The articles cover a wide range of topics, including:
- Computing and society - Legal issues - New trends in computing - Programming language geekery
Some of it may be too "niche" or "hardcore" (depending on your interests) but there's usually something for everybody in every issue. No, it won't be quite as task-specific as some of the mags out there (i.e., Not many articles with titles like "Turn up the Volume with LVM: twenty ways to crank up your hard drive!!") but excellent, nonetheless.
Glad to see someone else likes (tolerates?) this book. I remember reading it a looong time ago (~1980) and although it introduces a lot of stuff that wasn't present in the original movies, it seemed to hang together pretty well.
I'm sure some kind of "leap of faith" is required for any of these books.
Your post was 100% accurate, but also very depressing.
I guess we're due to go through another era of device proliferation until, in 30 years, some genius kid comes up with the idea of a way to "mark up" plain text, allowing one to navigate documents using "hypertext."
I tend to agree in many ways. It's not entirely an engineering problem.
The real risks come as a result of our system, which is squarely rooted in human greed and fallibility. We're risk-takers by nature, and the risk/reward equation is skewed toward danger.
For example:
If I'm a CEO and build a reactor, cutting costs by attenuating the safety systems specified by the engineers (e.g. using cheap materials for failsafes, or not installing them at all), my profit goes up. I saved a lot of money during construction, didn't I!
However, if something goes wrong and my poorly implemented safety mechanisms fail, my personal risk is actually quite low. I probably won't notice an impact on my earnings, I certainly won't go to jail, and once the media is done feeding on the corpse of my disaster, it's back to "business as usual."
This is a far cry from the careful designs of the engineer, and the scenario gets played out all the time, in various disciplines (see also: BP oil spill, mortgage-backed securities, etc).
Maybe the solution is to let the engineers control the nuclear industry, soup-to-nuts, and send the MBA's packing?
You're right--they probably should. Other folks in this thread have pointed out what a strange comparison it is; I guess they were just trying to contrast the power in two 'mobile' devices from different eras.
The real differences (significant though they may be) are not to be found in the computing power or specifications, however.
There's been a seismic shift in the way we approach the notion of "computing," and it's not necessarily a beneficial one. It wasn't too long ago that owning/using a home computer meant you had full access to the system, and could use it any way you saw fit (more or less).
Perhaps there was a steep learning curve, but it was a fantastic opportunity to explore the guts of your system--you could do some pretty neat stuff, since everything was so open-ended. Many of us spent our formative years hacking around on systems like the Osborne (or the C64, or Apple ][ or whatever) and benefitted tremendously from the experience.
Nowadays, everyone can pick up and carry around a computer with tremendous power, but you're very restricted in what you can do with it, and how you can use it.
- Real, physical keyboard - Easy access to the filesystem - The ability to install whatever you want, and use the computer however you want - Tons of languages, dev tools, and compilers (were) available for various languages - I/O ports for useful tasks like printing...and so on. Osborne 1 is much more suited for geekery.
Maybe it's because I grew up in another era, but I remember that the zeitgeist here in the US during the 60s/70s was all about Science. Your highest aspirations always involved pursuing some kind of career in Science, and if not that, to at least approach life in a rational, objective, semi-scientific manner.
Now it seems like it's all about emotions and chest-thumping. Maybe it's just Devlotuion in action. Don't say we weren't warned!
On a more serious note: I was a science-fair geek, and although I can look back now and see how crappy my work was, it was a very cool and enlightening experience. I remember military recruiters would show up at these fairs, and unless your research had something to do with blowing something up (I wrote computer programs for field biology) they sorta overlooked you.
Fun times. This article is probably just another signpost on the road to our demise.
I think we're talking about an organism... that could imitate other life forms... perfectly... It could have gone on and on... It could have become one dog... It could have become as many dogs as it wanted to -- and without losing any of its original mass...
I can think of at least two distros (gNewSense: http://www.gnewsense.org/ and Trisquel: http://trisquel.info/) that are the result of people working diligently to comb through the entire Ubuntu distro (not just the kernel) and checking modules/programs/packages for license compatibility. Binary blobs and other non-free kernel modules have always been a concern.
Is there a chance they'd try to monetize the J2EE/JEE container market (hey, they're holding the still-warm corpse of BEA) by being deliberately opaque with their JEE specifications?
Or at least, trying to extort or marginalize free/libre implementations as much as possible?
We're living in interesting times. It's obvious Oracle isn't going to be cutting people a whole lot of slack, here.
Maybe we should start taking bets on:
a) When Oracle starts requiring a per-core license for production JVMs, and b) How many $$ per core that will be?
This might play into their strategy. We know they're putting some heat on Google, but maybe a move like this would buy them some leverage, say, against Salesforce.com (with whom they're engaged in an emerging, but heated battle)
Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
This. I recently started a job where management's decided to migrate as much as possible to the cloud. No in-house application is safe.
The smell of death is in the air. All of the developer-admin-types are gradually seeing their responsibilities degrade as the cool things they love doing are being replaced by having to fight the limitations of some web UI.
What's the endgame here? I won't be able to stay, I've worked too hard to see my skillset rust away while I fight some foggy battle with pretty but restrictive UIs. Spending the day opening tickets with a remote cloud company and trying to help troubleshoot their products over the phone is no way to live. Sooner or later, management will say "Why are we paying these people so much? All they do is open tickets and complain about the SLA!"
Cool story, bro, I know, but is anyone else living through this? Is there any escape?
There are many reasons why I wouldn't deploy a production (i.e. www-facing) webserver of any stripe running on Microsoft Windows, security being a big one of them.[1]
On the other hand, for some purposes (corporate intranet, for example), Apache on Windows has been a godsend--it's allowed us, for example, to migrate our internal apps to a Free platform gradually, while depreciating our existing Windows machines (and advocates) into oblivion.
--------------- 1. Lots of people do, though. I'm pretty sure IBM and Oracle Websphere/Weblogic services all use Apache httpd at some level. Happy patching, boys and girls!
Ha! I did some of that too, but the game that I really hacked on was Telengard (check it here) which was written for the C64 in a mixture of basic and assembly. The asm parts were for handling some of the graphics chores only, IIRC, which meant that the rest of the code was easily tweaked.
+400 swords, anyone? Level 750 dragons? Oh yeah. I went there.
If you think that's ethical, you deserve whatever shit life hands you.
What you should have done was gotten the offer on tape, and reported him/her. This would have served the purpose of leveling the playing field, so that those who are ethically corrupt and financially flush (funny how the two seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of times) don't have an unfair advantage.
Well, I don't think paying someone to do it is ethical, but I also believe a lot of dissertation work gets done under shifty circumstances (or, at the very least, requiring an inordinate amount of humiliation, degradation, and ass-kissing). So I guess it becomes a "lesser of two evils" thing.
As for getting it on tape--you're 110% correct. I kick myself to this day for not having a portable recorder.
What I don't understand is how could you possibly hand in a postgraduate dissertation which you didn't write....
I agree, however, my Ph. D. adviser once offered to write my dissertation for $3,000, which at the time (being a poor student), was a ridiculous amount of money (and immoral to boot).
In retrospect, I should've taken a loan and paid him to do it, it would've been easier and far more ethical than actually writing it myself.
Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here's what happens:
"First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module.
Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding. God, I sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems companies have making their modules talk to each other. I think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist the knife in a project manager's ribs."
Slashdot Mirror
...with this
http://aide.sourceforge.net/
It's not a bad little alternative to "Tripwire" or some of those other things, either.
As someone who has downloaded this some time back and messed with it a bit, I do have to say it's kind of slick.
http://opalang.org/
I had a few complaints about it early on, but it's evolving, though. Might be worth revisiting.
Join the ACM.
This still comes on paper every month (plus a digital edition):
http://cacm.acm.org/
The articles cover a wide range of topics, including:
- Computing and society
- Legal issues
- New trends in computing
- Programming language geekery
Some of it may be too "niche" or "hardcore" (depending on your interests) but there's usually something for everybody in every issue. No, it won't be quite as task-specific as some of the mags out there (i.e., Not many articles with titles like "Turn up the Volume with LVM: twenty ways to crank up your hard drive!!") but excellent, nonetheless.
YMMV of course.
Yeah!
Glad to see someone else likes (tolerates?) this book. I remember reading it a looong time ago (~1980) and although it introduces a lot of stuff that wasn't present in the original movies, it seemed to hang together pretty well.
I'm sure some kind of "leap of faith" is required for any of these books.
Your post was 100% accurate, but also very depressing.
I guess we're due to go through another era of device proliferation until, in 30 years, some genius kid comes up with the idea of a way to "mark up" plain text, allowing one to navigate documents using "hypertext."
I tend to agree in many ways. It's not entirely an engineering problem.
The real risks come as a result of our system, which is squarely rooted in human greed and fallibility. We're risk-takers by nature, and the risk/reward equation is skewed toward danger.
For example:
If I'm a CEO and build a reactor, cutting costs by attenuating the safety systems specified by the engineers (e.g. using cheap materials for failsafes, or not installing them at all), my profit goes up. I saved a lot of money during construction, didn't I!
However, if something goes wrong and my poorly implemented safety mechanisms fail, my personal risk is actually quite low. I probably won't notice an impact on my earnings, I certainly won't go to jail, and once the media is done feeding on the corpse of my disaster, it's back to "business as usual."
This is a far cry from the careful designs of the engineer, and the scenario gets played out all the time, in various disciplines (see also: BP oil spill, mortgage-backed securities, etc).
Maybe the solution is to let the engineers control the nuclear industry, soup-to-nuts, and send the MBA's packing?
Shouldn't they compare it to a laptop then?
You're right--they probably should. Other folks in this thread have pointed out what a strange comparison it is; I guess they were just trying to contrast the power in two 'mobile' devices from different eras.
The real differences (significant though they may be) are not to be found in the computing power or specifications, however.
There's been a seismic shift in the way we approach the notion of "computing," and it's not necessarily a beneficial one. It wasn't too long ago that owning/using a home computer meant you had full access to the system, and could use it any way you saw fit (more or less).
Perhaps there was a steep learning curve, but it was a fantastic opportunity to explore the guts of your system--you could do some pretty neat stuff, since everything was so open-ended. Many of us spent our formative years hacking around on systems like the Osborne (or the C64, or Apple ][ or whatever) and benefitted tremendously from the experience.
Nowadays, everyone can pick up and carry around a computer with tremendous power, but you're very restricted in what you can do with it, and how you can use it.
...not trolling, either.
Why?
- Real, physical keyboard ...and so on. Osborne 1 is much more suited for geekery.
- Easy access to the filesystem
- The ability to install whatever you want, and use the computer however you want
- Tons of languages, dev tools, and compilers (were) available for various languages
- I/O ports for useful tasks like printing
I read the headline too quickly.
At first I thought it was going to be an article about some new garbage collector for Java.
Maybe it's because I grew up in another era, but I remember that the zeitgeist here in the US during the 60s/70s was all about Science. Your highest aspirations always involved pursuing some kind of career in Science, and if not that, to at least approach life in a rational, objective, semi-scientific manner.
Now it seems like it's all about emotions and chest-thumping. Maybe it's just Devlotuion in action. Don't say we weren't warned!
On a more serious note: I was a science-fair geek, and although I can look back now and see how crappy my work was, it was a very cool and enlightening experience. I remember military recruiters would show up at these fairs, and unless your research had something to do with blowing something up (I wrote computer programs for field biology) they sorta overlooked you.
Fun times. This article is probably just another signpost on the road to our demise.
(obligatory)
I think we're talking about an organism... that could imitate other life forms... perfectly... It could have gone on and on... It could have become one dog... It could have become as many dogs as it wanted to -- and without losing any of its original mass...
I can think of at least two distros (gNewSense: http://www.gnewsense.org/ and Trisquel: http://trisquel.info/) that are the result of people working diligently to comb through the entire Ubuntu distro (not just the kernel) and checking modules/programs/packages for license compatibility. Binary blobs and other non-free kernel modules have always been a concern.
Bravo!
All you fighters better turn in your plate mail, shields, and swords, and switch classes.
Might I suggest thief or magic-user?
Interesting. Good points (and you made some good ones upthread).
So, stir in some dual-license JDKs and Oracle's set to shakedown the entire Java programming industry.
Let us never think RMS wasn't eerily prophetic with his Java Trap warnings back in 2004!
Is there a chance they'd try to monetize the J2EE/JEE container market (hey, they're holding the still-warm corpse of BEA) by being deliberately opaque with their JEE specifications?
Or at least, trying to extort or marginalize free/libre implementations as much as possible?
We're living in interesting times. It's obvious Oracle isn't going to be cutting people a whole lot of slack, here.
Maybe we should start taking bets on:
a) When Oracle starts requiring a per-core license for production JVMs, and
b) How many $$ per core that will be?
This might play into their strategy. We know they're putting some heat on Google, but maybe a move like this would buy them some leverage, say, against Salesforce.com (with whom they're engaged in an emerging, but heated battle)
Fun is this not, though. Fun is making things, not using things.
This. I recently started a job where management's decided to migrate as much as possible to the cloud. No in-house application is safe.
The smell of death is in the air. All of the developer-admin-types are gradually seeing their responsibilities degrade as the cool things they love doing are being replaced by having to fight the limitations of some web UI.
What's the endgame here? I won't be able to stay, I've worked too hard to see my skillset rust away while I fight some foggy battle with pretty but restrictive UIs. Spending the day opening tickets with a remote cloud company and trying to help troubleshoot their products over the phone is no way to live. Sooner or later, management will say "Why are we paying these people so much? All they do is open tickets and complain about the SLA!"
Cool story, bro, I know, but is anyone else living through this? Is there any escape?
There are many reasons why I wouldn't deploy a production (i.e. www-facing) webserver of any stripe running on Microsoft Windows, security being a big one of them.[1]
On the other hand, for some purposes (corporate intranet, for example), Apache on Windows has been a godsend--it's allowed us, for example, to migrate our internal apps to a Free platform gradually, while depreciating our existing Windows machines (and advocates) into oblivion.
---------------
1. Lots of people do, though. I'm pretty sure IBM and Oracle Websphere/Weblogic services all use Apache httpd at some level. Happy patching, boys and girls!
To Free/Open alternatives.
I think I like Oracle even *less* than Microsoft, and that's saying something.
GCJ anyone?
Isn't it better to just use Mysql?
I LOL'd
Ha! I did some of that too, but the game that I really hacked on was Telengard (check it here) which was written for the C64 in a mixture of basic and assembly. The asm parts were for handling some of the graphics chores only, IIRC, which meant that the rest of the code was easily tweaked.
+400 swords, anyone? Level 750 dragons? Oh yeah. I went there.
Eh, not sure how interesting this might be, but since you asked...I was in a bad program, rife with corruption, turf wars, vendettas, etc.
"Success" would've meant participating in their schenanigans to a degree that would have probably meant compromising my own standards.
The only real option was to leave, which I did.
If you think that's ethical, you deserve whatever shit life hands you.
What you should have done was gotten the offer on tape, and reported him/her. This would have served the purpose of leveling the playing field, so that those who are ethically corrupt and financially flush (funny how the two seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of times) don't have an unfair advantage.
Well, I don't think paying someone to do it is ethical, but I also believe a lot of dissertation work gets done under shifty circumstances (or, at the very least, requiring an inordinate amount of humiliation, degradation, and ass-kissing). So I guess it becomes a "lesser of two evils" thing.
As for getting it on tape--you're 110% correct. I kick myself to this day for not having a portable recorder.
What I don't understand is how could you possibly hand in a postgraduate dissertation which you didn't write....
I agree, however, my Ph. D. adviser once offered to write my dissertation for $3,000, which at the time (being a poor student), was a ridiculous amount of money (and immoral to boot).
In retrospect, I should've taken a loan and paid him to do it, it would've been easier and far more ethical than actually writing it myself.
Have you ever sat down and worked on a C++ project? Here's what happens:
"First, I've put in enough pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial projects will work first time. Take operator overloading. At the end of the project, almost every module has it, usually, because guys feel they really should do it, as it was in their training course. The same operator then means something totally different in every module.
Try pulling that lot together, when you have a hundred or so modules. And as for data hiding. God, I sometimes can't help laughing when I hear about the problems companies have making their modules talk to each other. I think the word 'synergistic' was specially invented to twist the knife in a project manager's ribs."