If everybody buys into core time, the cubes vs. offices, etc. will become a non-issue.
This is not true -- people make noise and do annoying things whether they're explicitly conversing or not. The only real way to ensure real quiet is to have a physically isolated space.
I think group seating arrangements can be useful, some of the time; at other times, it's very hard to get work done without real isolation. Ideally this can be provided by having both offices and central space for working, and allow developers to easily shift between them as their task and mood dictate.
The best physical working environment I've ever had was where everybody had individual offices around the edges of the building (so almost all had windows), which were grouped into "cul-de-sacs" with short branch hallways (giving a cozy feeling to the small groups of 2-3 offices), and common areas -- including public workstations in a big common "lab" room -- in the middle of the building. This allowed varying degrees of privacy from almost total isolation in your office with the door closed, to the most common "doors open into the cul-de-sac" state, to working in the common lab together when you wanted a more social and public atmosphere. I split my time more or less evenly between these modes of working, and it was very conducive to getting things done.
Currently I work in a Japanese company, which (as is typical for such) provides very little privacy... everybody sits about 4-5 feet apart at long common desks (with the manager at the end where he can observe everybody!), and there's utterly no isolation from conversations, annoying personal habits, people seeing what's on your monitor, etc. In some cases it's fine, but there are times when it's absurdly hard to get anything done because of this -- when I have to think, I need some privacy and quiet!
Google is concerned about the security implications of their source code ending up in hostile hands. I don't see how you can infer anything else from that than that they were relying on obscurity.
Because "relying" implies a fundamental and strong connection (if you're relying on something, you believe that thing is critical to success); "being concerned" with something is a far weaker, and often not entirely rational, connection.
It is very common for humans to "be concerned" about an event even when they have made proper efforts to prevent it becoming a problem.
that they weren't really relying on obscurity, rather the enemy now has that much better a chance of finding something they missed
That's called relying on obscurity. If having the source code lets you find something Google missed, that means Google missed something.
No, it doesn't. There's a big difference between relying on obscurity -- which google, apparently, was not -- and simply being concerned because the bad guys have more ability to search for flaws.
The latter is a pretty natural human reaction to an event like this, regardless of how well designed their security system is, because all designs, and all code, potentially contains flaws, even if designed and implemented by the most brilliant security researchers.
I have to ask: do you see filesharing to be kind of like pot-smoking, in that "some other people say it's wrong, but it isn't hurting anyone else, so who cares?" Do you believe it's wrong, but participate anyway? Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?
If it's either of the first of those, why do you think it is that nobody challenges the ethics of these private servers? Do you not have any peers whose moral code says "No, filesharing is wrong, you guys are ripping off my favorite band, I'm turning you in to the ethics board?" Are you're saying that really, out of the thousands of students your university, and of every other university situation you are aware of, that not a single student complains about the inappropriateness of it?
I'm not trying to fish for snitches or get anyone in trouble with this question, but I'm just pretty much surprised that nobody complains. Not even the sons or daughters of (RI|MP)AA execs or artists, whose very education might be paid for by the media being copied?
I think that's pretty much reason that everybody around here seems so confident that the RIAA and their ilk are going to lose in the end -- for the vast majority of people, sharing of "trivial" stuff like music really isn't a bad thing; at most, it's just sort of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge wrong".
Even the industry's attempts to demonize it (like happened with marijuana) are ineffective, because it's something that most people have already done themselves, so they know in their gut that it's a natural and healthy thing. The histrionic pronouncements and clumsy flailing about by the RIAA may even weaken their case, as they simply don't ring true.
The pop music industry's traditional emphasis on trying to promote mega-stars may have hurt their case too, as it's hard to feel very guilty about copying a song by someone who's obviously mega-rich and flaunts their excessive lifestyle (and in many cases seems far more concerned with the lifestyle than the music). If it were humble local bands who were coming out against copying, maybe there would be at few pangs of guilt -- but AFAICT, it's the relatively unknown bands who are most likely to support sharing of their songs.
Exactly! Slapping Android on a tablet is an easy answer and easy answers to hard problems never sold well.
How is that any easier of an answer than slapping iPhone OS on a tablet?
You don't think Jobs' just bought his magical turtleneck at Walmart do you? That thing is woven from the neck-beard-hair of a thousand virgin developers, and.... Ok, so it took a few days.
No doubt, but from the description, there doesn't really seem to be any indication that he's done anything bad.
It reads more like grand-standing by some random Republican trying to smear by insinuation ("the Bush administration intentionally used private email accounts to bypass public accountability laws... therefore if someone in the Obama administration merely has a private email account, they must be doing the same thing!").
Fortunately one Canonical employee is prepared to share what they know with us: from TFA:
Rick Spencer, who announced the change back to Google, said that Canonical have decided to change back to Google after deciding that Google Search will be more familiar to a lot of users upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04...
Of course, you may choose not to believe that. But Canonical are providing an explanation.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
I suspect "will be more familiar" is a polite way of saying "yahoo search sucks too much, and the money from Yahoo isn't worth the negative PR we'd get."
Though the public information is pretty mild, I imagine there was a huge fight about this within Canonical...
"ooooh, finally, some income!"
"Yahoo search sucks, we'll be a laughing-stock."
"... but....income!!"
"Negative PR of Vista-like proportions!"
"...argh......but.....income....?"
"...Vista."
":-("
Cigarettes have provided you with an excuse to get away from everything and focus your mind. No offense, but I'm sure you could achieve the same mental experience without a cigarette. Grab a cup of tea instead.
Indeed; I find that pretty much any activity that enforces a period away from attention-grabbing activities and sources of stimulation has this effect.
For instance, I've found I do a lot of very productive thinking when exercising, walking somewhere familiar (since the route-finding etc is all basically subconcious for familiar routes), taking a shower, riding a train, etc. These require your body to do something, but your mind is left free to reflect.
Smarter people also tend not to enlist in the military to begin with. I had a naval recruiter after me for the longest time. It was pretty clear that he was angling for people that weren't particularly bright or of much value outside the military where they could be pressed into a job without much required aptitude.
This study was done in the Israeli military, which is a conscript force.
QT libraries are no problem, but KDE are. for starters, they usually screw up Brasero and the likes. Not to mention you have to load all that stuff and take more memory, etc.
Yeah, I agree... I've no prob with libqt (well other than some screwed up font-rendering lately), but it seems that when I occasionally use a random "k" app, the damn thing starts like 5 daemons in the background which persist (and do disk activity) even after the app exits.
I don't know, but it's happened to me before; happened just last week in fact. I haven't looked at the mod history of the GP comment, but in the one I had, there were three mods of "funny" and one of "insughtful" and it got a +5, insightful. I guess someone was trying to help my karma...
I'd say rather it's moderator meta-humor...
They risk the wrath of the meta-mods to bring us meta-enjoyment!
Except that it doesn't work for any videos that they haven't uploaded an ascii version of...... try it on an actual random video and it does nothing.
I saw it on some very random videos earlier today (which seem extremely unlikely to be classified as "popular"...), and it was available (through the resolution-selector widget) on every video I looked at subsequently.
It seems more likely that not all servers got it at the same time or something.
I've never tried Google Chrome, but now I never will unless they take this "feature" out. I won't use IE either of course. Microsoft may have more respect for my privacy, but they don't have any respect for my security.
Of course Microsoft doesn't have any more respect for your privacy. This particular problem seems pretty much an inadvertent consequence of the (otherwise very nice) combining of the address and search boxes in chrome; the fact that IE doesn't do the same thing is only due to its clunkier interface.
The fact that MS is trumpeting it this way smacks more of a desperate swat at a competitor than anything else...
Oh, so you mean the morons who are typing "My bank account number is 223344" or "My credit card is visa 2303232300022000 from citibank with cvv 100" into the address bar of their browser
World Wind is licensed under NASA's Open Source license. Not sure of the intricacies with it (IANAL) but was developed with the open source community.
The "NASA Open Source Agreement" (NOSA) license is... weird. It's GPL- (and debian) incompatible for no discernible reason, so one imagines it's one of these things from the wacky old "everybody make their own license!" days of yore...
A shame, really, as WW seems not so bad otherwise.
It'd be cool if the FSF or somebody would work with NASA to change the licensing.
China has a long history of extremely violent and bloody revolutions. The relative political stability of the past 60 years is pretty much unprecedented. If the past is any indication, the transformation to complete freedom in China is not likely to go as peacefully as it did with the Soviet Union.
Sudden change in China usually results in the deaths of millions. They have little history of peaceful change. The government has an obligation to tread cautiously.
Though oddly enough, the "relative political stability of the past 60 years" in China has also resulted in the deaths of millions....
The PRC government may trot out "stability" as a justification for their authoritarian policies, but if push comes to shove, there's little doubt they're quite willing to sacrifice large numbers of their populace to stay in power.
The same reason is why we have so many bland US and Japanese brand sedans, and unexciting light fixtures, and bland music, and beige computers (less, these days though). By definition, there are more people in the 50th percentile, thus we will always have woefully average stuff.
Part of it is also cultural though -- for instance, there's actually a far more interesting selection of Japanese cars for the Japanese market than there are Japanese cars for the U.S. market...
It hardly seems to be true that they "create/contribute nothing", since half the memes on the internet (and usually the funniest half) apparently come from 4chan...
Shouldn't the linker remove unreferenced functions?
I've had this problem with gcc for a while, with C++ code. I was writing some embedded code, and I wanted to use some simple C++. Just by adding a #include of one of the stream libraries. the executable grew by 200k, even though none of it was referenced. The C++ code in iostream is template-generated anyway, so even if the compiler wanted to include the code, it can't until I instantiate it.
<iostream> includes references to global stream objects like std::cout, not just interface definitions, so including it's going to have larger ramifications that something like <fstream>, which just defines interfaces (and indeed, for me, including <fstream> seems to have no effect on program size, whereas including <iostream> adds about 300 bytes to a simple executable).
So much for Republican core values of small government, free enterprise, and especially the government getting out of the way of free enterprise to do a job better, cheaper, and without the stifling bureaucracy.
At least that is what Republicans of all stripes say they stand for. In public. Officially.
Pork always wins out, tho.
Yup. Hutchinson is from Texas, and NASA has a lot of legacy infrastructure in Texas ("Houston, we have a problem...").
It IS a simple notion. It's just too many people find it easier to distort their perception of data in order to allow them to continue their existing lives with as close to no change as possible. Anything that requires one to perform effort, change, or that reduces ones comforts obviously must be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
If everybody buys into core time, the cubes vs. offices, etc. will become a non-issue.
This is not true -- people make noise and do annoying things whether they're explicitly conversing or not. The only real way to ensure real quiet is to have a physically isolated space.
I think group seating arrangements can be useful, some of the time; at other times, it's very hard to get work done without real isolation. Ideally this can be provided by having both offices and central space for working, and allow developers to easily shift between them as their task and mood dictate.
The best physical working environment I've ever had was where everybody had individual offices around the edges of the building (so almost all had windows), which were grouped into "cul-de-sacs" with short branch hallways (giving a cozy feeling to the small groups of 2-3 offices), and common areas -- including public workstations in a big common "lab" room -- in the middle of the building. This allowed varying degrees of privacy from almost total isolation in your office with the door closed, to the most common "doors open into the cul-de-sac" state, to working in the common lab together when you wanted a more social and public atmosphere. I split my time more or less evenly between these modes of working, and it was very conducive to getting things done.
Currently I work in a Japanese company, which (as is typical for such) provides very little privacy ... everybody sits about 4-5 feet apart at long common desks (with the manager at the end where he can observe everybody!), and there's utterly no isolation from conversations, annoying personal habits, people seeing what's on your monitor, etc. In some cases it's fine, but there are times when it's absurdly hard to get anything done because of this -- when I have to think, I need some privacy and quiet!
Google is concerned about the security implications of their source code ending up in hostile hands. I don't see how you can infer anything else from that than that they were relying on obscurity.
Because "relying" implies a fundamental and strong connection (if you're relying on something, you believe that thing is critical to success); "being concerned" with something is a far weaker, and often not entirely rational, connection.
It is very common for humans to "be concerned" about an event even when they have made proper efforts to prevent it becoming a problem.
that they weren't really relying on obscurity, rather the enemy now has that much better a chance of finding something they missed
That's called relying on obscurity. If having the source code lets you find something Google missed, that means Google missed something.
No, it doesn't. There's a big difference between relying on obscurity -- which google, apparently, was not -- and simply being concerned because the bad guys have more ability to search for flaws.
The latter is a pretty natural human reaction to an event like this, regardless of how well designed their security system is, because all designs, and all code, potentially contains flaws, even if designed and implemented by the most brilliant security researchers.
I have to ask: do you see filesharing to be kind of like pot-smoking, in that "some other people say it's wrong, but it isn't hurting anyone else, so who cares?" Do you believe it's wrong, but participate anyway? Or do you actually believe it's a right that's being wrongly suppressed?
If it's either of the first of those, why do you think it is that nobody challenges the ethics of these private servers? Do you not have any peers whose moral code says "No, filesharing is wrong, you guys are ripping off my favorite band, I'm turning you in to the ethics board?" Are you're saying that really, out of the thousands of students your university, and of every other university situation you are aware of, that not a single student complains about the inappropriateness of it?
I'm not trying to fish for snitches or get anyone in trouble with this question, but I'm just pretty much surprised that nobody complains. Not even the sons or daughters of (RI|MP)AA execs or artists, whose very education might be paid for by the media being copied?
I think that's pretty much reason that everybody around here seems so confident that the RIAA and their ilk are going to lose in the end -- for the vast majority of people, sharing of "trivial" stuff like music really isn't a bad thing; at most, it's just sort of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge wrong".
Even the industry's attempts to demonize it (like happened with marijuana) are ineffective, because it's something that most people have already done themselves, so they know in their gut that it's a natural and healthy thing. The histrionic pronouncements and clumsy flailing about by the RIAA may even weaken their case, as they simply don't ring true.
The pop music industry's traditional emphasis on trying to promote mega-stars may have hurt their case too, as it's hard to feel very guilty about copying a song by someone who's obviously mega-rich and flaunts their excessive lifestyle (and in many cases seems far more concerned with the lifestyle than the music). If it were humble local bands who were coming out against copying, maybe there would be at few pangs of guilt -- but AFAICT, it's the relatively unknown bands who are most likely to support sharing of their songs.
How is that any easier of an answer than slapping iPhone OS on a tablet?
You don't think Jobs' just bought his magical turtleneck at Walmart do you? That thing is woven from the neck-beard-hair of a thousand virgin developers, and .... Ok, so it took a few days.
No doubt, but from the description, there doesn't really seem to be any indication that he's done anything bad.
It reads more like grand-standing by some random Republican trying to smear by insinuation ("the Bush administration intentionally used private email accounts to bypass public accountability laws ... therefore if someone in the Obama administration merely has a private email account, they must be doing the same thing!").
Fortunately one Canonical employee is prepared to share what they know with us: from TFA: Rick Spencer, who announced the change back to Google, said that Canonical have decided to change back to Google after deciding that Google Search will be more familiar to a lot of users upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04...
Of course, you may choose not to believe that. But Canonical are providing an explanation.
If "familiarity" was the issue, then why move the fsck'ing window buttons to the upper left? I don't buy that as an argument.
I suspect "will be more familiar" is a polite way of saying "yahoo search sucks too much, and the money from Yahoo isn't worth the negative PR we'd get."
Though the public information is pretty mild, I imagine there was a huge fight about this within Canonical ...
"ooooh, finally, some income!"
"Yahoo search sucks, we'll be a laughing-stock."
"... but....income!!"
"Negative PR of Vista-like proportions!"
"...argh......but.....income....?"
"...Vista."
":-("
Cigarettes have provided you with an excuse to get away from everything and focus your mind. No offense, but I'm sure you could achieve the same mental experience without a cigarette. Grab a cup of tea instead.
Indeed; I find that pretty much any activity that enforces a period away from attention-grabbing activities and sources of stimulation has this effect.
For instance, I've found I do a lot of very productive thinking when exercising, walking somewhere familiar (since the route-finding etc is all basically subconcious for familiar routes), taking a shower, riding a train, etc. These require your body to do something, but your mind is left free to reflect.
Smarter people also tend not to enlist in the military to begin with. I had a naval recruiter after me for the longest time. It was pretty clear that he was angling for people that weren't particularly bright or of much value outside the military where they could be pressed into a job without much required aptitude.
This study was done in the Israeli military, which is a conscript force.
QT libraries are no problem, but KDE are. for starters, they usually screw up Brasero and the likes. Not to mention you have to load all that stuff and take more memory, etc.
Yeah, I agree... I've no prob with libqt (well other than some screwed up font-rendering lately), but it seems that when I occasionally use a random "k" app, the damn thing starts like 5 daemons in the background which persist (and do disk activity) even after the app exits.
Very annoying.
I don't know, but it's happened to me before; happened just last week in fact. I haven't looked at the mod history of the GP comment, but in the one I had, there were three mods of "funny" and one of "insughtful" and it got a +5, insightful. I guess someone was trying to help my karma...
I'd say rather it's moderator meta-humor...
They risk the wrath of the meta-mods to bring us meta-enjoyment!
Except that it doesn't work for any videos that they haven't uploaded an ascii version of...... try it on an actual random video and it does nothing.
I saw it on some very random videos earlier today (which seem extremely unlikely to be classified as "popular"...), and it was available (through the resolution-selector widget) on every video I looked at subsequently.
It seems more likely that not all servers got it at the same time or something.
Microsoft is starting to make sense.
I've never tried Google Chrome, but now I never will unless they take this "feature" out. I won't use IE either of course. Microsoft may have more respect for my privacy, but they don't have any respect for my security.
Of course Microsoft doesn't have any more respect for your privacy. This particular problem seems pretty much an inadvertent consequence of the (otherwise very nice) combining of the address and search boxes in chrome; the fact that IE doesn't do the same thing is only due to its clunkier interface.
The fact that MS is trumpeting it this way smacks more of a desperate swat at a competitor than anything else...
Oh, so you mean the morons who are typing "My bank account number is 223344" or "My credit card is visa 2303232300022000 from citibank with cvv 100" into the address bar of their browser
Er, well, you know Microsoft product managers...
So I've decided to electrocute cows if you disagree with me!
mmmm.... electro-bbq....
Here's a visual representation:
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
World Wind is licensed under NASA's Open Source license. Not sure of the intricacies with it (IANAL) but was developed with the open source community.
The "NASA Open Source Agreement" (NOSA) license is ... weird. It's GPL- (and debian) incompatible for no discernible reason, so one imagines it's one of these things from the wacky old "everybody make their own license!" days of yore...
A shame, really, as WW seems not so bad otherwise.
It'd be cool if the FSF or somebody would work with NASA to change the licensing.
China has a long history of extremely violent and bloody revolutions. The relative political stability of the past 60 years is pretty much unprecedented. If the past is any indication, the transformation to complete freedom in China is not likely to go as peacefully as it did with the Soviet Union. Sudden change in China usually results in the deaths of millions. They have little history of peaceful change. The government has an obligation to tread cautiously.
Though oddly enough, the "relative political stability of the past 60 years" in China has also resulted in the deaths of millions....
The PRC government may trot out "stability" as a justification for their authoritarian policies, but if push comes to shove, there's little doubt they're quite willing to sacrifice large numbers of their populace to stay in power.
The same reason is why we have so many bland US and Japanese brand sedans, and unexciting light fixtures, and bland music, and beige computers (less, these days though). By definition, there are more people in the 50th percentile, thus we will always have woefully average stuff.
Part of it is also cultural though -- for instance, there's actually a far more interesting selection of Japanese cars for the Japanese market than there are Japanese cars for the U.S. market...
How is this trolling? It's simply the truth.
It hardly seems to be true that they "create/contribute nothing", since half the memes on the internet (and usually the funniest half) apparently come from 4chan...
So this is a direct response to http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/18/2059236/Google-Slams-Viacom-For-Secret-YouTube-Uploads from Viacom ?
Of course.
They had one of their secret marketing companies do the slashdot submission though.
Shouldn't the linker remove unreferenced functions?
I've had this problem with gcc for a while, with C++ code. I was writing some embedded code, and I wanted to use some simple C++. Just by adding a #include of one of the stream libraries. the executable grew by 200k, even though none of it was referenced. The C++ code in iostream is template-generated anyway, so even if the compiler wanted to include the code, it can't until I instantiate it.
<iostream> includes references to global stream objects like std::cout, not just interface definitions, so including it's going to have larger ramifications that something like <fstream>, which just defines interfaces (and indeed, for me, including <fstream> seems to have no effect on program size, whereas including <iostream> adds about 300 bytes to a simple executable).
Yeah, the name "JavaScript" was stupid. So what?
The silly thing is that, however horrible the name javascript is, the "standard name" is worse... "ecmascript"... sounds like a skin disease!
"Say, you'd better see a doctor about that ecmascript!"
So much for Republican core values of small government, free enterprise, and especially the government getting out of the way of free enterprise to do a job better, cheaper, and without the stifling bureaucracy.
At least that is what Republicans of all stripes say they stand for. In public. Officially.
Pork always wins out, tho.
Yup. Hutchinson is from Texas, and NASA has a lot of legacy infrastructure in Texas ("Houston, we have a problem...").
It IS a simple notion. It's just too many people find it easier to distort their perception of data in order to allow them to continue their existing lives with as close to no change as possible. Anything that requires one to perform effort, change, or that reduces ones comforts obviously must be wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
Thank you! A wonderfully clear and concise statement of the problem.
[somebody please mod the parent up...!]