Literally, perhaps. This is 'nice' for networks, so to speak, right?
Re:This Should Clear Things Up
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually I do not quite understand IBM. Why the hell are they giving this a chance to be viewed in Utah? They could have countersued in a suitable country, obtained an injunction and got a relief exceeding SCO market's cap in Germany ten times by now.
Assuming IBM is a rational actor, only two things make sense:
(1) IBM knows that there is, in fact, some teeth to SCO's case. They're walking quietly because of this.
(2) IBM is pulling a judo-like move, where they're going to let SCO run and build up momentum, and then flip them over and send them flying into lunar orbit.
And while we're at it, Malcolm Gladwell produces for the social sciences what Gleick does for the hard sciences... equally fascinating writing that examines wide implications of interesting facts and disciplines.
It appears his argument isn't against standards, but our industry's application of them. He supports de facto standards and argues against design by committee.
I'm sure some folks will disagree with this, but I'm continually quite impressed with the work that comes out of the w3c. With very few exceptions, I've found that it's practical and well-thought out, and far more often, I feel frustrated that the standards aren't better implmented by the bigger players, rather than feeling any kind of "ivy tower" frustration at the standards.
Give me anyday a world full of browsers with fully compliant CSS2 support anyday, over the de facto standards imposed first by Netscape's dominance, then by IE's. The W3C also seems to forge a path ahead that makes quite a bit of sense....
Your overal point is really good, but I want to nitpick one point and then jump off to a larger issue...
Well, you say, let him hire some QA people. Maybe a few marketing guys--he has to make a living, after all. Perhaps an engineer or two. Pretty soon, it starts to sound like he's running a *gasp* corporation.
Not necessarily. He could be running a sole proprietorship still, even though it likely wouldn't make much sense. He would probably at least change to an LLC, or perhaps he would pick another corporate form.
Why would he do this? For tax reasons, partially, but also... liability reasons. Protection from many kinds of liability is great -- it allows companies to take the financial risks necessary to get off the ground.
But here's the thing: I think a lot of people in the corporate world start to beleive a little bit too strongly in the abstractions surrounding the corporation. The relief from liability. The view of the customer/consumer as a revenue source. Once you start building up the abstraction of the corporation, that's the only relationship you have with them as course.... whereas the guy in his garage talks to each of his customers, has probably lived on the same street as them for a few years, and if he has any humanity, is going to feel some responsibility to them. Not to mention pride in his work (sometimes I think there's some of us hackers, for example, who'd be nearly as hurt by the fact that something we made failed in a critical way as the fact that it could threaten a life:).
Large organizations/corps aren't inherently evil, but they can easily breed this kind of behavior because they're inherently somewhat insular and abstracted from normal human realities.
The Mac is still easier to use, a distinction it has kept for almost 20 years now.
To use? Maybe. It still does seem to keep some slight edges of being more well-thought out, in my opinion.
But I think it's not so much day-to-day use that's easier, it's administration. And that's what I think that many people forget... the kind of thing this article is talking about is, essentially, system administration, something that your average user sucks at. Make that easier, make it transparent, and you've made the easier to use machine.
The man in question, I beleive, is John Warnock. I'd heard he was working with Evans and Sutherland at the time, rather than Xerox, but that was word of mouth...
Absolutely true. That's the most convenient model -- you walk in the park, you're assigned an IP via DHCP, presto -- but that doesn't have to be the way it is. You may have to signup, just like I did for my local library. And that's OK with me.
Something else: the terms of service can also be enforced technically -- that is, what you're free to do can be constrained. You could throttle port 25 for each computer, for example, or watch for certain traffic patterns that suggest a kind of attack...
Any publicly listed company has a DUTY to their shareholders to increase the shareholders investments as rapidly as possible. Microsofts' only justification for holding on to all the cash they do, for instance is that they claim to produce better shareholder value by reinvesting the money than by paying dividends.
You could also argue this is one of the ridiculous things about the stock market: stock prices are a function of speculation on the value of future stock prices (which will, of course, be based on speculation on the value of future stock prices). Which is why many companies are now more worried about perception than performance. There is no inherent worth in holding non-dividend stocks: only the potential for selling higher. Dividend stocks seem a lot sounder, much less based on mass shared delusions.
Of course, in a "new economy" those mass shared delusions can make you money awfully quick. Curiously enough, Microsoft seems to know that the speculative rise/ride in their industry may be over... so what do they do? Announce themselves as one of the first with new dividend program... and their top leadership starts to dump stock. They're not a strong growth area anymore.
If I had the $$, I'd very seriously consider getting one...
From their web site, it doesn't look like they're currently available to the average consumer at any price.... but they project a very affordable $8000-$10000 right now.
Buddhism actively encourages the practice of meditation and contemplation, which (it seems to me) would have a larger effect on the calmness of an individual than the tenets of a religion in general. I rarely see a similar emphasis on daily meditation and contemplation in Christian churches.
This is absolutely true in terms of general cultural presentation, but you can find more than a few churches and individuals who advocate meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Usually they couple it with the study of sacred texts, as well... see Parker Palmer's To Know As We Are Known, for example. I'm a Mormon, and local and general leadership are constantly encouraging members to spend time daily reading canon, praying, and meditating. I can think of half a dozen people from other Christian denominations I've met who experience the same thing.
I think that the practice, however, is strongly discouraged by Western Culture, especially American. Two weeks of vacation? 6-10 is not uncommon in Europe. When touring Australia on said two weeks one year, a guy from France commented "You're practically Japanese." (interesting how they're famous for their hell-bent work focus, but have the buddhist/eastern attachement as well...). So the work-focused culture plays a part, no matter the religion. And I also think that the meditative practice may have been hijacked and given a cloistered stigma by the monastic traditions in the west....
You sir are either lying, have bad hardware, or you've severely corrupted your installation. This operating system (which is BSD) is solid as a rock.
As a person who loves Mac OS X dearly but is still frustrated as all get out by the 5-10 crashes per week, I thought I'd speak up here. It's quite possible the parent poster has bad hardware, and it's even possible that he's lying or messed things up himself. But I can tell you that I've been using various flavors of UNIX since 1988, OS X for over two years, and I know it pretty well, and it's unlikely that I've messed my own system over, and I'm telling the gospel truth when I say it crashes with the above frequency.
I'm sure most people's experience is better, but you don't have to be lying or incompetent to tell an OS X chronic system problem story.
The RFCs on HTTP are useful if you are writing a server or client, however they are less useful as a guide to how what is out there works.
But, as anyone who's tried CSS or just about anything else knows, this is absolutely true. Differences between vendor implementations are one reason why many geeks are bald, sickly, and pale.
You wouldn't even necessarily have to turn it all off. All you'd have to do is make a list of sites running open source OS's or servers. Ask people if why they think the following entities use open source:
It wouldn't take too long to demonstrate there's a fair number of prestigious organizations in the world who can use whatever the SBN* they want, but choose Apache or Linux or FreeBSD. And let's not even get started about Sendmail and BIND...
Maybe for bonus points, we could quiz Wexler and Smith, and see what in the same SBN they actually think they know about technical innovation.
Or maybe we could start making television commercials... picture this: we fade each of the names of the websites above, with a voiceover that goes "The day Wexler and Smith get their way, these sites would go dark."
Only if the GPL whacks you over the head with a nightstick and then releases itself with your other code while you're out cold.
Remember: when you use GPL'd code in your business, you don't pay for it with cash. There's no direct monetary cost. The only cost is that if you create a derivitave work with it, you're essentially engaging in an IP cross-licensing agreement: you get to use the GPL code, but must make your own contributions available. There are costs and downsides to that, but businesses make that kind of trade all the time, and they'll do it with the GPL. Calling it "viral" is one spin... viewing it as cross-licensing agreement is another, and probably closer to reality IMHO.
Drop me an email if you wouldn't mind discussing this further -- I'm interested, studied Math in college myself, though I often wondered if that did me the good I was hoping for... and it sounds like you're describing.
In the original classic text, the oracle uses the term "gyros", which translates as "spinning head". However, as Roman/Italic influences increased, especially the use of pasta, and the involved spinning upon implements of said pasta necessary to eat it, the terms for "spinning head" and "spun pasta" (or "noodle"), began to be conflated. Also, "pasta head" became something of a pejorative among the Greeks, once they saw how the Romans worked. Before long, the pejorative was dropped (somewhat like "Geek" and "Nigger", but especially as the concept of citizenship in the empire took hold), and further term conflation resulted in "noodle" being slang for the concept of brain/center of thought.
Bugginess is not my only concern, though it is a concern. My question: Where is that classic overhysterical paranoia of "hackers" that usually pervades discussion about safety/privacy of data?
I may be overparanoid, but I wonder if it's because the hacker game is one that all parties involved are actually willing to play. It's been done in the past (dead voters, altered ballots, running out the clock) and I wonder if politically jaded simply view it as a potential tactic...
And how do you ensure that your vote for Joe actually went to Joe? The printed card? Or the code redirection, which sent your vote to Mary instead.
There isn't any way to be absolutely sure of this, but the point of the card is that if there's any question, officials/experts can compare the record in the system with the second record -- and the second, printed record, is verifiable to anyone who knows how to read.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be nice.
Literally, perhaps. This is ' nice ' for networks, so to speak, right?
Actually I do not quite understand IBM. Why the hell are they giving this a chance to be viewed in Utah? They could have countersued in a suitable country, obtained an injunction and got a relief exceeding SCO market's cap in Germany ten times by now.
Assuming IBM is a rational actor, only two things make sense:
(1) IBM knows that there is, in fact, some teeth to SCO's case. They're walking quietly because of this.
(2) IBM is pulling a judo-like move, where they're going to let SCO run and build up momentum, and then flip them over and send them flying into lunar orbit.
James Gleick's "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" is not mentioned frequently enough when Feynman bios come up. Very good reading indeed.
Gleick is also known as one of the first authors of a popularized book on Chaos theory, and in general produces some interesting reads.
And while we're at it, Malcolm Gladwell produces for the social sciences what Gleick does for the hard sciences... equally fascinating writing that examines wide implications of interesting facts and disciplines.
If IPv6 is actually adopted before the heat-death of the universe, we'll probably be running out of IP addresses for Mars.
It appears his argument isn't against standards, but our industry's application of them. He supports de facto standards and argues against design by committee.
I'm sure some folks will disagree with this, but I'm continually quite impressed with the work that comes out of the w3c. With very few exceptions, I've found that it's practical and well-thought out, and far more often, I feel frustrated that the standards aren't better implmented by the bigger players, rather than feeling any kind of "ivy tower" frustration at the standards.
Give me anyday a world full of browsers with fully compliant CSS2 support anyday, over the de facto standards imposed first by Netscape's dominance, then by IE's. The W3C also seems to forge a path ahead that makes quite a bit of sense....
Your overal point is really good, but I want to nitpick one point and then jump off to a larger issue...
:).
Well, you say, let him hire some QA people. Maybe a few marketing guys--he has to make a living, after all. Perhaps an engineer or two. Pretty soon, it starts to sound like he's running a *gasp* corporation.
Not necessarily. He could be running a sole proprietorship still, even though it likely wouldn't make much sense. He would probably at least change to an LLC, or perhaps he would pick another corporate form.
Why would he do this? For tax reasons, partially, but also... liability reasons. Protection from many kinds of liability is great -- it allows companies to take the financial risks necessary to get off the ground.
But here's the thing: I think a lot of people in the corporate world start to beleive a little bit too strongly in the abstractions surrounding the corporation. The relief from liability. The view of the customer/consumer as a revenue source. Once you start building up the abstraction of the corporation, that's the only relationship you have with them as course.... whereas the guy in his garage talks to each of his customers, has probably lived on the same street as them for a few years, and if he has any humanity, is going to feel some responsibility to them. Not to mention pride in his work (sometimes I think there's some of us hackers, for example, who'd be nearly as hurt by the fact that something we made failed in a critical way as the fact that it could threaten a life
Large organizations/corps aren't inherently evil, but they can easily breed this kind of behavior because they're inherently somewhat insular and abstracted from normal human realities.
The Mac is still easier to use, a distinction it has kept for almost 20 years now.
To use? Maybe. It still does seem to keep some slight edges of being more well-thought out, in my opinion.
But I think it's not so much day-to-day use that's easier, it's administration. And that's what I think that many people forget... the kind of thing this article is talking about is, essentially, system administration, something that your average user sucks at. Make that easier, make it transparent, and you've made the easier to use machine.
The man in question, I beleive, is John Warnock. I'd heard he was working with Evans and Sutherland at the time, rather than Xerox, but that was word of mouth...
"Free" doesn't have to mean anonymous;
Absolutely true. That's the most convenient model -- you walk in the park, you're assigned an IP via DHCP, presto -- but that doesn't have to be the way it is. You may have to signup, just like I did for my local library. And that's OK with me.
Something else: the terms of service can also be enforced technically -- that is, what you're free to do can be constrained. You could throttle port 25 for each computer, for example, or watch for certain traffic patterns that suggest a kind of attack...
Any publicly listed company has a DUTY to their shareholders to increase the shareholders investments as rapidly as possible. Microsofts' only justification for holding on to all the cash they do, for instance is that they claim to produce better shareholder value by reinvesting the money than by paying dividends.
You could also argue this is one of the ridiculous things about the stock market: stock prices are a function of speculation on the value of future stock prices (which will, of course, be based on speculation on the value of future stock prices). Which is why many companies are now more worried about perception than performance. There is no inherent worth in holding non-dividend stocks: only the potential for selling higher. Dividend stocks seem a lot sounder, much less based on mass shared delusions.
Of course, in a "new economy" those mass shared delusions can make you money awfully quick. Curiously enough, Microsoft seems to know that the speculative rise/ride in their industry may be over... so what do they do? Announce themselves as one of the first with new dividend program... and their top leadership starts to dump stock. They're not a strong growth area anymore.
If I had the $$, I'd very seriously consider getting one...
From their web site, it doesn't look like they're currently available to the average consumer at any price.... but they project a very affordable $8000-$10000 right now.
If it's real, it's pretty intruiging.
4'33" could make it until they came out with "REST"...
Buddhism actively encourages the practice of meditation and contemplation, which (it seems to me) would have a larger effect on the calmness of an individual than the tenets of a religion in general. I rarely see a similar emphasis on daily meditation and contemplation in Christian churches.
This is absolutely true in terms of general cultural presentation, but you can find more than a few churches and individuals who advocate meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Usually they couple it with the study of sacred texts, as well... see Parker Palmer's To Know As We Are Known, for example. I'm a Mormon, and local and general leadership are constantly encouraging members to spend time daily reading canon, praying, and meditating. I can think of half a dozen people from other Christian denominations I've met who experience the same thing.
I think that the practice, however, is strongly discouraged by Western Culture, especially American. Two weeks of vacation? 6-10 is not uncommon in Europe. When touring Australia on said two weeks one year, a guy from France commented "You're practically Japanese." (interesting how they're famous for their hell-bent work focus, but have the buddhist/eastern attachement as well...). So the work-focused culture plays a part, no matter the religion. And I also think that the meditative practice may have been hijacked and given a cloistered stigma by the monastic traditions in the west....
Tyler and like-minded folks are probably more interested in the glycerin than the soap...
You sir are either lying, have bad hardware, or you've severely corrupted your installation. This operating system (which is BSD) is solid as a rock.
As a person who loves Mac OS X dearly but is still frustrated as all get out by the 5-10 crashes per week, I thought I'd speak up here. It's quite possible the parent poster has bad hardware, and it's even possible that he's lying or messed things up himself. But I can tell you that I've been using various flavors of UNIX since 1988, OS X for over two years, and I know it pretty well, and it's unlikely that I've messed my own system over, and I'm telling the gospel truth when I say it crashes with the above frequency.
I'm sure most people's experience is better, but you don't have to be lying or incompetent to tell an OS X chronic system problem story.
Where do you think you can find HTTP on the W3C site?
And yet, as has been pointed out, you can indeed find it on the w3 site.
The RFCs on HTTP are useful if you are writing a server or client, however they are less useful as a guide to how what is out there works.
But, as anyone who's tried CSS or just about anything else knows, this is absolutely true. Differences between vendor implementations are one reason why many geeks are bald, sickly, and pale.
You wouldn't even necessarily have to turn it all off. All you'd have to do is make a list of sites running open source OS's or servers. Ask people if why they think the following entities use open source:
i a.edu ...
yahoo.com
forbes.com
cnn.com
fbi.gov
columb
stanford.edu
nyse.com
nyi.com
verio.com
It wouldn't take too long to demonstrate there's a fair number of prestigious organizations in the world who can use whatever the SBN* they want, but choose Apache or Linux or FreeBSD. And let's not even get started about Sendmail and BIND...
Maybe for bonus points, we could quiz Wexler and Smith, and see what in the same SBN they actually think they know about technical innovation.
Or maybe we could start making television commercials... picture this: we fade each of the names of the websites above, with a voiceover that goes "The day Wexler and Smith get their way, these sites would go dark."
*SBN = Some Burning Netherworld
Only if the GPL whacks you over the head with a nightstick and then releases itself with your other code while you're out cold.
Remember: when you use GPL'd code in your business, you don't pay for it with cash. There's no direct monetary cost. The only cost is that if you create a derivitave work with it, you're essentially engaging in an IP cross-licensing agreement: you get to use the GPL code, but must make your own contributions available. There are costs and downsides to that, but businesses make that kind of trade all the time, and they'll do it with the GPL. Calling it "viral" is one spin... viewing it as cross-licensing agreement is another, and probably closer to reality IMHO.
Drop me an email if you wouldn't mind discussing this further -- I'm interested, studied Math in college myself, though I often wondered if that did me the good I was hoping for... and it sounds like you're describing.
It is my firm belief that visualization technique can be taught.
You wanna go into some details?
A songwriter friend of mine covered it here... not a bad tune.
In the original classic text, the oracle uses the term "gyros", which translates as "spinning head". However, as Roman/Italic influences increased, especially the use of pasta, and the involved spinning upon implements of said pasta necessary to eat it, the terms for "spinning head" and "spun pasta" (or "noodle"), began to be conflated. Also, "pasta head" became something of a pejorative among the Greeks, once they saw how the Romans worked. Before long, the pejorative was dropped (somewhat like "Geek" and "Nigger", but especially as the concept of citizenship in the empire took hold), and further term conflation resulted in "noodle" being slang for the concept of brain/center of thought.
Bugginess is not my only concern, though it is a concern. My question: Where is that classic overhysterical paranoia of "hackers" that usually pervades discussion about safety/privacy of data?
I may be overparanoid, but I wonder if it's because the hacker game is one that all parties involved are actually willing to play. It's been done in the past (dead voters, altered ballots, running out the clock) and I wonder if politically jaded simply view it as a potential tactic...
And how do you ensure that your vote for Joe actually went to Joe? The printed card? Or the code redirection, which sent your vote to Mary instead.
There isn't any way to be absolutely sure of this, but the point of the card is that if there's any question, officials/experts can compare the record in the system with the second record -- and the second, printed record, is verifiable to anyone who knows how to read.
Who makes the voting system go?
We do! We do!
Who keeps e-lection source unknown?
We do! We do!