that is functionally complete" to use B.S.'s words. But Windows 2000 will be just like old windows, but it will suck less (or so they purport). The Linux Way is to find the best standard and then make the best implementation of it possible. This too is far from perfect innovation, but at the moment it seems to be working better for a lot of people.
Stroustrop's attitude is what fails to challenge what needs to be. The questions should be "Is it acceptable that this is as slow as it is?" and "Does this really need to be as complicated as it is?" and "Why is it so difficult to get functionality x here?" C++ merely asks the question "What can we do with this and make it suck a little less?"
It seems to me that a lot of the programmers who prefer C++ do so mainly because C++ is what they were exposed to in school, rather than other programming languages and other systems of OO programming. The reason I've learned C++ (rather than simply C) is because my university decided that C++ would be a good language to teach students in the process of teaching computer science. This is an interesting choice, to say the least. Besides all the difficulty of the strict memory management required by C, many introductory computer science students struggle with C++'s implementation of templates and operator overloading - two programming models which seem to complicate the language a lot without adding much in the way of new functionality or useful structure.
Where do you see C++ in relation to education and it's role as a student of computer science's first programming language?
In penance, let me offer the following: While I don't know if formal Mac versions were released for any of his previous Infocom/Activision games, free/shareware interpreters for many platforms are available
I played Douglas Adams's infocom games Bureaucracy and Hitchhikers' Guide on a Mac in the mid-1980s. I don't know how much of a lag this was behind other platforms, but it can't have been much, because the Mac was a pretty new platform at the time. There was surely no question of "bankrupting the company."
The thing to do isn't to get a patent, but to publish the technology instead, so that it can't be patented at all.
This assumes that the existance of prior (published) art prevents a patent from being issued. This is obviously not the case. Most of the patents which slashdotters find objectionable are for ideas which are already in existence and obvious. The Amazon.com pattent is obvious and not an original idea, it was already "published" before it was patented. Even the idea of a open patent system falls through here, because who's going to think of patenting such trivial things?
Maybe a better idea would be just to pattent EVERYTHING - breathing, drinking water, using toilet paper, slashdotting and flooding the patent office until they're forced to reform patent legislation and practice. The problem with this is that, IIRC, it costs money to apply for a patent. Slashdotters should be campaigning for better US patent office administrators, except I don't think our republic allows those to be elected by the people.
Normally when a comment starts with that subject it's a flame. This is not a flame, read on.
This is Katz's third installment of a column where he defends his right to write for slashdot from a whole lot of people who don't think he should, some more intellectually than others. JonKatz's right to post is not news, it's not for nerds, and it really doesn't need to have a whole column dedicated to it. The cluebie sign reads "take it to private email."
JonKatz will not take it to email, because he is a sensationalist author who needs this kind of drivel to promote his work.
Katz continues to deny that there is any possibility that his opposition might have even one thing right about him. If you deny the validity of any opposition you deny the validity of your own argument. Katz writes:
But the founders of this site never meant for Slashdot to be an exclusive club for programmers using a particular computer operating system.An obvious poke at people who don't like Katz's use of Windows. Here's another clue, on slashdot, no one knows what OS you use. Unless you know me, you probably don't know what OS I use. I happen to use linux, but not as my primary operating system, and not as what I'm writing in right now. Oh no! No one knows what operating system you use unless you tell them. The complaint about Katz's OS comes from his decision to tell us by using mangled HTML and nonstandard characters. This is a totally valid complaint, and you SHOULD expect better from slashdot. I wouldn't tolerate a book that was published in this format, would you? I'm amazed CmdrTaco and the slashdot editors allowed this to begin with.
Katz says nothing in his recent articles. He has nothing to say and isn't very good at being insightful. I've been trying to catch up on slashdot tonight and I'm tired so I'll just make a few comments:
Communities naturally tend to exclude some people and make others feel welcome.Hurray for ethnocentrism and stereotyping. Please do not take out your frustrations with your own culture on the rest of the world and call it "natural."
Adolescent males are hungry for attention and peer approval.
Note even more ethnocentrism. This would sound really great next to a quote from one of JonKatz's essays on the evils of profiling, but I haven't got one. Anyway, it seems Katz has changed his mind about profiling kids.
Should we be concerned that entire social groups - women, newcomers - don't feel welcome here?
I'd REALLY like to see some evidence for this. In the second part of this series there was a large thread about black people and women being slashdot readers. We need statistics before anyone can make sweeping comments like this. Slashdot offers total anonymity and transparency. No one has to know who you are, or even that you're reading. I see no reason why slashdot should necessarily cause people to not feel welcome.
An entire generation has grown up learning how to communicate viscerally and impulsively, which is both exciting and creative. They also take no responsibility for what they say, and learn to think impulsively and instinctively.
If there's one thing slashdot has done which I approve of greatly, it's create a forum where the media has to take responsibility for what they post - or be demonstrated wrong by readers. With rare exceptions like the Sengan incident, no news post on slashdot does not appear without the ability to post responses to that article and say "HEY, you're wrong, here's why..."
As for his suggestions:
More moderation. Require all members to moderate discussions.
What kind of freedom is this? All this will ever do is dilute the efficiency of the moderation system and make slashdot membership a burden (not that it would last very long). I like the infrequent moderation point awarding system.
Innovate. Could sites have "free-fire" zones, areas designated for posters who want absolute freedom, but that others can avoid if they wish?
This sounds like Microsoft's idea of innovation. Anyone who was around in the days when BBSes were at their zenith knows that flame pits are not a new idea. Maybe you only have to remember the internet longer than 3 years ago. While "free-fire zones" or flame forums or whatever you name them can be fun for a while, I've never seen them be very effective in moving drivel away from the "on-topic" zones nor get people to channel their hostility to them. I don't see why slashdot should serve as a room with padded walls for those who want one.
I'm finding encryption challenges progressively lamer. What are we supposed do be doing? Besides trying to win money with chances which rival that of your average US state lottery, I think we're trying to prove that the encryption that the government wants to restrict us to is weak. The DES projects have proved this - for single pass 56-bit DES keys, the code can be broken quickly if you have a huge amount of cracking power available to you. The CSC project has proved that it's a little harder right now but it can be done. The RC5 project (which is pretty useless at this point), has already proved that if you're using RC5 encryption with a 64-bit key length, for the moment, you're safe unless you're paranoid about strange people with phenomenal amounts of cracking power. Is this what we want to prove? that 64-bit keys are good enough? I was under the impression we wanted free access to 128-512-bit keys for everyone.
The one thing which still interests me is the use of these contests as a way to chart CPU power over time. The RC5 project is currently about 17.5% complete, after 815 days - but look at how much faster the second 1% went compared to the first 1%. This is (among other things) Moore's law in action. The one thing that disappoints me about the CSC project is that there never got to be a AltiVec (Velocity Engine) enabled version for powerpc G4s. The RC5 client now has a AltiVec version and it's about a 4x speed improvement. That's impressive.
I think projects like GIMPS and OGR are far more useful and worthwhile. I don't like SETI because of the especially closed method of the project and the rather arrogant idea that looking for something, which may or may not be there, in a way that may or may not find it, while we may or may not understand what we're doing, is useful.
I will continue to crack RC5 blocks until something better comes along.
I find it really unfortunate that Lawrence Bender and his people are doing this, because it means it probably won't completely suck, and it deserves to. I must say I'm surprised, one thing about Bender's movies is that they've always been in some way new and original, and not typical Hollywood rehashing of the same themes we've already seen before. Not JonKatz. JonKatz is pro-Geek, anti-Censorship, anti-American/Establishment, anti-Conservative, anti-Religious, pro-Conspiracy-Theory, pro-Porn, pro-mp3, pro-linux, anti-MS. Wow, what an amazing set of original creeds! (or not) I can't wait to see all the twists and surprises in this movie!
JonKatz loves to play off the contradiction which is the popularity of 'alternative' culture. Geeks are alternative, so JonKatz has to write good things about them. Same with linux and mp3s and everything else. The y2k bug became too mainstream, so JonKatz had to say that it was a stupid overhyped thing which didn't matter.
The problem is that he doesn't actually think for himself too often. If you remember any of the old articles he posted (the ones where he stilled talked about computers, and used the word 'geek' 3 times per paragraph), it was obvious he had no idea what he was talking about or being a geek was. Of course sometimes he got the main point correct, but only incidentally, and without a lot of depth of discussion behind it.
The best part of JonKatz's articles has always been the user comments. I don't think we'll get that in the movie.
Besides, JonKatz once called Contact a failure, how can he ever be involved with the making of a good movie?
I can't wait to see how many times he uses the word 'geek' and uses microsoft-html in his movie.
Kids have forgotten the value of a library because they can just browse the internet.
And I think that's beautiful. A library represents everything which is proprietary and wrong with the information distribution of the world. A library is a closed system where people with cards can get books which have been selected by the few to be available to the many. And the books in publication are those which have been published by those with the relatively rare capacity to publish a book. This is a self-preserving system which has no interest in bringing new, challenging ideas into the system.
The internet has no such structure. Anyone can publish anything, and be heard without the approval of a third party who has no business interfering in the affairs of readers. This directly supports people with challenging or unpopular ideas, because they can be heard, too, in this medium. Not to mention the technical benefits of the internet over a library: access from any point at any time, powerful searching technology, the practicality of information being updated in a timely fashion, and the existance of a forum for discussion and disagreement about the content. It's far more difficult to access a library from Guam at 2:00am. It's far more difficult to find a book with a [computerized] card catalog than it is to use Google. Making comments in the margins of a book if you disagree with the author is usually frowned upon, and the opportunity for an interactive discussion is nil.
If a kid's going to play Quake rather than go out in the schoolyard and see what a fight really feels like, he's going to grow up with misconcieved and possibly fatal preconceptions of just how fragile human existence really is. And what about all of those "educational" programs that show little kids outdoors, exploring these cartoon worlds.
I, for one, would have much preferred it if Quake had been around when I was eight years old so my classmates could have had something better to take their eight- and nine-year-old angst out on besides me. But I guess that's just me.
And, most important, anyone who sits in front of a computer for hours at a time knows that they are the most ergonomically incorect devices this side of a guillotine. My back, wrists, and eyes are all damaged on a continual basis from these unnaturaly devices. Do we want our kids growing up with bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome? School desks and video game consoles at hmoe are bad enough - do we want them to think that bad posture and continuous back pain is the norm?
One wonders what millennia we live in when a computer is blamed for the incompetence of its user. Computers have never been ergonomically incorrect devices. Find yourself suitable desk and working environment and stop blaming Microsoft for your pain; for once it isn't their fault.
I am sure that this type of effect (and the systemwide transparency too) is only possible because of openGL
I think it's a conspiracy to get us all to buy G4s. Realtime shrinking and growing and dimming/translucent-izing of windows and icons is something which could use a lot of CPU overhead - something which is totally unacceptable in an operating system. I'm glad apple has left window movement as a hollow outline in MacOS, it means it can be fast and unbloated. However, I'm betting the OSX/aqua graphic toys can be done using the G4's Altivec instructions ("Velocity Engine"). Using Altivec would mean very little extra cpu load because most of the time in a desktop environment you aren't going to be using altivec for much else. This screws over those of us who "merely" have fast G3s, though.
Weather is by definition public domain and I don't see any copyright infringement from using the information therein.
The weather is of course, not copyrightable as it is public domain - but a weather forecast, as I imagine The Weather Channel has, should definitely be copyrightable. They put their own (well, someone's) research and effort into making original scientific predictions about the weather. It is up to the meteorologists who will own the copyrights, and it is up the the copyright holders what any licensing terms will be.
This has been one of the worst JonKatz pieces since he first used the word "geek" in vain. Watch Gattaca. There are 2 issues:
Katz may be somewhat confused about this, but these two are entirely different issues which have almost nothing to do with each other. How close are we to these goals?
How close are we to genetic selection of ideal children? Sure, eventually we'll be able to remove physical defects, tendencies to some diseases, etc. from our children. This may happen in the coming decades, even. Is this bad? Maybe questionable, but overall it's a great achievement for humanity, just like penicillin. How close are we to making super-intelligent children? That will never happen, let alone in the "early 21st Century" as Katz describes. No amount of genetic research will ever find the key to people being born intelligent.
But lets say genetic engineering did have some undesirable consequence in the next century. This would be the fault of the evil Human Genome Project. WHAT? Idiot. The Human Genome Project is about learning, information, and adding to the amount of data available to humanity. If Jon Katz believes learning information can be dangerous he is the Big Brother of his own personal 1984, not the scientists of the Human Genome Project. He would just as quickly be the person to blame gun manufacturers for genocide.
What about using a person's DNA to identify everything anyone needs to know about them? DNA tests are nothing new. I seem to remember something about a highly publicized trial and a retired football player. They'll get faster, and more common, and maybe somed day we'll be taking DNA tests to use an ATM. DNA tests will never be sufficient for job interviews, as is the case in Gattaca, because DNA will never be an indicator of how intelligent, knowledgeable, or talented a person is.
this is the single biggest thing that I hate about typical Mac's...they have the nibs on "d" and "k"
Unfortunately, on recent keyboards (the "iMac" Apple USB keyboard and some powerbook keyboards) Apple has sunken into the mindless conformity that is jf keyboard nipples (wtf is a nib? The word is "nipples"). Nipples on d and k are actually far superior. No, this is not a matter of opinion, this is a fact about human interface design. A person can get used to either fj nipples or dk nipples so the while personal preference does matter, it's only a matter of which one a person uses. What makes dk nipples superior is that there's a more or less equal chance of putting your fingers down left/right/inward/outward shifted from the correct position for typing. dk nipples give you positive feedback no matter which direction you're off in. That is, you feel the nipple being on the wrong finger, as opposed to just failing to feel a nipple at all. As any intelligent interface designer will tell you, positive feedback is many, many times better than negative feedback.
Call me a capitalist swine, but, owning stock in the evil empire, the 5 baby bills would be the most profitable by far.
This is why I disagree.
MS has basically 3 kinds of products which they make money off of (I make no claim of being objective about MS here):
Under the first category comes stuff like Windows 95/98. The consumer-OS minimicrosoft (or Baby Bill) will probably grow beyond its simple fractional value of the total microsoft. This is where the "split up MS == more money for MS" idea comes from, I think.
The second category includes things like Office2000 and other horrible microsoft bloatware products which aren't entirely bad, but are pretty lame compared to what else is available. The minimicrosoft which keep these products (consumer/business application software maybe?) will only be able to grow and continue to make money if they start making good products. Similarly, MSN/Hotmail will not control the amount of marketshare they currently do without being supported, run, funded, and owned by microsoft. Overall this isn't bad.
The last category includes utter crap like MS IIS and VC++ and Exchange and anything else MS has for server-type applications (NT if we're really lucky, but more likely MS will convince the DOJ that they deserve to have one company for all OS development). These are products which are so bad that if they were given away free (free speech or free beer, it doesn't matter) by a random company no one would use them because they suck so much compared to the alternatives. Would anyone use IIS over apache if microsoft didn't make it? I doubt it, for one.
I really like this solution. It's much better than the open-source-ify windows solution. That would suck, simply because there's no code in any microsoft program which is worth salvaging IMHO. The best thing that could come out of that is that someone could make a linux-windows hybrid of some kind, and it would be popular. This does not need to happen. Linux does not need to be more like windows.
Any word on when a MacOS/PPC client will be available? The client list seems a lot shorter than distributed's list for rc5/des, but this seems like one particular glaring omission.
I like perl, but I have to take issue with just about everything you said.
Interpreted languages (like Perl and Python) make it easier to develop things in a hurry because you can make changes without re-compiling.If you spend a majority of your time on a project waiting for it to compile rather than writing code, you either have a really slow processor or a really small project. A much more relevant measure of rapid development is how quickly people can make the project work. If one person is working on a project, and can write perl code efficiently, that's great. Perl does not especially promote code readability. If a larger group of people is working on a project and they spend a large amount of time just figuring out how each other's code works, that's a problem. C does promote code readability which may be desired in such cases.
The performance bottleneck is bandwidth, not performance. Usually, it's the speed of someone's modem, or the crowded internet backbones that slow down a web-page's performance.Or not. It depends enitrely on the application. If it's a big database intensive project, performance could easily be the bottleneck. Look at, say, slashdot. Slashdot runs on several machines and the load is still huge. When I read slashdot from school it's painfully obvious that it's the database which is slow, not the bandwidth. I don't have to explain to you that it's an issue of both latency and throughput. The program is latent and the page download is throughput, and most of the server-side processing has to be finished before the bandwidth-intensive moving can even begin. If you're making a cgi project which will run on a quad-athlon, and only have several modem users (you WISH you were so lucky), sure, the speed of the language isn't going to make a difference. If you have to buy nice hardware that just raises the price of the project.
I'd just like to remind everybody that recycling a name, that is, giving a name to a new computer that had been previously used on an old computer, is very immoral and should not be permitted. For example, if you have a box called "Fusion" and you get an entirely new computer you cannot name that computer "Fusion" just because it is replacing the old computer (hi Psychos :P) You must pick a new name for the new computer.
Of course this leads to the question of upgrades? What if all the disks are replaced, or a new OS is installed on the disks? What if the CPU is replaced with a faster one? Of course cases last forever if you treat them well and a case could conceivably contain one computer and then an entirely new one. I believe the best resolution to this issue is that the motherboard owns the name. That is, the name is associated with the computer's motherboard, and any time an upgrade goes so far as to replacing the motherboard, that is when the computer becomes a different computer, and a new name must be found.
800 on the math SAT implies that you answered EVERY SINGLE question CORRECTLY. No blanks, no errors. Are you telling me that 5% of the HS seniors who take the SAT do that, which is what 95th percentile implies?
False. Depending on when you take the test, you can get one, maybe even two wrong and still get an 800. When I got an 800 (late 96 or early 97), it was 97th or 98th percentile.
800s are easy to come by. 1600 (combined, obviously) are not impossible either. I had friends from high school who got 1600s, as far as I can recall they never went on any talk shows next to genius chess players, though.