Speak for yourself
on
Thebroken Videos
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Bittorrent simply doesn't work on my machine. I'm guessing its because I'm in a private address space behind a Linksys router.
I'd share my bandwidth if I could. But I'm not willing to expose my machine to a worm-infested, script-kiddie-prowling public internet in order to do it.
...and every fool knows that Jupiter is Saturn's son...
Well, not every fool. Remember that all these various gods started out as independent deities worshipped by competing cults. Making them into one big dysfunctional family was just a way of trying to reconcile competing legends. In particular, the idea that Jupiter/Zeus was the rebelious child of Saturn/Chronos was an attempt to explain a cultural shift that left Saturn and his chums, previously the dominant deities, as marginalized dudes with only a few followers. Some of whom, I suspect, found the idea that Jupiter was Saturn's son deeply offensive!
There's this silly bit in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where a character tries to explain how the Greeks could have two Gods of War (Ares and Athena) with some weird sociological riff about different attitudes towards war. The reality is simply that Ares and Athena had competing cults. Indeed Athena was probably a holdover from a pre-Helenistic culture where women had a larger role than they did under the male-chauvinist Greeks.
Readers of Robert Graves will notice that I'm parroting his party line, as opposed to the more usual myths-as-literature POV.
Thanks for the complement. Is there any money in tech writing?
Not that much. And the job market is kind of bad these days. Technical Publications is never a big priority -- there's often an attitude that manuals are just useless paper that nobody actually reads. Plus there's a surplus of writers who thought a Technical Communication degree was all they needed to be permanently employed.
On the other hand, there's always a shortage of tech writers who can both explain things well and have a solid technical background. But you'd have to learn the difference between "compliment" and "complement".;)
... which makes sense, sort of, until one realises the planets are named after roman gods, in latin. But modern day astronomical terminology is based on both latin AND greek.
Actually, they were named after Semitic gods. Middle Eastern people were the last major culture to worship planets. (Robert Graves claimed that the seven-branched menora is a leftover from Judaism's pre-monotheist planet worship.) The familiar Roman names for the planets comes from the fact that the Romans liked to adopt elements of the religions of the peoples they conquered. So the Roman gods got identified with middle-eastern gods, and it the process picked up planetary associations.
But you seem to think that I'm arguing for some kind of retro astronomical semantics based on historical word origins. Quite the opposite. I'm arguing that words like "planet" have gone through so many changes that there's no absolute, objective semantics left. The best you can do is to make sure that the way you use the word "planet" is clear to whoever you're talking to. Which is really all you can do with any word.
The historian Marc Bloch was always bemused by the word "atomic", which in his day was still associated with its original meaning: "fundamental and indivisble". And yet the hot topic in physics in those days was splitting the atom! Bloch would cite this fact whenever he had to use a historical term (like Fedualsim, his own particular specialization) that had evolved away from its origins. Rather than indulge in pointless arguments over the "correct" usage of the term, he would simply insist that it didn't matter how you used the word, as long as everybody understood how you used it.
The file/print/authentication/directory/etc services will just work - the users don't need to care whether the servers providing them are running on a NetWare or Linux kernel.
So if they both work the same, why offer a choice at all?
indeed, the newer Novell Client installers default to "Use IP, and get rid of IPX if it's already there".
Hmm, that wasn't even an option the last time I install a Novell Client. About 2 years ago. Is 6 newer than that?
The main thing we owe RMS for is founding the Open Source mode of development. Except that's not at all what he meant to do. In fact, he despises Open Source, which he considers a poor imitation of his "Free Software" concept.
As a software engineer, I have to consider RMS overrated. To be fair, he's probably a better programmer than I am -- by a factor of 100 or so. But even to me, it's apparent he doesn't understand the concept of sturcture. Usually when I need to hack somebody else's code, they compartmentalized it enough so I can change something without causing too much damage. But the last time I tried to add a feature to a GNU utility, I took one look and ran the other way!
IPX/SPX is better than TCP/IP in mnay respects, but the Unix community was committed to a non-proprietory protocol.
That should read "the internetworking community". We think of TCP/IP as a Unix thing, because of the pervasive influence of Berkeley's protocol stack. But it's always been widely used on other platforms, and originally didn't run on Unix at all.
The only thing that forces me to run IPX are the stupid JetDirect cards. But I digress.
No you don't. I was under the impression that you had to run IPX to get at Netware Servers and services. That was how things were at the last place I worked with a NetWare infrastructure. Setting up the Linux client software was a pain. Which made me contemplate the irony when I heard that Novell was becomming a Linux shop.
So were we misinformed? Or maybe it never occurred to our IT people to dispense with IPX.
Your choice of kernel - but you will still be running eDirectory and other Novell services.
So how do you choose? It's not clear to me how ones choice of kernel will affect things at the user level -- if at all.
...there are tons of small things out there that we don't call planets precisely because they are smaller: Asteroids!
It's worth considering where some of these words come from. Asteroid, for example, means "star like". Say what? Yep, 19th-century astronmer's considered asteroids to resemble stars, because when you pointed a telescope at them, you just see a point of light, unlike planets. But they weren't exactly like stars, because they moved in relation to the "other" stars. Hence "star like".
Asteroids are also called planetoids, which just flips the above comparison on its head -- they're like planets, but they're not exactly like planets. The really amusing thing about this double terminology is the way it confuses Star Trek writers.
Then there's the word planet, from a Greek word that translates literally as "wanderer". All the objects in the sky that move with respect to the stars were originally considered planets. Not including the asteroids, because you can't see an asteroid without a telescope which hadn't been invented yet. But what about the Sun and Moon? These were considered planets too. But not the Earth, because everybody knew that the Earth didn't move. Hey, motion is define in reference to the Earth, how could the Earth move? What is that Copernicus dude taking, anyway?
Incidentally, that's why there are seven days to the week. Each planet that you can see without a telescope (and thus that is actually considered to exist) is dominated by a deity, and each deity has their own special day: Saturn Day, Sun Day, Moon Day, Mars Day, Mercury Day, Jupiter Day, and Venus Day. Most of the names we use in English come from Norse gods that medieval scholars thought were cognate with familiar Roman gods; their logic was a little stretched, but nobody cared, since the Norse religion was already dead, and hadn't involved planet worship anyway.
But I digress. The important point it that all these names are historical relics -- there's no way to be really precise with them. The cover issues we no longer care about, and don't cover issues we do. If you want to be more precise than anybody is in real life, you refer to rocky body, gaseous bodies, and Kuiper objects. But in real life you use familiar terms, because they're, well, familiar. If there are confusions and ambiguities, you take a moment to clear them up ("for the purposes of this discussion, any large body that orbits the sun is a planet; also Greenland is an island, not a continent"), and then you move on to stuff that really matters.
Well, half-a-billion euros sounds like a lot of money. It even sounds like a lot of money when your translate it to US$616 million. But when you translate it to a Microsoft fiscal calendar (about 1 week of gross revenue) it does sound like a slap on the wrist!
I'm reminded of that Simpsons ep where Burns is caught dumping nuclear waste in a city park and fined some huge sum. He says something like, "As long as I have my checkbook out, I'll take that statue of Justice too."
So RMS actually thinks he could live off his open source activities if he had to? I'm reminded of various counter-culture types I knew back in the 70s. They were so proud of their ability to survive without all those material things we wage-slaves wasted our lives earning the money to pay for. Of course, they would have been in a pretty pickle if we'd all followed their advice, since they were dependent on us for things like access to a telephone and the occasional hot shower.
Well yeah, I'm perfectly happy to see RMS take grant money and use it develop free-as-in-whatever software. I'm simply expressing irritation as his belief that he's achieved some higher moral plane, even though he's ultimately dependent on the very "non-free" software industry he condemns.
So fine, RMS excels at the competitive world of grant proposal writing. Is that supposed to make his hypocritical attitude towards IP more palatable?
Though, come to think of it, grant money does sometimes fall from the sky. I think that it's expired by now, but RMS used to be a MacArthur Fellow. This is a grant that's designed to provide a certain kind of people with a proper income, no strings attached. You can't apply for this fellowship -- you just go out and do things that impresses the foundation. Whereupon they call you up and inform you that you're on their books, and they need to know where to send your monthly check.
(I knew a women who this actually happened to. First she thought it was some kind of scam, and wouldn't return their calls. Then she found out it was legit and had a minor breakdown. She was a struggling grad student, and the sudden change in circumstances was, well, disorienting.)
When the MacArthur Foundation does stuff like this, I'm usually gratified, because they seem to like to subsidize people who make life more interesting for the rest of us. And I suppose RMS is just the kind of person such a program was meant for. But this once I question whether they really did him, or us, a favor. By further insulating him from economic reality, they promoted the aspects of his philosophy that I, for one, find most arrogant and irritating.
When I said "fortunately... lost" I wasn't commenting on the quality of the Hartnell eps. (Though some of them are pretty ripe.) I was commenting on the fact that the missing eps weren't around to trouble us with their inconsistencies.
But of course I place more emphasis on story consistency than most people, Makes me a lousy drama-lit critic.
Hmm, I seem to recall the Fourth Doctor mostly worked in a space-ship-like control room, as did most of the other doctors. There was a period when he switched to the messy, wood-paneled room left over from the second Doctor, There was still a wooden flute lying around. I think that only lasted for a season or two. But it's been a very long time since I actually watched the show.
It just occured to me that they never explained where the "Doctor" did his graduate work. The name is actually a leftover from the original premise, which was that the Doctor was a scientist from the future, who for some unstated reason thought his grandaughter (written out in ep 10) should go to school in the 20th century. Not terribly consistent with the "Time Lord" premise that evolved later, but fortunately most of the First Doctor eps have been lost.
RMS is the classic schoolyard radical. He has all these social theories that he's never had to test in the real world, because he's spent his entire professional career subsisting on grant money.
Don't get me wrong -- there's nothing wrong with taking grant money. Just because something isn't economically sustainable, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I just get very tired of the way the "Free Software" folk insist that they've transcended the evils of software "ownership". Which they've never actually done. Their bills are paid for by revenues from the very businesses they are too pure to work for.
So of course RMS now works in a building that was paid for by the license fees that Microsoft gouged out of hapless computer buyers. What could be more appropriate?
That's a proxy. These popups are originating from spyware that's installed within IE! (You do know what spyware is, right?) Keeping the ad pages from downloading (which you don't need a proxy it do) isn't going to prevent the popups from occuring. I just get blank popups instead of popups with ads in them.
OK, perhaps I shouldn't have said "day one". How about "the first five years"?
Actually, I'm not the good at programming. I mostly read code that others have written (I write API docs for a living). But let me throw out some inexpert opinions.
Notice that I didn't say performance was the priority. Obviously there are, as you say, other priorities that take precedence in the early stages of a project. So yeah, you have to pay more attention to getting the thing working than to making it work fast.
But you can't just ignore performance. If you do, you'll make design mistakes that will be very hard to reverse later.
Except that's what the Mozilla team did. They piled on feature after feature, without worrying about whether they were destroying the performance of the product. I guess they assumed this was something they could fix later. Well it is later, and they still haven't fixed it. Yeah, we just had this breathless annoucement with gee-whiz figure about how Mozilla is smaller and faster. Except it still hasn't gotten as fast as IE 6.
Speaking of which: I finally nailed that spyware. (My main anti-spyware tool is now Spybot S&D. Koller is painfully flaky, but his software does the job better than anybody else's -- once you figure it out.) So I'm back to using IE. Yes, it isn't as kewl as Firefox, and yes it belongs to The Dark Side. And of course it isn't standards-compliant. (Though these days, who is?) But I don't go crazy waiting for pages to load, and I have a googlebar that actually works.
And yeah, if I had free choice I'd switch to Linux and use Konqueror. Or if I had free choice and deep pockets, I'd switch to Mac and use Safari. But I don't so I won't, so enough with the "switch to something else" mantra.
Yeah, I'm underwealmed by this announcement too. But your comparison is off-target, since this improvement in performance appears to have been done by improving the code, not by stripping out features. What's sad is that performance wasn't a priority from day one. Mozilla's bloated code base have pretty much destroyed its credibility outside its community of fanatical true-believers.
Ironically enough, I'm writing this using Firefox, 'cause my copy of IE is infested with some weird stealth popup engine that neither Ad-Aware nore Spybot can seem to corner. I'm very close to abandoning IE, going back to Mozilla permanently.
But I'm not quite there. Now might seem the right time to abandon IE, with its stupid security holes and lack of standards compliance. But Firefox still takes too long to download graphics and render complicated web pages. And the Mozilla version of the Google toolbar has a really stupid bug (actually more a case of overdesign) that makes search term buttons totally useless. I can't live without search term buttons!
Since this is Slashdot, the invention of Unix, C, and C++ should top the list of Bell Labs accomplishments. All OSs in widespread use owe a big debt to Unix -- even those that aren't (like Linux) simply evolutions of Unix itself. And for better or for worse. C and C++ are the most influential of all programming languages, ever.
As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.
We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.
And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.
But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.
There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.
Page ranking only matters if you plan for your content to be online indefinitely. News sites often put it on a free site for a couple weeks, then put it on a paid site.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd share my bandwidth if I could. But I'm not willing to expose my machine to a worm-infested, script-kiddie-prowling public internet in order to do it.
There's this silly bit in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where a character tries to explain how the Greeks could have two Gods of War (Ares and Athena) with some weird sociological riff about different attitudes towards war. The reality is simply that Ares and Athena had competing cults. Indeed Athena was probably a holdover from a pre-Helenistic culture where women had a larger role than they did under the male-chauvinist Greeks.
Readers of Robert Graves will notice that I'm parroting his party line, as opposed to the more usual myths-as-literature POV.
On the other hand, there's always a shortage of tech writers who can both explain things well and have a solid technical background. But you'd have to learn the difference between "compliment" and "complement". ;)
But you seem to think that I'm arguing for some kind of retro astronomical semantics based on historical word origins. Quite the opposite. I'm arguing that words like "planet" have gone through so many changes that there's no absolute, objective semantics left. The best you can do is to make sure that the way you use the word "planet" is clear to whoever you're talking to. Which is really all you can do with any word.
The historian Marc Bloch was always bemused by the word "atomic", which in his day was still associated with its original meaning: "fundamental and indivisble". And yet the hot topic in physics in those days was splitting the atom! Bloch would cite this fact whenever he had to use a historical term (like Fedualsim, his own particular specialization) that had evolved away from its origins. Rather than indulge in pointless arguments over the "correct" usage of the term, he would simply insist that it didn't matter how you used the word, as long as everybody understood how you used it.
As a software engineer, I have to consider RMS overrated. To be fair, he's probably a better programmer than I am -- by a factor of 100 or so. But even to me, it's apparent he doesn't understand the concept of sturcture. Usually when I need to hack somebody else's code, they compartmentalized it enough so I can change something without causing too much damage. But the last time I tried to add a feature to a GNU utility, I took one look and ran the other way!
So were we misinformed? Or maybe it never occurred to our IT people to dispense with IPX.
So how do you choose? It's not clear to me how ones choice of kernel will affect things at the user level -- if at all. Quite well. Considered tech writing?Asteroids are also called planetoids, which just flips the above comparison on its head -- they're like planets, but they're not exactly like planets. The really amusing thing about this double terminology is the way it confuses Star Trek writers.
Then there's the word planet, from a Greek word that translates literally as "wanderer". All the objects in the sky that move with respect to the stars were originally considered planets. Not including the asteroids, because you can't see an asteroid without a telescope which hadn't been invented yet. But what about the Sun and Moon? These were considered planets too. But not the Earth, because everybody knew that the Earth didn't move. Hey, motion is define in reference to the Earth, how could the Earth move? What is that Copernicus dude taking, anyway?
Incidentally, that's why there are seven days to the week. Each planet that you can see without a telescope (and thus that is actually considered to exist) is dominated by a deity, and each deity has their own special day: Saturn Day, Sun Day, Moon Day, Mars Day, Mercury Day, Jupiter Day, and Venus Day. Most of the names we use in English come from Norse gods that medieval scholars thought were cognate with familiar Roman gods; their logic was a little stretched, but nobody cared, since the Norse religion was already dead, and hadn't involved planet worship anyway.
But I digress. The important point it that all these names are historical relics -- there's no way to be really precise with them. The cover issues we no longer care about, and don't cover issues we do. If you want to be more precise than anybody is in real life, you refer to rocky body, gaseous bodies, and Kuiper objects. But in real life you use familiar terms, because they're, well, familiar. If there are confusions and ambiguities, you take a moment to clear them up ("for the purposes of this discussion, any large body that orbits the sun is a planet; also Greenland is an island, not a continent"), and then you move on to stuff that really matters.
I don't think Homer's philosophy extends to causes. Just solutions!
I'm reminded of that Simpsons ep where Burns is caught dumping nuclear waste in a city park and fined some huge sum. He says something like, "As long as I have my checkbook out, I'll take that statue of Justice too."
So RMS actually thinks he could live off his open source activities if he had to? I'm reminded of various counter-culture types I knew back in the 70s. They were so proud of their ability to survive without all those material things we wage-slaves wasted our lives earning the money to pay for. Of course, they would have been in a pretty pickle if we'd all followed their advice, since they were dependent on us for things like access to a telephone and the occasional hot shower.
Well yeah, I'm perfectly happy to see RMS take grant money and use it develop free-as-in-whatever software. I'm simply expressing irritation as his belief that he's achieved some higher moral plane, even though he's ultimately dependent on the very "non-free" software industry he condemns.
Though, come to think of it, grant money does sometimes fall from the sky. I think that it's expired by now, but RMS used to be a MacArthur Fellow. This is a grant that's designed to provide a certain kind of people with a proper income, no strings attached. You can't apply for this fellowship -- you just go out and do things that impresses the foundation. Whereupon they call you up and inform you that you're on their books, and they need to know where to send your monthly check.
(I knew a women who this actually happened to. First she thought it was some kind of scam, and wouldn't return their calls. Then she found out it was legit and had a minor breakdown. She was a struggling grad student, and the sudden change in circumstances was, well, disorienting.)
When the MacArthur Foundation does stuff like this, I'm usually gratified, because they seem to like to subsidize people who make life more interesting for the rest of us. And I suppose RMS is just the kind of person such a program was meant for. But this once I question whether they really did him, or us, a favor. By further insulating him from economic reality, they promoted the aspects of his philosophy that I, for one, find most arrogant and irritating.
But of course I place more emphasis on story consistency than most people, Makes me a lousy drama-lit critic.
It just occured to me that they never explained where the "Doctor" did his graduate work. The name is actually a leftover from the original premise, which was that the Doctor was a scientist from the future, who for some unstated reason thought his grandaughter (written out in ep 10) should go to school in the 20th century. Not terribly consistent with the "Time Lord" premise that evolved later, but fortunately most of the First Doctor eps have been lost.
Don't get me wrong -- there's nothing wrong with taking grant money. Just because something isn't economically sustainable, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I just get very tired of the way the "Free Software" folk insist that they've transcended the evils of software "ownership". Which they've never actually done. Their bills are paid for by revenues from the very businesses they are too pure to work for.
So of course RMS now works in a building that was paid for by the license fees that Microsoft gouged out of hapless computer buyers. What could be more appropriate?
That's a proxy. These popups are originating from spyware that's installed within IE! (You do know what spyware is, right?) Keeping the ad pages from downloading (which you don't need a proxy it do) isn't going to prevent the popups from occuring. I just get blank popups instead of popups with ads in them.
Actually, I'm not the good at programming. I mostly read code that others have written (I write API docs for a living). But let me throw out some inexpert opinions.
Notice that I didn't say performance was the priority. Obviously there are, as you say, other priorities that take precedence in the early stages of a project. So yeah, you have to pay more attention to getting the thing working than to making it work fast.
But you can't just ignore performance. If you do, you'll make design mistakes that will be very hard to reverse later.
Except that's what the Mozilla team did. They piled on feature after feature, without worrying about whether they were destroying the performance of the product. I guess they assumed this was something they could fix later. Well it is later, and they still haven't fixed it. Yeah, we just had this breathless annoucement with gee-whiz figure about how Mozilla is smaller and faster. Except it still hasn't gotten as fast as IE 6.
Speaking of which: I finally nailed that spyware. (My main anti-spyware tool is now Spybot S&D. Koller is painfully flaky, but his software does the job better than anybody else's -- once you figure it out.) So I'm back to using IE. Yes, it isn't as kewl as Firefox, and yes it belongs to The Dark Side. And of course it isn't standards-compliant. (Though these days, who is?) But I don't go crazy waiting for pages to load, and I have a googlebar that actually works.
And yeah, if I had free choice I'd switch to Linux and use Konqueror. Or if I had free choice and deep pockets, I'd switch to Mac and use Safari. But I don't so I won't, so enough with the "switch to something else" mantra.
Ironically enough, I'm writing this using Firefox, 'cause my copy of IE is infested with some weird stealth popup engine that neither Ad-Aware nore Spybot can seem to corner. I'm very close to abandoning IE, going back to Mozilla permanently.
But I'm not quite there. Now might seem the right time to abandon IE, with its stupid security holes and lack of standards compliance. But Firefox still takes too long to download graphics and render complicated web pages. And the Mozilla version of the Google toolbar has a really stupid bug (actually more a case of overdesign) that makes search term buttons totally useless. I can't live without search term buttons!
As for the end of Bell Labs: I'm just suprised it didn't happen 20 years ago, when AT&T stopped being a legal monopoly, and had to start acting like a business.
We lost a lot when that happened. Not just all the cool computer science and communications tech. Lots of pure science too.
And a nasty change in the way the phone business worked. In the old days, telephone equiment was made by well-paid, well-treated workers in the U.S. and Canada. And made to last. And when it finally did wear out, it was shipped back to Western Electric factories, where it was thoroughly recycled. Now phone hardware is made by underpaid peons in overseas sweatshops, designed to last a year or two, and finally tossed in a landifll.
But, as the Libertarians love to say, There Is No Free Lunch. (Which is not strictly true, but that's another story.) The price of AT&T's huge contributions to science and expense-blind corporate citizenship was immense. Phone calls were expensive, and telephone equipment could only be leased (it was illegal to sell it) at high rates. Forget going out and buying a cheap modem -- if you wanted to do dialup, you had to lease a "data set" (a huge, clunky slow terminal-modem combination) for a horrendous rate. Not that modems weren't availabe -- starting in the 70s, they were, and cost less to buy than a month's lease on a data set. But it was illegal to hook them directly to the phone system (they might break something!). Which is how the acoustic coupler got invented.
There are what, 100 million internet-connected computers and devices in the US? Probably a similar number of cell phones. Back in the 70s, when the Bell System was at its peak that's how many phones there were total. And only a tiny number of them were mobile or used to transmit data. I can't imagine such a geological shift in technology with AT&T continuing its total dominance of the communications marketplace. And without AT&T, no Bell Labs.
Page ranking only matters if you plan for your content to be online indefinitely. News sites often put it on a free site for a couple weeks, then put it on a paid site.
Have you ever thought that conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to make you buy tin foil? I'd worry about why it itches!