"But do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?"
That's an ill-conditioned question. Of course we can trust the FPU - to do what it's designed and specified to do. If the programmer doesn't understand how the FPU works, that spells trouble, just like using any other complex machine without proper training.
The question reflects a serious social - not technical - problem that we are facing more and more. Namely, there are so many people who rely on computers but have no idea how they work, many of whom think of a computer as some kind of "brain" or even "god" rather than a complex machine with well-defined capabilities and limitations.
Stories like this recall the old DEC war story about the customer who complained that his VAX was giving wrong answers. It got escalated to galactic support before the customer revealed that his criterion for judging the answers "wrong" was that they differed from those given by his HP pocket calculator! (Never occurred to him that his own calculator could be "wrong", and the whole concept of differing levels of precision seemed to have eluded him).
Having looked carefully at much of the comment about "Web 2.0", I have come to the conclusion that it is in fact 80% marketing smoke and mirrors. (And, of course, a commercial service mark). Behind that, there is an important idea: the emergence of a whole generation of open, data-sharing sites. Very little, if anything, new in the way of technology though.
The Semantic Web is entirely different. It has been going on, quietly but steadily, for at least 7-8 years now, and is beginning to yield some useful results. It is led by W3C, a well-informed and technically competent organization, and has the blessing of TBL. While I feel that it faces some really big challenges, I believe that the Semantic Web initiative will make as much progress as is reasonably possible given the current state of the art.
While Web 2.0 could really use something like the Semantic Web, it has contributed remarkably little in the way of technical innovation so far. It's really more a set of requirements than any kind of a solution. The real joke is that most of the people bragging about what a huge breakthrough Web 2.0 is have yet to understand that they are still well within the envelope of what TBL envisaged back in 1990. He intended the Web to be a medium of exchange for everyone, not just big organizations (that's why his first browser was read/write), and his vision for the Web has not yet been fully realized AFAIK. The Web 2.0 people are working to realize a fairly large slice of it, but the name "Web 2.0" is ridiculous on several counts.
But surely you don't need to slow down very much in order to reach an orbit that will eventually reach the Sun? Once it's out of Earth orbit, do we care how long it takes to spiral in?
Sorry if these are offensively ignorant questions. Obviously IANAS, IANAE, etc. 8-}
"Going down into a gravity well is just as hard as going up, unless you have atmospheric friction to help you slow down".
Why do we need to slow down? If we impact the Sun squarely, I doubt if any human-size load is going to make it out the other side, no matter how fast it's travelling.
"What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?"
Great idea, once you get it to the top of the Earth's gravity well. Then it's downhill all the way, and we have no problems. (Unless it turns out that dropping even a few tons of certain compounds into a star causes it to go nova).
The problem is on the way to the top of the gravity well. How do you get the stuff up there? Ignoring practicalities for a moment, a beanstalk would be the ideal way. Just put the stuff in big freight elevators, and quietly hoist it up there. Meanwhile, all we have is rockets. Now, why would you not want a rocket loaded with tons of deadly radioactive waste soaring over your family's heads? (clue: remember the Challenger disaster?)
We are talking about slightly different things here. I specified "internals"; my whole point was that much of the kernel structure (and even nomenclature) was very similar. In reply, you say "I've used VMS a lot". So have I, but I was not talking about how either OS appears to a user.
You note that:
- "The file system is entirely different". Indeed it is. The FAT system had to be retained for compatibility, and NTFS was seen as an opportunity to break new ground. The file system is one of the most obvious characteristics that users notice, so of course it could not change much from earlier versions of Windows (or from Windows 95, for that matter).
- The APIs are entirely different. The same applies here; the NT APIs had the task of supporting Windows programming, not VMS programming. Windows lacked the VMS Language Environment and its associated libraries and tools. Conversely, VMS did not support the paraphernalia associated with the Windows user interface.
- The shells are entirely different. The same applies here too: the Windows shell had to retain as much compatibility with previous versions as possible.
- The higher level features implemented by the operating system are entirely different, even those intended to support the same end-user features (compare NT printing to VMS queues, for example). Absolutely true: to this day, as I sit at my Windows XP (SP2) workstation, I bitterly regret that the printing and spooling facilities are utterly inferior to those of VMS, even as they were in 1990.
As I see it, a single explanatory pattern underlies all the similarities and differences between VMS and NT. Namely, Microsoft was very keen indeed to keep Windows as nearly unchanged as possible, while putting a more powerful, reliable "engine" inside the casing. It also has a very strong case of corporate NIH syndrome, which generally causes it to reject doing things in the same way as any group of outsiders, if there is a plausible "Microsoft only" alternative.
"People like to say that Windows NT borrows a lot from VMS. That's like saying Linux borrows a lot from Multics. There isn't really _anything_ in common, but they are in the same spirit".
That turns out not to be the case. Anyone familiar with VMS internals found the NT internals practically identical in many cases, to an extent that was quite laughable. Moreover, established VMS internals experts were able to start teaching and writing about NT within months - they had very little new to learn.
Of course there were some significant differences. The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) was meant to allow NT to run on any hardware with a minimum of porting effort. Arguably, if DEC had done something similar for VMS it would still be riding high and profitable today - the fatal drawback of VMS was that it had the VAX (and subsequently Alpha) tied like a millstone round its neck.
Then there was the famous Windows GUI. Legend has it that Dave Cutler wanted to make some changes to that, in the interests of security, stability, and performance. But Gates and his crew strictly forbade any changes, understanding the value of keeping it as compatible as possible to ease the migration path for their millions of customers.
The observation that average IQs have been increasing runs into at least three difficulties:
1. As noted by the parent, it's technically meaningless.
2. Measuring intelligence is such a challenging task that many people think it's not worth trying.
3. "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value". (Arthur C. Clarke). If you doubt this, just look at the members of Mensa and where their great intelligence has got them.
You bet you can! That's why this is a favoured police tactic in all relatively law-abiding countries. (In police states, they can just drag you off and dispose of you without needing any pretext).
Assaulting a police officer (in the execution of his/her duty) is a serious offence. So if a policeman can't think of any other way of putting a citizen in the wrong, he may well resort to baiting him. If Materazzi had been a police officer, Zidane would probably have got several years of prison time for head-butting him, no matter what Materazzi said to him first.
If there are no witnesses - or at least none who can't be intimidated - police officers can get away with a great deal of provocation. After all, there have been numerous incidents here in the UK, as well as in the USA and elsewhere, when groups of police have actually killed civilians who had not done anything obviously wrong - and got away with it.
Another variation is to bring in a citizen and charge him with assaulting a police officer, although it actually happened the other way round. Moral: if at all possible, never let the police catch you alone without reliable witnesses.
"...it's probably so easy to make mistakes in police procedure that if you were to record their activities, a good lawyer could probably shoot down a large percentage of arrests..."
In that case, the procedure is obviously far too complicated and should be drastically simplified. If something doesn't work, you fix it; you shouldn't go on using it unchanged and try to cover up the deficiencies.
As a general rule of thumb, it's usually safe to assume that anyone can be deemed to be breaking some law or other at any given moment. That, of course, is in itself an appalling state of affairs - it is the antithesis of democracy governed by law, as it gives the authorities carte blanche to arrest and punish whomever they wish.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged". - Cardinal Richelieu
'There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with'. - Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master".
- George Washington
Far too many people today have completely lost sight of what Washington was telling us. They see government as a huge nipple, dispensing delicious nourishment for them. Where the nourishment comes from - who pays in the end - is a matter of sublime unconcern. Like the boiling frog, we are so used to paying large fractions of our income (and possessions) in tax that we take it for granted. Just watch the commotion whenever anyone suggests reducing tax the slightest bit.
Seems to me that we are just about at the point where our governments stop being dangerous servants and become terrible masters.
There can be few examples of an advanced industrial activity in which the ultimate decision-makers know so little about the technology involved, and have so little respect for the opinions of those who do.
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast" - indeed, in business (and especially sales) optimism is highly thought of, and realism often denounced as "cynicism" or "negative thinking". This is all very well in activities involving human beings, who can easily be manipulated through their emotions. However, it fails utterly when confronted with the cold, hard facts of the physical world.
When someone seems to be unrealistically hopeful, we speak of "getting a reality check". In other words, finding our noses hard up against the brick wall of ineluctable, unarguable facts. The problem with most software development projects is that the ultimate decision-makers - those who have the gold and, therefore, make the rules - are very rarely able to get a reality check until the project runs out of time, money, or both. They are hopelessly ill-equipped to make reasoned, educated judgments based on the arguments presented by vendors, analysts, and their own technical staff. So it's hardly surprising that over-optimism tends to creep in.
I have been giving talks about software engineering for about 20 years now, and I usually stress the fact that "there are no silver bullets". This warning is always greeted by vigorous nodding, knowledgeable smiles, and sometimes applause. Afterwards, I sadly feel, the people who have just agreed that there are no silver bullets go out into the exhibition hall or open their magazines, and resume... looking for silver bullets.
Ultimately, I see just two ways out of this dead end. Either decision-makers take the time, trouble, and mental effort to learn the necessary basics about software development and maintenance. Or they start choosing technical managers and architects who really know their stuff - and trust them implicitly. As time goes by, I hope that both these things will happen more and more.
Hmm, having followed Microsoft's activities closely for the past 20 years, I had come to the conclusion that the Windows operation was guided by one principle. In its entirety, it reads as follows:
MAXIMIZE REVENUE
Analysis of Microsoft's behavior and the characteristics of Windows shows them to be fully and satisfactorily explained by this one hypothetical mandate.
We've already seen that it is possible, in the 21st century USA, to maintain a near-monopoly; to exploit that near-monopoly by methods that are, at best, borderline legal; to be found guilty of illegal behavior; and to escape scot-free (coincidentally right after a change of administration). After all that, is it really wise to stand up tall and brag loudly about your monopoly?
More than anything, I find these remarks offensive to Microsoft's customers. Apparently they somehow belong by right to Microsoft - they are "the food on its table", destined to be Redmond-fodder regardless of their wishes. Sounds very much like the RIAA's attitude to consumers.
In fact, customers will choose the search products that are best for them, after taking all considerations into account. Microsoft's sales people are welcome to make their strongest case; then they have to let the competition do likewise, and await the decision.
To say that Google "will not be allowed" to compete with Microsoft looks dangerously like a declaration of war on the free market system to which the USA is supposedly dedicated. I only hope customers vote with their wallets, and show that they cannot be intimidated by suppliers, no matter how big and arrogant.
Fortunately for us all, Microsoft knows that users need to be protected against the consequences that might arise if their legitimately-purchased copies of Windows mysteriously changed, overnight, into illegal "pirate" copies. This could happen at any moment, which is why WGA needs to give your PC a thorough checkout every time you download a Microsoft patch - which, at the rate things are going, could soon be every day.
Perhaps, a century after the Curies' groundbreaking work in physics, the big brains at Redmond have discovered the process of "software decay", whereby legimimately-purchased software - even if bought bundled with a new PC from one of Microsoft's own business partners such as Dell - spontaneously "decays" and becomes illegitimate. Of course, when that happens the user of the software becomes liable for some eye-watering fines, and possibly a stiff prison sentence; so it is very much in their interest that Microsoft solicitously verifies the software's provenance at every possible opportunity.
If what you say about breaking into houses is true, I think you are rather unusual in that respect. I would not be amazed if it were true, because people enjoy all sorts of challenges. But I don't think there are anything like as many people who would break into a house for that reason as people who enjoy pitting their wits against computer security.
As for Feynman, my description of his activities was rather inaccurate. As I recall, he specialized in two things: getting into locked filing cabinets, and finding the combinations of safes. The latter usually boiled down to seeing the first few digits by simple observation, and - where possible - getting the others by elimination.
Bringing the "mind" element in was a tactical error, I admit; I was broadening my assault on comparisons of computers with any physical form of property whatsoever.
A computer is an abstract machine for manipulating information. As good/.ers, we all understand that implicitly, but it's amazing how many people don't. They think it's a machine for running Office, or a machine for browsing the Web, or for email, or for playing games. Whereas it is actually all of the above and infinitely more, just as "the natural numbers" are not just 1, or 2, or 3 although it includes them.
Every time computer security is discussed, someone immediately trots out the "burglar" analogy. I have nothing against analogies - they are very useful for getting insight into unfamiliar situations - but every analogy has its limits. In this case, a burglar is someone whose only purpose is to steal property for his own gain. Some people who hack into computers have this motivation, but many do not.
This is where the analogy breaks down catastrophically. There is no simple, familiar motivation for anyone to try getting into a house as an intellectual exercise, or even as a challenge. Either the house is wide open - in which case it would be legal to enter in some jurisdictions, while in others the householder could legitimately shoot an intruder anyway - or it is secured, in which case any attempt to gain entry is almost certainly of a criminal nature.
Computers are different, in that trying to understand and improve on software mechanisms is a universal impulse among (good) programmers. Bill Gates, and many other people who came to be famous, hacked in his youth. The sainted Richard Feynman confessed openly to having made a hobby of getting into as many locked areas and safes as he could, while working on the Manhattan Project. He had absolutely no ill intentions, although he was well aware that the military bosses would be hard to convince of that. Incidentally, he told of a valuable spin-off, when a senior official left the project and his immense safe was found to be secured. No one had the combination, and they were thinking of explosives and thermic lances until Feynman came along and casually opened it.
Please don't accuse me of trying to excuse genuine criminals - I am the last person to do that. But do realize that many people who experiment with software do so from motives of genuine curiosity and intellectual challenge, which can be very useful if properly harnessed. And let's get over the crude physical analogy of "breaking into" a computer. A computer is a machine that executes instructions. When some sets of instructions are executed, the computer can display words, numbers, and pictures meaningful to humans, and accept human input through keyboards and other devices. A computer does not have a mind of any sort, and thus cannot be deceived, pleased, annoyed, or educated. Moreover, the idea of the computer as a structure or territory that could be broken into is simply an analogy that helps us to think about it; it does not correspond to anything real.
'That's the perfect bulletproof argument. You can use it for unicorns too: "We haven't seen any? Well then, they must be hiding."'
I love those jokes. When I was at school we used to ask, "Why do elephants have red feet?" "Uh, I don't know, why do elephants have red feet?" "So you can't see them when they are hiding in cherry trees". "That's ridiculous, no one has ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree!" "Just goes to show how well it works, huh?"
Great fun for 9-year-olds. Not so great coming from "statesmen" with nuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional weapons - and the determination to use them.
By the way, what's the latest about the USA's own stock of chemical weapons? Last I heard, it was about 40,000 tons - and 40,000 tons of gas is a lot of gas. The only thing that is stopping some other country from invading the USA to force it to destroy its WMDs is that no other country has the sheer military power. Is that an uncomfortable thought?
'...there are a trillion different forms of "grey goo" trying like hell to take over the earth and eat every last ounce of available energy. They are called plants, animals, fungus and bacteria'.
This is a sound argument, and one that certainly needs to be made (and attended to). There is, however, a slight flaw in it. If you believe in evolution (broadly speaking), you concede that organisms evolve stepwise. They cannot take huge leaps, but have to progress through a series of intermediate states all of which are evolutionarily successful. That is one reason why no living things have wheels, laser death-rays, or (AFAIK) radio communication.
Introduce a human designer into the loop, and the picture changes drastically. As gnovos reminds us, we are neck-deep in millions of species of fungi and bacteria (and viruses and protozoa...) Very few of them, however, are fatal to humans; and hardly any are fatal wholesale, in the sense that they wipe out whole populations. Why? If a microorganism wipes out its host, it disappears too - or, at the very least, suffers a serious check. But a human scientist can analyze the human body's defence mechanisms, and tailor an existing bacterium or virus to sidestep them. If a microorganism appears that kills whole populations, it will almost certainly be an artificial one.
'Now try telling Mr. Grouchy-old-guy Executive that your frustrating the hell out of him and all the people he employs all in the name of your software religion (as legitimate as it may be).
'Now multiply that by 175 users in 5 offices across 4 times zones and two countries and tell me it's worth Microsoft bashing and open-source evangelizing. It's not - not even close.'
In other words, if I follow your argument, because so many people have locked themselves in to Office over the years - mostly with no idea of the long-term consequences - Office should now be virtually exempt from competition. The only competitive products that have any chance are those that are more or less identical to Office.
'You just said, "extensible." I can't even look at you right now....'
What? It's a real word:
extendable adj. extendability// n. extendible adj. extendibility// n. extensible// adj. extensibility// n. [Middle English from Latin extendere extens- or extent- 'stretch out' (as ex-1, tendere 'stretch')] (Oxford English Dictionary)
Slashdot Mirror
'So that's what Orwell meant when he wrote: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever."'
Stamping, actually, old man. Orwell was English.
"But do we ever stop to think what goes on inside that floating point unit and whether we can really trust it?"
That's an ill-conditioned question. Of course we can trust the FPU - to do what it's designed and specified to do. If the programmer doesn't understand how the FPU works, that spells trouble, just like using any other complex machine without proper training.
The question reflects a serious social - not technical - problem that we are facing more and more. Namely, there are so many people who rely on computers but have no idea how they work, many of whom think of a computer as some kind of "brain" or even "god" rather than a complex machine with well-defined capabilities and limitations.
Stories like this recall the old DEC war story about the customer who complained that his VAX was giving wrong answers. It got escalated to galactic support before the customer revealed that his criterion for judging the answers "wrong" was that they differed from those given by his HP pocket calculator! (Never occurred to him that his own calculator could be "wrong", and the whole concept of differing levels of precision seemed to have eluded him).
Having looked carefully at much of the comment about "Web 2.0", I have come to the conclusion that it is in fact 80% marketing smoke and mirrors. (And, of course, a commercial service mark). Behind that, there is an important idea: the emergence of a whole generation of open, data-sharing sites. Very little, if anything, new in the way of technology though.
The Semantic Web is entirely different. It has been going on, quietly but steadily, for at least 7-8 years now, and is beginning to yield some useful results. It is led by W3C, a well-informed and technically competent organization, and has the blessing of TBL. While I feel that it faces some really big challenges, I believe that the Semantic Web initiative will make as much progress as is reasonably possible given the current state of the art.
While Web 2.0 could really use something like the Semantic Web, it has contributed remarkably little in the way of technical innovation so far. It's really more a set of requirements than any kind of a solution. The real joke is that most of the people bragging about what a huge breakthrough Web 2.0 is have yet to understand that they are still well within the envelope of what TBL envisaged back in 1990. He intended the Web to be a medium of exchange for everyone, not just big organizations (that's why his first browser was read/write), and his vision for the Web has not yet been fully realized AFAIK. The Web 2.0 people are working to realize a fairly large slice of it, but the name "Web 2.0" is ridiculous on several counts.
Just to document my argument in this thread, here is a sample URL:
9 0
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=15099
Oh, I see.
But surely you don't need to slow down very much in order to reach an orbit that will eventually reach the Sun? Once it's out of Earth orbit, do we care how long it takes to spiral in?
Sorry if these are offensively ignorant questions. Obviously IANAS, IANAE, etc. 8-}
"Going down into a gravity well is just as hard as going up, unless you have atmospheric friction to help you slow down".
Why do we need to slow down? If we impact the Sun squarely, I doubt if any human-size load is going to make it out the other side, no matter how fast it's travelling.
"What's wrong with just launching it into the sun?"
Great idea, once you get it to the top of the Earth's gravity well. Then it's downhill all the way, and we have no problems. (Unless it turns out that dropping even a few tons of certain compounds into a star causes it to go nova).
The problem is on the way to the top of the gravity well. How do you get the stuff up there? Ignoring practicalities for a moment, a beanstalk would be the ideal way. Just put the stuff in big freight elevators, and quietly hoist it up there. Meanwhile, all we have is rockets. Now, why would you not want a rocket loaded with tons of deadly radioactive waste soaring over your family's heads? (clue: remember the Challenger disaster?)
We are talking about slightly different things here. I specified "internals"; my whole point was that much of the kernel structure (and even nomenclature) was very similar. In reply, you say "I've used VMS a lot". So have I, but I was not talking about how either OS appears to a user.
You note that:
- "The file system is entirely different". Indeed it is. The FAT system had to be retained for compatibility, and NTFS was seen as an opportunity to break new ground. The file system is one of the most obvious characteristics that users notice, so of course it could not change much from earlier versions of Windows (or from Windows 95, for that matter).
- The APIs are entirely different. The same applies here; the NT APIs had the task of supporting Windows programming, not VMS programming. Windows lacked the VMS Language Environment and its associated libraries and tools. Conversely, VMS did not support the paraphernalia associated with the Windows user interface.
- The shells are entirely different. The same applies here too: the Windows shell had to retain as much compatibility with previous versions as possible.
- The higher level features implemented by the operating system are entirely different, even those intended to support the same end-user features (compare NT printing to VMS queues, for example). Absolutely true: to this day, as I sit at my Windows XP (SP2) workstation, I bitterly regret that the printing and spooling facilities are utterly inferior to those of VMS, even as they were in 1990.
As I see it, a single explanatory pattern underlies all the similarities and differences between VMS and NT. Namely, Microsoft was very keen indeed to keep Windows as nearly unchanged as possible, while putting a more powerful, reliable "engine" inside the casing. It also has a very strong case of corporate NIH syndrome, which generally causes it to reject doing things in the same way as any group of outsiders, if there is a plausible "Microsoft only" alternative.
"People like to say that Windows NT borrows a lot from VMS. That's like saying Linux borrows a lot from Multics. There isn't really _anything_ in common, but they are in the same spirit".
That turns out not to be the case. Anyone familiar with VMS internals found the NT internals practically identical in many cases, to an extent that was quite laughable. Moreover, established VMS internals experts were able to start teaching and writing about NT within months - they had very little new to learn.
Of course there were some significant differences. The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) was meant to allow NT to run on any hardware with a minimum of porting effort. Arguably, if DEC had done something similar for VMS it would still be riding high and profitable today - the fatal drawback of VMS was that it had the VAX (and subsequently Alpha) tied like a millstone round its neck.
Then there was the famous Windows GUI. Legend has it that Dave Cutler wanted to make some changes to that, in the interests of security, stability, and performance. But Gates and his crew strictly forbade any changes, understanding the value of keeping it as compatible as possible to ease the migration path for their millions of customers.
The observation that average IQs have been increasing runs into at least three difficulties:
1. As noted by the parent, it's technically meaningless.
2. Measuring intelligence is such a challenging task that many people think it's not worth trying.
3. "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value". (Arthur C. Clarke). If you doubt this, just look at the members of Mensa and where their great intelligence has got them.
You bet you can! That's why this is a favoured police tactic in all relatively law-abiding countries. (In police states, they can just drag you off and dispose of you without needing any pretext).
Assaulting a police officer (in the execution of his/her duty) is a serious offence. So if a policeman can't think of any other way of putting a citizen in the wrong, he may well resort to baiting him. If Materazzi had been a police officer, Zidane would probably have got several years of prison time for head-butting him, no matter what Materazzi said to him first.
If there are no witnesses - or at least none who can't be intimidated - police officers can get away with a great deal of provocation. After all, there have been numerous incidents here in the UK, as well as in the USA and elsewhere, when groups of police have actually killed civilians who had not done anything obviously wrong - and got away with it.
Another variation is to bring in a citizen and charge him with assaulting a police officer, although it actually happened the other way round. Moral: if at all possible, never let the police catch you alone without reliable witnesses.
"...it's probably so easy to make mistakes in police procedure that if you were to record their activities, a good lawyer could probably shoot down a large percentage of arrests..."
In that case, the procedure is obviously far too complicated and should be drastically simplified. If something doesn't work, you fix it; you shouldn't go on using it unchanged and try to cover up the deficiencies.
As a general rule of thumb, it's usually safe to assume that anyone can be deemed to be breaking some law or other at any given moment. That, of course, is in itself an appalling state of affairs - it is the antithesis of democracy governed by law, as it gives the authorities carte blanche to arrest and punish whomever they wish.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged".
- Cardinal Richelieu
'There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with'.
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
"Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is a force, like fire: a dangerous servant and a terrible master".
- George Washington
Far too many people today have completely lost sight of what Washington was telling us. They see government as a huge nipple, dispensing delicious nourishment for them. Where the nourishment comes from - who pays in the end - is a matter of sublime unconcern. Like the boiling frog, we are so used to paying large fractions of our income (and possessions) in tax that we take it for granted. Just watch the commotion whenever anyone suggests reducing tax the slightest bit.
Seems to me that we are just about at the point where our governments stop being dangerous servants and become terrible masters.
There can be few examples of an advanced industrial activity in which the ultimate decision-makers know so little about the technology involved, and have so little respect for the opinions of those who do.
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast" - indeed, in business (and especially sales) optimism is highly thought of, and realism often denounced as "cynicism" or "negative thinking". This is all very well in activities involving human beings, who can easily be manipulated through their emotions. However, it fails utterly when confronted with the cold, hard facts of the physical world.
When someone seems to be unrealistically hopeful, we speak of "getting a reality check". In other words, finding our noses hard up against the brick wall of ineluctable, unarguable facts. The problem with most software development projects is that the ultimate decision-makers - those who have the gold and, therefore, make the rules - are very rarely able to get a reality check until the project runs out of time, money, or both. They are hopelessly ill-equipped to make reasoned, educated judgments based on the arguments presented by vendors, analysts, and their own technical staff. So it's hardly surprising that over-optimism tends to creep in.
I have been giving talks about software engineering for about 20 years now, and I usually stress the fact that "there are no silver bullets". This warning is always greeted by vigorous nodding, knowledgeable smiles, and sometimes applause. Afterwards, I sadly feel, the people who have just agreed that there are no silver bullets go out into the exhibition hall or open their magazines, and resume... looking for silver bullets.
Ultimately, I see just two ways out of this dead end. Either decision-makers take the time, trouble, and mental effort to learn the necessary basics about software development and maintenance. Or they start choosing technical managers and architects who really know their stuff - and trust them implicitly. As time goes by, I hope that both these things will happen more and more.
Hmm, having followed Microsoft's activities closely for the past 20 years, I had come to the conclusion that the Windows operation was guided by one principle. In its entirety, it reads as follows:
MAXIMIZE REVENUE
Analysis of Microsoft's behavior and the characteristics of Windows shows them to be fully and satisfactorily explained by this one hypothetical mandate.
We've already seen that it is possible, in the 21st century USA, to maintain a near-monopoly; to exploit that near-monopoly by methods that are, at best, borderline legal; to be found guilty of illegal behavior; and to escape scot-free (coincidentally right after a change of administration). After all that, is it really wise to stand up tall and brag loudly about your monopoly?
More than anything, I find these remarks offensive to Microsoft's customers. Apparently they somehow belong by right to Microsoft - they are "the food on its table", destined to be Redmond-fodder regardless of their wishes. Sounds very much like the RIAA's attitude to consumers.
In fact, customers will choose the search products that are best for them, after taking all considerations into account. Microsoft's sales people are welcome to make their strongest case; then they have to let the competition do likewise, and await the decision.
To say that Google "will not be allowed" to compete with Microsoft looks dangerously like a declaration of war on the free market system to which the USA is supposedly dedicated. I only hope customers vote with their wallets, and show that they cannot be intimidated by suppliers, no matter how big and arrogant.
Fortunately for us all, Microsoft knows that users need to be protected against the consequences that might arise if their legitimately-purchased copies of Windows mysteriously changed, overnight, into illegal "pirate" copies. This could happen at any moment, which is why WGA needs to give your PC a thorough checkout every time you download a Microsoft patch - which, at the rate things are going, could soon be every day.
Perhaps, a century after the Curies' groundbreaking work in physics, the big brains at Redmond have discovered the process of "software decay", whereby legimimately-purchased software - even if bought bundled with a new PC from one of Microsoft's own business partners such as Dell - spontaneously "decays" and becomes illegitimate. Of course, when that happens the user of the software becomes liable for some eye-watering fines, and possibly a stiff prison sentence; so it is very much in their interest that Microsoft solicitously verifies the software's provenance at every possible opportunity.
It's sort of like a big lottery, only in reverse.
If what you say about breaking into houses is true, I think you are rather unusual in that respect. I would not be amazed if it were true, because people enjoy all sorts of challenges. But I don't think there are anything like as many people who would break into a house for that reason as people who enjoy pitting their wits against computer security.
As for Feynman, my description of his activities was rather inaccurate. As I recall, he specialized in two things: getting into locked filing cabinets, and finding the combinations of safes. The latter usually boiled down to seeing the first few digits by simple observation, and - where possible - getting the others by elimination.
Bringing the "mind" element in was a tactical error, I admit; I was broadening my assault on comparisons of computers with any physical form of property whatsoever.
/.ers, we all understand that implicitly, but it's amazing how many people don't. They think it's a machine for running Office, or a machine for browsing the Web, or for email, or for playing games. Whereas it is actually all of the above and infinitely more, just as "the natural numbers" are not just 1, or 2, or 3 although it includes them.
A computer is an abstract machine for manipulating information. As good
Every time computer security is discussed, someone immediately trots out the "burglar" analogy. I have nothing against analogies - they are very useful for getting insight into unfamiliar situations - but every analogy has its limits. In this case, a burglar is someone whose only purpose is to steal property for his own gain. Some people who hack into computers have this motivation, but many do not.
This is where the analogy breaks down catastrophically. There is no simple, familiar motivation for anyone to try getting into a house as an intellectual exercise, or even as a challenge. Either the house is wide open - in which case it would be legal to enter in some jurisdictions, while in others the householder could legitimately shoot an intruder anyway - or it is secured, in which case any attempt to gain entry is almost certainly of a criminal nature.
Computers are different, in that trying to understand and improve on software mechanisms is a universal impulse among (good) programmers. Bill Gates, and many other people who came to be famous, hacked in his youth. The sainted Richard Feynman confessed openly to having made a hobby of getting into as many locked areas and safes as he could, while working on the Manhattan Project. He had absolutely no ill intentions, although he was well aware that the military bosses would be hard to convince of that. Incidentally, he told of a valuable spin-off, when a senior official left the project and his immense safe was found to be secured. No one had the combination, and they were thinking of explosives and thermic lances until Feynman came along and casually opened it.
Please don't accuse me of trying to excuse genuine criminals - I am the last person to do that. But do realize that many people who experiment with software do so from motives of genuine curiosity and intellectual challenge, which can be very useful if properly harnessed. And let's get over the crude physical analogy of "breaking into" a computer. A computer is a machine that executes instructions. When some sets of instructions are executed, the computer can display words, numbers, and pictures meaningful to humans, and accept human input through keyboards and other devices. A computer does not have a mind of any sort, and thus cannot be deceived, pleased, annoyed, or educated. Moreover, the idea of the computer as a structure or territory that could be broken into is simply an analogy that helps us to think about it; it does not correspond to anything real.
'That's the perfect bulletproof argument. You can use it for unicorns too: "We haven't seen any? Well then, they must be hiding."'
I love those jokes. When I was at school we used to ask, "Why do elephants have red feet?" "Uh, I don't know, why do elephants have red feet?" "So you can't see them when they are hiding in cherry trees". "That's ridiculous, no one has ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree!" "Just goes to show how well it works, huh?"
Great fun for 9-year-olds. Not so great coming from "statesmen" with nuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional weapons - and the determination to use them.
By the way, what's the latest about the USA's own stock of chemical weapons? Last I heard, it was about 40,000 tons - and 40,000 tons of gas is a lot of gas. The only thing that is stopping some other country from invading the USA to force it to destroy its WMDs is that no other country has the sheer military power. Is that an uncomfortable thought?
'...there are a trillion different forms of "grey goo" trying like hell to take over the earth and eat every last ounce of available energy. They are called plants, animals, fungus and bacteria'.
This is a sound argument, and one that certainly needs to be made (and attended to). There is, however, a slight flaw in it. If you believe in evolution (broadly speaking), you concede that organisms evolve stepwise. They cannot take huge leaps, but have to progress through a series of intermediate states all of which are evolutionarily successful. That is one reason why no living things have wheels, laser death-rays, or (AFAIK) radio communication.
Introduce a human designer into the loop, and the picture changes drastically. As gnovos reminds us, we are neck-deep in millions of species of fungi and bacteria (and viruses and protozoa...) Very few of them, however, are fatal to humans; and hardly any are fatal wholesale, in the sense that they wipe out whole populations. Why? If a microorganism wipes out its host, it disappears too - or, at the very least, suffers a serious check. But a human scientist can analyze the human body's defence mechanisms, and tailor an existing bacterium or virus to sidestep them. If a microorganism appears that kills whole populations, it will almost certainly be an artificial one.
The same applies to grey goo.
'Now try telling Mr. Grouchy-old-guy Executive that your frustrating the hell out of him and all the people he employs all in the name of your software religion (as legitimate as it may be).
'Now multiply that by 175 users in 5 offices across 4 times zones and two countries and tell me it's worth Microsoft bashing and open-source evangelizing. It's not - not even close.'
In other words, if I follow your argument, because so many people have locked themselves in to Office over the years - mostly with no idea of the long-term consequences - Office should now be virtually exempt from competition. The only competitive products that have any chance are those that are more or less identical to Office.
'You just said, "extensible." I can't even look at you right now....'
// n. // n. // adj. // n.
What? It's a real word:
extendable adj.
extendability
extendible adj.
extendibility
extensible
extensibility
[Middle English from Latin extendere extens- or extent- 'stretch out' (as ex-1, tendere 'stretch')]
(Oxford English Dictionary)