In political systems with fully proportional representation (example: Israel) these sorts of political parties make sense:
For the parties, maybe. I think Israel's electoral system serves the nation quite poorly. Mainstream parties need fringe support to govern, so you have racist-nationalist idiots and religious extremists with influence far beyond their numbers.
I suppose by "tastefully" you mean something like the more restrained use of 3D in Coraline. Good movie, and 3D didn't distract — but it didn't add anything either.
In fact, the only reason I even went to see Avatar was to check out its use of 3D. Cameron's a talented director (and whatever its other problems, Avatar is certainly well-directed) but his movies are too long, he's developed an irritating and naive moral agenda, are stories are just plain dumb. So all I wanted to know is if there was something about the 3D craze that I was missing. So far, the answer is a Big No.
No wow factor for me either. It even makes movies less enjoyable. A good movie allows you to immerse yourself in the story, and that's a lot harder to do when things on the screen keep extruding themselves into the theater.
But "hype" is the wrong word. There's clearly a big audience for this gimmick. I don't understand why; but then, I don't get car chases either.
It's amazing what kids can do with computers, period. I think it's safe to say that these kids will soon be way more computer-savvy than their mom, if they aren't already. No reflection on her intelligence, kids just learn this stuff fast.
If I were her, I'd forget about software barriers to their computer (mis)use and just make sure I knew what they're doing.
People seem to be reading my post to say Gosling sat around playing video games for 10 years. Not my intent. Just pointing out that he's moved totally away from creating new products.
I did two stints as a contractor, writing docs for the core Java software. First in 97 through 98, then 05 through 06. Later I was a regular Sun employee, but on the hardware side.
IBM wouldn't have been any friendlier to the recent departures. The various Open Source people that Oracle fired were attached to projects that just didn't make sense for Sun. And Gosling hasn't played a major role in Java development for years.
Anyway, recent departures are nothing compared to the folks who've been abandoning ship for the last 5 years. A huge number of key Java people (most notably Josh Bloch, who really had more to do with the Java APIs in their current form than any one person) have moved to Google. Others left Sun because they couldn't live with the idea of Java going open source.
But the most emblematic departure, was Andy Bechtolsheim. He pretty much invented the company: Sun exists because he couldn't find an existing company that wanted to license his hardware designs. Then he left because he couldn't convince anybody that Sun needed to be less SPARC-dependent. A decade later, Sun bought up a company he had founded just to get access to the really cool x64 servers he had designed. (I worked on the documentation for one of them.) They made a big thing about getting back "Badge Number 1", but once again, they managed to drive him away. Officially he never left, but his role is so reduced, it's conspicuously a face-saving thing.
When I was at Sun, Gosling had less and less to do with actual work on Java. By the time I left the company, he seemed to be mainly an evangelist. Java was almost entirely his brainchild, of course, but it's been a long time since he contributed to it in any significant way.
Sun had a fair number of people who were paid to do more or less what they wanted. Most of the time I was at Sun, Gosling was more or less in that category. Some of these folks did some really brilliant work, but I'm not sure they really earned the money Sun paid them. That wasn't a big deal when everybody wanted Sun's high-end hardware and there was plenty of money for this sort of thing. Towards the end, though, money got tight, and there were fewer people like that. But even during the last days, I think they really had more Blue Sky People then they could really afford.
Oracle's revenues are all about software and in it's expansion from databases into other middleware, it had bet the house on Java.
What do you mean "bet the house"? Last time I looked, most Oracle software was native code. Yes, they rely on Java a lot, but no more than a lot of other companies, including IBM.
And even if Java technology is somehow crucial to Oracle's survival, how does owning Sun help them? You don't need Sun's permission to use Java. At best you need permission to use the trademark.
Recall that IBM walked away from Sun rather than meet the asking price. If Sun is worth owning just for Java, that would be insane. But IBM didn't want to own Java; they wanted to own Sun's SPARC technology, and they wanted to shut down Sun's x86 business, which competes with IBM's x86 servers. Doing that was marginally more cost-effective than just letting Sun die of natural causes.
Sun was worth more to Oracle than to IBM because Oracle is in a position to ramp up Sun's hardware sales. Oracle is claiming that they can generate billions in new revenue from Sun products. There's no way they can do that selling Sun's software products, most of which are just given away.
There are two reasons this claim is plausible. First, Oracle already has a huge sales organization (bigger than all of Sun!). But it's not just that Oracle has a lot of good sales channels, it's that these channels lead straight to customers that are already buying high-end computer hardware. Because that's what you need to run Oracle software. It's a natural fit.
The other reason is the disappearance of Sun's cronyism-riddled middle management. They're why Sun has never made serious inroads into the x86 marketplace: the sales org was always dominated by old SPARC hands that wouldn't admit that this architecture had a limited market. It's why actually buying stuff from Sun was always a pain: obsolete processes and procedures that never seemed to change.
If you think that anybody would buy Sun just for Java, you clearly have no idea what Java is. Or the role it played at Sun.
Where did you hear that? I was working for Sun at the time, and there was nothing official about Oracle until after talks with IBM broke down. And then it was for the whole company. It's true that Sun restructured itself so that all the software businesses (minus Solaris, which was moved into the hardware division) could be sold. But there were no offers. The sad truth is that Sun's software initiatives generated tons of press (even people who don't know what "high level language" or "virtual machine" mean have heard of Java) but not much in the way of revenue.
This acquisition was never about software. People assumed it was, because software is all they know about Sun. But most of the revenue came from selling hardware. Buying Sun for the software is as silly as buying Oracle for Larry Ellison's yacht.
That said, there's no need to decrypt the data: If you can view it, then you can record it in some fashion.
Not necessarily. Yes, it's always possible in theory, but in practice people tend to get cranky when you try to bring recording equipment to a place where it's not supposed to be. And in this situation, getting caught costs you more than being banned from your local movie theater.
Which is not to say that security at some installation might be sloppy enough to allow this. But it's not a given that it's possible
And recall that Wikileaks said it was an encryption issue. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually a codec issue, and somebody just isn't technical enough to understand the difference.
From a military standpoint, this is a non-event. From a public-relations standpoint, it's a big steaming pile of shit.
You're a war or two behind. That's OK, Donald Rumsfeld didn't get it either. But when you're fighting an insurgency, there's just no such thing as collateral damage. If you piss off the locals by killing their friends and family, you lose the war, no matter how effectively you outfight the other side. Petraeus and McChrystal hold their current jobs precisely because they get this and their predecessors didn't.
There is a delay involved, but not the kind you're thinking of. With a modern encryption algorithm, we're talking huge periods of time, in some cases longer than the whole lifetime of the universe. The Blechley Park folks leveraged sloppy procedure that prevented the Enigma encryption from being as effective as it could have been. That and discovering a flaw in the math used in the encryption are the only ways to break modern ciphers.
You're assuming the keys were in a form that could be easily shared. I very much doubt that military encryption works that way. Having your keys in a file on your PC my be adequate for you and me, but when Blofeld is out to steal your plans for invading Normandy, you need to make it a little harder for him to steal access.
And of course, it wasn't brute force. That approach was obsolete even back in Turing's day.
New Yorker cartoon: Man's in his lawyer's office. Lawyer says, "we've gone through all the information and it's clear you have a very good case. There's only one thing more we need to know: how much justice can you afford?"
This may or may not count as irony, but VMS (DEC's main OS) survives solely as an OS for HP's Itanium based systems. Further weirdness: a major app for this platform is RDB, a DBMS that Oracle bought from DEC over a decade ago. It's interesting that two companies whose mainstay is competing tech (x86 servers for HP, Oracle DBMS and now x86 and SPARC Sun servers for Oracle) work so hard to keep this particular legacy stack alive.
Two years? I was involved in what was supposed to be the big Linux breakthrough ten years ago! The only thing that's happened lately in more people realizing that they were never going to find enough Linux users to keep the lights on.
Under the category of "not so hard": taking the time to write on edit a summary so that I can tell what it's about. Having to refer to Google just to decide whether I care about a story is lame.
God, don't get me started on iTunes. It's the primary reason I don't own an iPod. How can a company that puts so much emphasis on usability so thoroughly screw up a user interface?
"Bombed back to the stone age" is best regarded as just an expression. The iron age is here to stay, no matter how much civilization declines. Even if we forget how to smelt iron ore, there would be billions of tons of refined iron lying around in abandoned machinery, buildings, and such.
The cliche should end, "... and the poor have children." (That's literally true: there's a well-established relationship between prosperity and family size.) Aside from that, I agree with you.
Still, not every political battle is determined by how many smart people you can afford to hire. The government can stand up to the big corporations if the political will is there. Fifty years ago, it certainly was. Then everybody decided that the Great Depression was a myth, and that big corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want. For the last couple years now, we've seen exactly where that goes, and so the pendulum has begun to swing back. The fact that we're even having this discussion is indicative: 5 years ago, complaining about low corporate taxes on Slashdot would have been dismissed as liberal whining.
I have high hopes for a certain politician with a strange name, not because of any of his policies (I agree with many, but he's actually a little too conservative, despite what the tea party idiots say) but because he's beginning to show some talent for instilling a little backbone into his fellow politicos. He's already managed to do it with his fellow Democrats, and when the Republicans get slaughtered in November (and they will) we'll see a shift in their attitude as well.
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For the parties, maybe. I think Israel's electoral system serves the nation quite poorly. Mainstream parties need fringe support to govern, so you have racist-nationalist idiots and religious extremists with influence far beyond their numbers.
But what does it add?
I suppose by "tastefully" you mean something like the more restrained use of 3D in Coraline. Good movie, and 3D didn't distract — but it didn't add anything either.
In fact, the only reason I even went to see Avatar was to check out its use of 3D. Cameron's a talented director (and whatever its other problems, Avatar is certainly well-directed) but his movies are too long, he's developed an irritating and naive moral agenda, are stories are just plain dumb. So all I wanted to know is if there was something about the 3D craze that I was missing. So far, the answer is a Big No.
No wow factor for me either. It even makes movies less enjoyable. A good movie allows you to immerse yourself in the story, and that's a lot harder to do when things on the screen keep extruding themselves into the theater.
But "hype" is the wrong word. There's clearly a big audience for this gimmick. I don't understand why; but then, I don't get car chases either.
It's amazing what kids can do with computers, period. I think it's safe to say that these kids will soon be way more computer-savvy than their mom, if they aren't already. No reflection on her intelligence, kids just learn this stuff fast.
If I were her, I'd forget about software barriers to their computer (mis)use and just make sure I knew what they're doing.
People seem to be reading my post to say Gosling sat around playing video games for 10 years. Not my intent. Just pointing out that he's moved totally away from creating new products.
I don't mind you making fun of me, but that joke is really lame!
I did two stints as a contractor, writing docs for the core Java software. First in 97 through 98, then 05 through 06. Later I was a regular Sun employee, but on the hardware side.
IBM wouldn't have been any friendlier to the recent departures. The various Open Source people that Oracle fired were attached to projects that just didn't make sense for Sun. And Gosling hasn't played a major role in Java development for years.
Anyway, recent departures are nothing compared to the folks who've been abandoning ship for the last 5 years. A huge number of key Java people (most notably Josh Bloch, who really had more to do with the Java APIs in their current form than any one person) have moved to Google. Others left Sun because they couldn't live with the idea of Java going open source.
But the most emblematic departure, was Andy Bechtolsheim. He pretty much invented the company: Sun exists because he couldn't find an existing company that wanted to license his hardware designs. Then he left because he couldn't convince anybody that Sun needed to be less SPARC-dependent. A decade later, Sun bought up a company he had founded just to get access to the really cool x64 servers he had designed. (I worked on the documentation for one of them.) They made a big thing about getting back "Badge Number 1", but once again, they managed to drive him away. Officially he never left, but his role is so reduced, it's conspicuously a face-saving thing.
When I was at Sun, Gosling had less and less to do with actual work on Java. By the time I left the company, he seemed to be mainly an evangelist. Java was almost entirely his brainchild, of course, but it's been a long time since he contributed to it in any significant way.
Sun had a fair number of people who were paid to do more or less what they wanted. Most of the time I was at Sun, Gosling was more or less in that category. Some of these folks did some really brilliant work, but I'm not sure they really earned the money Sun paid them. That wasn't a big deal when everybody wanted Sun's high-end hardware and there was plenty of money for this sort of thing. Towards the end, though, money got tight, and there were fewer people like that. But even during the last days, I think they really had more Blue Sky People then they could really afford.
Oracle's revenues are all about software and in it's expansion from databases into other middleware, it had bet the house on Java.
What do you mean "bet the house"? Last time I looked, most Oracle software was native code. Yes, they rely on Java a lot, but no more than a lot of other companies, including IBM.
And even if Java technology is somehow crucial to Oracle's survival, how does owning Sun help them? You don't need Sun's permission to use Java. At best you need permission to use the trademark.
Recall that IBM walked away from Sun rather than meet the asking price. If Sun is worth owning just for Java, that would be insane. But IBM didn't want to own Java; they wanted to own Sun's SPARC technology, and they wanted to shut down Sun's x86 business, which competes with IBM's x86 servers. Doing that was marginally more cost-effective than just letting Sun die of natural causes.
Sun was worth more to Oracle than to IBM because Oracle is in a position to ramp up Sun's hardware sales. Oracle is claiming that they can generate billions in new revenue from Sun products. There's no way they can do that selling Sun's software products, most of which are just given away.
There are two reasons this claim is plausible. First, Oracle already has a huge sales organization (bigger than all of Sun!). But it's not just that Oracle has a lot of good sales channels, it's that these channels lead straight to customers that are already buying high-end computer hardware. Because that's what you need to run Oracle software. It's a natural fit.
The other reason is the disappearance of Sun's cronyism-riddled middle management. They're why Sun has never made serious inroads into the x86 marketplace: the sales org was always dominated by old SPARC hands that wouldn't admit that this architecture had a limited market. It's why actually buying stuff from Sun was always a pain: obsolete processes and procedures that never seemed to change.
If you think that anybody would buy Sun just for Java, you clearly have no idea what Java is. Or the role it played at Sun.
Where did you hear that? I was working for Sun at the time, and there was nothing official about Oracle until after talks with IBM broke down. And then it was for the whole company. It's true that Sun restructured itself so that all the software businesses (minus Solaris, which was moved into the hardware division) could be sold. But there were no offers. The sad truth is that Sun's software initiatives generated tons of press (even people who don't know what "high level language" or "virtual machine" mean have heard of Java) but not much in the way of revenue.
This acquisition was never about software. People assumed it was, because software is all they know about Sun. But most of the revenue came from selling hardware. Buying Sun for the software is as silly as buying Oracle for Larry Ellison's yacht.
I'm not assuming anything. I'm simply saying what Wikileaks said.
That said, there's no need to decrypt the data: If you can view it, then you can record it in some fashion.
Not necessarily. Yes, it's always possible in theory, but in practice people tend to get cranky when you try to bring recording equipment to a place where it's not supposed to be. And in this situation, getting caught costs you more than being banned from your local movie theater.
Which is not to say that security at some installation might be sloppy enough to allow this. But it's not a given that it's possible
And recall that Wikileaks said it was an encryption issue. Though it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually a codec issue, and somebody just isn't technical enough to understand the difference.
From a military standpoint, this is a non-event. From a public-relations standpoint, it's a big steaming pile of shit.
You're a war or two behind. That's OK, Donald Rumsfeld didn't get it either. But when you're fighting an insurgency, there's just no such thing as collateral damage. If you piss off the locals by killing their friends and family, you lose the war, no matter how effectively you outfight the other side. Petraeus and McChrystal hold their current jobs precisely because they get this and their predecessors didn't.
There is a delay involved, but not the kind you're thinking of. With a modern encryption algorithm, we're talking huge periods of time, in some cases longer than the whole lifetime of the universe. The Blechley Park folks leveraged sloppy procedure that prevented the Enigma encryption from being as effective as it could have been. That and discovering a flaw in the math used in the encryption are the only ways to break modern ciphers.
You're assuming the keys were in a form that could be easily shared. I very much doubt that military encryption works that way. Having your keys in a file on your PC my be adequate for you and me, but when Blofeld is out to steal your plans for invading Normandy, you need to make it a little harder for him to steal access.
And of course, it wasn't brute force. That approach was obsolete even back in Turing's day.
New Yorker cartoon: Man's in his lawyer's office. Lawyer says, "we've gone through all the information and it's clear you have a very good case. There's only one thing more we need to know: how much justice can you afford?"
He's not. Make a list of who we're trading violence with. You'll find the enemies mentioned.
This may or may not count as irony, but VMS (DEC's main OS) survives solely as an OS for HP's Itanium based systems. Further weirdness: a major app for this platform is RDB, a DBMS that Oracle bought from DEC over a decade ago. It's interesting that two companies whose mainstay is competing tech (x86 servers for HP, Oracle DBMS and now x86 and SPARC Sun servers for Oracle) work so hard to keep this particular legacy stack alive.
Well, since I've just been mocked by somebody who can't be bothered even to log in, I -- still think it's a dumb show.
Two years? I was involved in what was supposed to be the big Linux breakthrough ten years ago! The only thing that's happened lately in more people realizing that they were never going to find enough Linux users to keep the lights on.
Under the category of "not so hard": taking the time to write on edit a summary so that I can tell what it's about. Having to refer to Google just to decide whether I care about a story is lame.
God, don't get me started on iTunes. It's the primary reason I don't own an iPod. How can a company that puts so much emphasis on usability so thoroughly screw up a user interface?
Yeah, what else is new?
I really don't get the appeal of this show. Dumbest stories this side of Ed Wood.
"Bombed back to the stone age" is best regarded as just an expression. The iron age is here to stay, no matter how much civilization declines. Even if we forget how to smelt iron ore, there would be billions of tons of refined iron lying around in abandoned machinery, buildings, and such.
The cliche should end, "... and the poor have children." (That's literally true: there's a well-established relationship between prosperity and family size.) Aside from that, I agree with you.
Still, not every political battle is determined by how many smart people you can afford to hire. The government can stand up to the big corporations if the political will is there. Fifty years ago, it certainly was. Then everybody decided that the Great Depression was a myth, and that big corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want. For the last couple years now, we've seen exactly where that goes, and so the pendulum has begun to swing back. The fact that we're even having this discussion is indicative: 5 years ago, complaining about low corporate taxes on Slashdot would have been dismissed as liberal whining.
I have high hopes for a certain politician with a strange name, not because of any of his policies (I agree with many, but he's actually a little too conservative, despite what the tea party idiots say) but because he's beginning to show some talent for instilling a little backbone into his fellow politicos. He's already managed to do it with his fellow Democrats, and when the Republicans get slaughtered in November (and they will) we'll see a shift in their attitude as well.